Greek myth as living material
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Our essays on gods, mortals and folk belief, newest first. Use the section filter to cut the stack down to what you came for.
6 essays filed
Ancient poets gave every life a thread spun by three sisters. In Greek villages the same sisters were expected at the cradle on the third night. Fate, from Hesiod to the household table.
A princess too beautiful to marry, a husband she must never see, a drop of hot oil and four trials set by a furious Venus. Apuleius’s tale of Psyche, read task by task.
Ovid’s Apollo mocks Cupid, takes a golden arrow in return and chases a nymph until she becomes a laurel. Then he wears her. A close look at the arrows and the crown.
Burnt out of one womb and sewn into a second, Dionysus became the god of wine and of the theatre. Why the god who must always arrive owns the best seat in the house.
A goat-legged god from the hills of Arcadia lent his name to blind terror, made music from a fleeing nymph and became the one Greek god whose death made the news.
For roughly a thousand years, crowds walked from Athens to Eleusis to be initiated into Demeter’s Mysteries. Almost nobody broke the silence. Here is what survives, and where the trail goes dark.
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