Legends Summarized: The Gods of Greece

A little under two years ago, I decided to delve  into my channel backlog and pull out every single   video I'd ever made about a hero of Greek  mythology so I could stitch them together into   a single feature-length Director's Cut where  I put them all into a rough timeline order,   gave a little bit of bonus context and potentially  annotated anywhere it turned out I'd goofed up.    It was an emotional hoist! I had nine years of  channel content to cover and there was a pretty   wide spread of quality in there, because I'd  managed to somewhat improve my craft in that   span of time - thank fuck for that - and it's  always somewhat humbling to remind myself of   what the best I could do used to look like.   After all, I'm fallible, easily distracted,   prone to slipping up on the details and  not always the best at showing my work.    I see how far I am from perfect, and even  as I improve as an artist and storyteller,   it feels like that gap continues to widen just  the same. I am, like so many others, only human.   But that's not the case for the protagonists of  our tales today. Where the heroes of greece were   fallible mortal champions ekeing out a challenging  living in a world far larger and grander than   them, today we're going to flip that coin over  and take a look at the gods on the other side.    After all, greek mythology is inextricable from  its pantheon, and the gods are arguably the most   important characters of all, especially if you  hear them tell it. And while the gods are less   subject to linear time than the heroes they helped  and harmed, there's still a timeline to be found   in the misty golden ages of mythic yore. So today  we're gonna supplicate ourselves before Apollo   and the Muses and take a crack at compiling  everything I've got on the gods themselves! And of course, where else to start but  the very beginning? When it comes to gods,   a family tree is the same thing as a cosmology,   and Hesiod's Theogony is firmly  supported by both columns A and B.

[THEOGONY] You know how urban fantasy writers really  like doing that "all myths are true" thing, so they try really hard to  find some way to make sense   of every world mythology being real all at once? And how sometimes it works okay, but sometimes it  just comes across as really busy and incoherent? Well, I'm gonna let you in on a  little secret about Greek mythology: Hesiod did it first. See, Greek mythology isn't internally consistent-- because no mythology is-- but that didn't stop Greek writers like Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer and one  of the earliest sources we have, from trying to make consolidated narratives out   of every random regional myth  they could get their hands on. In Hesiod's case, his efforts  famously produced the Theogony, an attempt to outline the genealogy  of EVERY SINGLE GREEK GOD. I'm not talkin' the Big Twelve  here--I mean ALL of 'em. You wanna know the names of all 50  Nereids? All 3,000 Oceanid nymphs? Well, Hesiod maybe can't give you all 3,000, but  he's more than happy to rattle off 41 of 'em! Ever wonder what specific  combination of Titanic boinking produced the Oneiroi? The  Ash Nymphs? The Hesperides? Well, don't you worry-- Hesiod has it down! Everyone's got a place in the family tree! EVERYONE. So, yeah, on a scale of 1 to American Gods, Hesiod's ranking maybe a 3 and 1/2 on the  Actually Making This Interesting Meter. That said, the Theogony is more than  the world's most pompous flash card set. Scattered haphazardly through its  endless lists of meaningless names is a genuinely fascinating narrative  of gods and monsters and the creation   of the ancient Greek world we all know and love. So, let's set aside the genealogical  aspect for now and focus on the fun part:   the ancient Greek creation myth. So, in the beginning, there's nothing but Khaos, a vague entity representing some sort of  primordial emptiness pre-anything happening. But it's not alone for long, as soon enough,  Gaia, Tartaros, and Eros pop out of nowhere, representing the primordial earth, abyss, and  existential concept of love, respectively. Khaos takes a cue and spoots out Erebos and  Nyx-- darkness and night, respectively-- and then, I guess, goes and takes a nap,  because that's the last we hear of it forever. While Nyx and Erebos are off bumping abstract  concepts and creating the day-night cycle, Gaia crafts herself a partner:   an equal and opposite in the form  of Ouranos, the sky to her earth. The two of them promptly get busy  and crank out three sets of siblings: first, twelve Titans, then three Cyclopses, and finally, three Hecatoncheires,   ludicrously powerful giants with  fifty heads and a hundred arms each. Now, the Titans, Cyclopses, and  Hecatoncheires have their differences, but they're united in their complete  and utter hatred of Ouranos for... seemingly no reason at first,  although it rapidly becomes justified, when Ouranos takes to imprisoning his   more monstrous-looking children in  secret locations under the earth. Gaia gets fed up with Ouranos' shenanigans and  comes up with a plan to knock him down a peg. She forges a sickle out of grey adamant  and calls up her Titan children, asking them to help her take down Ouranos so  they can take his place ruling the universe. The Titans are a bit skittish, but the youngest,  Kronos--Titan of the harvest--accepts the task, and ambushes Ouranos,  castrating him with the sickle. And in case you were wondering what  happened to the balls, don't you worry! Hesiod's worldbuilding rule  is "waste not, want not. " They fall into the ocean and start foaming,   and from that foam arises none  other than the radiant Aphrodite, who presumably spent the next few millennia  showering with a thousand-yard stare. So Kronos supplants Ouranos, and Ouranos  officially dubs him and his siblings Titans, which apparently means "stretchers,"  the idea being that they stretched   beyond their means in order to overthrow him. So this is officially when the Titan Age begins. Coincidentally, this is also around  the time a whole bunch of death and   destruction gods and classic monsters  start popping out of the woodwork. So Kronos takes his sister Rhea as a  wife and they start cranking out kids, but Gaia and Ouranos warn Kronos that he's  fated to be overthrown by one of his children. So as a safety precaution, Kronos swallows  each of his children as soon as they're born. Bit extreme, but I guess the god of safe  contraceptive measures didn't exist yet. After losing Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades,   and Poseidon to Kronos' exceedingly  inefficient heir-disposal method, Rhea asks Gaia and Ouranos for help  keeping her sixth kid, Zeus, alive, and Gaia spirits the baby away to  a secret location in the mountains while Rhea replaces him  with a blanket-covered rock. So young Zeus is raised in secret by Gaia, and somewhere along the line  decides the thing to do is supplant his father Kronos and take  his place as ruler of the universe. So, with the help of Metis-- an Oceanid nymph  with a serious talent for cunning plans-- he slips Kronos a poison that causes  him to throw up the kids he ate. Zeus, now allied with his five siblings, gives himself an additional edge by freeing  the three Cyclopses from their prison, and in gratitude, they forge  him his lightning bolts. Zeus, now geared up with weapons and allies, rallies support from the frankly ridiculous  number of minor gods running around at this point and goes to war with the Titans. The conflict lasts for ten straight years, until Gaia suggests that Zeus could  maybe free the Hecatoncheires, too, and it turns out the ridiculously strong,  fifty-headed, hundred-handed, rock-chuckin' giants were exactly what he needed to turn the  tables and finally overthrow Kronos. Kronos and his allies are thrown into Tartaros  and Zeus takes his place as King of the Cosmos, after a short interlude, where he,  Poseidon, and Hades draw lots to determine who exactly gets to lord over  what bits of the universe. So, Zeus marries Metis and she gets pregnant, but Zeus is warned by Gaia and Ouranos that Metis   is destined to bear thoughtful  children more cunning than Zeus: first a daughter, and then a son,  who will eventually overthrow him. Determined to stay Super-Cool  God-Emperor of Everything forever, Zeus reacts by eating Metis, but not in, like, a murder way; in, like, a... subsuming-her-essence-into-himself-so-she-can-provide-him-with-wisdom-and-advice  kind of way... Is that better...? Eh, still a huge dick move. Also really ironic, considering Metis helped  him overthrow Kronos by making him puke. Guess the lesson here is  "never do any favors for Zeus. " In the meantime, Zeus marries Hera,  and she has Ares and Hephaistos, then he has a fling with Leto  that produces Artemis and Apollo, and then one day, Zeus develops  an absolutely splitting headache. And when he responds extremely literally   by actually splitting his head  open to relieve the pressure, Metis' daughter Athena pops out of his forehead,  fully grown and ready to kick some ass. Turns out, absorbing your pregnant wife  can have unforeseen medical consequences. *sped up* Ask your doctor if  absorbing your pregnant spouse is   right for you. Side effects may include  migraines, dizziness, and childbirth. *normal speed* Anyway, rounding  out the Olympian roster, Zeus has a fling with the  Pleiad Maia, producing Hermes, and lastly, a complicated  fling with the mortal Semele,   producing the equally-complicated Dionysos. Zeus, having successfully dodged the  destiny of being supplanted by his own kid by learning the lessons of history  that his father failed to internalize, proceeds to flagrantly bang his way  across the entire Mediterranean, secure in the knowledge that this  could literally NEVER go badly for him. Ever. Nope-- Zeus' divine down-unders  are a consequence-free zone. Except that one time where he had  to specifically not bang Thetis because she was fated to bear  a son stronger than his father, but other than that, no worries, right? Seriously. Why keep tempting fate? Just bag it up if ruling the  cosmos is so important to you. Zeus's incorrigibility truly is the  stuff of legend. More on that later.   For now, the Theogony does a good job of laying  out the divine family tree, but a family tree is   really just a roadmap right now: there's a lot  more detail to be found under every single one   of these big names. And while time, and more  specifically seniority can be hard to nail   down with a posse of ageless immortal beings,  Hesiod was at least pretty clear on one thing:   after the children of the Titans overthrew  their parents, the first of the new generation   of gods was none other than Aphrodite. So  that's as good a place to start as any!

[APHRODITE DEEP DIVE] So I've talked about a lot of  Greek myths on this channel and I don't know if you guys have noticed but  Aphrodite kind of shows up in a lot of them. It's actually a little  weird if you think about it. She's this fickle, temperamental force that  just kind of shows up and causes chaos. She's a bit of a ditz who would literally  murder people to maintain her OTPs and NOTPs. She's a doting mother, an unfaithful spouse, a benevolent boon granter, and a really sadistic  punisher of perceived slights. She's confusing is what she is. What the heck is her deal? So before we go trekking through historical  context to try and figure out why she's like this, let's put together everything we  know about Aphrodite at this point. (BABYYYY) Aphrodite's most well-known birth story  involves her spontaneously arising fully formed from the sea foam  kicked up by Ouranos' castrated balls and drifting ashore on to the island of  Kythera which she then made her home. It's generally agreed on that  Aphrodite was never a child as she represents adult love and sexuality. So, she just spontaneously appears all grown up which is good because the  alternative is pretty gross. Grosser than the balls thing. Now first off, Aphrodite  has a big role in the Iliad as she's almost single-handedly  responsible for kicking off the Trojan War. For those unfamiliar with the premise, Eris, the goddess of discord, gets pissed when  she's not invited to Achilles' parents' wedding, so she hucks a golden apple at the Olympians  and says it's for the hottest goddess. Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena got  all hung up on the competition and, recognizing that there was no safe  answer to that particular question, Zeus fobs the responsibility off  on this random Trojan kid, Paris. The three goddesses appeared Paris and tell  him to choose which of them is the fairest. And to sweeten the deal each goddess  also offers him a gift/bribe. Hera offers to make him the  ruler of all of Europe and Asia, Athena offers him wisdom and  hecking sweet battle tactics, and Aphrodite says she'll give him  the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris picks the hot lady option, Aphrodite claims  her prize, and gives Paris what she promised him: Helen of Troy, who happens to be married  already, to the volatile Spartan King Menelaus, and is additionally the subject of a giant treaty   ordering pretty much every  Greek king under the Sun to side with her husband if anything bad happens. So this divine kidnapping  unsurprisingly kicks off the Trojan War and puts Hera and Athena firmly  on the opposing side from Paris which, let's be real, having the  goddesses of rulership and battle   tactics opposing you in a war is not a good thing. So at this point Aphrodite has claimed a hottest  trophy by throwing a cute couple together with no regard for the potential repercussions and kicked off a war as the direct result. Great. This portrays her as flighty and impulsive  with a general disregard for consequence. Aphrodite plays a major role again in the Aeneid where she serves as a source of regular  divine intervention for her son Aeneas, but is at one point goaded by Hera  into setting up Aeneas with Queen Dido and distracting him from his divine  Rome founding quests in the process. Zeus intervenes, Aeneas leaves Dido,  and Dido kills herself as a result. In this story, Aphrodite demonstrates  an unrelenting loyalty to her son but ends up self sabotaging  when her shipping reflexes get   too strong and she sets off a romantic subplot. Aphrodite's protective mother side comes into  focus again in the myth of Eros and Psyche where her son Eros falls in love with  the ludicrously beautiful Psyche, and Aphrodite gets super huffy about it. First sheltering and then  imprisoning Eros in her palace and putting Psyche through deadly  trials to try and get rid of her. This Aphrodite is both jealous and ruthless.    Her initial dislike of Psyche  is prompted by the fact that Psyche's beauty has prompted some locals to  start worshipping Psyche instead of Aphrodite. And her many tasks for Psyche seems less  "prove yourself" and more "just die already". Aphrodite may be a protective mother,  but she's far from a loyal spouse. Though technically married  to Hephaestus in most myths, she has a well known habit of sleeping with Ares because Hephaestus is all grody  from having been thrown off Olympus and hitting every branch on  the ugly tree on the way down. So Aphrodite is not big on  marital responsibilities. She also has a habit of taking mortal lovers she  thinks are cute, which is how Aeneas happens. Aphrodite is terrible at  managing her own relationships but she does like helping  other people with theirs. In the myths of both Pygmalion and Atalanta, Aphrodite responds to the prayers of a pining   dude unlucky in love and blesses  him with something to help him. In Atalanta's case, she gives Hippomenes the  enchanted golden apples he uses to win the race, and in Pygmalion's case, she brings  his statue waifu Galatea to life. But on the flip side Aphrodite is really unhappy when  people actively avoid relationships, which shows up most strongly  in the myth of Hippolytus, a rare male hunter of Artemis who  did the classic-Artemis-hunter thing of staying single and refusing to mingle. This pissed off Aphrodite so much  that she made Hippolytus' stepmother,   Phaedra, fall in love with him and when he rejected her advances,   she told his father, Theseus, he'd  assaulted her, then killed herself. Theseus calls in a favor from Poseidon  and has Hippolytus killed in retribution. It's a really nasty situation. Now there's a ton of myths about  Aphrodite I haven't talked about but they all generally fall  into one of these categories: Aphrodite sleeps around, Aphrodite gets pissed and ruins someone's life, Aphrodite thinks the ship is cute and  makes it canon no matter the consequences, and Aphrodite is a very overprotective mother. So now that we've got something of a concrete feel for where Aphrodite's character was  at by the time of classical Greece, let's start talking about how she got that way. (epic music) Now like I talked about in the Dionysus video, before ancient Greece got  going around the 700s BC, there were two major historical intervals  that are relevant to this kind of thing. Mycenaean Greece, between the 1600s and 1100s BC, and the post Bronze Age collapse Greek Dark  Ages filling in the centuries in between. We don't have any written  records from the Dark Ages, but in that intervening period,  all the gods got shuffled around, Poseidon got demoted from head  god and Zeus got to be in charge, and the Mycenaean syllabic script,   Linear B was replaced by the  basically Phoenician Greek alphabet. Linear B only got properly  translated in the last few decades, but using that we've been able  to find written records of a   lot of the Hellenistic gods from Mycenaean Greece like Zeus, Dionysus, Persephone, etc,  meaning they predated ancient Greece and were worshipped in the precursor  culture of Mycenaean Greece and carried over through the Dark Ages. Again, like I mentioned in the Dionysus video, Mycenaean Greece was the ancient  Greece of ancient Greece. Ancient Greek culture deliberately presented  itself as a successor to Mycenaean Greece, with the Iliad and the Odyssey codified in   the 700s BC in ancient Greece  but set in Mycenaean Greece. There was a lot of rollover and, as we  discussed, Dionysus was one of the rollover gods. He was worshipped in an obscure  cult capacity in Mycenaean Greece and carried on through the Dark  Ages into Ancient Greece proper. But if we go looking for Aphrodite's name in ye  olde Mycenaean inscriptions, we come up empty. Aphrodite is not a Mycenaean goddess. So, where did she come from? Since Aphrodite isn't Mycenaean  but is very relevant in the Iliad,   one of the oldest ancient Greek texts we have, this gives us a concrete interval to  look in for when she first showed up and/or when she became an  established member of the Pantheon. She can't have been very relevant before  the 1100s and she can't be newer than 700. Honestly, she really can't  be newer than 900 as Homer   didn't write the Iliad, he just wrote it down. It'd most likely already been codified  in oral tradition for a century or two. So let's put a pin in this for a minute and  talk about the Phoenician goddess, Astarte. (Dangerous Woman~) Astarte is a Phoenician goddess of  fertility, sex, war, and the planet Venus. References to her name first appear in the  port city of Ugarit between 1450 and 1200 BC, and there's evidence that her cult  moved out along Phoenician trade routes, which reached the eastern tip of Crete. There was also a Phoenician settlement on the  island of Kythera sometime in the 1400s BC. And if the name Kythera is ringing any bells, it's the mythological realm of Aphrodite  and the home to her oldest temple, as well as the place she supposedly first  came to shore after being born from sea foam, making it a very simple leap to suppose that  this is a mythological representation of her cult coming from across the sea  and making landfall there. Also, like I mentioned right at the beginning, the Phoenician alphabet was brought to  Greece sometime around the Dark Ages. And it's not so unreasonable that the Phoenicians  might have brought some other info with them, like a nifty cult for example. So the general consensus is that the  Phoenician cult of Astarte came to Greece, specifically Kythera, most likely in the 1400s. Astarte became Aphrodite, and in the  intervening centuries, her worship spread until by the time the Iliad was being taught,   she'd been firmly emplaced  as a member of the Pantheon. Sure, that's cool. Um, Astarte is also Ishtar. (YEAH-YEAH! ) Ishtar is the Mesopotamian  goddess of love, sex, fertility, beauty, war, justice, political power, the  planet Venus, and a bunch of other stuff. She was worshipped from 4000 BC onward and  saw a major jump in popularity around 2300 BC. You may remember her from her  appearance in the Underworld Myths video where she quests into the underworld  to retrieve her boyfriend, Tammuz, and comes into conflict with  Ereshkigal, the queen of the underworld. So it might fascinate you to know that  Aphrodite has a very similar myth. In the story of Adonis, Aphrodite finds the orphaned  infant Adonis and gives him   to Persephone to be raised in the underworld. That part is pretty unique, but when  Adonis grows up to be super hot, Aphrodite and Persephone end up getting  into a fight over who gets to keep him. And while Persephone has  no relation to Ereshkigal, her status as queen of the underworld slots her  into the appropriate mythological role perfectly. I'm not crazy, by the way. Tammuz had his own cult and it got  imported to Greece under the name Adonis. This is a legit connection. So Aphrodite, a goddess of sex,  love, beauty, and the planet Venus, comes from Astarte, a goddess  of all of the above plus war, and Astarte comes from Ishtar, a goddess  of all of the above plus justice and power. That's not too crazy. Astarte makes landfall in Kythera when  her cult travels up along trade routes. At this point, we've got a couple  questions presenting themselves to us. Where did her cult go next? And if Ishtar and Astarte are  so strongly war goddesses, then why is Aphrodite totally not a war goddess? I'll answer both those questions at once. The next place she went was Sparta, and she was absolutely a war goddess. (war music) So Kythera is this little  island right about here-ish. Sparta is about here-ish. Unsurprisingly, given their proximity,   Sparta had a habit of intermittently  claiming Kythera as a territory, and equally unsurprisingly, some of that OG Phoenician cult  attitude seems to have leaked through whenever Sparta was in the area. Sparta is also one of the  oldest cities in ancient Greece. So when you put that all together, you get the fact that Sparta pretty much got  the first good look at this brand new goddess, and judging by the statues they  carved and the way she was worshipped, Aphrodite was a full-on war god  back when she first made landfall. Now unsurprisingly, a goddess of beauty and  sex simultaneously being a goddess of war was unlikely to bother the Spartans  because you know, Spartans. But the rest of Greece didn't  seem too keen on the concept. Apparently it was considered an  inherent contradiction in values. The warlike Aphrodite is found almost  exclusively on Kythera and in Sparta. And it's worth noting that in the Iliad,   Zeus explicitly tells Aphrodite that  she doesn't belong on the battlefield, which is the kind of overt character interaction  that contemporary writers like to use to make firm political statements  on controversial subjects. The fact that it needed to  be stated at all implies it   might have been something of a debate at the time. Anyway, this warlike Aphrodite,  while probably the oldest Aphrodite, isn't the most popular  Aphrodite in ancient Greece. As her worship spread, her image changed, which  wasn't uncommon but is still very interesting. But before we go further in that direction  to explore how she was worshipped, we got to talk about two things: mythological  inconsistencies and divine epithets. (( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)) (Kiss with a fist is better than none~) See, here's this problem: Homer  and Hesiod were contemporaries and they both wrote about Aphrodite's birth. But their accounts are contradictory. In the Iliad, Homer says Aphrodite is the  daughter of Zeus and the Titaness Dione. But in Hesiod's Theogony, Aphrodite is  supposedly the motherless child of Ouranos born from the sea foam around  his severed testicles after   Kronos overthrows and castrates him. Also, fun fact, this is an adaption of another Ishtar myth, wherein one Hittite story of her birth, the god Kumarbi overthrows  his father, the sky god Anu, and bites off his testicles, then becomes pregnant with  and gives birth to Ishtar. Amazingly, the bath bomb ball sack is the  less disturbing version of the legend. Anyway, obviously these birth stories disagree, so what's an ancient Greek philosopher  to do to resolve the conflict? Well, if you're Socrates, Plato,   or Xenophon philosophizing in the 300 to 400 BC, you solve the problem by codifying  two distinct Aphrodite's. This is where the epithets come in. ( A little bit of Monika in my li-: D) Now most gods have epithets. Pallas Athena and Phoebus  Apollo are well-known examples. And most gods also had regional epithets, where in specific areas they'd have these  epithets appended to the deity's name to describe what capacity  they were being worshipped in. Consider Hera Alexandros, an  epithet meaning defender of men, only used in Sicyon that reflects a side of Hera  that's very rarely seen in the general narrative. Anyway, in Aphrodite's case, she had three major epithets that,  instead of being regional variants, almost got treated as three distinct gods. The first of those is Aphrodite Areia, the  warlike Aphrodite worshipped in Sparta, and, to a certain extent, Kythera. The others are two of a pair. Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemos. See, that whole contradictory  Aphrodite birth story things   seems like it should be a real pain in the butt but it actually lent itself well to an elegant  solution to a few problems with Aphrodite. As we've already covered,   Aphrodite is not the most internally  consistent character personality-wise. Sometimes she's benevolent and kind. Sometimes she's petty and cruel. This is not unexpected from  a divine representation of something as fickle and potentially both  amazing and thoroughly miserable as love, but a lot of fifth and fourth  century BC philosophers weren't content with Aphrodite being a sort  of nebulous, internally inconsistent entity. They wanted something concrete, so they split her in half. ( romantic music ) The benevolent more, quote-unquote, "divine"  half of her character went to Aphrodite Urania, who also got the motherless  child of Ouranos birth story. Aphrodite Urania was presented as an  embodiment of celestial love and beauty, without all that icky physical  attraction stuff lumped in with it. Although take this description  with a grain of salt as it was partially codified  by Christian interpreters who   had a habit of distancing sex from divinity and highlighting purity as a divine  trade in contrast with profanity, so it's not clear how much of  this is the legit Greek angle and how much is Christianity  lumping her in with the Virgin Mary? Which, yes, is a thing they did. It seems a little more likely to me that any  personality splitting Aphrodite Urania experienced probably fell along Greek love lines like   the separation between eros,  storge, philia, mania, etc, rather than distancing physical sexual  attraction from pure divine love but who knows? Aphrodite Urania was  widely worshipped in various cults but she almost never turns  up in the mythology proper.    There aren't really many stories about her. The rest of her character went to Aphrodite  Pandemos, almost literally the people's Aphrodite. Aphrodite Pandemos was the  child of Zeus and Dione, and was ascribed the more physical side of  love aka the more carnal and less pure kind. Again, not necessarily a fully accurate  description but it's kind of all we got. This Aphrodite is flighty,  petty, willful, and impulsive. She does what she wants, when she  wants, no matter the consequences. This is the Aphrodite whose  name turns up in the literature. Now, here's a very interesting thing to  consider when examining Aphrodite Pandemos. It was actually very rare for an Olympian  god to be worshipped by everybody. Looking back on ancient Greece as  though it were a cohesive unit, it's easy to think that because it had a  concrete Pantheon, everyone worshipped everyone. But in practice, most of the  gods were fairly specialized. They'd be honored on their  festival days obviously,   but, well, for example, unless  you're a blacksmith or craftsman Hephaestus is unlikely to be super  relevant to your everyday life. Zeus is the major exception, as evinced by his Panhellenios epithet denoting  him as a god of the whole Hellenistic world. But Aphrodite is pretty much  the only other god who seems   to have been relevant to almost everybody. And it makes sense; there aren't many people  for whom love, sex, and beauty don't matter. So Aphrodite Pandemos is in this rare divine   position of being directly  relevant to nearly everybody and this didn't go unnoticed by  the greater Hellinistic world. One of her explicit divine qualities was the  ability to bring large groups of people together, and if you think that seems like it could be a  politically useful divine quality, you'd be right. (Who run the world? ~) (Beyonce? ) Aphrodite Pandemos' everyman appeal was mythically  leverage by Theseus during the founding of Athens as he used her influence to unite scattered  and disconnected townships under one banner. Aphrodite Pandemos was  worshipped in Athens as a result, but her pseudo-leadership  position didn't end there. See, around the 200s BC, a little something called  the Roman Empire started getting really important, and in case you forgot, Aphrodite's son Aeneas was pretty instrumental  to that whole debacle, mythically speaking. And that means Aphrodite, or Venus as the Romans called her, syncretizing  her with a local small-time fertility goddess, was from a certain perspective the mother  of Rome itself, known as Venus Genetrix. Julius Caesar was big into the cult of Venus, and  even claimed to be descended from Aeneas himself. So suddenly Venus has all this  motherhood symbolism attached to her,   along with a lot of political clout. And this flowed backwards from  Venus's characterization to Aphrodite, who the Greeks began portraying  with maternal symbolism as well as rather more militaristic and  political clout than she'd had before. This is also around the time that  Eros began to be portrayed as her son. In earlier myths, he was one of her attendants but they weren't outright related  until it began to fit her new image. Aphrodite's mythical role as protective mother  was firmly established around this time, and since Rome was also in  the process of eating Egypt, she was occasionally syncretized  with Isis and Hathorne, both goddesses with themes of motherhood  fertility and political power. Aphrodite ended up with a lot of political  and military clout pretty much by accident. A few centuries down the line in roughly the 300s  AD, Rome decided it didn't like paganism anymore and kind of threw Aphrodite and all  her icky sex symbolism under the bus, wrecking a few of her temples. But you're not fooling me, Rome, we both know Genetrix knows best. Gotta say, I do think it's really interesting that even though Aphrodite had her  Ishtar based war connections pretty aggressively stripped  away when she arrived in Greece, she still ended up kind of  gaining them back through Rome. And also made her debut in the first  place by being directly responsible for the biggest war in Greek mythos history. I guess you can take the war out of the goddess, but you can't take the goddess out of the war. I love the deeps dives, but they're so  hard to make. Trying to reconcile the   loose implied timeline of the mythological  order of operations with the real historical   timeline of narrative and religious  changes that shaped these myths and   the gods themselves makes things pretty  brain-hurty, which is bad news for us   if we're trying to make this video a timeline.   But rather than tying ourselves in knots trying   to lock down a birth order, let's just keep  things alphabetical and bring in the twins.

