Mythology: Part One

No wind, Homer says, ever shakes the untroubled peace of Olympus; no rain ever falls there or snow; but the cloudless firmament stretches around it on all sides and the white glory of sunshine is diffused upon its walls.

His breastplate was the aegis, awful to behold; his bird was the eagle, his tree the oak.

Her implacable anger followed them and their children too. She never forgot an injury.

In one important story, the Quest of the Golden Fleece, she is the gracious protector of heroes and the inspirer of heroic deeds, but not in any other. Nevertheless she was venerated in every home. She was the goddess married women turned to for help.

He was the ruler of the sea, Zeus’s brother and second only to him in eminence.

He was unpitying, inexorable, but just; a terrible, not an evil god.

Apollo at Delphi was a purely beneficent power, a direct link between gods and men, guiding men to know the divine will, showing them how to make peace with the gods; the purifier, too, able to cleanse even those stained with the blood of their kindred.

Whoso is chaste of spirit utterly
May gather leaves and fruits and flowers.
The unchaste never.

The Goddess of Love and Beauty, who beguiled all, gods and men alike; the laughter-loving goddess, who laughed sweetly or mockingly at those her wiles had conquered; the irresistible goddess who stole away even the wits of the wise.

They clad her in raiment immortal,
And brought her to the gods.

He never was to them the mean whining deity of the Iliad, but magnificent in shining armor, redoubtable, invincible.

...from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer’s day, and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star,
On Lemnos, the Aegean isle.

As the idea of Zeus became loftier, two august forms sat beside him in Olympus. Themis, which means the Right, or Divine Justice, and Dike, which is Human Justice.

Nevertheless, both brothers, Castor and Pollux, were often called “sons of Zeus”; indeed, the Greek name they are best known by, the Dioscouri, means “the striplings of Zeus.”

Aeolus, King of the Winds, also lived on the earth. An island, Aeolia, was his home. Accurately he was only regent of the Winds, viceroy of the gods.

Aeolus, King of the Winds, also lived on the earth. An island, Aeolia, was his home. Accurately he was only regent of the Winds, viceroy of the gods.

Faunus was Saturn’s grandson. He was a sort of Roman Pan, a rustic god.

Quirinus was the name of the deified Romulus, the founder of Rome.

Lucina was sometimes regarded as a Roman Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, but usually the name is used as an epithet of both Juno and Diana.

They were a beautiful, radiant company, to be sure, and their adventures made excellent stories; but when they were not positively harmful, they were capricious and undependable and in general mortals got on best without them.

“At the sacred threshing-floor, when they are winnowing, she herself, Demeter of the corn-ripe yellow hair, divides the grain and the chaff in the rush of the wind, and the heap of chaff grows white.”

“At the sacred threshing-floor, when they are winnowing, she herself, Demeter of the corn-ripe yellow hair, divides the grain and the chaff in the rush of the wind, and the heap of chaff grows white.”

“May it be mine,” the reaper prays, “beside Demeter’s altar to dig the great winnowing fan through her heaps of corn, while she stands smiling by with sheaves and poppies in her hand.”

She asked instead for barley-water flavored with mint, the cooling draught of the reaper at harvest time and also the sacred cup given the worshipers at Eleusis.

Then she showed herself the goddess manifest. Beauty breathed about her and a lovely fragrance; light shone from her so that the great house was filled with brightness.

He was accompanied, as was his custom, by a train of women dancing and singing exultant songs, wearing fawn-skins over their robes, waving ivy-wreathed wands.

Earth, the beautiful, rose up,
Broad-bosomed, she that is the steadfast base
Of all things.

Later, when Zeus was grown, he forced his father with the help of his grandmother, the Earth, to disgorge it along with the five earlier children, and it was set up at Delphi where eons later a great traveler, Pausanias by name, reports that he saw it about 180 A.D.: “A stone of no great size which the priests of Delphi anoint every day with oil.”

Later, when Zeus was grown, he forced his father with the help of his grandmother, the Earth, to disgorge it along with the five earlier children, and it was set up at Delphi where eons later a great traveler, Pausanias by name, reports that he saw it about 180 A.D.: “A stone of no great size which the priests of Delphi anoint every day with oil.”

Their boon is life forever freed from toil.

And therefore you must guard this joyless rock—
No rest, no sleep, no moment’s respite.

Fortunately Zeus was not offended, because the two were pious, faithful worshipers of the gods.

It looked like a heifer, but talked like a girl who seemed mad with misery.

You—he who succored the whole race of men?
You, that Prometheus, the daring, the enduring?

Driving his flock before him he entered and closed the cave’s mouth with a ponderous slab of stone.

He bade each man choose out three thick-fleeced rams and bind them together with strong, pliant strips of bark; then to wait for day, when the flock would be sent out to pasture.

But Odysseus was too angry to leave in prudent silence. He sent a great shout over the water to the blind giant at the cave’s mouth.

Up he sprang and tore a great crag from the mountain and flung it at the ship. It came within a hair’s breadth of crushing the prow, and with the backwash the boat was borne landward.

As she listened amused, the others silently stole away and Hera could come to no conclusion as to where Zeus’s wandering fancy had alighted.

The god was horrorstruck to see the blood gush forth and the lad, deathly pale, fall to the ground. He turned as pale himself as he caught him up in his arms and tried to stanch the wound.