[APOLLO AND ARTEMIS DEEP DIVE] In the field of mythology in general and greek mythology specifically, fraternal twins where one is a boy and the other is a girl are very unusual. Twins in general aren't. Castor and Pollux, Helen and Clytemnestra, Heracles and Iphicles, if you get late enough in the myth cycle you even get Romulus and Remus when Rome rolls into town. But fraternal twins of different genders are quite rare, not just in Greek mythology but in mythology overall. You do get Freyr and Freyja over in norse mythology, but in general the identical twins far outnumber them. Even in the pantheons that share hypothetical proto-indo-european roots with Greek mythology, the only twins we really run into are identical - the Ashvins in Hinduism and their twin sons Nakula and Sahadeva, Lugal-Irra and Meslamta-Ea in Babylon, the Dioscuri in Greece. The always-identical "Divine Twins" are even a reconstructed proto-indo-european god archetype - so take that with as many grains of salt as you want, but the bottom line is, mythology in that slice of the world is loaded with identical god-twins and very sparse in the fraternal god-twin department. In the mortal cases Greek mythology is fond of having twins where only one of them has a divine parent, but in the case of twin gods they're almost always all-the-way identical and function basically as two copies of the same guy. Which brings us to a perhaps rather obvious line of inquiry: where did Artemis and Apollo come from? We've discussed in previous videos how the roots of different Greek gods can be traced through the historical record, with varying degrees of accuracy, certainty and success, to paint a possible picture of where these gods geographically and culturally originated, how they changed and moved over the centuries and what social pressures or changes may have affected their characterization over time. Aphrodite's glow-up is one of the most dramatic and obvious, as her central role in Rome's mythological origins helped keep her very solidly documented over the centuries, and her Phoenician origins are pretty well agreed on in the scholarship around her. But some gods are trickier to track, and right out the gate, Artemis and Apollo are giving us trouble, because when we go looking for likely candidates for where they might have come from, we find nothing. There are no convenient brother-sister twin pairings in any of the surrounding areas, certainly none that match their divine domains of archery, medicine, hunting vs civilization, etcetera. But this lack of information does actually give us one very important clue right out the gate: Artemis and Apollo may have their origins in non-Greek cultures, but they don't seem to have started out as a matched set. Now this is not actually the weirdest thing in the world. We have to remember that gods are not people, and their genealogy is not set in stone. Hermes seems to have started his life as an offshoot of the god Pan and was later written to be Pan's father, and Persephone's parentage oscillates between Poseidon and Zeus depending on where and when you're asking. So it is not too bizarre  to consider the possibility  that Artemis and Apollo did not start their divine existences as twins, but were two initially unrelated gods that became twins over time. For one thing, if we go looking in the Linear B inscriptions from the pre-Greek-Dark-Age Mycenaean civilization, we can find Artemis in the ledgers of Pylos, but we can't find Apollo anywhere. This does not categorically mean that Apollo, or a god who would become Apollo, did not exist in Mycenaean Greece. It's possible he just had another name - for instance, we actually can find two names that later became epithets of Apollo, "Smintheus" and "Paieon", attested at Knossos. But it does mean that Artemis and Apollo were not, at this point, two of a pair. Their names or epithets aren't listed in the same areas and it's not even clear if Apollo exists yet, while Artemis's worship was solid enough that it has an actual archaeological record to back it up, with artifacts from as far back as the Greek Dark Age found at a temple to Artemis Orthia in Sparta. Again a lack of information gives us information. With Artemis attested in Linear B we can pretty solidly assume she was a Mycenaean god, and if she has foreign origins earlier than that, we don't really have any chance of figuring out what they are. But Apollo's absence is interesting, and suggests that he might have a more far-flung origin. This is potentially supported by the fact that the etymology of his name is uncertain, and there's no obvious Greek root for what it means, though "ἀπέλλα" (apella) has been suggested, which would mean "wall" or "fence" or "place where people gather", which could potentially match up with his role as a god of civilization in contrast with Artemis's stewardship of the wild, but it's disputed and possibly nonsense, so who knows. So there is still a pretty hard limit to how much information we can get from no information. Now while Apollo's place of origin isn't known, it is interesting that he has an awful lot of myths about coming to greece from somewhere else, most of which are discussed in his Homeric Hymn. To start with, he and Artemis are born on the comparatively far-flung island of Delos because Hera used her goddess-powers to forbid their mother Leto from giving birth anywhere closer to home, giving a plausible mythological reason for why Apollo would've had to join the pantheon late and from somewhere else. Reinforcing that theme, in Delphi, Apollo's major cult center, he was mostly revered for slaying and usurping the Python, described in the hymn as a monstrous dragon and the offspring of Typhon - so in broad strokes Apollo is born outside of Greece, comes to Delphi, seizes control of Python's place of power and takes his place as the local god. That looks like an analogy for a new god rolling up in the neighborhood and finding his niche in the pantheon, by force if necessary. The hymn also describes Apollo wandering the world for a while, looking for the perfect place to establish his center of worship and at one point abducting a crew of Cretan sailors to be his worshippers. We'll get more into this later, but it paints a picture about how the Greeks may have thought of Apollo by the roughly-500s BCE, when the  later hymns were being written  - as a well-established and broadly well-respected deity who, nonetheless, came to Greece a little late in the game. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's stick to the timeline and see what we can find that way. After the Greek Dark Ages the first big source we have on hand is, of course, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and lucky for us, Artemis and Apollo are major players in the Iliad - but, interestingly, they're both firmly on the antagonistic and non-Achaean Trojan's side. Now, admittedly, so is Zeus, so this doesn't mean that Trojan-favoring gods were automatically being framed as foreign scary bad-guy gods or anything - but they were on the same side as Aphrodite, who we know was a Phoenician import god still kinda gettin' her legs under her, and Ares, a god the Greeks seem to have generally disliked. And the way these two are characterized in the story is a little… odd, when you compare it  to their later portrayals. Not everything is weird! A lot of their very consistent character traits are established. While they aren't explicitly referred to as twins in so many words, they are full siblings, and Artemis is a great huntress and archer and the "patroness of wild beasts" with a habit of divinely smiting people for wrongdoings, disrespect and possibly shits and giggles, while Apollo is the lyre-playing leader of the muses who is also an expert archer who strikes down mortals on the regs, and he's already established as a major god in Troy, as Agamemnon disrespecting his priest is what kicks off his direct intervention in the war. Achilles at one point describes him as "the most malicious of all gods", but he's explicitly pretty biased so we don't need to take that as 100% factual or representative of the popular attitudes at the time. Artemis and Apollo are both also described as healing various combatants, making them stronger and cooler-looking and other General God Things that are pretty much par for the course, but while this all sounds pretty much in line with what we expect, elements of their characterization seem a little bit… off from their more well-known versions. For one thing, despite Artemis being described as a powerful hunter goddess and the mistress of wild beasts, when the gods square up to fight each other, Hera literally beats the crap out of her with her own bow and sends her crying to Zeus. This doesn't really line up with her "strong and wrathful goddess of the wilds" thing, though in fairness she might be suffering from The Worf Effect, since Hera is the most powerful goddess in the pantheon and this scene specifically is dedicated to proving that, and more broadly to proving why the gods don't fight each other directly. But while Artemis is literally spanked and sent crying home to daddy, Apollo is portrayed a little more… respectfully? He's still framed as a bit of a terrifying, dread god, but he's also smart enough to not pick a fight with Uncee Poseidon and subsequently get his ass beat, so he comes out of the whole situation looking less arrogant than his sister. Which could've been intentional. We can't read too far into this, and this is just me conspiracy-boarding again, but if Artemis was already a well-established and powerful Greek god at this point, but Apollo was a slightly newer addition to the pantheon, one way to give him credibility would be to explicitly portray him as superior to his sister - wiser and on better terms with the other gods. This isn't the only time the Iliad makes an explicit statement about a newly-integrated god, as it also goes out of its way to declaw  Aphrodite's apparently  pre-existing war associations when Zeus firmly and blatantly tells her that she has no place on the battlefield. And also it would be  disingenuous to not acknowledge  that the Ancient Greeks had some pretty strong opinions about gender roles that might possibly be being reinforced here. The gods are much less centralized in The Odyssey, so the only references we get to Artemis and Apollo are distant and reverent rather than personal godly exploits, and the main theme is that they seem to be credited with causing sudden, unexpected deaths with their divine arrows. Again, not their most friendly look. One common interpretation of this is that Artemis and Apollo's arrows represent illness and corresponding sudden death, which would make this an early instance of their incidental association with medicine - when a god is in charge of killing you in a specific way, you might ask them to specifically not do that. Another important player referenced in the Iliad is Artemis and Apollo's mother Leto, who is - like her children - on the Trojan side of the conflict. During the Big God Fight where Artemis gets whacked, Hermes is squared off against Leto but respectfully refuses to fight her and asks her to tell everyone that she beat him fair and square. Then she gathers up Artemis's dropped bow and scattered arrows and goes off to comfort her after her vicious ass-beating at the hands of Hera. And it is interesting that, while Artemis and Apollo are framed as pretty terrifying and antagonistic, Leto is afforded only the highest respect by both the gods and the narrative overall. We don't get much more about Leto here, but we get a little bit more in the Theogony by Hesiod, written around the same time as the Iliad and Odyssey, who says that Leto and Zeus were together before Zeus married Hera, and thus Artemis and Apollo are basically Zeus's kids from a previous relationship with no explicit drama involved. It also, again, only says that Artemis and Apollo are the children of Zeus and Leto - it does not say whether or not they are twins. This no-drama family picture severely contrasts with the version we get a few centuries later in the Homeric Hymns, which give us a very different and more familiar rundown of the circumstances of Apollo and Artemis's birth. Of course, it's not immune to its own weirdnesses. For one thing, the homeric hymn to Apollo describes Leto giving birth to Artemis on the island of Ortygia, the location of which is uncertain because it could be referring to a half-dozen places of the same name, including one all the way at the boot end of Italy, and then giving birth to Apollo on the island of Delos. Now I know they're gods and I know the rules are different, but I'm counting this as evidence for my "these guys were not always twins" theory, because giving birth to twins on different islands seems wildly impractical otherwise. And in fact the Homeric Hymn does not call them twins. Now, perhaps they are still implied to be twins by the fact that they both seem to be the result of the same  vaguely-defined one-night-stand  with Zeus and it's biologically  unlikely otherwise, but they're gods, man! The rules are weird! Anyway, the Hymn explains that Leto is having an absolute bear of a time trying to find a place to have her baby, in large part because  of Hera, who is very angry  at this whole situation, evidently since in this version of the timeline Zeus got Leto pregnant after marrying Hera. And while the causality is not directly stated in the hymn, fear of Hera's wrath is implied to be a large part of why all the places Leto tries to settle down to have her baby kick her out again. The only exception is the island of Delos, which is pretty crappy by island standards and devoid of all the classic appeals of a hunk of rock in the middle of the ocean, and Leto swears on the river styx that her glorious golden son will skyrocket the property values with his biggest and baddest temple if Delos will let her have her baby already, and the island agrees! But Hera does not, and keeps Eilithyia, goddess of childbirth, on a short leash for nine days and nights until the other goddesses fire off a message to kick her out of bed and she zips down to help Leto out. Apollo is finally born and everyone is really impressed with how cool and badass he is, and he declares that the lyre and the bow will be his symbols and he will speak the will of Zeus. In celebration, Delos blooms with golden flowers and, true to his word, no matter how many temples Apollo gets, his shrine at Delos is always the best. The hymn to Pythian Apollo goes into more detail about some of the shenanigans Apollo gets up to, like absolutely shredding on the Lyre while Artemis kills it on the dance floor, and the singer recounts a short list of some of Apollo's many lovers before settling on the story of how Apollo found the perfect place to sit his oracle. After a very scenic mediterranean grand tour he settles on the area of Crissa, lays out the foundations for his temple and then casually scoots over to a nearby spring currently populated by a terrible dragon, Python, and kills it, gaining the epithet Pythian and naming the place Pytho in one fell swoop. Then, of course, Apollo decides his fancy temple needs people to work at it, spots a nearby trading ship from Crete and decides those are just the guys he needs. Obviously looking to win first place in the Simple Solution Olympics, he turns himself into a dolphin and launches himself onto the deck of the ship, furiously shaking and rattling the boat whenever they try and throw him off so they have no choice but to leave him flopped on the deck while he summons the winds to steer them way off course. When they finally go to ground near Crissa, Apollo zips off the ship, gets the temple all shiny for the new visitors and strolls out in all his glory to give 'em the good news. To honor his heroic exploit of kidnapping a ship full of sailors while shaped like a dolphin, the area is given the name Delphi. The homeric hymns to Artemis are a lot shorter and a lot less morally wack somehow. They mostly praise her prodigious hunting skill, her virginity, and how she loves nothing more than racing through the mountains firing arrows in every direction, except when she wants to unwind, when she scoots back to Delphi to party with her brother and the Muses to sing about how they're the greatest gods in the entire pantheon. Hubris: it's okay when gods do it! Now it's worth noting that, at this point, Artemis and Apollo… really haven't changed all that much. They've been remarkably consistent since the Iliad - Apollo as an extremely well-respected god of archery, prophecy and music with hints of healing thrown in the mix, Artemis as a more wild goddess of archery and the hunt. They are explicitly full siblings even in the stories that don't specify in so many words that they're twins, and they are overall very well-liked gods whose many feats are a credit to their divine mother Leto, even if those feats do involve killing an awful lot of mortals for often very flimsy reasons. Hesiod's Astronomia, another early source from the 700s-ish BCE around the same time as the theogony and the Homeric epics, lists a number of constellation myths that Artemis is involved in, giving us another look at her early post-Dark-Age characterization. Artemis appears in the myth of Callisto, hunting wild beasts in the mountains before transforming Callisto into a beast herself. Orion is described as a hunting-companion to Artemis and her mother Leto, before being killed by a monstrous scorpion sent by Gaia and turned into a constellation at Artemis and Leto's behest. Later, in the 300-200s, Aratus's Phaenomena does the same, describing a different version of the Orion myth where Artemis kills him herself for trying to assault her - the narrator actually apologizes to Artemis before telling the tale. Apollo's less common in the constellation myths, but significantly more common in myths about his lovers and the resulting kids. Pindar wrote the Pythian Odes in the 400s BCE, which reaffirm Apollo's status as leader of the muses but also starts getting into his tumultuous love life. For instance, Pindar describes the birth of Asclepius, son of Apollo and hero-turned-god of medicine. The gist is Asclepius's mother Coronis sleeps with someone else while pregnant with Apollo's kid, and Apollo gets big mad about it and sends Artemis to do some vengeance, but crucially doesn't tell her when to stop, so Artemis's divine smite leaves a lot of collateral damage - which supports the idea that Artemis and Apollo's arrows sometimes take the form of a plague. Apollo saves the unborn Asclepius from his mother's funeral pyre and gives him to Chiron to raise. Asclepius later uses his medical skills to bring someone back from the dead for money and Zeus strikes him with lightning about it. This is probably one of the earlier instances  of Apollo being associated  with medicine - indirectly through his son - but other than that this story mostly reaffirms what's already been established. Apollo has powerful, oracular omniscience, a strong musical bent and a propensity for sharing the stage with the Muses, while his sister Artemis - is terrifying. However, there is one little crucial shift that we find around this time: along with the hot goss of the Pythain Odes, Pindar is also the first writer I can find who explicitly states that Artemis and Apollo aren't just siblings, they're twins. He says as much in a fragmentary papyrus (Pa. XII) describing the story of their birth from yet another angle where they're both born at the same time, which makes sense. So it took us a few hundred years, but we finally got written confirmation. By the 400s BCE, Artemis  and Apollo were officially  twins. Things start to shift more seriously when Rome becomes more of a thing closer to the tail end of the BCEs. The romans made my life personally a lot more difficult by enthusiastically syncretizing their own gods with the Greeks, and Artemis is no exception. The Romans seem to have just taken Apollo wholesale, with temples to him popping up in Etruscan Italy as early as the 500s BCE and a cult of his manifesting in Pompeii around the same time, hitting Rome proper in 431 BCE with a temple dedicated to his healing aspect - and the fact that Apollo evidently didn't already have a similar Roman equivalent knocking around is pretty solid evidence for the idea that he's a quite late addition to the region, which is most likely why he's the only major Greek god whose name remains unchanged. But when it came to Artemis they did have a deity they could conflate her with - their own hunting goddess, Diana. Around 200 BCE Roman poet Ennius listed the twelve major roman gods in his Annales poem, now preserved only in fragments, and two of them are Apollo and Diana. A couple centuries later Virgil gave us a much better-preserved text in the Aeneid, and namedrops the twins' Roman editions on the regular. Virgil describes Diana as chaste, accompanied by similarly chaste followers, and majestically leading a dance of nymphs while armed with her trusty quiver. In short, Virgil's description of Diana lines up very well with the Homeric Hymn's description of Artemis - right up until it doesn't, when he casually drops the idea that Diana is a triple-goddess like Hecate, a deity very commonly represented with three distinct faces and aspects and divine power  over three-way crossroads,  where Hecate's three-faced statues - hekataia - were commonly found. Virgil also references Diana alongside Night, Erebus, Chaos and other extremely witchy gods in the context of Dido doing some very spooky magic, and he calls her by the epithet "Trivia," which explicitly means "triple. " None of this triple symbolism was in the mythology of Artemis, so this seems to have been the strictly Roman addition - the epithet "trivia", the triple nature and the association with spooky cthonic gods. This is quite a shift, and a very cool one! Diana doesn't have as much triplicate statuary are Hekate does, but Roman coins from the last years of the BCEs show a tripled Diana, a recreation of a cult image to Diana Nemorensis from a sacred grove turned temple dedicated to her in the region of Nemi, Italy, that had seen continuous use since the 500s BCE, meaning that Diana's triple status was centuries old by the time the Romans started conflating her with Artemis. The Aeneid meanwhile mostly refers to Apollo as "Phoebus," the epithet meaning "bright", while Diana is described as a dark counterpoint to him. They're referenced together more often than not, and Aeneas is at one point urged to do a sacrifice to each of them, reinforcing their characterization as a matched set. But there's one part of their characterization you might have noticed we haven't found yet, and that's their astronomical side. After all, Apollo is famously a god of the sun and Artemis of the moon. But we've gone through more than eight hundred years of myths without even a hint of their most iconic symbolism. So… when and where did that crop up? Well… really late. It doesn't come up at all in the pre-Roman myths, even in places where it'd make sense to bring up - like the various constellation myths Apollo and Artemis are wrapped up in, where their celestial counterparts would be very easy to loop into the narrative. The first clear evidence we have of the connection is as late as 45 BCE, when Cicero's Nature of the Gods says outright that Diana is the goddess of the moon while Apollo is the god of the sun, and further links Diana's moon association with pregnancy and childbirth, something that's been in Artemis's purview since the early myths where in some versions she assisted in her own twin brother's delivery, which is a hell of a visual. It's a nice connection that lines up well with their divine domains, so it makes sense that it would catch on - but it also makes sense why it wouldn't have been a thing before the Romans started mashing gods together, because there were already Greek gods of the sun and moon - Helios and Selene, referenced as early as the Theogony alongside their sister Eos, goddess of the dawn. Helios turns up in the Odyssey and Selene and Helios are the subjects of their own homeric hymns, meaning they were clearly distinct deities for a while. The sun and moon are probably some of the easiest natural phenomena to assign gods to, so it's not too much of a stretch to assume that Helios and Selene are some of the oldest gods in the pantheon, or even the pre-greek theoretical Proto-Indo-European pantheon scholars like fistfighting each other about. But when Rome rolled up, with their habit  of syncretizing gods left and right,  the similar-and-yet-very-different fraternal twins, Apollo  with his bright associations  and Diana with her dark, wild ones, must've made very tempting targets for just a little more divine conflation to give them command over nature's own similar-and-yet-very-different celestial phenomena. By the time of Cicero, Apollo is solidly the god of the sun and Artemis - slash Diana - is the goddess of the moon. Of course once the Romans roll up we start looking for ol' reliable Ovid right around the start of the CEs, and Ovid has goss aplenty about the twins. This is where we find the story of Niobe, who brags about having more children than Leto and therefore being a better mom, at which point Leto's two children slaughter Niobe's children and she turns into a rock about it. Ovid also recounts a few of Apollo's ill-fated romantic exploits, including Daphne - who turns into a tree to escape him - and Hyacinthus, who's into the relationship and then dies anyway. Meanwhile, Artemis, or "Diana", is less of a major player and is instead portrayed as a bit of a distant force of nature - for instance, she sends a massive boar to ravage Calydon when its king fails to honor her with the other gods, and this appears to be her default method of conflict resolution, because according to some footnotes there are versions where Diana also sends a boar to kill Adonis because Ares, or Mars, was jealous of how much attention Aphrodite, or Venus, was giving him, which is honestly a very bro move of her. Ovid's version of the myth of Callisto features Zeus/Jupiter taking Diana's form and seducing Callisto that way, at which point Diana exiles Callisto for violating their virgins-only policy. Diana is also referenced at several points in the tale of the unfortunate nymph Arethusa, who is pursued by the extremely horny river Alpheus. Diana does several acts of divine intervention to facilitate her escape and ultimately turns her into a freshwater spring to get her outta there for good. Ovid tends to mark the point in the timeline where the gods have reached their final consistent characterization. And all things considered, Artemis and Apollo have an interesting developmental curve. Artemis is thoroughly ancient,  pre-classical-antiquity  minimum, and seems to have been worshipped in the wild, dark places and feared when she gets mad and encroaches in the civilized ones, but Apollo seems to have come out the gate swinging as an instant beacon of power and civilization, creativity and the arts, appearing in the Homeric era with a cavalcade of myths about coming from a far-flung, exiled birth. Apollo continues to serve as a god of music and the arts, leader of the Muses and a dealer in creativity and inspiration, but he also stays firmly planted in the city centers, with oracles and priests and power and a long list of superpowered lovers and heroic offspring, while Artemis's power over the wilderness and its wild creatures and the people who choose to leave the structure of civilization to forsake love and partnership and join her in the hunt - is only exacerbated when she gains Diana's cthonic triple-goddess crossroads symbolism and later power over the moon. Apollo is a god of civilization, Artemis of the uncivilized wild. Together they cover basically everything the average Ancient Greek is liable to deal with on a daily basis. It's almost unsurprising that they slowly absorbed more and more symbolism. If Apollo is the god of light and civilization, why wouldn't you also tie him in with the daylight, the time where civilization gets most of its civilizing done? And if Artemis is a goddess of navigating the wild and dangerous wilderness, why wouldn't you give her power over the moonlight that casts the world in shifting, uncertain shadows, that commands the nighttime when the animals she hunts are most active? Artemis and Apollo fit together. Narratively and aesthetically speaking, they're just plain fun. And they're also dangerous,  fickle and unpredictable. Their divine domains contain multitudes and those multitudes contradict. Artemis is a defender of young women and also the goddess whose job it is to kill them. She helps hunters and gives people who don't wanna marry a career option and divine protection, and she also unleashes wild animals on innocent towns whenever she's provoked and kills any hunter that gets too hubristic about their own skill. Apollo is a god of music and creativity who leads the Muses, mistresses of inspiration, and one way to interpret his many mortal lovers is a metaphor for creative inspiration, striking at random and often to devastating effect. And another way to read it is that Apollo's disastrous lovelife is a nightmare because he does not take "no" for an answer, making his relationship with Artemis, the protector of young women who intercedes when they're attacked, a very blatant conflict. And that can make my flavor of storytelling… difficult. I mean, how are we supposed to like these guys? How can we be cutesy and fun about these people that've done so much fucked up stuff? Well. There's a problem in our premise. At the end of the day, when we analyze any god, we have to remember that they are not people. These contradictory characteristics - blessings and atrocities doled out in equal measure, protections and injustices inflicted on hapless mortals - these are not moral actions taken by human beings. Artemis and Apollo are gods that existed through a civilization for nearly a millennium, and in that time they were the subject of many stories. Why are the greek gods so fickle? Why don't they always help the people they care about? Why does the mistress of the hunt both protect and kill her hunters? Well, because sometimes hunters live and sometimes they die. Sometimes arrows rain down from heaven and the people they strike get sick, and sometimes they just as randomly get better. And if you worship gods that represents those realities, those gods are not going to be entirely benevolent. If you tell a story to explain the world, especially if you tell that story over a thousand years, the story is not going to be entirely happy, and I think that's what makes the story so interesting. When we unravel one of these gods, we're getting a glimpse of centuries of civilizations and generations of people making sense of the world around them. That civilization is long gone, the people are long dead, but the stories they told about the world and each other are still here. And two of those stories happen to be named "Artemis" and "Apollo. " These deep-dives are hard to put on the timeline  on account of how they span a thousand years of   real history and also include quick references  to myths that are going to show up later in this   video, but I'm doing the best I can with  what I've got. This cast of characters has   already gotten big, but we're not even close  to done. And luckily for us and our timeline,   the ever-effervescent god of thieves and travelers  is, in at least one story, officially established   to be younger than Apollo, which means now  is as good a time as any to bring him in.

[HERMES DEEP DIVE] What's the Greek god you see the most influence of in your everyday life? Wrong, it's Hermes. Hermes, Hermes, Kinda hope you're not dealing with  that daily, but still, Hermes. Hermes, known to the Romans as Mercury, was the ancient Greek god of roads, journeys, merchants, thieves, athletes, trickery and a handful of other related things. He was predominantly  recognized as a messenger god,  but he was also revered as an underworld god and a psychopomp responsible for guiding the souls of the dead. He also pulled a triple shift guiding dreams and had a hobby on the side  of helping out mortal heroes   when they got wrapped up in sticky situations. With that many jobs, it's no wonder why he's so  widespread these days! What a millennial icon. So before we start in on the whole historical context/character development thing, let's do a quick rundown of where exactly Hermes stands in mythology of ancient Greece. ♩ Hermes is very young by Olympian standards;  only Dionysus is canonically younger. He's born to the pleiad Maia  in the mountain in Arcadia, and is unsurprisingly the son of Zeus,  like roughly 7% of all of ancient Greece. But Hermes sets himself apart from the other  Olympians by getting his shenanigannery underway literally the day he's born. According to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the first thing he does after being born is find a tortoise, kill it, and turn its shell into a lyre. Then he gets hungry, so he  does the only rational thing and steals 50 of Apollo's sacred cattle. Oh, but what if Apollo notices they're missing? Well, obviously Hermes reverses their hooves  first so it looks like they're walking backwards. Duh, you guys. Anyway, Hermes stows the cows and starts a  fire so he can sacrifice the meat to the gods including himself, of course. Then he scoots back home and puts on a helpless baby act, but his mom isn't buying it. So instead Hermes explains to her that this is all   part of his cunning plan to put  himself on the Olympians' radar so he can get them both the respect and honor they  deserve instead of, you know, living in a cave. Meanwhile, Apollo has finally  noticed his cows are missing and after a little detective work, he tracks down Hermes in Maia's cave. Apollo interrogates Hermes who insists he's   just a widdle baby who doesn't  know anything about any cows. So Apollo brings him to Zeus who thinks this  entire situation is absolutely hilarious. Zeus tells Hermes to guide Apollo to the cows, and, on the way, Hermes wins Apollo over by playing the lyre for him. Apollo is so enchanted that he promises Hermes will be the messenger of the gods and he and his mother will be  honored among the Olympians. He trades his role of herdsman for Hermes's  lyre, and the two of them return to Olympus. And in exchange for Hermes promising never to rob  him again, Apollo also gives him his caduceus, a small staff with two snakes coiled around it,   usually seen as a symbol of  like, messengers and heralds, but it's also very specifically  a symbol of Hermes. So Hermes makes his debut as a trickster underdog wrangling an improbable victory through cunning and trickery. And despite winning untold power and fame in the process, somehow still manages to come across as a tricksy underdog for centuries to come. Neat trick! Hermes makes regular appearances in the mythology, playing a supporting role in  both the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Iliad, though he was allied with the Achaeans for the majority of the book, he also protected King Priam  when he traveled to the  Achaean camp to retrieve  the body of his son Hector. And in the Odyssey, Hermes provided regular help and advice to Odysseus including helping him confront Circe to break her enchantment on his men and later guiding the dead souls of the suitors to the afterlife. This extra-special deific  assistance might have been   because Odysseus is actually his great-grandson, the grandkid of his son Autolycus, who was a notorious bandit trickster and shapeshifter. Runs in the family, I guess. One of Hermes's most well known accomplishments is killing the hundred-eyed giant Argus. In the myth of Io, for...   somewhat complicated reasons the nymph Io ends up getting turned into a cow  and kept under the watchful guard of Argus. Zeus asks Hermes to free her, so Hermes  disguises himself as a simple shepherd, lulls Argus to sleep with a  long and boring story about  the creation of the panpipes,  then cuts off his head. To commemorate the occasion Hermes is most   frequently referred to with  the epithet "Argeiphontes" meaning "Argus slayer. " Hermes has a handful of other  appearances in popular Greek mythology. He frequently helps out errant heroes like Perseus and Orestes by giving them the means to sneak around invisibly or fool their enemies. In fact, this trickery is a  major characteristic of Hermes. Hermes is the god of liars and thieves along with all the other stuff in his purview. And while these may seem like kind of unheroic qualities for a god to instill, actually, most Greek heroes were tricksters or underdogs on some level. Even Heracles, who was the best-equipped person on the planet to solve all his problems with sheer brute force, still had to be clever on occasion. Like when he tricked Atlas  into taking back the sky. So even though Odysseus got a bit of a bad rap for being all trickery all the time, in practice trickery was a well respected heroic trait when used in moderation and it was thanks in large  part to Hermes' influence. Now before we get to the history, there's one wacky thing to know about Hermes that we're gonna look into a little more later, and that's these things. These are called Herms. They were boundary and border markers found along roadways. They usually had Hermes's  head although that varied  and they always had a dong. I don't know why the dong  is non-negotiable, but yeah. With Hermes being a god of boundaries and borders, it kind of makes sense that he'd be on most of these road markers but at the same time it's still a little weird and not just because of the dong situation. So let's hold off on investigating that for a bit and get to the history. ♩ So, uh... First things first... Hermes... used to be Pan. Let me explain. Now, the Greek god Pan is a mysterious figure. Not purposefully, he's just really old so there's not much clear information available about his origins or development. Pan, as he was characterized in the era of ancient  Greece, is generally considered  to be a rustic wild god. Officially he's the god of forests, mountain wilderness, fertility, shepherds, and flocks but he's also got a bunch of other wacky characteristics on the side. His worship was almost exclusively found in  the mountainous inland region of Arcadia, which is also Hermes' birthplace, and Arcadia was known for being inland, forested, and very old compared to the rest of Greece. Pan, as a wild god, wasn't really worshipped in built structures. He was worshipped in natural  caves and only ever had  two constructed temples,  one of them in Peloponnese. In the mythology, Pan is considered older than the Olympians. He's credited with having gifted Artemis her hunting dogs, and Apollo his gift of prophecy. He's most commonly known for two things that both bear his name: PANpipes and PANic. Pan created the syrinx, or panpipes, when a nymph he was chasing turned herself into reeds to escape. So he turned her into a musical instrument he could put his lips all over... Bit twisted. Now panic as we all know describes a kind of fear so intense that it borders on madness. Pan is specifically credited as being responsible for panic. He would yell in the woods and anyone who heard it would be inflicted with panic. He could supposedly rout entire armies with it. Now we know some stuff about Pan, but there's a lot about him that's very vague and fuzzy. His parentage, for example, is  incredibly vague and varied, suggesting he's very old because that's the  kind of myth that takes a while to drift. And in fact Pan is probably older than Mycenaean Greece. See, those comparative mythology scholars working  to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European religion that spawned off the Vedic, Norse, and Greek mythologies theorized that Pan is an offshoot of the Proto-Indo-European pastoral god... THIS... whose only other known offshoot is Pushan, a Vedic pastoral deity. The Rigveda, which mentions Pushan might be as old as 1700 BC So if Pan is an offshoot of the same god,   he most likely predates the Mycenaean  age that started in 1600 BC. Now the thing is, due to a lack of written sources we don't know much about how Pan was characterized before ancient Greece. But Pushan can give us a  lot of information by proxy. Pushan is the Vedic deity of journeys, roads,   travel, pastoralism, herding,  and a handful of other things. He's also a psychopomp. Did you notice these are all  things Hermes is a god of? So the theory -- and it's not actually my  theory, this is generally accepted these days -- Is that WAY back in or before the Mycenaean Age, Hermes was split from Pan and before that, original Pan was very similar to Pushan, a liminal god of navigating between places like roads, the  general wilderness, and the  journey to the afterlife. When this original Pan was  subdivided, Pan retained  his pastoralist and herding connotations but all the roads and journey stuff went  to Hermes, leaving Pan quite reduced. And it's worth noting that Hermes also has some herding associations. Now this theory isn't just based on the fact that Hermes has general similarities to a Vedic deity. Pan and Hermes also have some other weird connections. For one, their origins are both in  Arcadia as are their centers of worship. For another, in some versions of mythology, Pan is Hermes's son? Now that's a damn weird connection, but it makes sense to link them in a backwards kind of way and it's surprisingly relevant; Hermes and Pan are both mythically notorious  for having some serious dongage going on. So let's circle back to the Herms. ♩ Now the word Herm literally means "piled stones". It's not a name. Hermes' name is not a name. And Herms are a very old concept in that region, older than ancient Greece, and older than Hermes. Before they were sculpted statues, roads were demarcated with heaps of stones. But the lack of human features didn't make them any less sacred. Herms were revered. It was customary to throw another stone on the   heap or anoint it with oil if you  were feeling particularly devout. And messing with them, or later defacing them, was seen as this horrible affront. And Pan, as the old deity of roads and journeys, was probably the god revered through the Herms. Now remember back in the Aphrodite video when I mentioned divine epithets and how they describe the capacity a god was being worshipped in? We don't actually know for certain, but it seems very likely that way back in the day, Pan had some kind of Herm-related epithet   describing him as Pan of  the piled boundary stones. And also way back in the day, this epithet got separated from him into its own deity, Hermes. Now, this all happened VERY early, so we don't  really know why Hermes separated from Pan. It might have been because Pan was a fairly specialized deity and his worship was having trouble expanding beyond the more rustic wild lands. So they peeled off this brand spankin' new deity with so much mass-market appeal he's literally STILL showing up on brand labels. Whatever the original reason, we know Hermes is attested in Mycenaean Linear B inscriptions or at least a word that sounds like Hermes, and that means Hermes split from Pan well before we have any sort of proper records. By the time the 800s hit and Homer starts writing his epics Hermes is firmly established as evidenced by his role in the Iliad and Pan has already been reduced to a simple wilderness god. Oh, and before we move on  here's a fun fact about Pan. Some of you who are well acquainted with Greek mythological esoterica, or just read the Percy Jackson books, may have heard that Pan is canonically dead. According to Plutarch writing around 100 AD, a mere handful of decades earlier during the reign of emperor Tiberius, a divine voice called out from the isle of Paksi to a sailor named Thamus and told him to tell everyone that the great god Pan was dead. Thamus obliged and everyone was slightly bummed to hear that Pan was dead. However, Pan didn't actually seem to be dead in any meaningful sense. His shrines were still frequented, his worship still happened. So what was all that about? Well. This whole thing might be a  hilarious misunderstanding. Do you remember in my old underworld myths video I mentioned that Ishtar had a dead boyfriend named Tammuz? And in my Aphrodite video I elaborated that Tammuz  had his own cult that had been brought to Greece? Well, in ancient Greek the sentence: "Thamus, the great god Pan is dead! " is read as "Thamus Panmegas tethneke". But there's this funny little thing in Greek.    Pan- along with being the god's  name is a prefix meaning "all". So this sentence could be: "Thamus, Pan the great is dead! " or it could be "Tammuz the all-great is dead! " So this whole thing about Pan being dead might have been the result of some sailors overhearing the cult of Tammuz praising Tammuz for his sole accomplishment and thought they were hearing them tell some dude  named Thamus that the god named Pan had died. Anyway, I thought that was the funniest thing in the world when I learned it. You're welcome for that wacky anecdote to share at parties. Back to Hermes! ♩ Now in the early days of ancient Greece Hermes didn't actually look too dissimilar to Pan. In the Archaic Age between 800 and 500 BC Hermes was always represented as an older bearded man. In Classical and Hellenistic Greece, his image changed to the one we recognize now. An athlete, young, beardless and mostly naked. Dionysus also underwent a similar transformation. Maybe the Romans just weren't into older dudes. Speaking of, we should really talk about Mercury, the Roman version of Hermes. ♩ Now most Roman versions of Greek gods started off as fully developed deities in their own right. For example Mars, the parallel  to Ares, was originally  an agricultural deity as well as a war god and most notably wasn't  treated with anywhere near as  much contempt as Ares was within his own pantheon. For the most part, the other Roman gods were also full-fledged deities though sometimes they got a little confused and accidentally mashed other gods together. Like Pluto, Hades's Roman equivalent, who was accidentally both the underworld  god Pluton and the wealth god Plutus. But Mercury? Mercury didn't exist! The name Mercury has uncertain etymology   but it probably derives either  from the Latin root of "merchant" or from an older word for "boundary". Either way, the name is a  literal descriptor of one of  Hermes's divine duties and  has no history beyond that. Mercury did seem to absorb a handful of minor Roman deities called the Dea Lucrii, a collective of minor gods of profit, specifically  immoral profit that comes from bad sources, but basically, Mercury was literally just the Roman name for Hermes. I'm not sure why they bothered; they didn't make up a Latin name for Apollo, but it is what it is. Now during the Roman era Hermes/Mercury was incredibly popular. Since Rome was all about that expansion, Hermes's status as the god of trade and merchants saw a lot of use. He turned up on the coinage, the sculptures are all over Pompeii, and there is one other quirk of his that made him so popular. See, Rome had this policy that whenever they subsumed another culture they treated that culture's  gods as their own. Literally. They found the Roman god  that most closely resembled  the local god and insisted they were the same. First they did it with the Greeks, and then when they dealt with the Celts this led to Mercury being syncretized with Lugus. Known in Ireland as Lugh and in Wales as... Lleu. Lou... Also Lou? I don't know man. I'm- I'm sorry Wales... who was broadly seen as a big stonkin' deal as in the creator of all arts, along with being a badass warrior-hero-king and stuff. The Romans saw him as a patron of commerce, so  he was equated with the  commercial-friendly Mercury. And if that's not wacky enough for you, when the Romans dealt with Germanic peoples, They equated Mercury with MOTHER FING ODIN! Was it cuz they were travelers? psychopomps? Was it that stylin' hat-staff combo? Unclear! But the Romans were certain that the Germanic people worshipped Mercury as Odin. The Ptolemaic Greeks also syncretized Hermes with  a few different gods including Thoth and Anubis. Thoth because of their mutual cleverness and I guess tendency to write stuff down and Anubis because of their shared psychopomp duties. Hermes was all over the place, which is honestly very appropriate! Hermes also turns up in a lot of Aesop's fables for some reason... Dunno what's up with that. ♩ Hermes is a versatile god but I can't say for certain why he's so literally iconic. There are some possibilities. Maybe his speed and mobility resonates well with our modern high-speed society. Maybe he's one of the few Olympians to combine likable character traits with a general lack of distractingly awful character flaws. Maybe it's just because medicine, communication,  and capitalism are kind of  central to most societies and they're also central to what he represents. I dunno! Whatever the reason Hermes's liminal status helps him get into the cracks of almost any society and then just... stay there forever! Turning up in unexpected places centuries down the line. He's got this certain je-ne-sais-quoi keeping him in the popular consciousness long after the rest of his pantheon faded into novelty or obscurity. I mean, I get it. He's just fun! I always liked the trickster gods. What do you want from me? Keeping the merch plug in the  megacompilation feels weird,   but it also feels like the most Hermes-honoring  thing I could possibly do, so here we are!   Anyway, Hermes has quite a lot of  time-shenanigans wrapped up in his   origins with Pan, and it's pretty clear  that when it comes to timeline funkiness,   the weirdest thing that can happen is  when an old god shows up late to the   party. But there's one god that can never  resist a party, especially one he wasn't   invited to. So for the last of this wave  of Deep Dives, let's delve into Dionysus.

[DIONYSUS DEEP DIVE] Ah, Dionysus. God of wine, life of the party, known primarily for being drunk and having some   pretty intense fangirls who  killed Orpheus that one time. Wears lots of leaves, not a fan of pants, spends most of the day draped in  grapes and turning dudes into dolphins. Is there really more to him than that? Oh is there. Is there EVER. But we'll get to that. For now, let's start simple and  cover the basics of the backstory. *dramatic music* The official story of Dionysus begins with Zeus (who at this point may as well change his  deific designation to God of One-Night Stands) carrying on a semi-secret affair  with the mortal woman Semele. Hera, as is her wont, catches  wind of their business and decides that she's tired of just outright  killing Zeus's children and girlfriends and for this particular murder, she's gonna  mix it up a little with some disguises. Hera transforms into an old woman  and ingratiates herself to Semele, who trusts her immediately and confides  in her that her boyfriend is Zeus himself, and not only that, she's  actually pregnant with his son. But Hera's like, "Come on, every guy pulls that 'I'm really  Zeus' stunt to get a little mortal action. How do you know for sure  he's being honest with you? " And tells Semele she should make him prove  his god status by showing her his true form. So the next time they meet up, Semele  makes Zeus promise her a favor, then demands he drop the mortal shape  and reveal himself in all his glory. Zeus isn't one to go back on a promise, so he gods it up a little and immediately  vaporizes Semele, Ark-of-the-Covenant-style. But good news, sports fans: the mom  may be dead, but the baby lives. Zeus takes little demigod-baby Dionysus-- --Oh, yeah, that's who the baby is, by the way-- --And sews him into his leg  so the kid can finish growing. A few months later, Dionysus is born for  realsies and his exploits can really get started. Keep an eye on that initial theme of rebirth; it's central to some very interesting  aspects of his character I'll explore later. But first: shenanigans! Dionysus is, of course, wildly  unsafe on Olympus on account of Hera, so Zeus sends him away to be raised in secret. Exactly who raises him varies from telling  to telling, with foster parents ranging from: Hermes, the Titaness Rhea, the mortal King Athamas and Queen Ino (who  raised him as a girl), and even Persephone. Let's also make note of his connection  to Persephone in this version. This is all gonna come together later, I promise. So, Dionysus grows up to young adulthood  and begins his classic godly exploits. He starts off by discovering how to make wine, but before he can spread this  knowledge to the rest of the world, Hera drives him temporarily crazy and he wanders  around for a while before Rhea fixes his brain. Then he gets on that whole "teaching the world how  to make wine" thing and wanders pretty far afield. There's a story that Alexander  the Pretty Alright stumbled on   a town called Nyssa during his  journeys along the Indus River, which they told him was founded by  Dionysus during his meanderings. Dionysus is also a major cutie,  which gets him in a spot of trouble when he gets abducted by  sailors for unsavory purposes. Of course, they get more than they bargained for, and Dionysus responds by turning  the mast and oars into snakes, filling the ship with ivy and the sound of flutes, and possibly turning into a lion. This obviously terrifies  and/or maddens the sailors,   who leap overboard and are  promptly turned into dolphins. You may be wondering: "Hey, how did the cheerfully drunk god  of wine do all that stuff you just said? What does feral wildlife and crippling  insanity have to do with a fine Chardonnay? " Don't worry about that for now. We'll get there. While it's generally accepted in modern canon  that Hestia, goddess of the hearth fire, gave up her seat as the twelfth Olympian  to Dionysus and established his godhood, there's actually no mythological  precedent implying that ever happened. Listings of the twelve Olympians will generally  include either Hestia or Dionysus, but not both, so people kind of assume he supplanted her, but  it's not really clear or established anywhere. He also gives Midas his Golden  Touch, which turned out... Not good. That was a not-good thing that happened. So, now that we've established  some canon for Dionysus, forget all that, because there is no canon; there is only an endlessly deep well  of mysteries and fragmented mythology, and Dionysus is much older  and weirder than he seems. To start our dive down this well,  a little historical context. *mysterious music* Ancient Greece as we generally  conceive of it got going around 700 BC. Before that, the civilization in  the area was Mycenaean Greece,   which existed between 1600 and 1100 BC. After it fell apart in the Late Bronze Age  collapse, there were a few centuries of dark ages, where nothing really got written down, and then city-states started popping  up and Greece got its act together over the course of a couple hundred  years, starting around 900 BC. Mycenaean Greece and Ancient Greece  had a pretty interesting dynamic, since although they were, practically  speaking, different cultures, Ancient Greece really seems to have thought  of itself as a successor to Mycenaean Greece. Classics like The Iliad and The  Odyssey were written in the 700s BC, but explicitly set in the  legendary past of Mycenaean Greece. So it's, like... Ancient Greece squared. There was also a linguistic roll-over:  Mycenaean is considered an early form of Greek, but was written in Linear B, a syllabic  script which was replaced around 900 BC by the basically-modern Greek alphabet, which, in turn, was derived  from the Phoenician alphabet. Anyway, this is important because  the majority of the Hellenistic   Pantheon originated in Mycenaean Greece, and we know this because we found  their names in Linear B inscriptions. Dionysus is one of those gods. In most cases, we know very little about what  roles they played in the Mycenaean religion, although they seem very different from their  classical, Hellenized characterizations. Poseidon, for example, seems to  have filled the role of head god, and he was treated more as a god of  earthquakes than a god of the sea. We do know that the Mycenaean religion seems  to have put a stronger focus than Hellenism did on worshiping chthonic gods, deities  with connections to the underworld, and that Poseidon's "Earthshaker"  epithet designated him as a chthonic god and might have been why he  was considered so important. While Zeus, in contrast, as a  sky god, was barely acknowledged. There's also--fun fact--no  Mycenaean equivalent to Hades, although Persephone and Demeter  are both Mycenaean in origin. Anyway, regardless of who they used to be, by the time Ancient Greece  as we think of it got going   and we started getting written records again, all those old Mycenaean gods were  pretty solidly locked into their new,   Hellenized characterizations. Poseidon got nerfed and sidelined and  had his chthonic connections minimized, chthonic gods in general were  shunted to the background, sky god Zeus got to be the most  important dude on the block, and everyone adjusted pretty quick. Well-- everyone except for Dionysus. *lobby music* See, here's the thing: In the early days of Ancient  Greek historical analysis, everybody knew that Dionysus  was a latecomer to the pantheon (although exactly how late is hard to pin down), but nobody really knew why. Before Linear B was deciphered, the  theory was that he was an import god, since a lot of his documented myths had  him coming to Greece from somewhere else or wandering far afield before returning. But after finding his name in  Mycenaean Greek inscriptions, that theory went out the window  and a replacement was proposed: That Dionysian worship predated Ancient Greece and was deliberately suppressed  for several hundred years before undergoing modification and being  allowed into the Hellenistic pantheon. Since Ancient Greece had kind of a known   habit of not exactly promoting  equality for all its citizens, this wasn't too crazy of a notion. In essence, what distinguishes  Dionysus from the rest of his pantheon is that his character development didn't  happen during the Greek Dark Ages, but several centuries after  everyone else got with the program, which is actually pretty appropriate for a guy   whose most consistent character trait at  this point in history was Chronic Drunk. But why was he so late to transition? Well, to understand that, we  have to understand his cult, and we have to understand  who Dionysus was before he got Hellenized. So, let's talk about that. *dramatic music* First of all, let's define some names. Dionysus is usually the name used for the   Hellenistic characterization  we've already established. Orphic Dionysus is the scary older version,  embraced by the religion of Orphism, a characterization that puts the focus  more on themes of death and rebirth. These two have notably different backstories. Confusing matters, Orphic Dionysus has been  equated with another figure called Zagreus, and it's unclear whether this  was a later syncretism or an   early case of multiple-names-for-one-god. Orphism--side note--was a 6th-century-BC religion that basically boiled down to an  attempt to understand life and death. It mostly worshiped gods or figures that  entered the underworld and left alive,   like Orpheus, hence the name Orphic. Other noteworthy figures of worship included  Persephone, for fairly obvious reasons. But, working from this definition,  it's unclear why Dionysus would have   caught the attention of a cult  focused on death and rebirth, when it seems like the farthest we can stretch his  characterization at this point is Drunk and Rowdy. What connection did Dionysus have with the   underworld that would cause  an Orphic cult to favor him? Let's talk about an older  story of Dionysus's birth. The first difference between Orphic  Dionysus and Plain Vanilla Dionysus is that he's the son of Zeus and Persephone, while in older fragmentary myths, Zagreus  is instead the son of Hades and Persephone. Whichever way the parentage swings,   Orphic Dionysus is slated to inherit  Zeus's status as king of the gods, which enrages Hera, who gets a bunch of Titans   to murder Baby Orphic Dionysus by  ripping him apart and eating him. Athena saves his heart and, with  Zeus's help, gets him reborn, either by doing the leg-implant thing again or   sticking the heart in Semele so  she can grow a baby around it. Either way, Orphic Dionysus gets reborn  after being ritualistically shredded and gets on with the whole "being a god" thing. This myth predates his Semele parentage and  possibly predates Ancient Greece overall, since the Mycenaean characterization also   featured this theme of dying  and being reborn early in life. It handily contextualizes  both his theme of rebirth and his weird connection with  Persephone that we touched on earlier, as well as giving him an  unexpected link with the underworld that we don't see much of in  his later characterization. This is strengthened by his "Zagreus" epithet. Zagreus in his earliest references isn't  explicitly connected with Dionysus, but he is strongly linked with  Hades and the underworld in general. In his earliest references  from around the 600s BC, it's not even clear if he and  Hades are different entities,   and he's hugely important  in the underworld hierarchy. Zagreus as a standalone entity seems to  have been a very important chthonic god, and by appending his name to Dionysus, Dionysus  inherits his strong underworld connections. Going back as far as we can, the  Mycenaean inscriptions we have confirm that Dionysus' death and rebirth,  as well as his status as a son of Zeus, were original elements of his characterization,  not later additions by his Orphic cult. He's also got some themes of being  abandoned by humanity and raised by nature, which might play into his later  nature and animalistic associations. So, this gives us something of a starting point. Dionysus enters the Ancient Greek world as a god   of death and rebirth with strong  connections to the underworld. Those underworld connections appeal to  the later Orphic religious movement, causing his characterization  to get a bit schizophrenic as they put focus on an element of his   characterization otherwise  largely being left behind. Anyway, this alternative birth myth gives us   something of a feel for where  his characterization started, but doesn't really explain why he would have  been excluded from the Hellenistic pantheon. And we also haven't put together where  his wine connection came from yet. So now, let's talk about what his personal cult   can tell us about the rest  of his characterization. *folk music* The Cult of Dionysus was,  unfortunately for us, a mystery cult, meaning its exact rituals and practices  were kept secret from outsiders. But we have pieced together the basics. For one thing, it predates  ancient Greece by a wide margin, and might even predate Mycenaean  Greece in one form or another. It also most likely started off less as  a Dionysus cult and more as a wine cult, worshiping the state of intoxication and   the liberation from societal  inhibitions that came with it, because wine predates Mycenaean  Greece and, consequently, Dionysus, and the wine cult is very focused  on wine and the effects thereof,   with the Dionysian aspect  almost seeming secondary. It's even possible that the wine cult  originated around the same time wine did, AKA 6000 BC, making it very old. Old as balls. If this is true, it also probably originated  in this place called the Zagros Mountains, which--yes--does sound a lot like Zagreus. This would be a really convenient etymological  link if the two words were actually connected, but sadly, they are not. Still a neat coincidence. Anyway, if this theory holds, the cult  probably followed wine export routes to wind up in Egypt and then Minoan  Crete and then Mycenaean Greece, where it scooped up Dionysus and made him its own. Really, for our purposes, it doesn't  matter where or when the wine cult started, just that it wound up in Mycenaean  Greece one way or another. The short of it is: A wine-centric  cult popped up in the area and, one way or another, Mycenaean  Dionysus got wrapped up into it,   turning it into a localized Dionysian cult and potentially affecting his early Mycenaean   characterization to incorporate the  invention of wine in the first place. We don't really know, though,  since the records are limited and, to a certain extent, we're playing  around in the record-less Dark Ages, but it would make sense. So by the time the Dark Ages wrapped up, the cult of Dionysus was firmly established  and centered on the Dionysian Mysteries, which was this ritual that predominantly  focused on getting crazy stupid high. Whoa, Dionysus. The 70s called. They want to  know if they can borrow some of your stash. See, intoxication was, at this point, considered  a form of possession by Dionysus' spirit, which, in turn, allowed the cult members  to theoretically tap into his divine power, along with the primordial,   inhibition-less, subconscious mind  that Dionysus' madness could release. There was also some pretty hefty symbolism linking   the transformation of living  grapes into fermented wine with Dionysus' transformative rebirth. Anyway, the whole point was liberation,  catharsis, and a connection to the divine, as well as drunken insanity,  crazy music and dancing,   and symbolic recreations of  Dionysus' death and rebirth. A lot of dismemberment happened. Like, a lot. Mostly to bulls, because they  were symbolic of Dionysus, but it also happened to other stuff. Ever wonder why Orpheus got ripped  apart by those ladies that one time? It's this. He died for a sweet literary reference. He was an artist. It's what he would have wanted. Unsurprisingly, Dionysus' cult attracted a   lot of marginalized people, like  women, slaves, and non-citizens, 'cause it gave them the opportunity to reject  the societal constraints getting dumped on them. Double-unsurprisingly,   this cult wasn't very popular with the  society that made those constraints, which led to several centuries'  worth of attempts from various   ancient Greek governments to  outlaw the cult altogether, which never, ever worked, because wine and parties  and "stickin' it to the man, yo" will never die. So after this had failed enough times,   eventually Greece settled on  trying to control it a little bit, resulting in the establishment and gradual  acceptance of the more chilled-out,   Hellenistic Dionysus we all know and love. *quiet pop music* It's tricky to put dates to this  sort of deific character revolution, but we've got a few concrete  milestones to work from. To start with, Dionysus is explicitly not in the  Olympic pantheon during the eighth century BC, because that's when The Iliad  and The Odyssey were written,   and Dionysus is notably nowhere to be found. He and Hestia are the only ones of the  traditional twelve Olympians to not be referenced, so this is a very noteworthy exclusion. Dionysus was officially integrated into  Athens somewhere between 561 and 527 BC, because that's the duration of the  reign of famous tyrant Pisistratus,   who first brought the Dionysia to Athens. The Dionysia was a formerly-rural  celebration honoring Dionysus and   celebrating the cultivation of wine. When Pisistratus imported it to Athens, it grew to   incorporate a competition  of performances and plays, which eventually produced the  field of Greek theater overall. At this point, however, one gets  the impression that Dionysus still   wasn't fully popular with the Athenians, as Pisistratus justified the  importation of the Dionysia with a myth that outlined all the horrifying  things Dionysus could and would do to the dongs of the Athenians who rejected him. This is not a joke, and is also why the Dionysia would feature  a parade of people carrying sculpted junk. Contemporary imagery of Dionysus also  usually recalled an older visual, where he sported a beard and  had an overall mature look, so, at this point, Dionysus has landed in Athens, but hasn't fully transitioned to his popular,  young, drunk, hippie characterization yet. The next milestone comes to us from Euripides, who provides us with a literary missing  link in the form of The Bacchae, first performed in 405 BC  at the Dionysia Festival. The Bacchae shows us a  Dionysus in roughly the middle of his transition from terrifying god  of uninhibited madness to party guy, as he returns to Greece from a  globe-trotting exile with an army of Maenads to claim his divine status and take  revenge on a king who outlawed his worship. This Dionysus is the child of Zeus and Semele, born prematurely, roughly in accordance with  the Hellenistic version we discussed earlier. But, in this case, the people of Thebes  refuse to believe his divine origins, so he drives them crazy and  claims them as his followers. After a sufficiently large number of shenanigans   involving natural disasters  and plagues of madness, Dionysus begins to warp King Pentheus' sanity, who begins to see through Dionysus's mortal  disguise and notices that he has horns, another holdover from the older,   scarier characterization that didn't  make it to the Hellenized edition. King Pentheus winds up getting  dismembered by Dionysus' Maenads,   including some of Pentheus' female relatives, and it's... a happy ending... or, at least, a cathartic one. This mid-transition Dionysian characterization  shows us a Dionysus with a mortal mother, no explicit death and rebirth, a serious temper, no regard for the social structures that  reject him, an army of crazed followers, the ability to induce madness and  hallucinations in whoever he wants, and horns. Despite the absence of his dismemberment  and rebirth in his Bacchae backstory-- --Bacchae-story? -- The theme has still held on in his worship, which is why Pentheus is  dismembered in such a familiar way, despite lacking the immediate mythical context. It also shows us that by 400 BC, Dionysus  was basically considered an Olympian, even if his characterization wasn't  quite all Happy, Fun Drunk just yet. I should probably just make  The Bacchae its own video. But even though Dionysus has attained a level   of chill deemed acceptable  by polite Athenian society, he's still not really recognizable as  the party dude we all know and love. He's getting there, but he's not there yet. So what's next? Well, here's the deal with that. The century after Euripides, a little  something happened to Greece, called Alexander the Great Gets All  Up In Everyone's Business, during which time, Alexander the Alright conquered  his way through Persia, the Levant, and Egypt, radically expanding the ancient Greek world and paving the way for centuries of luxury for the  kings that ruled this expanded Hellenistic world. These kings focused on two  things and two things only: Power and parties. And, wouldn't you know it, there was an Olympian  all set and ready to embody both of those things. Post-the 300s BC, Dionysus' popularity exploded as the ruling class began embracing his  extravagance and unrestrained party vibe, with the convenient undertone that Dionysus had   been characterized as a conqueror  for the past couple centuries, leading these kings to embrace  his image even more strongly. Some of them even acted like  they were Dionysus, but, like... incarnated or something. A cult that had previously belonged largely to   marginalized communities that  threatened the ruling class was suddenly being embraced by  that ruling class because, frankly,   the Cult of Dionysus threw the best parties. What with all the wealth and  power they had to throw around,   the Hellenistic kings didn't really  want to do anything but party. And with that, Dionysus completes his  transformation from death god to party animal. Thanks to the nationalization of his  cult during the Hellenistic period, Dionysus--or Bacchus, as he was  commonly called at this point-- settled into his recognizable,  modern-day characterization, leaving the majority of his more  alarming character traits behind. But this goes a long way towards explaining the  lingering idiosyncrasies in his characterization. Dionysus probably had one of the most radical  transformations in the entire pantheon. And while the toned-down,  recognizable version was mostly chill, he never completely lost the old-school  death-and-madness god he used to be worshiped as. To torture a metaphor, both Dionysus and  Greek wine were watered down for potability, but that didn't make them lose their  inherent intoxicating properties. This also goes a long way to  explaining why a pantheon of gods with concepts as big as war  and wisdom and the entire ocean would bother having a god on the prayer  roll whose entire job was being drunk. Whoof! I feel like I gotta hydrate after all  that. Like I said, I love the Deep Dives,   but they're hard. So much research goes into  them compared to the average myth summary, which   is usually as easy as "find translation I like,  and then say it again but shorter. " For the Deep   Dives I gotta go digging through so many different  sources, connecting dots, looking into the actual   physical archaeology rather than just the cleanly  collated myths. It's tough to do and easy to mess   up, and no matter how many times I say that I'm  a funny haha youtube channel and not a rigorous   academic source, I still feel it like a punch in  the gut every time I learn I messed something up.    For instance, this next little myth turned out to  be the victim of citogenesis! When I was scripting   it seven years ago, I didn't dig far enough in  the sourcing to catch that a whole plot beat was,   as far as I can tell, someone's original character  do not steal. Mortifying. Let's take a look!

[NERITES] So, I think most people would agree that  it's a bad, BAD idea to date most Greek Gods. There's just... so much drama,  so many complicated family feuds, and the odds of you getting vaporized, shot, or  turning into a plant are pretty astronomical. The threat is somewhat reduced if  you happen to be a deity yourself, but even with that precaution,   it's probably a good idea to steer  clear of the more risky deities. Like Aphrodite, who classifies  everything anyone's ever done   as either flirtation or deadly personal insult. Or Poseidon, who wouldn't recognize consent  if it jumped up and bit him in the trident. So let me introduce you to Nerites, a  minor ocean deity and absolute madman, whose only claim to fame is  that, depending on the narrator, he dated both Aphrodite and  Poseidon and actually survived. So, much like the story of Narcissus,   who exactly Nerites is in love with  varies from telling to telling. There's two versions of the story, one  where the S. O. in question is Aphrodite,   and the other, where it's Poseidon. We'll talk about both versions in this video,  but first, we've got to talk about Nerites. Now the two main things about  Nerites is that, number one, he's the beautiful son of  Nereus and the sea nymph Doris. And, number two, he's young. Liiiiiiike really young. In the ancient Greek world, this  was a thing called pederasty, where adult men would have sexual  relationships with adolescent boys in an alleged effort to teach them how to be men. In the modern world, this is known as  pedophilia and it is very, very not okay. However, Nerites is also an immortal god. So he's kind of more like the ancient Greek male  equivalent of those prepubescent anime girls who are actually thousand-year-old  dragons or elves or whatever,   so it's really okay that we're using  them for so much fanservice, you guys. So if that... makes you feel better  about these romances... that's... that's cool I guess... It's always fun when a story  from another time and place   really drives home how different that society was by smacking you in the face with  some hardcore moral dissonance. Anyway, moving on to the actual stories. Don't get comfy. They're pretty short. (music) So in this version of the myth, Aphrodite, before she rises from the ocean, drifts to the  shores of Kythera, and becomes an Olympian God, is spending her days chilling under the sea  when she meets and falls in love with Nerites, and the two of them carry on a vague  but probably adorable whirlwind romance. But eventually Aphrodite decides to leave the  ocean, and she asks Nerites to come with her. But Nerites doesn't really want to leave the  ocean since that'd mean leaving his family behind, and even when Aphrodite offers him  a nice pair of wings, he refuses. So Aphrodite, with her characteristic  level-headedness in the face of rejection, turns Nerites into a shrimp, gives the wings  to her son Eros, and takes off for Olympus. But if you were expecting this story to have  a classic Greek tragedy ending, think again. Nerites' sorry state is  discovered by his sister Nerea, who begs Poseidon to reverse his  shellfish condition, which Poseidon does. Happy ending, I guess. (music) In the other main version of this myth,   Poseidon and Nerites have been  carrying on a pretty sweet romance, and, in fact, are so in love with each  other that their mutually supportive   relationship produces a whole entire  deity: Anteros, the god of requited love. Nerites also serves as Poseidon's charioteer, and wows all the creatures of the ocean  with his impressive speed and skill. But one day, the Sun God  Helios, for unspecified reasons, turns Nerites into a shrimp. Maybe he was... jealous? Either way, Nerea finds Nerites, asks  Poseidon turn him back and he does. Happy ending. For extra comedy points, I like to imagine that  both versions of the myth happened sequentially, and Nerites just gets turned into a shrimp  for various reasons, like, every other week. Euuuuurgh. At this rate I'M gonna turn into  a shellfish. But honestly? I am so glad that,   when I tell you guys these stories, you look  them up for yourselves, and sometimes that   means you learn I goofed! And then I get  to learn I goofed, and once I get over the   Inescapable Horrible Torment I get to be way more  careful next time! When I retell these stories,   it's not because I'm an authority on them.   It's because I think they're really cool   and I want to share them with everyone who's  interested! I do my best to get everything right,   but my degree is in math, a field of binary right  and wrong where achieving an objectively correct   solution is the entire thing we're good at.   This is great for, for instance, mapping out   all the ways astronomical myths are correlated  to the Actual Stars In The Actual Sky, or for   teasing out the connections and common themes  that bind together an otherwise disorganized   soup of stories, but I have to recognize that my  ironclad sense of Provable Truth Derived Through   Logical Steps doesn't always gel with a field that  is, literally, 100% made up. It's tough for me to   make my way through a space where there is no way  to be 100% right and a million ways to be wrong!   But the egg on my face aside, this fun little  god-squabble can be seen as a bit of a herald   of things to come. When the gods have no-one  to fight, they tend to fight each other. And   the one time they did have someone  to fight, shit got absolutely crazy.

[TYPHON] Ah, Zeus. You were so promising back in the day! Freeing your siblings, overthrowing  your tyrannical father Kronos, casting the Titans into Tartarus,  becoming lord of the heavens, and ruling the ancient world with wisdom  you got from absorbing your first wife! That's such a strong start for  the heroic king of the gods! And, sure, you married your sister, but like, that was traditional for gods.   It could have been way worse. And then you spent centuries  screwing with humanity, punishing Prometheus for trying to help them out, commissioning Pandora  specifically to screw them over, and systematically having sex with as much  of the female population as you could manage by ANY means necessary. I mean, you're the king of the gods! Lord of Thunder! You have a killer aesthetic! I want you to be cool. You  have so much going for you! But there's only so much I can respect a god  who routinely turns himself into livestock specifically for the purpose  of boning unsuspecting humans. Some days, I just really want  to see you get your ass kicked. So in the early days of Ancient Greece,   Zeus and the fam had just overthrown  Kronos and cast the Titans into Tartarus. And by all accounts, Gaia wasn't too happy about  her last batch of children getting slam-dunked into the underworld's sewage outflow pipe. Now, because the modern image of Mother  Nature is generally positive and nurturing, it can be easy to forget that, personality  wise, Gaia covered all of nature. You know, storms, volcanoes,  earthquakes, landslides. There's plenty of nice, happy  tree stuff happening on the side, but in Greek mythology, Gaia mostly makes monsters and this story is no exception. With Tartarus itself as the father, Gaia  gives birth to the monstrous Typhon, a kaiju-sized eldritch abomination  with loads of heads, flaming eyes,   and just a whole bunch of snakes. Now Typhon is unironically the  biggest threat in Greek mythology. While primordial Titans like Gaia  and Ouranos were physically bigger, they also had a lot less agency and  didn't tend to directly oppose the gods. And while there were monsters aplenty,  most of them were small enough that they could be taken  down by one hero at a time with maybe the bare minimum of divine  assistance or the occasional flying horse. Typhon is in a weight class of his own. Physically huge and incredibly powerful, Typhon  is more like a force of nature than a monster. He also plays into the Greek  mythological succession cycle, where each ruler of the cosmos is successively  overthrown by a new generation of gods. With Kronos defeating Ouranos  and Zeus defeating Kronos, Typhon is next in the lineup to take down  Zeus and become the new ruler of the world. But before he starts off  on any of the god-fighting,   the first thing he does is he goes and shacks up with a monstrous half-beautiful-nymph,  half-giant-snake called... *sigh* Echidna. It's not her fault, guys. It was her name first. Anyway, Typhon and Echidna  have a bunch of monster babies including the Chimaera, the Hydra, the  Sphinx, the Nemean Lion, and Cerberus. With that out of the way, and plenty of antagonists established for  future generations of heroes to fight, Typhon marches towards Olympus  to smack down some gods. Now in a couple of versions of the story,   the Olympians are so spooked by this  fire-breathing Godzilla-sized snake monster that they shapeshift into animals  and run away all the way to Egypt, which is a little random until you notice that Artemis turns into a cat, Hermes turns into an ibis, Zeus turns into a ram, and, yeah. Basically, this is a  little bit of early syncretism. It's specifically the Ancient Greek explanation  for why the Egyptians worshipped animal gods. As far as they were concerned, Bast was cat Artemis, Thoth was ibis Hermes, Amun was ram Zeus, etcetera. Pretty neat. But Zeus waits just long enough for the  Egyptian artists to get his good side before turning back and hucking  some lightning bolts at Typhon driving the monster back before getting  in close with an adamantine sickle. But when Zeus goes in for the kill, Typhon  surprise grapples him and turns the tables by ripping out his tendons like  he's a misbehaving chicken leg! So with Zeus's strength now roughly  on par with a spaghetti plate, Typhon tosses him into a cave  along with all of his loose tendons and sets the half-beautiful-nymph,   half-enormous-F**k-you-dragon  Delphyne to guard it. Surprisingly, she's apparently  got no relation to Echidna,   the other half-lady half-snake-thing in the story. Anyway, then Typhon wanders off to presumably do   giant monster things like knocking  over buildings and breathing fire. But luckily, unlike every other overthrown king of  the cosmos, Zeus doesn't need to languish for long as Hermes and Pan sneak into  the cave, retrieve his tendons and restring him like the  world's horniest ukulele. Now back at full power and  presumably very annoyed, Zeus charges off after Typhon and  a truly epic battle commences. Earthquakes, volcanoes, fire everywhere, thunderbolts and lightning, very frightening me! You know, the works. Eventually, Zeus's thunderous  assault wears Typhon down and when he tries to run, Zeus responds  with his characteristic sportsmanship and drops a mountain on his head. This produces the famous Mount Etna, one  of the world's most active stratovolcanoes and supposedly also the home to Hephaestus' forges which seems like a bit of a  workplace hazard, I'm not gonna lie. Takes a lot of work to beat out the inherent  dangers of working in an active volcano but an imprisoned mega-kaiju in the next  room over manages it pretty handily. Anyway, Typhon's imprisonment is used to explain  why Mount Etna is always getting the rumblies. And he's also credited with  being responsible for the world's   ill winds that cause bad weather or bring storms. And fun fact, despite what one might assume, this is not actually the  origin of the word "typhoon", since, while the etymologies are similar, typhoons don't happen in Europe, only in Asia. The word itself seems to have originated  with the Chinese word for "big wind" then been reinforced by the  Arabic word for cyclonic storm and finally, lightly spiced  with the Greek word Typhon when it made the jump into English. I think the lesson here is that the real  monster was the English language all along. One of the really fun things about greek mythology  is its cyclic nature. Children overthrow their   parents almost habitually, and it seems like  half of what Zeus does for his job is frantically   holding back that cycle from ever catching up to  him. While plenty of antagonistic forces try to   take their turn on the great wheel, none of them  ever manage to win, and while Typhon definitely   put on the most impressive showing, the giants  also did manage to come kinda close. And while the   Gigantomachy will not be making a showing in this  megacompilation, we DO have the next best thing.

[ARES' ABDUCTION] Apparently, it doesn't take much to  be the Olympian family disappointment. I mean, when you consider the competition  Ares deals with from his siblings, You know, the drunken parties and the  felonies and the constant murders,   it's kind of impressive that Ares is the  only one who seems to be actually disliked. Zeus is definitely the kind of parent  who like conspicuously brags about only   some of his children, like at the family reunion He'll be all like "Hey, Athena!   How's my favorite war god doing? " And Ares is just like one chair over. It's almost unfair, but it's also hilarious. Now mythologically speaking, it's a little hard  to tell why Ares takes so much crap from everyone. The general theory is that Ares  embodies the brutality of war. The violence, the suffering, basically  all the ugly, unpleasant parts. Meanwhile, Athena gets to represent the more noble  parts of war: strategy, tactics, leadership, etc. A handful of smaller gods covered other  aspects of war like Nike, goddess of victory. And while in some versions Ares is Nike's  father (which is a positive connotation),   on the battlefield Ares only brings three gods. His sons Phobos and Deimos (aka Fear  and Terror) and his sister Enyo,   war goddess of discord and strife. Ares brings all the bad stuff with  him and from this perspective,   it makes sense why Ares would be  vilified but still worshipped. All of these bad aspects of war are  non-negotiable: you don't like them,   but if you want a war you're gonna get them.   You can't have a war without the ugly parts. Etymologically, Ares' name might even mean  ruin or bane, which I guess would make him a *Bane voice* NECESSARY EVIL Ah, that joke would have  killed it eight years ago. Anyway, Ares gets surprisingly  little press in the mythology. He doesn't really make many appearances. I mean, he's in the Iliad, but  he's not exactly the leading man.    And he doesn't really come out looking very good. He most commonly shows up cameoing in  other stories or in his seminal role as   Aphrodite's boy toy and there aren't  really that many stories about him. That's not to say he wasn't  well liked in certain circles. The Spartans loved him (unsurprisingly)  and the Homeric and Orphic hymns paint   a pretty flattering picture, praising his  glorious strength and indomitable spirit. Which is going to make this  myth pretty embarrassing. So our story begins far from Olympus in the region   of Thessaly where two giants, Ephialtes  and Otus, are weaving a very sinister plan. Now Ephialtes and Otus aren't  your garden-variety giants. They're sons of Poseidon by a mortal woman,  Iphimedeia, who also happens to be married   to this dude Aloeus, and in honor of their  stepfather, the giants are called the Aloadae. Now the Aloadae are sometimes credited  as being bringers of civilization and   were hailed as founders in the  regions of Naxos and Ascra. But none of that particularly matters right  now because the more important thing is   that they're planning on kidnapping  some goddesses to be their wives. Ephialtes has his eyes set on Hera  and Otus is enamored with Artemis. And I'm not here to critique anyone's  kidnapping plans, but of all the goddesses   you could have chosen, way to pick ones who  are 100% guaranteed to not be down with it. Anyway, the main problem the Aloadae are currently   dealing with is that Olympus is  pretty tall and hard to climb. And while the timeline is a little screwy, the  last time a bunch of giants tried to storm Olympus They all died mostly from getting  shot and hit by lightning. Tactically speaking, charging uphill is always a   little dicey and Mount Olympus  kind of cranks that up to 11. But the brothers hatch a plan to level the  playing field a little and the Olympians are   very surprised one morning to find a whole  stack of mountains on their front lawn. The Aloadae are piling mountains on top of each  other to reach the summit of Mount Olympus. Obviously the Olympians aren't down with  that and there is a bit of a scuffle. But when the dust settles and the giants run  off, the gods notice that someone's missing. The giants have KIDNAPPED ARES. Well, this is TERRIBLE AWFUL WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING In 8 to 13 business months... Presumably not sure what else to do with him,   the giants chain Ares up and lock him in  a big bronze jar for an entire lunar year Before their stepmother Eriboea  quietly contacts Hermes to let   him know that Ares is stuck in her basement. (I assume there is no other way  to file a divine noise complaint. ) Anyway, with nothing else on their schedule,   Hermes and Artemis embark on a  rescue mission to the Aloadae's lair. And while Hermes sneaks  around the back to find Ares,   Artemis like awkwardly props an  elbow on the door and goes all, "Hello boys. Looking for me? " So after first getting over their shock at the  presence of a real live girl in their man cave,   Otus is overjoyed that his waifu  of choice has made an appearance, But Ephialtes is jealous because his waifu  hasn't and the brothers start fighting. As the battle escalates, Artemis transforms  herself into a deer and jumps between them. Not in a "Boys please, there's enough  of me to go around" kind of way,   more of a circular firing squad situation. When they throw their spears at her, she nimbly  dodges out of the way and they kill each other. With that problem handily solved, she  and Hermes bust Ares out of the jar   and head back to Olympus presumably to  roast him for the next hundred years. While the hero myths are very character-forward  in spotlighting the unique strengths and flaws   of the Main Guy so we can really get a feel for  them before their inevitable horrific downfall   and painful tragic death, the role humanity  plays in the god-centric myths tends to be   a little more broad strokes. After all, a lot of  these stories are creation myths used to explain   why the world the ancient greeks lived in was  Like That. And of course, nothing required more   justification and explanation than the existence  of that most mysterious and elusive creature,   composing a mere 50% of everyone on  earth: of course, the humble hwoman.

[PANDORA] You know, Mythology and folklore as a whole is  a really incredible field to study There's so much creativity and wonder, and it's   really fun recognizing story elements  that have persisted to the modern day Or been adapted in one way or another to stories we actually recognize. But sometimes, you find a myth that really Reminds you that you're studying a  different culture from a different time and place and that culture from a  might have held some pretty nasty attitudes towards your demographic specifically, and they  didn't hesitate to document those   attitudes for posterity and that can kind of sting *SIGH* So this is the story of Pandora, the first  woman whose entire gender was created by Zeus specifically to be evil and  sexy and make men's lives worse. *Red inhales deeply* I'd like to apologize in advance for what  the comment section is going to look like. So Pandora's story is told  by Hesiod in the Theogony   and Works and Days and it begins in the  Greek Golden Age: A time before women existed when mankind had just recently been  sculpted from clay by the Titan Prometheus Or possibly Zeus. Whatever the case life was pretty swell;   people were immortal, technology  was all right, life was good. Now, Prometheus apparently really liked humans and he was always trying to look  out for them whenever he could. So when he realized that they  kept having to burn all the best bits of their meat as offerings to  Zeus he decided to do something about it. So he went to Zeus with two possible offerings:   a nasty-looking ox stomach that was secretly  full of prime beef or a bone wrapped in delicious-looking fat that looked  a lot tastier than it actually was. Zeus picked the tasty looking option and... accidentally said a sacrifice  precedent where humanity got   to keep all the best bits of the  cow and just burned bones in fat. So Zeus is pretty pissed both because  of the disappointing sacrifices he's   getting and Prometheus' sneaky  subversion of his own supposed omniscience, and he decides to confiscate  humanity's fire access as punishment. So this sucks for everybody and Prometheus again Decides to do something about it. So Prometheus sneaks up to Olympus and  steals some fire storing it at a fennel stalk While he brings it back to earth  and gives it to humanity again Zeus spots the fire in the distance  and gets crazy pissed at Prometheus   and decides to punish him first  before he deals with humanity. Prometheus, rather famously, is  chained to a rock and his liver   is ripped out and eaten by an eagle once a day. Of course being an immortal titan  his liver also grows back every   night so the cycle can continue ad infinitum. Lucky Prometheus... So now this brings us to Pandora Zeus decides to inflict a lasting  punishment on humanity for reacquiring fire And he conscripts all the  Olympians to help him out He has Hephaestus sculpt a beautiful body from  clay and brings it alive with the four winds, then Athena addresses her in fancy clothes,   Aphrodite gives her a sex drive, Hermes gives  her a brain and teaches her how a lie, and basically all of Olympus gets in on the action,   giving her all kinds of nifty  presents and character flaws. Hermes names her Pandora meaning all gifted or all giving, depending on the translation,   to represent the fact that every  Olympian gave her a gift of some sort. The end result Is that Pandora  is a beautiful alluring creature But secretly she's also cunning and sly. You see she's pure evil because  she lures you in by being hot But then like she's secretly a person underneath. That's right Hesiod's vision  of evil is hot but not dumb Pandora also, rather famously, has a  Pithos with her that contains a whole   mess of interesting evils to unleash  on humanity and interestingly enough There's no implication in Hesiod's telling  of the story that she's unaware of this Which doesn't really line up  with later characterizations   the paint Pandora as an insatiably curious dupe Remember this Pandora is specifically not an idiot That's what makes her so evil...! So Zeus presents Pandora to  Prometheus dumber brother: Epimetheus and despite having been warned by the   forward-thinking Prometheus not  to accept any gifts from Zeus Epimetheus is a being of pure  hindsight and accepts her This is a bad call as Pandora promptly dumps  out the contents of her jar full of evil and humanity is immediately stricken  with all kinds of nasty things Like natural lifespans and  childbirth and swedish fish! only one thing stays in the jar hope, representing  the fact that humanity will always have: hope (another exasperated sigh) Greece I love you, but come on. The timeline of creation myths is always  confusing, but in Greek mythology, the   various contradictory narratives do still tend to  agree on one thing: the world used to be easier.    Before all those evils got let out into the world,  before Kronos was overthrown, before the world   got complicated and hard. The concept of a bygone  Golden Age is absolutely everywhere, and we'll get   back to that idea in a little more detail later  on, but first there's a pretty famous foundational   myth that locks in another little tidbit of  mortal hardship we've all been dealing with:   the turning of the seasons. And even if you've  only ever dabbled in Greek mythology, there's a   strong chance you've heard this tale before,  or seen one of its ten million reimaginings.    It's the last of our Deep Dives, and we're  gonna have to delve pretty deep for this one.

[HADES AND PERSEPHONE DEEP DIVE] Okay, let’s not kid ourselves here. Relationships in Greek Mythology are almost unilaterally really bad. Zeus and Hera get some flack for Zeus’s nonstop adultering- -with extremely unwilling mortals- and Hera subsequently punishing the innocent mortals involved, but that’s got nothing on the story of their actual marriage, which I will not be recounting here because- it is so far from consensual there’s no way for me to be funny about it. And “far from consensual” is a recurring theme in the mythos - Zeus, Poseidon and Apollo especially tend to default to kidnapping- -when a pretty mortal catches their eye, sometimes combined with their whole divine shapeshifting dealio- -to trick or coerce those mortals into banging them. If the mortal is lucky, they survive the process- and gain some superpowers, or kick off a lineage of heroes. If they’re not, they usually die horribly. Some of Apollo’s famous lovers die tragically after- -a fulfilling personal relationship with him, but most of them die tragically trying to outrun him. That’s straight-up f*cked and everybody knows it. Check almost any Olympian god’s “list of lovers” and you’ll usually find- -at least one character who super didn’t want to be on that list. Yes, even your favorite. Yes, even Olympian soft boy Dionysus. And I’ll be the first to admit that I gloss over a lot of this stuff in my videos! And I do that because it makes me incredibly uncomfortable! Can you blame me? It’s not like I’m the only one! I grew up with a freaking picture book that told me- -Zeus was a cool guy who had a lot of cool kids that did cool stuff! I watched a Disney movie about these people! I don’t have an easy time reconciling the fact that- -these shining, heroic figures that inspired so many incredible stories- -were characterized as absolutely garbage in several very key ways! And when I do talk about that stuff, it feels disingenuous to talk about anything else- -as if that first thing isn’t very much a dealbreaker- -for finding the characters heroic or compelling! Basically every modern retelling or reimagining of Greek mythology- heavily sanitizes the stories in one way or another. The Greek Pantheon gets given the same treatment as most- -beloved “problematic” celebrities - we love it for the stories it gave us- -and we pretend not to notice the part where it won’t stop assaulting underage fans, because that behavior doesn’t fit the image we have of it. And that’s because we, as a collective audience, are primed to think of gods as good guys. And good guys don’t do that kind of thing. That’d make them… bad guys. And that is exactly why only one Greek god- gets consistently held responsible for these “problematic” behaviors - none other than Hades, lord of the dead and unjustified Satan analogue. Because of our social biases, most of which come from- -a pop culture understanding of Christianity, which is the same source for our “gods are necessarily good” thing, a modern audience starts off primed to hate this guy. Lord of the underworld? We all know what that means! Cartoon Lucifer, king of hell, token evil divinity, blatant bad guy, easy peasy! And he kidnapped his wife? What an asshole! No wonder nobody hangs out with this guy! Man, what a jerk. Anyway, I just love Apollo! He’s the hottest thing since hotness! And isn’t it tragic how many of his true loves die? Wonder why that keeps happening. When retelling or reinterpreting ancient stories in a modern context, we almost always end up cherrypicking the parts that make the most sense- -to our modern worldview and sensibilities, and working around the parts that suffer from the worst of the culture clash. Ancient Greece was pretty cool about a lot of stuff, but women, for example, were not on that list. So from a modern perspective, when we look back at the original tellings, it’s very difficult to see Zeus doing his thing and conclude anything- -other than that the king of the gods is an omnipotent serial r*pist- -who leaves a trail of shattered lives- -and bastard children in his wake and this pantheon is a f*cking nightmare. But that is not the perspective a contemporary Athenian would have had, it’s not the impact the contemporary storytellers would’ve wanted to produce, and it is not the image most modern writers want to attach- -to their sky-father king-of-the-gods hero character. The idea that gods are supposed to be good is comparatively new. For the ancient Greeks, gods were reflections of what was true- -rather than what was ideal or morally right. Ancient Greece was terrible to women, so that was reflected in the gods. But to us, and our pervasive pop-culture Christianity, deities and divinity-adjacent figures are thought of more like paragons, idealized representations of goodness and virtue. So when we try and apply that moralized perspective to the Greek Gods, we get some serious cognitive dissonance. So the adaptations usually end up buffing it out. Sure, in all but the most squeaky clean versions, Zeus is usually still cheating on Hera, which from our societal perspective- - is typically seen as a much more forgivable crime, especially if you also rewrite Hera to be as deliberately unlikable as possible- cough the Romans - but most of Zeus’s trysts get rewritten as affairs of the heart, because those are almost universally seen as significantly less bad- -than the nonconsensual alternative, a distinction that did not exist in Ancient Greece. Among other things, ancient Greek art used a lot of stock poses- -to signify major story beats, and there was literally no distinction- -between the stock pose for “kidnapping” and for “marriage”. Same result, same concept. What registers as an unforgivable crime to our eyes- -wasn’t even recognized in the culture it came from. This specific culture clash is pretty significant, which is why this is the part that mostly- -gets ignored, sanitized or otherwise rewritten for modern audiences. I mean, unless you’re Hades. Because f*ck ‘im, right? We already hate that guy on principle! There’s no need to clean up his image so a modern audience will like him! In fact, maybe it’s better if we make him deliberately worse- -just so people know who they should be rooting against! So, with that lengthy and spicy preamble out of the way… Let’s talk about Hades and Persephone. Now, these two show up off and on throughout the mythology, but their best-known myth - the story of how they got married - is recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, written sometime around the mid 600s BCE. This is pretty much the only detailed source we have for this myth, although references to Persephone’s abduction pop up- in broad terms in the Theogony and the general folklore. The hymn begins with Persephone chilling in a flower field when- -the ground splits open, Hades erupts from the earth in a chariot, grabs her and dives back underground. The narrator helpfully informs us that this abduction- -was sponsored and ordered by Zeus, Persephone’s father, because Hades was in love with Persephone but Zeus didn’t think Demeter would approve, so he told him - “eh, just kidnap her. Never fails for me! ” Demeter, of course, panics when she realizes Persephone’s gone, and tears off in a fury looking for her. Nobody has any idea where she might be - until Demeter runs into Hekate, the cthonic goddess of magic, who tells her she didn’t see anything, but she heard Persephone being abducted. The goddesses continue searching together, and eventually seek out Helios, titan of the sun, who - from his lofty vantage point - conveniently saw everything. He tells Demeter that Persephone was taken by Hades, but the blame is all on Zeus, who approved the kidnapping- -and gave Persephone to Hades as his wife. So this isn't really a kidnapping, so much as it is an arranged marriage. Demeter is furious, but Helios tells her, hey, she could do a lot worse for a son-in-law! Hades is a pretty cool dude, and as king of the underworld, his divine domain is nothing to sneeze at - as firstborn son of Kronos, the world was his by birthright, and even if there’s a bit of a delay, everyone becomes his subject eventually. Hades is basically the best husband Persephone could ever hope for. But that’s pretty cold comfort for Demeter. Who evidently didn't want Persephone getting married at all. She takes a bit of personal time and disguises herself as an old woman, and ends up getting a part-time job as a nurse to the royal family of Eleusis - fun fact, a major cult center of Demeter and Persephone we’ll talk about more later. Demeter cares for the baby prince Demophon in her own unique way - by setting him on fire. Don’t freak out! It’s totally cool! She’s just burning away his mortality little by little, making him more and more godlike as he grows. But one unlucky night his mother Metanira spots Demeter- -setting her baby on fire and freaks out, disrupting the ritual and pissing off Demeter something fierce, which at this point is becoming a running theme. Demeter reveals her true identity and orders them- -to build her a temple as an apology, and when they do, Demeter takes up residence in her fancy new chateau - but she’s still really pissed off and sad about Persephone, so she sits back and has a nice little sulk about it for a while. It’s okay, sometimes you just gotta get it out of your system. One little problem, though. Demeter is responsible for all plant growth. Grain, fruit, vegetables, the works. Livid at the loss of her daughter, Demeter stops the plants from growing, shrouding the world in eternal winter and straight-up killing quite a lot of people. Now, I think we can all agree that people are very important. After all, without people… we wouldn’t have any divine sacrifices! So the ice age and the mass casualties draw the attention of Zeus, who notices Demeter seems really upset for some strange reason. He sends Iris, goddess of the rainbow, to summon Demeter, but she ain’t budging. Zeus realizes this might be a problem and sends the other gods to try and convince- -Demeter to stop with offerings, gifts, anything. But none of those things are Persephone, so Demeter is unmoved. Desperate to escape the consequences of his actions, Zeus sends Hermes to Hades- -to see if he can convince him to let Persephone return to the surface. Hermes scoots down to the underworld and finds the couple… well, this part of the text is a bit garbled, but basically, Hades and Persephone are hanging out, and Persephone seems kinda bummed out and missing her mom. Hermes explains the whole “Demeter murdering everyone” situation and- -Hades is like, oh balls, that doesn’t sound good, yeah, no, Persephone, absolutely go and talk to her. He also takes a minute to ask Persephone not to be sad - as his wife she’ll be a queen of queens, ruler of the dead and highest among the goddesses, and meanwhile he will work to be the best husband he can be for her. Overjoyed, Persephone prepares to leave for the surface and see her mom again. But before we pat Hades on the back too hard, he does get worried that Persephone might never come back to him, so he sneaks her a few pomegranate seeds to bind her to the underworld - how that works exactly isn’t really explained, mostly because this part of the only manuscript that preserves this hymn- -is actually torn. Gotta love those primary sources. Anyway, when the signal fuzzes back into focus, Hermes and Persephone are explaining to Demeter that Persephone can’t permanently leave the underworld, presumably because of the whole pomegranate situation, so she’ll have to split her time between Demeter and Hades. Demeter’s just happy to have her back and stops the whole killing-everybody thing, producing spring for the first time. Zeus, finally having the audacity to show his face, confirms that Persephone will need to spend roughly- -one third of the year in the underworld - the exact fraction varies from telling to telling, but broadly, when she’s not around, Demeter gets all bummed again and- -stops letting the plants grow as a fun callback- -to that time she nearly killed the entire planet, explaining the seasonal cycle very handily. With our status quo firmly established, the hymn ends. Now there’s a few surprising things about this story! For one thing, the hymn itself goes out of its way to absolve Hades- -of all responsibility except for the pomegranate bit. Everything else is on Zeus, as father of the bride and authorizer- slash-orderer of the kidnapping. Hades as wicked, villainous kidnapper- -is a later interpretation unsupported by the original framing. And, perhaps more surprisingly, Persephone’s role in the coming of Spring- -is… fully incidental. It’s Demeter bringing the world back to life. Which means, functionally, Persephone… isn’t the goddess of spring. Spring is Demeter’s job. The only thing Persephone’s explicitly the goddess of is the underworld. And if we go looking through the rest of the mythology, we only find more evidence for this. The Theogony refers to the couple as “Stalwart Hades and Dread Persephone. ” The Iliad does the same thing - Hades gets a few anecdotes- -but is mostly referred to obliquely- -when the text calls the Underworld “the house of Hades. ” Meanwhile, Persephone gets namedropped as “Dread Persephone” on the regular. In the Odyssey, when Odysseus travels to the underworld- -and is tormented by ghosts, he assumes Persephone- -must be responsible for their actions. None of this lines up tonally with- “innocent flower goddess dragged into the underworld”. Persephone is a straight-up queen of the dead. And if we dig a little deeper, things start looking even weirder. First of all, when we do our standard dive into Mycenaean records, we find that we have no actual evidence that Hades predates Ancient Greece. And that’s weird, because we have plenty of evidence- -that Demeter and Persephone do. Both of them are referenced in Mycenaean Linear B texts under various titles, including the collective “Wanasso”, meaning “The Two Queens”. and uh, remember that, we’ll come back to it later. Zeus and Poseidon also have clear Mycenaean counterparts - but not Hades. And that wouldn’t be super weird if it weren’t for the fact that- -the story of Persephone’s descent into the underworld also- -seems to predate Ancient Greece, and by extension, Hades. Now just because we can’t find his name in Linear B- -does not strictly mean that Hades didn’t exist in some form. But we do know that in the Mycenaean inscriptions we have, the role of king of the underworld was filled by Poseidon, which would’ve made Hades’s role redundant. And Poseidon is frequently referred to collectively with the “Wanasso”- -with the epithet “Wanax”, meaning “The King”, implying that Mycenaean Poseidon, Demeter and Persephone were worshiped together- -in some form of trio capacity. So even if the kidnapper wasn’t Hades back in the Mycenaean days, Demeter and Persephone were still mixed up with the king of the dead. Anyway, the Homeric hymn is the main written account we have- -of the abduction myth, but it was also ritually reenacted every year- -at the Eleusinian Mysteries, an initiation rite for the cult of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis. We don’t know what exactly they entailed, because the whole thing with mystery cults is they kept their exact rites secret, but the theory is it was originally derived- -from an agrarian Mycenaean religious ritual that predates the Greek dark age. The central theme of the mystery seemed to be- -the three-part journey of Persephone - her descent into the underworld, staying in the underworld while Demeter looked for her, and ascending out of the underworld to reunite with Demeter. Hades had a part in the mystery as it was practiced in ancient Greece, but if it’s as old as the theory believes, Hades might not have existed when it started in the Mycenaean age. And he’s not as central to the narrative structure as Persephone and Demeter - he’s basically just a walking inciting incident- -to get Persephone into the underworld in the first place. He might not have been strictly necessary in the Mycenaean version, which is good, because as near as we can interpolate, he can’t have been in it, or at least not as the character we’d recognize later. And on top of that, the whole descent-into-and-ascent- out-of-the-underworld thing- -is a very common story structure in Indo-European mythology, as we’ve talked about with Ishtar - and that base story format does not require an abduction. And that’s not the only instance in the mythology where Hades takes a backseat. Persephone and Demeter are central to a very ancient Arcadian mystery cult- -that doesn’t seem to factor in Hades at all. In Arcadia, Demeter and Persephone are collectively referred to as “Despoinai”, meaning “the mistresses”, which you may note is quite similar- -to the Linear B “Wanasso” two-queens title. In Arcadia, Persephone was also individually called Despoina, “the mistress”, and this gets a bit confusing, because Despoina is sometimes described as distinctly separate from Persephone, and by “sometimes” I mean “exclusively by Pausinias in the 200s AD, fully eight hundred years after the Homeric hymns, and apparently by nobody else. ” Other than him, basically everyone seems to recognize that Despoina is Persephone, but it’s hard to say for certain, both because mystery cults keep their secrets, and because Despoina’s whole deal- -was that her true name was forbidden. Only those initiated in her mysteries were allowed to know or speak it. So… it might’ve been Persephone… …but we’re not allowed to know. The Arcadian mystery cult of the Despoinai is theorized to straight-up predate- -the Greek-speaking immigrants to the region, so Demeter and Persephone might have originally been the Greekified version- -of a very ancient duo of spooky eldritch goddesses. Also, fun fact, in Arcadia, Despoina is seen as a child of Demeter and Poseidon, rather than Zeus, and more confusingly, everyone involved- -in that particular story is shaped like a horse. Demeter turns into a horse to outrun Poseidon, Poseidon chase her down, they have a beautiful horse baby who later grows into Despoina, aka Persephone. That is too many horses. Put those back. But it also does parallel that weird connection we noted- -between Poseidon and the Queens in the Mycenaean version, hmmmm. There’s also more confusion about Persephone’s name specifically, because in some parts of the mythology, usually when discussing the time before her abduction, she’s referred to as “Kore”, meaning “maiden. ” Now, unlike Persephone, “Kore” does occasionally get- -specifically referenced as a nature goddess. But the other weird thing about that is that “Kore” is a really vague title. “Maiden” is the classy translation - it’s equally valid to say it just means “girl”. And that sounds a hell of a lot like a vague pseudonym- -you use when you can’t say their name - like in the case of Despoina, and, more notably, Hades. See, underworld gods were scary as hell, pun intended. And it was generally believed that calling them by name- -was a really good way to get their attention, which was a scary bad thing. So rather than saying Hades’s name outright, he’d mostly get called by epithets or euphemisms, like “the one with many names”, or “the one who receives many guests”, which has the bonus benefit of sounding raw as hell. So we’ve got Persephone, which is, as near as we can tell, her actual name, but we’ve also got two extremely vague- -but very distinct titles, Kore and Despoina, that seem to have been pseudonyms originally arising from people- -specifically playing it safe and trying not to get her attention! Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles actually calls her Nestis, which supposedly means “the fasting one. ” All these vague nicknames and pseudonyms lend some pretty significant credence- -to the idea that Persephone’s oldest version, whatever it was, was really scary. Like- “don’t speak her name, you might get her attention” scary. And the fact that Persephone has potentially over- -a thousand years of secret mystery history, while the first concrete confirmation we have of Hades’s existence is the Iliad, is actually kind of reflected in how they’re characterized in the actual mythos. Because Hades… doesn’t actually do much. He rules the underworld and shows up whenever someone visits, but he doesn’t, like, go out and do stuff. He’s pretty passive most of the time. Even in his own core myth he takes a backseat- to the core mother-daughter drama. Persephone and Demeter have so much going on we- -literally can’t tell how many other goddesses and cthonic rituals- -might be caught up in their personal mythology, but Hades is exactly what it says on the box. He feels simpler. Now this might be because the underworld kinda creeped the Ancient Greeks out, so they avoided talking, thinking, or writing about it- -in case they attracted its attention, but while that would explain Hades’s broadly inoffensive- -and generally lawful characterization, it wouldn’t really explain why Persephone, also a dread underworld deity, is disproportionately so much more complicated than him. Now it’s impossible to be sure about almost anything about this, but my guess - and this is just me theorizing - is that Persephone as dread queen of the underworld is- -probably her oldest characterization, and all her other names and versions came from the deliberate vagueness- -people used when talking about her because of how scary she was. The flowery Kore spring-goddess stuff seems to have been a later retcon- -to give her some pre-underworld lore- -that wasn’t reflected in how she was actually worshipped. And if I can get a little wilder in my speculation, I think Hades might’ve started off as an offshoot of Mycenaean Poseidon. Now as we’ve discussed, Mycenaean Poseidon was- king of the underworld, and he had an unclear but definitely extant- -connection to Demeter and Persephone. In fact, in some Minoan and Mycenaean cults, there was a very widespread duality between the paired figures- -of a god of the underworld and a goddess of nature - and in the Mycenaean version, that god of the underworld role- -was filled by Poseidon, and the goddess of nature- -seems to have been Demeter, although there is some debate over that. The parallels keep popping up. But after the Greek dark age, Poseidon was definitely- not the king of the underworld anymore, and that connection to the Despoinai was mostly lost - and Hades got it instead. So this might be another Hermes situation, where Hermes started off- -as a specialized epithet for Pan before getting carved off into his own god. If Poseidon’s “king of the underworld” duties got peeled off during the Dark Age- -and formed a new god filling an ancient role, that’d account for the discrepancy and why Hades is curiously absent- -from the pre-Dark-Age sources, and barely factors into Homeric stories either. It’d also potentially indicate that, in the pre-dark-age roots- -of the abduction story, Poseidon filled some variation of the role- -that later belonged to Hades. This is one hundred percent my own crack theory, though, I can’t find anyone else making this connection, and there’s no ironclad textual evidence to support this - we are in fully in the thumbtacks-and-string zone here. But if there’s one thing we can definitely take away from this, it’s that this is a uniquely snarled part of the mythos. There’s a ton of moving parts, epithets, and pseudonyms- -making everything confusing. This is not helped by the fact that there’s also- -a lot of widely-accepted misinformation- -about the story in general and Persephone specifically. On one side, there’s the misinterpretation that Persephone’s abduction- -was a horrifyingly violent assault, which stems from the fact that the ancient word- -for “kidnap” has taken on… much more unpleasant connotations over the centuries. Which... was not its original application in the story. And on the other end of the misconception spectrum, there’s the fairly modern idea that in the “””original””” version of the myth, Persephone willingly walked into the underworld and the kidnapping thing- -was a later retcon to strip away Persephone’s agency and girl power. I traced this telling all the way back to the archaic era of 1978, when author Charlene Spretnak wrote- -“Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths”, which was intended to make the mythology more palatable for her young daughter- -since she didn’t want to expose her to all the kidnapping and sexual assault. This book attempted to interpolate what a theoretical- -pre-patriarchal no-kidnapping version of the myth might have looked like, but it has no sources because- -there are no pre-hellenic pre-kidnapping sources for this story. We just don't have them, they don't exist. So this is fanfic. And that’s fine, people have been writing Greek mythology fanfic since- -before there was Greek mythology, but it’s definitely not “the original version” because- -we straight up do not know the original version. At this point, we'll probably never know the original version. This book was then later adapted by Marjorie Graham- (without crediting Spretnak, by the way) -into a beautifully-illustrated retelling that advertised itself as- -“the much older pre-patriarchal version of the myth” and- -“what is thought to be the goddess- worshiping Bronze age version of the tale,” which is a nice way of saying it’s completely unsourced and I hate it. See, this is how misinformation spreads, people! This is citogenesis in action! Cite your sources or admit you don’t have any! But myth-conceptions aside, at its core, the story of Hades and Persephone is surprisingly compelling. They are one hundred percent the most functional- -canon relationship in Greek mythology. Among other things, Persephone is in the extremely rare position of sharing- -equal power and authority with her husband. They also never cheat on each other, and whenever someone tries to intrude- -on the relationship by kidnapping or seducing one of them, the other one does something really nasty to the intruder. This is all just canon! We don’t even need to sweep any indiscretions under the rug - it’s just there! And that’s why this story is so incredibly popular with modern writers. There are at this point dozens of reimaginings of their relationship, and while some of them lean into the- -“Hades-as-Satan” angle for some easy villainy, most of them focus on the strange and contradictory beauty- -of the ultimate pastel goth love story. Their relationship started with an arranged marriage kidnapping and- a near-apocalypse and- -seamlessly transitioned into the most functional love story in the entire mythos! That’s a fascinating scenario for writers to explore - from Lore Olympus reframing the controversial parts of their love story as a matter of unreliable narrators, to Supergiant Games’ Hades painting Hades and Persephone as- -deceiving the other gods with the story of the original myth, to Hadestown playing up how strained and tragic- -their love has become over the years. There’s tons of complexities to explore! This story has the worst rep out of any Greek myth because of the whole- -“Hades as bad guy” bias we start with, but when we pull back the curtain of societal preconceptions and- -look at the real story as the Ancient Greeks told it, we find a very strange and surprisingly loving relationship- -between two very different people. It’s beautiful! And it’s basically the only relationship in Greek mythology- -that’s less horrifying when you read the original version. But, all justifications and recontextualization aside, don’t kidnap your loved ones. Not even if their dad tells you to. We know better now. One interesting thing about Greek mythology  is that, while everyone agrees that the world   used to be better, there a lot of competing  theories about why. Inventing bullshit seasons   instead of just letting the weather be nice  all the time is a pretty compelling reason,   but way back in the day, Hesiod proposed a  different trigger for where it all went wrong:   the downfall of Kronos. According to the model of  the Five Ages of Man, everything was great until   Zeus showed up and ended the thriving golden  age where mortals automatically lived long,   happy lives. That's a rough review, my guy. But  then again, Zeus's siblings basically spent that   golden age as Omelas Kids suffering in Vague  Digestive Torment while Kronos kept that golden   age running topside, so maybe it was okay and  even perhaps understandable for them to burn   it to the ground a little bit. But one goddess  didn't seem to think so, and her name is Astraea.

[ASTRAEA] I'm not an expert.   This is one of my favorite things about myself.   I love learning new things, I'm not so good at   continuing to learn old things. When they coined  that phrase about being a "jack of all trades,   master of none," they were talking about me. But even though I'm not an expert, being,   as they say, in the sauce about Greek  Mythology for the better part of a decade   has inadvertently given me something of a feel  for the terrain. So when I'm out in the wilds   of the internet hunting down fun new stories to  tell, sometimes I get a little bit of a whiff,   you know? Just the faintest smell of bullshit. Every field of art has its forgeries - works   that their creators thought wouldn't be impactful  enough if they were presented on their own merits,   so instead they have a whole historical context  stapled onto them after the fact. This painting   isn't just nice, it's a lost Da Vinci. This  story isn't just a fun little tale, it's an   ancient native american legend. This bite-sized  anecdote isn't just a slice of good advice,   it's an ancient chinese proverb or something. There are so many of these, and they make me so   mad, not just because their supposed "ancient  origins" are frequently blatantly chosen for   their tropey exoticization to make them seem  foreign and mystical and hard to contact the   supposed source to corroborate. But mostly  they make me mad because they're lies! They   muddle an already extremely complicated field to  research, and if I get duped by one - which has   happened - I end up perpetuating misinformation! So I've developed a bit of a spidey-sense for   when a story feels a little too new to  be true. The time-traveling goat-fish   we discussed back in the Zodiac video? Too  many bits of that story that just did not   fit the tone of the classic Greek greats.   The greek goddess of torture and punishment   that tumblr made up for funsies? Smelled that  spiral-bound-notebook-doodle OC a mile off.   But. I'm not an expert. And that means sometimes  I stumble into something that sounds too good   to be true, and when I go digging, it turns  out to be real. And that is such a rare joy   for me that I cannot wait to tell you about  this one. So today let's talk about Astraea,   the constellation Virgo - which is now  available in our crowdmade shop as the   lastest installment in our Zodiac enamel pins  collection! Get em while they're gettable! To start our journey, I'm gonna do the  one thing you're never supposed to do:   I'm going to read you a few lines from  Astraea's wikipedia page. I just want you   all to understand why I started off suspicious. Astraea "is the virgin goddess of justice,   innocence, purity and precision. " "Astraea, the  celestial virgin, was the last of the immortals   to live with humans during the Golden Age, one  of the old Greek religion's five deteriorating   Ages of Man. " And, last but not least, "According  to myth, Astraea will one day come back to Earth,   bringing with her the return of the utopian  Golden Age of which she was the ambassador. " So, this is fine. Everything here is totally  plausible. Except it's got this vibe that a lot   of "fakelore" - which is what it's called, which I  love - shares, which is this sort of surprisingly   modern set of tropes. For one thing, Astraea's  godly domain is extremely thematically coherent   while still covering a decent amount of ground.   A god of both justice and innocence makes a lot   of sense, those two things are connected, and  looping in "purity" plays well with the rest of it   too. The thing is, real mythologies frequently do  not do that. Zeus is a god of the sky and storms,   but he's also the god of divine hospitality  and the maker of heroes. Poseidon is the god   of the ocean and also earthquakes and  horses. In Greek mythology, it's very   common for gods to either have about a million  seemingly unrelated divine characteristics,   or to have one single concept as their entire deal  - for instance, Eos is the goddess of the dawn,   and that's basically all she does. But modern-day  fictional deities in fantasy settings are   purposefully written and worldbuilt to cover a  single neatly-partitioned slice of the universe,   and they usually get given a tightly-woven set  of godly duties that all thematically resonate   with one another, or a singular gimmick that  gives them a nice, simple personality to play   with. A quick scroll through the gods in dnd  communicates that pretty cleanly. You want a   god of justice? Human shaped or dragon shaped,  we gotcha covered. You want a god of the sea?    We got like three of em. If you don't mind a bit  of a crowd, we can bring in all our gods of war-  So Astraea's extremely thematically  clean divine domain was a little bit sus,   and the thing about her being the last immortal  to still live with humanity was also, to my eyes,   suspiciously modern. It implied, again, some  hard worldbuilding that just generally isn't   found in classical mythology, which was built  up slowly over the course of thousands of   years of changing generations of people. In  Greek mythology, the gods aren't walled off   from humanity. The only time a no-interference  clause comes up explicitly is in the Trojan War,   and even then it's constantly ignored. Throughout  the entire rest of the corpus of greek mythology   the gods are constantly dealing with humans -  popping in to help out directly or sire more   kids or spawn a few monsters in case everyone  was getting a little too cozy. So this idea   that the rest of the gods had dipped out of the  mortal world early on, while Astraea - this pure,   wonderful goddess of goodness - had lived  with humanity through their waning morals   but had eventually reached her breaking point  and reluctantly turned her back… it felt, to me,   very unusual. In fact, what it really felt like  was reminiscent of some of the stuff Tolkien got   up to in the Silmarillion. That's right, bitches,  I've actually read it now! It's fine. Anyway,   I was getting Big Fall Of Numenor energy  off this bit, and I wanted to know more. So of course, the first thing I did was go looking  at the sources. And, to my genuine surprise,   all of this stuff is mythologically supported. So  it probably had Tolkien energy because Tolkien had   read the same things I did. Aratus's Phaenomena,  a book of constellations and general astronomy   information written between 300ish and 250 BCE,  lays it out pretty clearly, with a few bonus   details provided by Ovid's Metamorphoses a few  centuries later. Astraea, an immortal goddess,   makes the unusual choice to live among humans  in their earliest days - a pastoralist golden   age where the land is bountiful, conflict is  nonexistent and everything is wonderful all   the time. Hilariously, one explicit way the  writer communicates that this is a simple age   of boundless idealism is that nobody has even  considered building a boat. Don't go into the   ocean, everyone! That's where the sin lives! Ovid adds the detail that this golden age was   when the titans ruled the world under Saturn, aka  Kronos, father of Zeus, who, of course, overthrows   Kronos and ushers in the age of the gods - which,  embarassingly, is considered a downgrade from a   golden age to a silver one. Zeus nixes the eternal  springtime and introduces a seasonal breakup,   forcing the fledgling humans to start constructing  homes to shelter during extreme temperatures and   invent agriculture to not starve. Astraea's not  super happy with the events of the silver age,   and she's disheartened that humanity is  becoming increasingly more conflicted.    Her primary godly move is to advocate for mercy  and understanding when justice is called for,   but she's not happy with the silver age, and  she likes its sequel even less. The bronze age,   quickly followed by the iron age, sees  humanity discover the evils of war and money,   which from Aratus's perspective is just war  with extra steps. Disgusted with humanity's   newfound penchant for violence and - even worse  - seafaring - Astraea finally turns her back   on humanity and retreats to the heavens  above, becoming the constellation Virgo. And that's all fine and dandy! Ovid's source  alone is good enough for me - he may be biased,   but this isn't the kind of story  he tended to dubiously embellish,   and Aratus's source just adds even more  legitimacy, proving that Astraea wasn't   just a roman concept and dated back to ancient  greece. Plus, these stories have some fascinating   implications about the vibes the writers  were living through. Aratus and Ovid both   were firmly of the opinion that they were living  in the shitty, terrible iron age. The world had   once existed in this beautiful, primeval,  pastoralist state where the land provided   everything humanity needed without requiring  any work. But a divine overhaul and a tragic   downfall into petty selfishness and greed had  left humanity constantly at war with itself,   miserable and hungry and cruel. And sailing!   Are there no depths to which we won't sink?!   And there's a lot here that I think  is super interesting. Like - again,   getting back to the trope perspective. When a  modern western writer wants to communicate that   an empire is unimaginably powerful and decadent  - they make it look like rome. Aesthetically we   associate it with an empire at the height of its  glory. And the writers from that civilization were   like "this is disgusting, I wish we could  go back to eating berries in the woods. "   Amazing. I guess the grass is always greener  on the other side of the Course of Empires. But, okay. We've got that settled. Astraea  was a real deity, she was associated with   justice and innocence and purity and stuff.   But it was really that last bit about Astraea   that made me profoundly suspicious. You  know, the prophecy. *musical sting* See,   there are some mythological prophecies that  perpetuate out into the modern day. But   there are not many. Most of them take the form of  "this true king is buried in this mountain and he   will rise again in his country's greatest hour of  need," which is conveniently self non-fulfilling;   when, in response to whatever current crisis is  rearing its ugly head, the dead guy fails to bust   outta his mausoleum with sword in hand, it just  kicks the "greatest hour of need" down the road   and implies he won't wake up until things find  a way to get even worse. So these prophecies can   hang around in cultural perpetuity without too  much trouble. In myths, prophecies are usually   short-term tragedy-bait - whimsical little bites  of the near future that only exist to doom their   hapless protagonist into meeting their destiny  on the road they take to avoid it. Prophecies are   one of those things that modern writers cannot  get enough of, but they are, in my experience,   very unusual in mythology. I mean, you can tell,  because I haven't used that "the prophecy" musical   sting joke in eight real years! That's a  good bit and I just never get the chance!   And the reason why "this mythical figure has  an ongoing prophecy about them" is especially   suspicious is because it's the kind of thing  people love co-opting to support whatever social,   cultural or political agenda they think they can  most convincingly staple it to. Especially one as   vague as "her return will signify the dawn of a  new golden age. " Bitch that could mean anything But, shockingly, this bit is also real! Virgil's  fourth Eclogue says it in plain latin - "Virgin   Justice", aka Astraea, returns, and  with her the reign of Saturn - again,   Kronos - and an accompanying golden age.   Even more than that, Virgil's funky little   prophecy - credited to the "Cumaean sybil" - says  that this ringing-in of a new golden era will be   accompanied by the birth of some amazing kid who  will personally lead this world to paradise. And   he was coincidentally writing this around 40 BCE,  so within a few scant decades this little tidbit   was going to reach its first pile of people  really, really eager to explain how it totally   applied to their personal choice of messiah. The  popular read, for the record, is that Virgil was   actually writing about the predicted future kid  of Mark Antony and Augustus's sister Octavia,   a union that would've handily stitched two thirds  of the triumvirate back together, but this is what   happens when your prophecies are vague. They get  jesus'd. Which - not to criticise - I feel like   a good oracle should've probably seen coming. And it somehow managed to get even vaguer. See,   once the renaissance started and there was a whole  crop of powerful queens popping up across Europe,   it became extremely hip and cool to conflate  every single one of them with Astraea,   returned in the form of this one lady to usher in  that new golden age everyone was talking about,   and to prove conclusively that their empire  was just as amazing and wonderful as the great   empires of the ancient past had been in the glory  days. The holy roman empire hasn't fallen off,   guys! It's just as good as it was before!   And now it's got "holy" in front of it!   Anyway, the short of it is I was right to be  suspicious of this prophecy thing, not because   it wasn't a real part of the early mythology, but  because its promincence in the story of Astraea is   100% the consequence of it being so politically  and religiously useful so many times. Which is   also dishonest, but the classy kind of dishonest  that cites its sources and makes me even angrier. So, the world this mythology is shaping is  starting to look… kind of familiar. We've got   fire, that's pretty handy, since now we've also  got winter. We've got evils plaguing humanity,   that seems about right. The gods  are pretty well established,   they've weathered some trials and tribulations,  the bleeding hearts that think maybe they   should be nicer to the mortals have handily  turned themselves into stars and fucked off,   and we're about locked in to the Olympian pantheon  we've been expecting. If the gods are officially   sorted, it sounds like it's a great time  to start playing games with the lives of   men - and what better place to start than the  best city that's ever been invented, according   to the deep thinkers and phenomenal poets of the  completely unbiased third party that is Athens? [ATHENS]

When studying the ancient world, it  becomes very clear very quickly that   Athens is the archetypical shining city on  the hill and the singular foundation of the   greatest civilization in history, according  to Athens. If you ask anyone else, of course,   the story is very different. The fact is,  for the majority of Ancient Greek history,   Athens was one of the smaller potatoes rattling  around. It gets the barest of mentions in Homer’s   epics around the 800s BCE, where Athens is brought  up once in the infamous Boat List Chapter of the   Iliad - and its sole representative hero, Theseus,  isn’t even mentioned and didn’t really start   getting any major press till the romans rolled  up around the turn of the millennium. Athens only   scraped together the barest possible claim to fame  in 490 BCE when they won the battle of marathon,   and spent the next few decades gradually building  up momentum before taking their place center stage   starting in the mid-400s. After that, the first  priority appeared to be making up for lost time,   and Athens was pretty quick to start constructing  narratives where they were actually always the   coolest kids on the block and everybody knew  it all along. We’ve touched on this in some   earlier videos - like how in the mid-300s  BCE Plato spent the bulk of his dialogues   Timaeus and Critias talking about how the ancient  empire of Atlantis was single-handedly defeated   thousands of years prior by the totally real  Ancient Athenians by virtue of how totally rad   and Athenian and real they were. But Plato was  far from the only one, and the most illustrative   example of this retroactive spotlight-hogging  is probably Athens’s official founding myth. Now before we talk about the Government-Issued  Founding Myth written after Athens became   actually important, let’s briefly touch on  what the athenian founding myth looked like   before Athens hit it big. Don’t worry,  it’s short. In the Iliad’s Boat Chapter,   Athens is referred to as a “well-built citadel”  and “the land of great-hearted Erechtheus”. Now,   that’s all we get about Athens at this point, but  Erechtheus, sometimes also called Erechthonius,   the culture hero slash first king of Athens, is  a fairly interesting figure who has a little more   detail. For one thing, he’s autochthonous, meaning  born from the earth - essentially he’s one of   Gaia’s direct offspring. Gaia’s mostly known for  giving birth to monsters, and Erechtheus isn’t   entirely an exception - he’s frequently described  as having serpentine or draconic features,   in some versions having warped or snakelike legs  that make it difficult for him to walk. But he’s   also not just Gaia’s kid. The actual story of his  birth is - well, frankly, pretty gross. Basically,   according to Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca,  Athena decides she wants some new weapons,   so she goes to commission Hephaestus for some, but  instead of just taking the commission, Hephaestus   is struck by her beauty and tries to assault her.   This obviously doesn’t work out so hot for him,   given that she’s a war goddess and his legs  don’t even work, but as a result of… certain   icky parts of the process, Erechtheus is conceived  by Hephaestus and born from the earth itself, and   Gaia hands the baby off to Athena. Sources vary on  how Erechtheus’s childhood went, but TLDR he ends   up as king of Athens, erects a statue of Athena  in the acropolis, founds the Panhellenic games,   and - most interestingly, I think - invents  the chariot to help compensate for his own   limited mobility. It’s not really surprising that  Erechtheus is the offspring of Hephaestus - being   a disabled inventor is pretty on-brand. This myth  is also interesting because sometimes Athena was   credited as the first charioteer when she  was referred to with the epithet Hippia,   meaning “Of Horses”. A lot of modern pop culture  greek mythology says she and Poseidon invented   the chariot together, but unfortunately that  apparently isn’t sourced anywhere - Athena   as first charioteer is corroborated with the  epithet, but if there was ever a more detailed   myth about this, it unfortunately didn’t  survive beyond a single anecdotal epithet.   So that’s pretty neat, but it’s not really  about Athens, is it? It’s just about this   cool king of Athens. And that’s about the  coolest story Athens had to offer until   bam! It’s the turn of the fifth century BCE  and Athens just invented democracy and kicked   some persian ass! Now they’re a big deal and  it’s time everyone started acting like it!   So Athens has its glow-up and becomes important  - and, fun fact, one of the first things they did   around this time was make the official statement  that all Athenians were autochthonous just like   Erechtheus. Not to say that they all individually  sprouted out of the ground just like that,   but that their ancestors did. The Athenians  didn’t settle Athens, they were born from it.    MOLDED by it. They didn’t see anything that wasn’t  Athens until they were already a man, and by then   it was nothing to them but nowhere near as cool  as athens. So yea, autochthonous pride was not   what I was expecting to find researching  this, but it’s still pretty dang nifty. Anyway, now that Athens is a big deal IRL, it’s  time to give them a big deal founding myth that   reflects how much of a big deal they are. One with  gods and heroes and really important stuff. No   other city did this, by the way. Sure, you’d get  mythical founder-kings bouncing around setting   up cities and naming them after stuff, but it  didn’t usually get much fancier than that. Not   so for Athens. In the first-ish century CE,  Pseudo-Apollodorus writes his Bibliotheca,   a compendium of greek myths and legends derived  from earlier works, mostly from around the 300s   BCE. And in this Bibliotheca he tells us the  new and improved founding myth of Athens.   For one thing, Erechtheus is no longer the first  king of athens. That honor goes to Kekrops,   another autochthonous founder-king who is also  part snake, what a coincidence. He rules the   Attic peninsula, which he names Kekropia after  himself, and is by all accounts doing a good job   when the gods decide it’s time to start divvying  up the planet and the problems begin. See,   Kekropia is just such a prime piece of Grade A  real estate that both Poseidon and Athena want   a piece of it. Poseidon gets there first, and  to mark his territory he strikes the ground   with his trident, producing a saltwater spring  - and, according to some later roman writers,   also a horse. Then Athena shows up, calls Kekrops  over to make sure he’s watching, and plants a nice   little olive tree. Athena and Poseidon start  butting heads over who gets the city, so Zeus   intervenes to break it up. Sources vary on who  exactly makes the final judgment, but the popular   attestation is that Kekrops judges the olive tree  a more practical gift than a saltwater spring,   so the city goes to Athena and is renamed Athens.   Poseidon is unsurprisingly butthurt about this   and floods the nearby plains in revenge, most  likely to explain why Athens was, at the time,   located right next to three separate rivers. A few kings later, our old buddy Erechtheus   pops back up in his old role as Super Cool  King, though by this point they’re pretty   consistently calling him Erichthonius instead.   What’s neat about this is that Erechtheus’s   original name still gets independent press  in this telling, since the saltwater spring   Poseidon creates is called Erechtheis -  and in the Acropolis of Athens, alongside   the statue of Athena Polias, patron goddess  of the city, there was a statue of Poseidon   Erechtheus, a figure of worship very specifically  conflating the figures of Poseidon and this   autochthonous snakey founder-king to worship them  in a single capacity. Erechtheus also features in   a more subtle role - in the Parthenon’s  massive now-lost statue of Athena Parthenos,   there’s a snake behind Athena’s shield, and  that snake represents Erechtheus. Pretty dope! Now the really cool thing about this  specifically is Athens is not the only   snake-centric myth about a god claiming a city.   Kekrops and Erechtheus are both offspring of   Gaia with hefty amounts of snake symbolism and  iconography, and they both play a mythological   role in giving Athena control over their city.   This story structure also happens… in Delphi.   See, before Apollo took over as its patron,  Delphi and its oracle were ruled by Python,   an autochthonous child of Gaia who  was, unsurprisingly at this point,   a giant snake. Python is supposedly minoan in  origin, and was potentially originally framed as   a benevolent guardian spirit - though by ancient  greek times Python was a little more antagonistic,   in one story being sent by Hera to kill Apollo  and Artemis’s mother Leto. Regardless of why,   Apollo killed Python and claimed Delphi and its  oracle for his own. This story is referenced in   the Homeric Hymn to Apollo in 522 BCE, meaning  it’s most likely a lot older than that. I   don’t know exactly how far this “olympians  superseding ancient snake gods” thing goes,   but even if it’s just a coincidence it’s  a hell of a throughline to stumble on.   Can’t believe all my mythological conspiracy  theorying finally led me to friggin’ snake   people. All these thumbtacks and  string might be getting to me… Wow! How cool that this completely neutral party  got the coolest and smartest and bestest god ever   to be in charge! And the really convenient  part is they don't even need to change the   name on the road signs! But as much as I've got  a soft spot for Athena - anyone who helps out   my boy Odysseus is a friend of mine - she's still  unleashed her share of divine wrath on those who,   depending on how you look at it, may  or may not have been playing with fire. [ARACHNE]

It's fun to talk sh*t on the Greek gods. "Oh man, that Zeus, amirite?   Can't keep it in his pants to   save the lives of countless  mortal women and children. " "Jeez, that Apollo! He's almost worst than Zeus! 'cause all it takes is him falling in love,  and you got a one way ticket to Deadsville! " "And oh man, Aphrodite! And we think  today's shippers are obsessive! " Of course, this all works  with the benefit of hindsight, and the fact that, you know, this is  a very distant religion to most of us. Broadly speaking, these aren't our gods and  that makes it okay to get a few cracks in. The situation was *very* different if  you actually lived in Ancient Greece,   and no story demonstrates  that better than Arachne. Now, Arachne is just your average Lydian maiden. With one standout quality,  she's a hell of a weaver. This on its on own isn't too noteworthy,  but Arachne decides to up the ante by bragging how she's such a good  weaver, she's even better than Athena. And much like saying you're hotter than Aphrodite, claiming that you surpass the gods in a quality  that was presumably given to you by the gods is not a great idea when those gods  evidently have a lot of spare time   to spend cooking up suitably karmic  punishments for your shenanigans. So, Athena catches wind of Arachne's  boasting and pops down in a mortal   disguise to gauge the severity of the situation. When she suggest that maybe Arachne should dial   back the blasphemy a little,  Arachne responds by saying, "HA! If Athena wants me to stop so bad  she should come down here and make me! " (Let's file that under: things you should  probably never say ever just to be safe) So Athena takes that suggestion, and she and   Arachne set up a weaving competition  to see who's really the better creator. So Athena weaves a big tapestry  primarily a different myth entirely; where she and Poseidon competed for  the honor of naming the city of Athens. You can probably guess that she won,  but the tapestry shows how she won. Where Poseidon caused a miraculous  creation of a salt water spring, Athena created a much more practical olive  tree and won over the citizens that way. She further embellishes the  tapestry with four more myths; each one demonstrating how  much of a bad idea it is to   sass the gods and/or claim superiority over them. Arachne, meanwhile, demonstrates her  spectacular lack of situational awareness   by using her tapestry to beautifully  render over fifteen separate occasions where Zeus and/or Poseidon dropped  everything to bang random women,   more than half the time shaped  an animal while they did it. (Hilarious, right? ) Well, not to Athena, who has to live with these people  and probably doesn't want to see a   graphic visualization of her dad and  uncle banging everything that moves. While she admires Arachne's  skill and execution she finds   her lack of audience awareness disturbing, and responds by destroying  the tapestry and whacking   Arachne on the head with a weaving shuttle, presumably while yelling "WHAT! WERE! YOU! THINKING?! " to emphasize the point. When Arachne takes this critique about as   well as any artist handles their  first really cutting criticism, Athena takes pity on her and saves her life  (*kind of*) by transforming her into a spider. (Don't feel too bad, Arachne. You  were just ahead of your time. ) (Also, it's maybe not a good idea to  show your NSFW god fanart to one of   the only three Olympians, who explicitly  want nothing to do with that business. ) You know, even though Arachne hubris'd  harder than almost anyone alive,   I've always thought it was kind of beautiful  that she was turned into something that   could still create her art. Spiderwebs  are complicated, fascinating things,   and even though they serve an obvious purpose for  the spider, they're still strikingly beautiful,   and I kind of love the thought that the question  "why does the spider weave so beautifully"   inspired a story of an unbelievably talented  artist who lost herself but kept her wondrous   craft and spread it all over the world, decorating  forgotten corners and catching the light in silver   strands. Sometimes a divine punishment is an  intricate, nuanced, even beautiful metaphor for   some potentially rewarding transformation.   And sometimes you just get murdered.

[NIOBE] *sigh* When will these people learn  not to piss off the gods? Okay, the story of Niobe is very short   and like most Greek tragedies is  an essay on the folly of hubris. But for context we're going to need the story of  Leto and her twin children, Artemis and Apollo. Yeah you already know who *they* are, but their mom is more important in this story, so bear with me. So way back when, the goddess Leto had  a fling with Zeus and got pregnant. Hera obviously objected, but because she  couldn't do her normal solution and kill Leto, she instead decided to make her life really hard. So she put out some rules-- Leto could totally give birth, she just  couldn't do it on the mainland, on an island, or anywhere under the sun. And apparently Olympus counted too? Whatever. So Leto found this tiny barren rock called Delos,  which wasn't the mainland  and didn't count as an island and set out to give birth. Some versions also say that Hera kidnapped  Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, to keep Leto from having her kids. But any mother will tell you that nothing  stops the baby when it wants to get out, so Leto had her children anyway. First, Artemis and then NINE DAYS LATER, Apollo. So now that we've got some backstory, let's talk about Niobe. So Niobe, queen of Thebes, has a loving husband, Amphion, and fourteen children, seven  sons and seven daughters. Life is pretty sweet. Now Leto has a temple in Thebes and she's requested that the women of  Thebes pay her some respect via incense. Pretty much standard godly fare. Well Niobe shows up to do her thing, and apparently decides that the best way  to worship Leto is to try and one-up her. So Niobe claims that, hey, she managed to  have fourteen kids, while Leto only had two, so who's the *real* goddess? Well, evidently Leto, as the minute  she hears that particular gem, she calls up the twins and asks them to show Niobe who's boss. So Artemis and Apollo gear up and start sniping Niobe's kids, killing all of them. Then her husband kills himself. Sucks to be you, Niobe. Sounds like your mouth was writing  checks your nuclear family couldn't cash. Then she turns into a rock. The end. Artemis is tied in with a lot  of these divine-wrath stories,   actually. Let's throw in one more for the road!

[ORION] I've talked before about how mythology  doesn't really have a single, set canon. A culture's mythology is usually  tied to a living religion. The stories get told and  retold over the generations, and depending on political  shenanigans and power struggles, whole batches of gods and heroes can  end up reshuffling in the hierarchy to conform to whatever the current  socio-political arrangement is. So, studying mythology isn't usually about  arguing canon because there's no point. Instead, it's about finding the threads  that stayed consistent over time. Comparative Mythology has a lot in  common with biological phylogeny, tracing how stories evolved and spread over time by tracking what traits those  stories consistently had and where and when their common  ancestor might have first appeared. For instance, a lot of Indo-European  mythologies feature two warring batches of gods that, despite the conflict, intermarry, exchange  hostages and otherwise co-mingle quite a lot: The Æsir and Vanir; the Fomor and the Tuatha Dé Danann; the Olympians  and the Titans; the Asuras and the Devas. It's very consistent across  multiple mythologies implying   that it was probably a property  of their original common ancestor. Also Æsir and Asuras are cognate, which is fun,   and both the Æsir and the Fomor  are ruled by a one-eyed god who tries to forestall a prophecy of his doom. None of this is relevant to this video. I just thought it was way too cool to leave out. But some stories make this easy, because some  stories are grounded in a very tangible thing. And no matter how much the myths might  drift, that one solid fact stays relevant. In the myth of Orion, that solid real  fact is that he's a constellation. No matter what else happens, that's  the most important thing about him - after all, the constellation was there first. And it was being recognized as shaped like a   dude a full 30,000 years before  Ancient Greece was even a thing. Star charts are some of the earliest art we have. Now, Orion makes a few sporadic appearances in early Greek mythology. He is referenced  as a constellation in the Iliad, one of many that Hephaestus decorates  Achilles' shiny new armor and shield with. The star Sirius is also  referenced as Orion's hunting dog. He's also mentioned in the Odyssey  as having been killed by Artemis, and is cited as one of the giants  who tried to attack the Olympians. Odysseus also sees him in the underworld later,   hunting the ghosts of  animals he previously killed. Which to be honest, seems  wildly unfair to the animals. But despite these little scraps of mythology,  Orion's life doesn't get much consistent press, and he's mostly referenced  as a constellation because   he makes a very convenient timekeeping tool. In that region, Orion first  rises in the east around July, which is when you're supposed  to start winnowing the grain. He's directly overhead in September, when  you're supposed to harvest the grapes. And when the Pleiades drop below  the horizon, hiding from Orion, you probably shouldn't try  sailing anywhere because   that's when the storms start getting really bad. The stories about him make these  fun facts easier to remember, but the important part is that  he's a constellation very useful   for delineating important times of year. And, not so coincidentally, many of his myths  involve a never-ending chase of some kind - mapping to his motion across the sky. So, the earliest proper story fragments  we have about Orion as a person come from a later summary of a lost work that *might* have been written by famous astronomer  and all-around cool scientist, Aristophanes. But then again, he wasn't all that interested  in the mythology of the stars he studied. So this author *might* have just been  attributing it to him for literary street cred. Anyway, in this version, Orion is  a son of Poseidon and Euryale - either a daughter of King Minos,  or the second Gorgon sister. It's not really clear. Either way, Orion is giant, and kind of monstery, and has the ability to walk  on water - thanks to his dad. He visits the island of Chios and  hangs out with the king, Oenopion. But gets drunk and attacks Merope, which  is the name of one of the Pleiades, although they don't appear to be officially the  same character in this story - which is confusing. The king gets mad and blinds him,   and Orion wanders around for a while  before bumping into Hephaestus, who gives him a servant,  Cedalion, to guide him around. With his help, Orion travels east and  meets Helios, the sun, who heals his eyes. Now restored and pretty pissed off, Orion  charges back to take vengeance on the king. But Oenopion has taken this time  to build himself an underground   fortress to hide in and Orion can't find him. So he wanders off to do something else instead. Now, I-I can't find confirmation of this,  but this myth sounds suspiciously like a beat-for-beat mythologization  of Orion's physical movement   across the sky over the course of the year. He travels to Chios, which is  nearly due east of mainland Greece, presumably when he first rises  over the eastern horizon. He attacks Merope, who if she is  supposed to be one of the Pleiades, is represented in a star cluster in  Taurus that Orion constantly chases. He's blinded and wanders around  bumping into Hephaestus, which   could be when Orion sinks  below the western horizon because Hephaestus's forge was  supposedly located in Mount Etna   which is just about due west from mainland Greece. Guided by Cedalion, Orion travels under the earth   until he reaches the east  again where the sun rises. And restored by Helios, Orion rises in the east  again to continue chasing Merope and Oenopion. Again, I can't find confirmation and I had to,   like, physically look up the maps  to see if the location's lined up. But I mean, it's plausible. Anyway, apparently after all this went down,   Orion decided to start hanging out  with Artemis and her mother Leto, where they brode out over their mutual love of  putting arrows and things from several miles away. But in classic Greek hero fashion, Orion  gets a little too much of the hubris one day, and boasts that he's gonna  kill every animal in the world. Gaia, likely perturbed at the widespread  ecological devastation this boast would entail, responds with her characteristic subtlety   and summons a monstrous scorpion  which stings Orion and he dies. Zeus places Orion among the stars  and then makes the scorpion a   constellation too. Presumably, so  Orion doesn't get too comfortable. This is another consistent constellation myth. Orion and Scorpio are on near opposite  points of the celestial sphere. So, when Scorpio rises over the horizon,  Orion nopes out for half the year. Because of this, the scorpion is a  very common element in Orion's myths. For instance, one variant says that the  Pleiad nymphs are close friends of Artemis, and Orion will not stop pursuing them. Artemis asks Zeus for help,   and Zeus responds by turning the Pleiades  into stars where Orion can't get to them. Now upset that she can't see her friends anymore, Artemis has Apollo unleash a  monstrous scorpion to attack Orion. And when he dies,   Zeus turns him into a constellation so  he can continue to chase the Pleiades, because Zeus is an asshole. But I bet this all sounds pretty weird, right? Because a lot of you have probably heard that  Orion was the only man Artemis ever loved. First of all, no. But more specifically... NO. Plenty of artists, poets and other such creatives   have historically loved framing their  dynamic as a tragic tale of love lost, because who doesn't love that trope? But this popular interpretation is based  on one very specific fragmentary myth, dubiously recounted by hygienists, who tells us that Apollo disapproves of the   friendship between Artemis and  Orion and worries that he might seduce her with his prodigious  bow and arrow skills. Which makes me question if Apollo has ever paid  any attention to the company Artemis keeps. Anyway, Apollo gets all browy and  overprotective and decides Orion has to die, so he challenges Artemis that  she totally can't hit that tiny,   little dot swimming really far out in the ocean. Which, of course she does, and oops, it was Orion. So Orion's super dead and Artemis is  pretty upset at the loss of a friend, so she places him among the stars as a... *constellation prize*. Ayyy. Anyway, as near as I can tell, Orion only  ever gets written as Artemis's tragic,   dead boyfriend because a handful of translators, baroque artists, and 19th century poets,  decided it was more dramatic that way. And that the only reason a dude and  a lady would ever want to hang out   and talk about their mutual interests together, is if they also wanted to bone. This single interpretation  conveniently ignores that   it's *vastly* outweighed by the number of versions where Artemis kills Orion on purpose  for trying to assault her friends. But hey, what are you gonna do? Either way, Orion ends up dead and  Artemis goes back to foreswearing   forever the company of men  and all that entails. Divine punishments can be remarkably uncreative.   And to be clear, that's a good thing. Because   the creative ones are ten million times  worse than just getting shot from space.

[WRATH OF DEMETER] There are a lot of stories with environmental messages. There's been a bit of an uptick since the advent of man-made climate change gave us a whole new form of species-wise guilt to sublimate through storytelling, but the concept of "man vs nature" is a tale as old as time, and the moral element of "nature good, or at least not to be messed with" is just as old. Modern environmental narratives tend to focus more on how important it is to protect nature and how terrible it is to harm it on a widespread scale, but a lot of those stories are grounded in more modern concepts like nuclear damage or anthropogenic climate change. Sometimes harming nature is its own punishment, and a world critically damaged by foolhardy humans becomes deeply unpleasant for those humans and their descendants to live in. In some other stories, nature takes a slightly more active role in defending itself, or, failing that, avenging itself. Whatever the flavor, the general consensus is that it's never wise to pick a fight with the biosphere you live in, since no matter who wins, you eventually lose. And you'll be happy to know that this general concept dates as far back as ancient greece! So today let's talk about a short, sweet, and ridiculously unnerving tale of what exactly the wrath of Demeter looks like. Now this story, like many others, is recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and it begins, like so many do, with a king. The protagonist of our story is King Erisichthon, and he's kicking things off with a bang by clear-cutting Demeter's sacred grove. The reason behind this questionable choice is never explained, not that it would help, because this grove is like mondo sacred - it's where all the dryads like to hang out and party, and it's like deep wilderness. At the heart of the grove is a massive, ancient oak tree covered in garlands and prayer tablets and a big flashing neon sign that says "do not kill. " Erisichthon's workers aren't exactly jazzed about the thought of knocking it down, so Erisichthon grabs an axe and forges in to do it himself, and further paints a target on his back by loudly declaring that not only is he going to cut down this tree, he'd do the same thing even if that tree was Demeter herself. At the first strike of the axe, the tree starts bleeding, which Erisichthon takes as a great sign and keeps chopping. Right before the tree gives up the ghost, it speaks and tells the assembled mortals that it is in fact a dryad, beloved by Demeter herself, and Ereisichthon's ass is grass. The tree dies, the people move on and the dryads who saw the whole thing book it to Demeter to fill her in. Now Demeter's none too pleased about the loss of her sacred grove and her favorite dryad, so she spends some time mulling over what exactly to do to this idiot, and settles on a particularly unsettling plan. She sends a nymph up to the frozen, barren wastelands of northern Scythia to transmit a message to Limos, the goddess of starvation, whose nature is so antithetical to Demeter that they literally physically can't get near each other. The nymph quickly tells Limos that Demeter's asked her to inflict a curse on King Erisichthon, and then the nymph books it before Limos's divine vibes can starve her skeletal. Limos is always down for a little mischief, so she heads over to Erisichthon's palace, slips in at night and super casually inflicts him with the curse of eternal hunger. Then she heads home to put on the new season  of Bake-Off while Erisichthon  dreams of magnificent feasts and wakes up absolutely ravenous. Now, as king, Erisichthon has plenty of access to delicious foods of all varieties, but no matter how much he eats, he's never satisfied and in fact just gets more hungry the more he consumes. In desperation to buy more and more food, he ends up draining his treasury and selling off his possessions. He even ends up selling his daughter Mestra, who's none to pleased about her new situation and calls in a favor from Poseidon as payback for him deflowering her back in the day, which as we all know by now happened with alarming frequency, and Poseidon evidently feels real bad about this one because he grants her the power of full-on shapeshifting, which she uses to escape. Erisichthon sees this as a golden opportunity and makes a pretty solid racket out of selling his daughter over and over again while she uses her shapeshifting to escape every time. But of course this does nothing to help with the curse, and eventually Erisichthon is so overwhelmed with ravenous hunger that he just fully eats himself. alive. Practical takeaway from this whole debacle? Hell if I know, but this is definitely the anecdote Demeter likes to tell when Hades comes over for family dinner and game night. Honestly we shoulda known Demeter was the scariest  god when she triggered that apocalypse that one   time. I swear, people see the sheaf of wheat and  the diaphanous green robes and their brain jumps   straight to "unthreatening maternal figure" and  they miss the part where she will fully make you   eat yourself fingers-first. But if Demeter  is surprisingly terrifying, her son-in-law   the Lord of the Underworld is unsurprisingly  terrifying. Which is another marker in the   long list of reasons why Theseus is not  beating the "big dumb idiot" allegations.

[THESEUS AND PIRITHOUS] Hades has really gotten a bad rep over the years. People hear "King of the Underworld" and suddenly all they can see is Satan - That's me! The thing is, mythological Hades never  did *anything* to deserve his bad rep. Sure, he kidnapped Persephone, but this was a time when kidnapping your future  wife wasn't as frowned upon as it is today. And by all accounts, their  relationship was remarkably functional. He asked Zeus to stop Asclepius  from resurrecting the dead, but it's not his fault that Zeus  interpreted that as "set the guy on fire. " He helped Orpheus reunite with his dead wife, and hey, it's not his fault that the kid  did the one thing he warned him not to do. By all accounts, Hades is a really  nice guy who loves his wife,   keeps his promises and does his job. Also there's evidence that  k̑érberos [Cerberus] means "spotted" so this enormous dork also named his three-headed  hellhound "Spot" — you gotta love this guy! In his entire run as Lord of the Underworld,  Hades has only messed up TWO people— and believe me, they deserve it. These are their stories. So you've probably all heard of Theseus, famous for killing the Minotaur and  abandoning his wife on a desert island, but you probably haven't  heard of his bro Pirithous,   because he's pretty much only known for this. So Pirithous and Theseus are  egotistical as only Greek heroes can be, and decide that they both deserve  to marry a daughter of Zeus. Theseus settles on Helen of Troy,  who is only TWELVE at this point, and they run off and kidnap her. Now of course it wouldn't be appropriate  for Theseus to get with a 12-year-old, so the flawless plan is to keep her  until she reaches legal banging age. *Retching sounds* I cannot believe how much  crap Helen gets put through. Can you believe people still  blame HER for the Trojan War? Anyway, as disgusting as that was,  Pirithous has an even better idea: he wants to marry Persephone — did I say  better? I meant mind-bogglingly stupid — but amazingly Theseus goes along with this plan. Take notes everybody: friends  don't let friends kidnap goddesses. So the bros scoot down to the Underworld,  where they encounter a slightly livid Hades, who, like any good host, offers  them seats at his dinner table. They cheerfully sit down, you know, may as well get to  know your future husband-in-law,   before kidnapping and marrying his wife, whereupon snakes erupt from the  ground and fuse them to their chairs. Hades sics the Furies on  them and calls it a night. Theseus, you are supposed to be smarter than this! Let that be a lesson, folks— don't try and kidnap the Queen of the Underworld  when her mild-mannered husband is within earshot. Or maybe, just to be safe,  don't mess with Hades. Period. Satan: See, I go with the snakes too, but  I wouldn't use 'em as literally as that. In most of these stories of divine wrath,  the gods take a fairly reactive role. They   don't go out looking for people who piss  them off, they're largely minding their   own business when some hubristic mortal  too big for their britches rolls up and   starts poking the bear. But some gods are  easier to poke than others, and sometimes   incurring a proper smiting can be as easy as  being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[ACTAEON] The major well-known figures in greek mythology  are famous for all sorts of things. Heracles for   his strength, Odysseus for his cunning, Atalanta  for her speed and kickass Tarzan origin story,   Tantalus and Sisyphys for their unique  punishments in Hades, Clytemnestra for   axe-murdering her husband… the list goes on.   Some are good, some are bad, some are pretty   cool and some are frankly kind of embarrassing.   I mean, nobody wants to be remembered forever   as That Guy Who Got Squished By A Boat, Jason. But in the tumultuous annals of mytho-history,   surprisingly few heroes are remembered  only for how they died. In fact,   I can only think of one - a particularly  unlucky dude by the name of Actaeon. Now, Actaeon is a little tricky to talk about.   Instead of being referenced in only one story   or source, he’s one of those guys who seems to  have been kind of a meme in Ancient Greece. He   gets referenced all over the place, but a lot of  those references are pretty light on the details,   more of a “get a load of this guy” than a “let  me tell you a tale”. The most complete version   of his story is recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,  but it pops up in a lot of earlier literature as a   cautionary tale, typically framed as “Don’t  disrespect the gods, or you’ll end up like   Actaeon! ” Funnily enough, those early references  don’t actually agree on what Actaeon did wrong.    In Euripides’s play the Bacchae, back in  the 400s BCE, Actaeon is cited a hunter   who boasts he’s a better hunter than Artemis,  and it’s a major no-no to do that in general,   so he’s devoured by his own hounds. But about a  hundred years later, the poet Callimachus says in   his Hymn #5 that Actaeon accidentally sees Artemis  bathing, and since it’s a major no-no to behold   a deity naked, he’s devoured by his own hounds.   Then a little after the turn of the millennium,   Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca gives us  a sprinkling of detail where it specifies   that Actaeon is a hunter trained by Chiron  who makes the mistake of wooing Semele,   girlfriend of Zeus and future mother of  Dionysus. This is, naturally, a bad idea,   and at Zeus’s command, Actaeon is… devoured by his  own hounds. Pseud-Apollodorus does say, however,   that this is an unusual telling and the more  popular version of the story is that, like in   Callimachus’s version, Actaeon’s real offense is  seeing Artemis bathing, at which point she turns   him into a deer… and then he’s devoured by his  own hounds. The hounds are then confused when they   can’t find Actaeon and go to Chiron, who figures  out the sad story and carves a statue of Actaeon   so the dogs feel better about the whole situation. Now we’re starting to see the faintest hint of a   pattern emerging, but these anecdotal references  don’t really paint the full picture just yet. For   one thing, they don’t agree on literally anything  other than Actaeon’s death. Actaeon is a hunter   who pisses off at least ONE god and is  devoured  by his own hounds, either explicitly at the god’s   orders or apparently because that’s just a thing  that happens. What did he do? Nobody can agree!    Which god did he anger? Who’s to say? How did  he die? Well, okay, that one we’ve got down.   Now when discussing Actaeon, most people  tend to go with Ovid’s version, written in   the same general first-century-CE timeframe as  Pseudo-Apollodorus’s telling, mostly because it   is the only version longer than three sentences.   In Ovid’s version, Actaeon is - say it with me   now - a hunter. He and his hunter bros have had  a long and productive day of hunting and they’re   packing it in for the evening and heading home.   But unbeknownst to Actaeon, the goddess Artemis   happens to have a private grotto nearby where she  likes to go and unwind after a long day’s hunting   with the gals. And unfortunately for Actaeon, he  happens to stumble on said private grotto right   after Artemis has popped into the water for a  nice refreshing no-clothes-needed bath. Now,   as you may know, Artemis is distinguished in the  Olympian pantheon as one of the virgin goddesses   whose single status was more than just a personal  choice, but also actively sacred, so a dude seeing   her naked, accidentally or otherwise, isn’t just  uncool, it’s kinda also sacrilegious. Artemis’s   nymphs freak out at the intrusion, but Artemis  quickly handles the situation by hucking a handful   of water at Actaeon and cursing him to silence so  he can never tell anyone about this breach of her   privacy. The way she does this is by transforming  him into a stag, which are famously known for not   being able to talk. Actaeon freaks out and bolts  into the woods, but makes the rookie mistake of   being shaped like a deer, and every hunting dog in  the zipcode perks up and bolts after him. Actaeon   is eventually run down and - ba dap bap ba-dap  BAP - devoured by his own hounds. What a twist! So this is one of those cases where the  story has a lot of recurring elements but   not every telling has all of those elements  - which sometimes indicates that there was an   “original version” that contained all of those  elements, but sometimes indicates that the story   was always a cluster of other very different  stories with only a central point as overlap.    To determine which of these things happened here,  we need a broader look at the story - one we can’t   necessarily find in written works, which we’ve  basically exhausted at this point. Luckily for us,   referencing Actaeon was just as popular with  artists as it was with poets, and Actaeon   shows up in visual media all the time, which can  give us a pretty good insight into what elements   of the story may have been popular at different  times. For instance, earlier versions didn’t seem   to have Actaeon turning into a deer - in fact,  visual representations from the four hundreds BCE   up to the turn of the millennium mostly show  Actaeon fully human when he’s chased down by his   hounds. It’s only around the aughts CE that there  starts to be an uptick in representations where   Actaeon appears to be partially transformed  into a deer during the attack - there’s a   painting of him in pompeii from the first  century BCE where he’s got little antlers,   but before that he’s almost always human. It’s  not until the renaissance, a full thousand years   after Rome, that the artists start leaning on  the “Actaeon as a deer” imagery super heavily,   which is also coincidentally when artists  starting giving us an eyefull of Artemis bathing,   evidently missing the entire point of Ovid’s  telling in the process. Most of the earlier art   only shows Actaeon as a lone figure being killed  with no sign of which god he might’ve offended to   make that happen. A few pieces of the art from  that early roman era feature a woman, probably   Artemis, looking pretty cranky but usually  - though not always - fully clothed. In some   cases other gods appear to be present, generally  disapproving of Actaeon’s vibes. In at least one,   it looks like Artemis is chasing him down with  a spear while other women are bathing nearby.   So it seems like the reason we can’t find one  specific linear retelling to treat as “the real   one” is because, as is so often the case, there  never was one. The only consistent thing about   Actaeon was that he pissed off the gods and was  devoured by his own hounds. What exactly he did,   which god or gods were responsible for his death,  whether or not he was deer-shaped at the time -   changed. It was most commonly related to Artemis,  and more commonly because of the bath, but   considering the variety of tellings it probably  got locked into the cultural zeitgeist as “Actaeon   copped an eyeful of Artemis’s Secret Maidenhood  and she decided not to be cool about it” because   Ovid’s version was the easiest to access and  renaissance artists were weird like that. Whether intentional hubris or just bad  luck, as a rule, tempting the wrath of   the gods almost always ends extremely  badly. But what they don't tell you is   that the affection of the gods can actually  be far worse for your health. For instance,   here's what happens when the  moon turns into your girlfriend.

[ENDYMION] So here's something fun about Greek mythology: everyone knows Blue and I  like to rag on the Romans   for mashing their gods up with everyone else's, but to be totally fair to them, it's  not like they were the only ones. I mean, the Greeks did it to  themselves on multiple occasions. I think the one everybody knows  about, or maybe don't know they know, is how Artemis got mashed together with the  goddess Selene, the original Greek moon goddess. Now her brother Apollo also got mashed  together with Helios, titan of the Sun, but in his case the transition  was smoother because most of   Helios' myths could easily be ascribed to Apollo. I mean, Apollo's primary defining trait  was that he liked music and pretty girls, not exactly the most restrictive characterization. Helios' stories have all but  been subsumed into his lore, but Selene and Artemis ran into  some... characterization issues. See, Artemis' thang is that she  didn't like dudes, like, at all. Now there's no evidence to suggest that  she liked girls either (sorry Internet). See, Artemis is actually pretty  textbook from a modern-day perspective: she's never expressed an interest in sex,   and has only romantically loved  one person, the hunter Orion (you may know him as that chunky star  guy over the Northern Hemisphere). So, no sexual attraction and romantic attraction   only blooming after a long and  already intimate relationship— hey, would you look at that! But I'm not here to speculate about the  hypothetical orientations of ancient goddesses, no matter how fun it might be. The point is, Artemis' primary defining feature   was "no boyfriends ever,"  except for that one time. Now this came into direct conflict with Selene, whose only major story involved  head-over-heels love at first sight. You're probably familiar  with this story in some form, but not its original form,  because nobody knows what that is. By the time we got ahold of it,   it was already fragmented into way too many  regional versions to have a true version, but the consolidated one is basically this: So there's this dude,  Endymion who is beyond pretty. So Selene floats overhead every night just  looking at this fine honey of a shepherd (or maybe a king? Sources vary). After a while she's like,  "Okay, I can't handle this," and goes to Zeus, asking him  to do something about it. When he asks her to narrow it down, she tells him she wants to be able to  look at Endymion's beautiful face forever. So Zeus grants Selene's wish by  putting Endymion to sleep forever so that he'll never age and never die, but also  never wake up again. Selene is fine with this—and then she proceeds to  having 50 kids with Endymion. Whoa! Not cool lady, he's asleep! The gods love their mortals and boy do they  hate consent. If Zeus is ever offscreen,   you can almost always safely assume  that he's off ruining someone's life and   sentencing them to a short and unhappy stint  in Hera's crosshairs. And when that happens,   the best case scenario the mortal in  question can usually hope for is a   permanent trip heavenward - which  is not always as bad as it sounds.

[URSA MAJOR] If you live in the northern hemisphere, one of  the first constellations you probably learned   about was Ursa Major, the Great Bear. Or,  more specifically, you probably learned about   the asterism the Big Dipper, which is about  fifty percent of the Great Bear. It's big,   recognizable and actually visible a lot more than  most constellations - for one simple reason. This   constellation is circumpolar, which means it's  close enough to the north star, polaris, that if   you're at a high enough latitude it never actually  sets below the horizon, it just spins under the   pole star. And you have to go pretty far south  before the constellation ever completely sets; at   most latitudes you'll still be able to see the top  part of the Great Bear, and from the perspective   of Greece only the Great Bear's paws are ever  obscured - the main body is always visible. Fun   fact, the original purpose of the word "arctic"  was to define the area of the planet where an   observer would never see any part of the Great  Bear set below the horizon. "Arctic" is derived   from the greek "arktikos", literally meaning "of  the bears. " It's a very convenient coincidence   that the arctic is also the only natural habitat  of polar bears, which aren't found in the   antarctic. It's funny how these things work out! Now Ursa Major has a lot of myths attached to it,   and like all constellation myths, they're not  particularly consistent. The only throughline   of a typical constellation myth is that  eventually the constellation gets made,   because that's really the only part of the story  that demonstrably has to happen. But in the case   of Ursa Major there's one other consistent  thread in the greek myths of its creation:   that it isn't a particularly happy affair for  anyone involved. So today let's tell a few   versions of the tale of the nymph Callisto, and  how she got screwed over in every possible way. Now this story is retold in Ovid's metamorphoses,  Hyginus's Astronomica and a few other places,   and you know it's gonna be bad when Ovid's version  isn't notably meaner than the rest. Our story   begins with Callisto, daughter of King Lycaon  (of the halloween Werewolf video) and follower   of Artemis. Like all of Artemis's devotees,  Callisto likes nothing more than sprinting   through the woods wild and free and hunting her  little heart out on all the beasts of the wood.   Well unfortunately for Callisto she's a human  being in Ancient Greece and thus catches the   attention of Zeus, who's tired of Hera spotting  all his earthly escapades and wants to stress-test   the idea that maybe a thin covering of trees will  prevent the goddess-queen of marriage and familial   responsibility from noticing him cheating on her  for the fourth time that month. So Zeus zips down   to earth while Callisto is relaxing in a wild and  ancient grove, and to further avoid suspicion Zeus   takes the form of Artemis. In this form he seduces  Callisto, which, depending on the version, she may   or may not have been super into. Regardless of  the specifics, the outcome is the same - Callisto   becomes pregnant, and when this is discovered,  Artemis is pretty peeved that one of her followers   didn't maintain the maidenhood that Artemis  is so big on, and kicks her out of the group.   This is where the story starts getting very wibbly  depending on who's telling it. In Ovid's version,   Callisto is exiled from Artemis's followers and  gives birth to a son named Arcas. Hera seizes the   opportunity to curse Callisto for, you know, the  usual reasons, and transforms her into an enormous   bear. Callisto, trapped in this form, wanders the  mountains, torn between worlds and utterly alone,   unable to even petition Zeus for help on account  of being a bear. Meanwhile her son Arcas spends   the next fifteen years doing normal baby stuff  like pretty quickly not being a baby anymore,   and one day, while out hunting, he encounters a  bear - a strange bear that looks at him with a   very piercing expression and doesn't seem  at all inclined to attack him. Even so,   a bear is a bear, and Arcas moves to attack it.   This kicks off Zeus's fratricidal spidey-sense   and he finally clocks the situation, and to  prevent the tragedy of Arcas accidentally   killing his own mother Zeus thinks fast and  raises them into the sky, transforming mother   and son into the constellations Ursa Major and  Ursa Minor, the nearby little bear constellation   whose tail contains the north star Polaris.   Spared from inflicting the ultimate tragedy   on each other, the two bears spin through  the night sky together for all eternity,   most likely united in the feeling that there  had to be a better solution than this, Zeus.   But other versions of the story don't quite  play out the same way. Hyginus's Astronomica,   for instance, enumerates several ways Callisto has  been mythically transformed into a bear - in some   version by Artemis herself, in at least one case  because Callisto loudly said that Artemis was the   one who got her pregnant in the first place,  which is honestly pretty funny just for the   sheer audacity. In other versions Zeus turned  Callisto into a bear to hide her from Hera,   and in some stories Artemis is subsequently  the one who unknowingly killed Callisto.    In another version bear-Callisto and her son  are captured by Arcadians and brought to King   Lycaon to sacrifice to Zeus for trespassing  in his temple. Zeus, catching wind of this,   zops them into the stars as constellations. In  this one, intriguingly, Arcas is transformed into   a different constellation - instead of Ursa Minor  he becomes the constellation Bootes, which most   notably contains the red star Arcturus, whose name  means "guardian of the bear" and is very easily   found and identified by following the arc of the  tail of Ursa Major to the nearest bright star.   In Ovid's Fasti it's also explained why the  Great Bear never sinks below the horizon:   Hera negotiated with Tethys, one of the  ocean titans, to keep them away from her   waters to make their starry fate just a  little shittier for them. Thanks, Hera!   Arcas also has a little more going on in some  stories - Pausanias's Descriptions of Greece lists   several of his accomplishments after Callisto  was turned into a bear, most notably becoming the   King of Arcadia, which wasn't even called Arcadia  until Arcas introduced the locals to agriculture,   weaving and the glorious technology of bread. The  land and its people were renamed in Arcas's honor,   and on top of all that, he supposedly married  a dryad named Erato and had several children   who later began several lines of Arcadian kings.   Pausanias, a practical guy, can accept a legendary   king being birthed by a bear and marrying a  wood-nymph but draws the line at people turning   into stars, and in his telling Arcas never becomes  a constellation, and even Callisto's starry fate   is questioned - Arcas just dies like a normal  person, and his grave is described near the   temple of Hera in the Arcadian town of Maenalos. No matter the specifics of the story, and even   no matter which constellations they get ascribed  to, a few unsurprising details remain consistent:   the unfortunate nymph Callisto is transformed  into a bear, and then to sort of make up for   it is divinely transformed into the constellation  the Great Bear. Her son Arcas goes on to do other   things but after his death or ascension remains  nearby, either as the bearlike Ursa Minor or the   more humanoid Bootes constellation, accompanying  and watching over his mother as she slowly turns   around the pole star. While it makes sense that  the only part of the story that's 100% consistent   is the part where the immutable stars take the  arrangement they have in real life, it's still a   bit of a bummer that we don't have more reliable  throughlines to trace. Overall, the one thing   all the versions agree on is the same thing that  everyone always agrees on: it's all Zeus's fault. Zeus, you've done it again. At  this rate you're giving a bad   name to the whole pantheon. But even the  actual apparently healthy relationships   have a tendency to end in fire, or  at least in a discus to the dome.

[HYACINTHUS] So Apollo's got a bit of a reputation when it  comes to how his relationships generally end. I mean, for a guy with an Oracle on his payroll, he was really bad at finding  people who would actually date him. I mean Daphne, Castalia, Cassandra,  Acantha, Bolina, Ocroe, Leucates. Considering how many of Apollo's potential  dates flung themselves off of cliffs or turned into various pieces of  local flora just to avoid him,   it's amazing the poor guy even tried anymore. But surprisingly, Apollo DID manage to have  a few functional relationships. Kind of. At the very least, there were relationships he   was in where he wasn't actually directly  responsible for their tragic resolutions. The most famous of these is probably  the romance of Apollo and Hyacinthus. Now, Hyacinthus is a young Spartan prince and   his primary defining feature  is that he's super pretty. There's also apparently  some evidence that he might   actually be a pre-hellenic deity of some sort. Anyway, bottom line is, he's majorly cute  and Apollo goes all head over heels for him. Surprisingly, considering Apollo's track record,   springing this on Hyacinthus does  not send him screaming into the hills or turn him into a plant, and instead they  end up getting along famously. So that's cool. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Apollo  isn't the only one who noticed Hyacinthus, and our lad actually has another deific  admirer, in the form of Zephyr, the west wind. Also unfortunately, Zephyr has no idea  how to express his feelings properly, and just ends up stewing in his own jealousy,   while Apollo and Hyacinthus run  around doing cute couple things. Also also, unfortunately, Zephyr subscribes to   the "if I can't have you, no  one can" school of romance, so one day when Apollo is showing  Hyacinthus how to throw a discus, Zephyr decides to take the opportunity  to kill Hyacinthus by shifting the winds and sending the discus into the side of his head. So that sucks. Apollo transforms the dying  Hyacinthus into a flower to preserve his life and beauty forever, writes  a little bit of emo poetry on the petals, and goes off to cry to Hermes about it. On the plus side, this love interest didn't  turn into a plant until AFTER the second date. While the mortals definitely suffer the  worst of the god's relationship drama,   the gods themselves are not immune to a little  bit of soap opera shenaniganery. Honestly,   that may as well be Aphrodite's  official divine domain at this point,   because when she's not making it happen for  other people, she's doing it to herself.

[APHRODITE'S AFFAIR] In the giant spaghettified mess that is the pantheon of Olympian gods, there are a number of relationships that could be charitably described as unhealthy. It is a colossal mess of affairs and love-children and plenty of revenge that benefits precisely nobody except Aphrodite, goddess of passion and love who enjoys nothing more than relationship drama, and when she can’t find it, she will create it. Though she can’t take credit for all the drama, she certainly seems to have a hand in the majority of it, encouraging love affairs and directing Eros to break a few hearts when it’s a slow week or she’s bored or it’s a day ending in “Y”. But while wrecking other people’s lives is good clean fun, Aphrodite’s own love life is a rather complicated and fraught affair, pun intended. Early attestations from Homer in the Iliad describe her as happily unmarried and a consort to Ares, god of war, natch, but then Homer’s Odyssey cites her as married to Hephaestus, god of the forge and brother to Ares - while still consorting with Ares on the side. This is a bit jarring for several reasons. Aphrodite is the universally-desired goddess of lust and attraction, while Hephaestus is… shall we say, not the most polished hammer in the forge. He’s a very skilled artisan respected for his craft, but he’s also often characterized as cunning, rude, and alienated from the rest of the Olympians, especially his mother Hera, who in several tellings chucked him off Olympus  shortly after his birth  because he had a congenital impairment and she was kind of a jerk like that. This isn’t actually consistent, though - in other versions, including the one in the Iliad, it was Zeus who drop-kicked him off Olympus because he was trying to protect Hera from Zeus, and injuries from the fall are what led to him becoming disabled rather than it being something he was born with. This lack-of-singular-canon is very common in greek mythology, so instead of looking for a single true narrative, because there is no point, we kind of have to look at the general vibes - and in general, the vibe is not great. Hephaestus is broadly respected for his work and very little else, while Aphrodite is loved for her beauty while generally feared and disliked for how much trouble she causes. Pairing them up is… inobvious, to put it mildly, and Homer doesn’t really explain how it happened. Later stories eventually came up with explanations for how the odd couple came to be, and how a goddess who could have had any husband she wanted ended up with the guy it kinda felt like nobody would ever pick. One popular explanation was that Hephaestus trapped his mother Hera with a trick throne and then demanded Aphrodite’s hand in marriage in exchange for setting her free. In other anecdotes, Zeus was apparently tired of everyone fighting over Aphrodite and married her off to Hephaestus to make the yelling stop. You may note that, while these stories explain how the marriage happened, they don’t really explore their relationship or how they feel about each other. The general consensus is that they’re not very functional, but we rarely get a look into how dysfunctional they actually are. One story that gives us a rare glimpse at the mess is recounted in Homer’s Odyssey, so let’s talk about it today! Now our story begins very efficiently, by laying out the status quo. Aphrodite and Hephaestus are married, but Aphrodite is carrying on a pretty steamy side romance with Ares, who’s been wooing her with presents and flowers and squishy stuff like that. This is all kept very hush-hush and down-low but doesn’t escape the attention of Helios, who has a pretty good view of everything on account of being The Sun, so he decides to let Hephaestus know what’s been going on in his bedroom while he’s off in his kickass volcano lair making robots and stuff. Hephaestus is, unsurprisingly, very displeased to hear this, and responds in the same way he solves most of his problems - by inventing something. Specifically he fires up the forge and hammers out a huge lattice of incredibly fine chains, nearly invisible but totally unbreakable. Then he scoots back home and drapes them all over the bedroom, creaking an invisible net of unbreakable chains. Then he loudly announces he’s going on a business trip to Lemnos and won’t be back for a hot minute and scoots around the corner to wait. Ares, naturally, pops out of the bushes and scoots inside so he and Aphrodite can finish their monopoly game, but they very quickly find the fun times scuttled by the golden net, which tangles them up and leaves them completely trapped. Hephaestus pops out of the woodwork and summons all the other olympians to come see what he’s caught. Poseidon, Hermes and Apollo pop down to see what all the fuss is about, but the rest of the gods catch one glimpse of exposed god booty and decide they’ve probably seen enough for one night. So Hephaestus is, unsurprisingly, pretty pissed about the whole situation. He knows he’s not exactly a prize in the looks department, while his brother Ares is a chiseled specimen of masculine vigor, but just because he gets it doesn’t mean this isn’t a pretty spectacular violation of the marriage agreement and he’s not about that, so his plan is to keep them in the net until Zeus agrees to refund the dowry he paid when he married Aphrodite. The fact that this implies that he bought his wife and is now requesting a refund is just a smidge fucked, but it’s not like the rest of this situation is any less fucked, so, eh. Now Apollo and Hermes think this situation is absolutely hilarious, but Poseidon is taking the whole thing a bit more seriously and asks Hephaestus to let them go. Poseidon tells Hephaestus he’ll get Ares to pay the damages instead of Zeus, since it’s more Ares’s fault, but Hephaestus is reluctant, because what if Ares doesn’t pay, so Poseidon promises that if Ares goes back on the deal, he’ll cover the price out of pocket. Hephaestus, satisfied that he’s getting a refund either way, releases the lovers. It’s unclear if any lessons were learned that day, but the world certainly never forgot Hephaestus’s great innovation of using chains in the bedroom. Aphrodite being the goddess of love gives her a  pretty good reason to be getting up to hijinks   of the relationship variety, but Zeus has much  less of an excuse. In fact, since Zeus is married   to the goddess of marriage, you'd think he'd be a  little less cavalier about everything. But I guess   when you're uncontested King of the Universe it's  easy to get pretty blasé about the status quo.

[HERA CRASHES ZEUS'S WEDDING] Maybe we just don’t get what Zeus and Hera have got going on. I mean, every relationship is complicated, right? And sure, centuries of mythology and fighting and trickery and murder don’t exactly paint a flattering picture, but maybe we’re the assholes here. Maybe we just can’t judge a two-thousand-year-old highly symbolic dynamic between the all-powerful lord of the skies and guardian of hospitality and the goddess of women and family by the same metric we’d use to deem a bestie’s new boyfriend “a serious red flag”. Zeus and Hera are fascinating characters, but they’re also gods, and that means their actions and relationships have meaning beyond the surface level. Hera punishing Zeus’s lovers slash victims  for Zeus’s infidelity is,  of course, a victim-blaming dick move, but Hera is more than a garden-variety woman scorned - she’s the goddess of marriage and family. Of course she punishes people who break their vows, no matter the context. And why doesn’t she punish Zeus? Well… in-lore it’s because Zeus is more powerful than her, but the practical reason is because Zeus is not a person. Zeus is a story and a god. Hera’s vengeance on infidelity was a social pressure on the people of Ancient Greece. Stay faithful to your spouses and respect the bonds of marriage or Hera would strike you down for defying her domain. Be a good host and keep your guests safe because violating the laws of hospitality would bring down Zeus’s wrath on your head. When we retell myths it’s easy to focus on the gods as characters - because they are. But it’s easy to forget that they were also more than that. We can get hung up on the “canon” of the mythology not holding together, but that means we’re approaching the mythology with the wrong set of expectations. We read a novel or watch a movie expecting the story to hold together because that’s the point of those stories, but the point of the mythology was not to tell a set of stories that was internally consistent - it was to establish who the gods were and what they meant to the people of Ancient Greece. So we can judge Zeus and Hera’s wacky red-flag bonanza all we want - and we should, because it’s hilarious - but we shouldn’t forget that those stories existed for a reason. In fact, today we’re gonna be talking about a story that both ties directly into a real historical celebration and paints Zeus and Hera’s relationship as more mutually affectionate than average. Don’t get too excited, it’s still a pretty low bar. Now this story comes to us from Pausanias’s Descriptions Of Greece, and the story begins like so many do - with Hera pissed off at Zeus. The actual reason is unspecified - feel free to spin a wheel on that one - but this time she’s more than just cranky, she seems actually willing to break things off. She dips out of Olympus and crashes on the island of Euboea to sulk, and nothing Zeus says can change her mind. Faced once again with the terrifying specter of the consequences of his own actions, Zeus seeks help from King Cithaeron, a mountain god with a startling amount of experience in romantic shenanigans - one can only assume he’s seen his share of lovesick young people looking for picturesque environments to wax poetic in. Cithaeron suggests that Zeus can win Hera back with a wacky hijink by playing to her jealous nature, and proposes a scheme where they spread rumors of Zeus’s upcoming marriage to Plataea, daughter of Asopus and granddaughter of Cithaeron. For the record, bonus fun fact, all of these people share names with major local geographical features in Boeotia - Cithaeron is a mountain range, Asopus is a river and Plataea is the name of the whole city, so this is most likely a situation where all parties involved are gods, nymphs and other  anthropomorphic personifications  of the kingdom and its natural environs. Anyway, Cithaeron suggests they really sell the bit with a celebration parade where Zeus can show off his new bride. True to form, when Hera  hears about Zeus gallivanting  around with some brand new squeeze she gets in a right twist about it and flies up to Boeotia in a furious rage, finding Zeus heading a lavish bridal procession with someone dolled up in a beautiful wedding dress. Hera storms the procession in all her glory and rips the dress away - finding nothing underneath but a wooden statue. Hera is shocked to learn that, at least in this specific case, Zeus genuinely only had eyes for her, and in Boeotia they say that the heart of the queen grew three sizes that day. Zeus and Hera reconcile in a reunion so beautiful it was commemorated in the Daedala festival for centuries, where wooden statues were carved from sacred oaks and carried through marriage ceremonies up the peak of Mount Cithaeron, where a huge offering to Hera and Zeus was prepared and burned to celebrate the one time their relationship actually kind of made sense. So remember, folks, if you and your partner are having a hard time, they’re gonna absolutely love it if you replace them with a doll. With so many affairs and heartbreaks and  threats of divorce it can be easy to see   the Olympian gods as a serial telenovela  that's gone on way too long. I mean, if   our most functional marriage is the one where the  husband opened things up by kidnapping the bride   and accidentally triggering armageddon, things  are dire. But they don't have to be. Sometimes,   very rarely, the love story is actually  rock solid all the way through. After all,   who better to star in a real, proper  love story… than love himself?

[EROS AND PSYCHE] This is a true story. Last year, spring quarter, for my third quarter of Greek thought and literature I took a course on love (; My teacher was an absolutely GORGEOUS man, ~with a beautiful accent and  the most piercing of eyes~ and one of the things he taught  us was that for the Greeks, love had many different meanings There was Agape, the unconditional  love of one's fellow humans Philia, platonic love of one's friends, Storge, love of family, And Eros. Now, of these four, Eros is  definitely the most well known. It's the deep passionate  love one feels for a romantic and or sexual partner. And, not so coincidently, it's also  the name of the Greek God of love. Eros, as far as gods go, has been through many incarnations There is the aspect of Eros  that's an ancient primordial deity older than the gods themselves and in that incarnation, Eros is characterized  as a being even more powerful than Zeus. In part because he can jerk  the guy around like a puppet. see every myth were Zeus  couldn't keep it in his pants. also known as EVERY myth There is the aspect of Eros  that's the child of Aphrodite representing love as a consequence of beauty and then there's... Cupid... We don't like to talk about him. Now typically, those first two representations  exist concurrently in the same character. Eros will simultaneously be Aphrodite's   son and a powerful and ancient  force that even the gods fear. I say "typically" but really there's  only one data point to draw from. There's one major legend(27) about Eros. and that is the myth of Eros and Psyche. So Psyche is a princess. but not just any princess, a beautiful princess! Plot twist? but she's not just any beautiful princess she's a lonely beautiful princess! Plot twist?! But she's not just any lonely beautiful princess She's a lonely beautiful princess  even more beautiful than Aphrodite! Aw, that ain't good! In fact, since Psyche is so incredibly beautiful, People have started worshiping  her instead of Aphrodite. My God, it's just like high school... Now those of us familiar with Aphrodite  through the golden apple, the Iliad, or just Greek mythology in general, know that she doesn't really handle  people being prettier than her very well. But Aphrodite has just the  plan to take Psyche down! She'll make her fall in  love with a hideous monster. Aphrodite, you are a goddess! Why don't you just kill her? Aphrodite knows just the guy to call And summons her son Eros to make Psyche  fall in love with something gross. Eros scoots down to the  mortal world to do the thing But when he sees the beautiful Psyche,  he is startled by her gorgeousness And accidentally stabs himself  with one of his arrows. Way to go, smart guy. But meanwhile back in the mortal world Psyche is (We recall part  2 of her characterization) Very lonely See, she's beautiful but in a way  that people worship from afar. She wants to be loved, but she's just ~too beautiful for this sinful world~ And it's really starting to get on her nerves. So she goes to the oracle and asks  her if she'll ever find true love and the oracle responds that she will! Buuuutttt... She'll fall in love with a terrible monster  that even the gods fear (foreshadowing) So Psyche is taken to a big scary cliff and  left there so her monster boyfriend can find her And Zephyr, the west wind, Carries her off to her monster  boyfriend's gorgeous and luxuriant palace. Man, Greece has WAY classier monsters than we do. Anyway, turns out that her  monster boyfriend is invisible And he tells her that she will be totally safe  and provided for by his many invisible servants... but she can never see him. Not even when they do the sex thing. So Psyche is totally chill with living in  luxury with her invisible monster boyfriend But one day she is paid a visit by her two sisters Who are jealous of her living situation. And convince her to find out the  identity of her monster boyfriend. And if he really is a monster, to kill him  before he kills her and her unborn child. So that night, Psyche sneaks into her monster  boyfriend's room with a lantern to see him and a dagger to maybe murder him with. But as soon as the light touches him, she sees  her invisible monster boyfriend is actually A very visible super-hot boyfriend,  none other than Eros himself. Surprised by his gorgeousness,  Psyche (say it with me now) accidentally stabs herself  with one of Eros's arrows. Damn, that's hard to say. And is now double in love with him. Buuuuttttt... the lamp oil also thinks Eros is super cute and a little bit tries to get closer  to senpai and ends up splashing on him That's not hyperbole, the book actually says that. Not the senpai part but you know. So Eros wakes up because ow and flies off because ~betrayal~ leaving Psyche alone and  regretting her life choices. Eros flies back to Aphrodite to nurse  his minor burn and feel sorry for himself And Aphrodite now like twice as mad at Psyche scoots over to her and tells her  that if she wants her boyfriend back she needs to accomplish four tasks for her. Yay? So Psyche agrees and after Aphrodite slaps her around  for a minute to make herself feel better She gives Psyche her first task She throws a mixed assortment of grains on the   ground and tells Psyche she has  one day to sort them all by type This is obviously some BS but Psyche is  basically an archetypal Disney princess so while she is sitting there pondering  the BS-itude of her current situation, A nearby nest of ants take pity  on her and sort the grains for her So obviously Aphrodite is pissed  that Psyche managed to do the thing So she makes the next task even more problematic. and tells her to go get some golden fleece  from the sun sheep that live across the river. While Psyche is busy trying to drown herself, A local spirit tells her that the  sheep will kill her if she not careful so rather than try to rip  a chunk of their fleece off She should just gather fleece that  got caught on the nearby thorn bushes so she does and Aphrodite gets even more pissed so she tells Psyche to take this goblet  and go get some water from the river Styx which is a problem because there is a  cliff face and several dragons in the way but this time, Zeus himself helps her out. And sends down an eagle to beat up  the dragons and bring her the water. So last but not least, Aphrodite gives up on the  subtlety and literally orders Psyche to go to hell specifically, to bring a  fancy box to the underworld,   take a little bit of Persephone's  beauty and put it in the box And then bring it back and give it to Aphrodite By the way, at this point, Eros is all better and has long since forgiven  Psyche for the whole betrayal of trust thing. But Aphrodite is having none of that  and keeps him confined to her palace while she tries to do the vengeance thing. So again, with help from various  household objects and noted landmarks, Psyche makes her way to the underworld  and gives the box to Persephone who does something to it and then gives it back So Psyche leaves the underworld with the box But then it occurs to her,   that if the box contains pure beauty and  she's about to go see her boyfriend again She might as well use the magic  beauty box to freshen up a little Unfortunately, as soon as she opens the box it turns out that the only thing in it is murder! So Psyche low key dies. But Eros escapes Aphrodite's  palace while his mom is distracted and flies to Psyche casually  fixes the whole dead thing And flies up to Olympus with  Psyche to be properly married Zeus is cool with it tells Aphrodite to back off and gives Psyche some ambrosia, which  makes her into an immortal goddess She and Eros are married as equals  and when their kid is eventually born they name her Hedone which  roughly translates to Joy c: Oh man. Memories. You know, this is the  first myth video that really popped off   in the algorithm - and that, in turn, kicked off  the first real serious spike in channel growth,   which hit like a truck in 2017. No idea why -  the algorithm just kinda does that sometimes.    But this video going so wild is what turned my  college hobby side-project into a viable job,   and nobody was more surprised by that than me. This channel has been so many different things for   me since I started it back in December of 2012.   It's always been an outlet for something. It gave   me the tools to unpack and analyze the books I  was struggling to get through in high school,   and then again in college; and then it turned  into a way for me to share these fun stories   I grew up with while I explored more deeper  study of what made them work in the first place,   and then it branched out into a space where I  could unpack the individual building blocks of   these stories I liked and compare and contrast  the execution and the impact and figure out why   they did what they did and how it worked or  it didn't. But through all these iterations,   it took me a long time to zero in on what I was  actually driving at, and, like a lot of things,   it was really obvious in hindsight.   It's all storytelling. Always has been.   And, wouldn't you know it?   They have gods for that too.

[THE MUSES] If you have a creative person in your life,  or are life,   or spend any amount of time on the internet  watching the artists and writers toil away in   the posting mines to someday fulfill the dream of  affording hamburger, you are definitely more than   familiar with the epic highs and lows of the  artistic process. Creativity is one of life's   great "can't do it on command"s, and creative  inspiration frequently strikes like a bolt out   of heaven and far more frequently does not do  that. I've seen the creative process described   as "being possessed by an idea you are constantly  arguing with," and boy if that don't just sum it   up nicely. An artist can hone their craft over  years and years of practice and refinement and   grueling, rigorous training, but on some level  they'll always be at the mercy of inspiration,   and that is the one part of the creative process  that no artist has figured out how to control.   In my personal experience, nobody feels  or acts more like a plaything of a cold,   uncaring god than an artist wrestling artblock.   It's an unpredictable rollercoaster that drags   the hapless bard from the epic highs of "I am  a shining golden god and the master of making   sense" to the dismal lows of "I will surely  never have another good idea in my life" and   then right back again three days later. So it's not too surprising that,   in many mythological models of the universe, this  unpredictable and fickle ingredient in the lives   of so many is the domain of an unpredictable  and fickle deity, or in some cases, several   deities. So today let's talk about the Ancient  Greek gods of inspiration - the Nine Muses. Now, not to name names, but some mythologies  have a habit of playing pretty fast and loose   with their use of simple numbers. When they say  something like "there's this many of this thing,"   sometimes they're lying. But thankfully, when it  comes to the greek muses, this is not the case!    Kind of. More on that later. Basically every piece  of ancient Greek literature agrees that there are   nine muses, and as far back as Hesiod's Theogony -  which is one of the earliest Ancient Greek sources   we have access to - we get a solid list of them,  names and all, and there are in fact exactly nine.    Not only that, but Hesiod doesn't just slap  'em into the family tree; as a card-carrying   bard type, Hesiod talks about the muses a lot,  from a pretty personal standpoint - the entire   framing sequence of the Theogony is that Hesiod  was minding his own business shepherding sheep on   the slopes of Mount Helicon when the Muses  rocked up and divinely ordained him to lay   out the whole cosmological family tree in vivid  and comprehensive detail. Not too surprisingly,   ancient greek poets evidently had a lot of  reverence for the muses, and while the muses   don't really feature as characters very often,  they get woven into narrative framing quite a lot,   with the Iliad famously starting with a prayer  to the Muses asking them to play that one about   Achilles Making His Bad Day Everyone Else's  Problem. When it comes to the casting of these   myths, the Muses aren't usually the talent,  they're the directors behind the camera.   There are a couple minor exceptions, one of which  comes up very early in the timeline in Homer's   Iliad, where the muses get to star in a classic  tale of hubris gone wrong. Thamrys the Thracian   is a talented musician favored by the muses,  but one day he brags that he could out-perform   the muses themselves in a contest of the arts,  and in response they smite him divinely and take   away his performing ability and also his eyes,  in case he didn't get the message the first time.   Anyway, Hesiod's Theogony doesn't just invoke  the muses, it also lists them in a nice,   numbered fashion, which is such a rare  treat for me that we're just gonna… go   down the list. I don't get to indulge this  very often, all right? Lemme have this one.   Hesiod lays out that the Muses are the  daughters of Zeus and the titaness Mnemosyne,   the goddess of memory, and he starts off his  list with the boss of the muses, Calliope,   which means "Beautiful-Voiced". She's generally  seen as the inspirer of epic poetry and has the   distinction of being basically the only muse with  a consistent mythological presence - she's always   listed as the mother of Orpheus, and while  she doesn't really show up in his story,   it's thematically pretty clear that she's why  his music is so overwhelmingly magical. Hesiod   distinguishes Calliope from her sisters in one  more key way: Calliope is the muse delegated   to inspire kings. If Zeus approves of a king and  thinks he'll be a good leader, the muses grant him   the power of rhetoric and make him real good at  public speaking and stuff. This feels like a bit   of a correlation-causation fallacy but I love the  vibes on this one. When it comes to the many sides   of showbiz, politics somehow manages to be even  more unforgivingly carnivorous than hollywood.   Now after this Hesiod basically just lists the  muses by name, and the names all have pretty   blatant literal translations, but the idea that  they're each in charge of specific domains of   individual slices of creativity are kind of a  later development. It's clear from their naming   conventions that they were already thematically  subdividing the creative inspirational process,   but the Ancient Greek writers that talked about  them mostly just referred to them as a unit. So,   while we do have a nice numbered list,  and I'm gonna say what every muse is   classically considered to be in charge  of, it's important to note that this   sorta hard worldbuilding around them seems  to have been a sort of retroactive thing.   Anyway, next up, Clio's name means "to recount"  or "to celebrate" and, appropriately enough,   she's generally framed as the muse of History, and  she also gets a minor credit in a myth - way down   in the second century CE, Pseudo-Apollodorus's  Bibliotheca says that Clio made fun of Aphrodite   for her love affair with Adonis, and Aphrodite  love-beamed her in revenge to make her fall for   this king, Pierus. Things happen, and the end  result is Clio and Pierus's son, Hyacinthus,   who would go on to date Apollo and then die  about it. Talk about not learning from history.   Next on the list is Euterpe, whose name just  means "delight" which is pretty unspecific,   but she mostly gets featured in a musical context  and is sometimes credited as the inventor of the   double-flute. In the Bibliotheca again she's  also listed as the mother of King Rhesus,   whose primary claim to fame is getting his  horses stolen by Odysseus and Diomedes in   the metal gear chapter of the Iliad. Next on the list is Thalia, whose name   means "the joyous" or "the flourishing", and  she is unsurprisingly the muse of comedy,   while her sister Melpomene is the muse of  tragedy. The Bibliotheca gives more details   and says that Thalia, by way of Apollo, is the  mother of the Corybantes, which were a Phrygian   cult of Cybele-worshippers, while Melpomene is  credited as the mother of the sirens. Of course   not every ancient Greek source agrees with the  bibliotheca, so the parentage gets a little fluid.   Terpsichore, whose name means "delight  in dancing," is the muse of dance and the   chorus - exactly what it says on the box.   Terpsichore is also a very good example of   that "flexible parentage" thing, since she  also gets credited as the mother of Rhesus   and the Sirens by a few different authors.   We're starting to see the effects of the   muses basically always functioning as a matched  set - it's easy to just start mixing them up.   Erato, whose name is a spoiler, is the muse of  erotic poetry - and apparently also mimicry? I   don't see the connection, please do not explain  it to me. And as a pretty handy illustration of   that thing I said about the muses not having  concrete themes, she's the muse Virgil invokes   when he kicks off the second half of the Aeneid,  which, to be frank, isn't the steamiest bit of   poetry around. So that tells us even by Virgil's  roman times, the muses hadn't been pigeonholed.   Polyhymnia, whose name means "many praises,"  is the muse of hymns and sacred poetry,   and finally rounding out the cast we have  Urania, the muse of… astronomy. She's usually   portrayed holding a globe and sometimes gets  her role expanded to be the full-on goddess   of the heavens themselves. Gotta be honest,  I personally wouldn't classify astronomy as   an art form, but maybe I should. Maybe the world  would be a better, more whimsical place if I did.   And that's the list of nine muses! Man, that was  quick. I dunno how the clickbait channels do it,   that was definitely not enough time for a midroll  ad. But there's really not much else to say about   them! The muses just don't really show up in many  myths. They have a name that usually literally   means what they represent, they have a favored  accessory they're usually visually portrayed with,   and that's kind of it. If we wanted to flesh 'em  out further we'd need to start writing fanfiction.    There's just not many stories there. And that  might be because the set of myths we have access   to are a pretty small slice of the full corpus of  ancient greek literature that used to exist, since   there's a heavy element of randomness in what  curds of history made it through the cheesecloth   of time to the present day, but the Muses were  so widespread and so universally worshipped - at   least according to all the storytellers,  who I cannot imagine being biased in this   regard - that I think it's legitimately noteworthy  they very rarely take any sort of starring role.   And that kind of brings up an interesting thing  about the Muses specifically. When it comes to   the Greek Gods, sometimes it feels like the myths  we have about them make it easy to forget that   they're gods - they played a complicated role  in society beyond just having fun stories about   them. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing! I  love those fun stories! Unpacking them or goofin'   on them is a lot of good fun times for me. But  this is an angle of approach that works when we   have those stories to work on. We can focus on  the hijinks and shenanigans and the Zeus Putting   His Weiner Where It Doesn't Belong and not really  think about what depth these stories might've had   for people steeped in a cultural context that  we're two and a half thousand years too late to   understand. The myths kind of provide this… buffer  around that idea; it gives us something to focus   on and be goofy about. The Muses don't really have  those fun stories. Instead they have poets talking   about them like - well, like the way modern  artists talk about creative inspiration. It's a   much more present, personal kind of thing, and the  conversation about them is often very candid about   the fact that the muses aren't characters in a  story with a canon, they're components of a living   religion - which is basically the same thing as  saying they're parts in a constantly-developing   working model of the universe. And this conversation really starts   to get interesting after the romans turn up. Around 45 BCE, Cicero wrote a philosophical   dialogue called On The Nature Of The Gods,  where, in classic philosophical dialogue fashion,   Cicero gave several characters philosophical  stances and had them argue with each other for   three whole books. One of the characters is an  "academic skeptic" whose position is basically   "the gods are ridiculous stories that don't  make sense if you think about them," and when   he's listing his evidence, he mentions some  interesting things about the muses. The first   relevant claim he makes is that some people say  there were three Jupiters - who, we remember,   the Romans used as a syncretized synonym for Zeus  - so he says the first Jupiter was born in Arcadia   as the offspring of Aether, aka Chaos, and was the  father of Bacchus and Proserpine, aka Dionysus and   Persephone; Jupiter number two was also born  in Arcadia but this one was the kid of Caelus,   aka Ouranos, and the father of Minerva, aka  Athena. Ugh…  dealing with the romans always gives   me a headache. Anyway, the dialogue continues  that Jupiter Number Three is the son of Saturn,   aka Kronus, born on the isle of Crete. Then,  having laid out his multi-jupiter hypothesis,   he gets to the muses, starting off with the  claim that the second jupiter had the first   group of muses as his daughters. First group?   Yup! He says there were originally four of them,   and gives them the names Thelxiope, Aoede, Arche  and Melete, and then he says after that Jupiter   number three got with Mnemosyne and produced  the nine muses we already know about. This is   a baffling conversational flashbang to drop, and  he's not even done, because for good measure he   says some poets claim there's another set of nine  muses - with the same names as the first set,   obviously, otherwise it would get confusing - who  he lists as the daughters of Pierus and Antiopa.    And I know what you're thinking - but no, this is  apparently not the same Pierus that Clio had that   fling with. Second, unrelated Pierus. And if you  just can't get enough of the guy, don't worry,   there's more where that came from. Now, this is very convoluted,   probably intentionally - Cicero wrote this barely  two years before he got assassinated and doesn't   seem to have done any copy-editing before he  bit the big one, and as the kicker, when he   interjects a little author's note at the end of  the spiel, the dude firing off these hot takes   is not the dude he says he agrees with. But this  is already a really interesting framing - even   from the potentially cartoonishly exaggerated  perspective of the Enlightened Skeptic, the fact   that the number and grouping of the muses was the  subject of active debate is neat. It was pretty   clear that the romans were aware that the ancient  muse-worshippers had not always worshipped the   same set of muses that they were familiar with. A very similar framing turns up in Plutarch's   "Quaestiones Convivales", written somewhere in  the first century CE. This is also framed as a   philosophical argument between a diverse  set of characters, but it's additionally   framed as a big question-and-answer challenge,  where the characters pose brain-teasers to one   another and try to unravel them to everyone's  satisfaction. The muses get referenced off and on,   getting petitioned to make their performances  good and broadly functioning as one expects   deities of creativity to work, but Question 14  is specifically about the Muses and kicks off a   really interesting conversation. Basically, all  the participants in the dialogue start arguing   with each other over which of them "gets" which  muses. The rhetorician makes the claim that,   while certain haters will tell you that Calliope  only keeps the company of kings, real ones know   that rhetoric is a very renaissance skill that  every muse wants a piece of. A discussion breaks   out over why there are specifically nine muses,  and why nine is such a nice number in general.    One of them pipes up that it's common knowledge  that in ancient times there were only three muses,   but - and this is not a joke - citing his sources  would bring down the party vibes, so he won't.    Honestly, fuckin power move. Anyway, this idea  comes up in the conversation that initially there   were only three fields of study that the muses  were in charge of, but as the arts and sciences   advanced and were subdivided, the domains of those  original three muses were also split into threes,   and the speaker proposes that an initial trifecta  of Philosophy, Rhetoric and Math, was subdivided   into three smaller trifectas - Philosophy gets  split into logic, ethics and physics; Rhetoric   gets demonstrative, deliberative and judicial  subtypes; and Math gets split into the three   genders of music, arithmetic and geometry. Tadah!   Everything important is broken into nine parts,   and everybody gets a muse, except for the large  crowd of poets and doctors and astronomers who   immediately kick up an enormous fuss about  having their designated muses confiscated by   this ass-pull of a paradigm, and of course the one  farmer in the bunch tries to explain how he should   still get Thalia because when you think about  it, crops growing is a little bit like comedy-  The conversation goes in more weird directions.   Other possible muse classifications are proposed,   including one that puts the three muses in charge  of the entire universe in a series of basically   concentric spheres - with one called Hypate in  charge of the "fixed stars", one called Mese   in charge of the planets, and one called Nete in  charge of everything under the moon. After a few   more fascinating hypothetical cosmological models,  the narrator eventually puts forth his own opinion   on the muses: letting all the heavenly stuff be  the domain of Urania, he basically proposes the   idea that the other eight muses don't "belong" to  specific professions, but instead have a role in   absolutely everybody's lives, providing rules  and regulations and a guiding system to help   Joe Everyroman live a healthy and well-balanced  life. It's not like only comedians ever experience   the joy that Thalia is in charge of, and it's not  like only kings need to use those good leadership   qualities that Calliope doles out. The narrator  of this dialogue basically suggests that the   muses exist to regulate and essentially civilize  those natural, universal parts of life. Oddly,   the breakdown of the muse's roles in this  model doesn't super line up with their   traditional artistic inspiration domains unless  you squint really hard, and this is pretty late   in the timeline for the Muses to not have their  quote-unquote "classical roles" locked in, but   the concept is there. According to this slice of  dialogue, Calliope helps with logical reasoning,   Clio inspires nobility and lofty aspirations,  Polyhymnia guides people to seek out and retain   knowledge, Euterpe inspires curiosity  and speculation into the natural world,   Thalia regulates physical hunger and transforms it  from a simple, animalistic desire for food into a   regulated, civilized, social ritual; Erato tempers  wild lust into the concept of orderly marriage,   and Terpsichore and Melpomene work together to  temper the excess out of exceptionally beautiful   sights and sounds, so they're only very pleasant  and not enchantingly overwhelming. In this model,   the muses are present in literally every  aspect of life, not just "for" the poets   or the astronomers. It's a very elegant model,  and Urania is the only muse left unaccounted for   in the daily life of Joe Everyroman because  she's much too busy handling All Of Space.   And the vibes of this dialogue carry pretty  smoothly into the second century CE, where   Pausanias's Descriptions of Greece also brings  up the sheer scope of the worship of the muses,   going so far as to say that basically every temple  he's visited in his travels has had the muses   represented in them, usually backing up a major  deity like Apollo. He also references the apparent   "common knowledge" that before the nine muses  there used to be a set of three muses worshipped   in certain regions, listing them with the same  names Cicero did along with an explanation of   their meanings - Melete, meaning "practice,"  Mneme, meaning "memory," and Aoede, meaning   "song. " He credits some random macedonian named  Pierus, that's right it's this fuckin guy again,   with popularizing the "nine muses" model and goes  so far as to say that some people speculate Pierus   himself had nine daughters with the names commonly  ascribed to the nine muses. This is basically what   Cicero had his Enlightened Skeptic say in On The  Nature Of The Gods, so that lines up pretty well.    There used to be three (or four,) now there's  nine, and some dude named Pierus and his nine   daughters were involved at some point. And following this thread, Pierus and his   daughters turn up in another one of our old  standbys: Ovid's Metamorphoses, from right   around the aughts CE. In a framing device of a  conversation between Athena and the muse Urania,   she recounts a story where the king Pierus had  nine daughters who, in another classic display   of mortal hubris, falsely compared themselves  to the muses and challenged them to a contest   of performance. One of the girls told the  story of Typhon in a goofy and ridiculous   manner that made the gods sound like fools, I  wouldn't know anything about what that's like,   while on the muses's side Calliope recounted  the tale of Demeter's search for Persephone   after her abduction to the underworld, and  the compromise that led to the division of   the seasons. The nymphs judging the contest found  Calliope's performance much more compelling and   awarded the victory to the Muses, which did  not sit well with Pierus's daughters and,   instead of gracefully taking the L, they  kicked up a big fuss about it, to which the   muses responded by turning them into magpies. And honestly this is almost a relief. This   is such a classic formula for Greek God  misadventures. Someone slights the gods,   the gods turn them into something nasty. I went  so far into the research process before I found   a story the muses actually participated in, I was  almost worried we had another Hestia on our hands.    In the space of greek mythology, some of the gods  seem so universally revered on such a personal   level that they don't get stories told about them.   They're more like natural laws than characters.   Researching this made me start pondering a  question I've never given much thought to before:   why do these myths exist? Why are these  stories told about some gods and not others?    Why were these primordial forces of nature  embodied as the stars of their own little   goofy sitcoms where the god of the horrors  of war gets stuffed in a jar for a year,   or the guide of dead souls steals a herd of  cattle by putting their hooves on backwards?   And there are a lot of explanations that get  proposed - oh, the myths exist to explain   things in the natural world, like why that  mountain is there, or why the stars are that   shape. They get told as allegories to explain  the social and political order, like why that   city is where it is and why the king's godly  heritage means he deserves to be in charge.    And, tempting as they are, I've learned to be very  suspicious of a simple explanation. I don't think   there's any one reason stories get told. And  I think the sheer universality of the muses is   proof of that. The one consistent throughline  through the texts we've unpacked here is that   the muses are confounding. What is their role,  what's their place in the natural order, do they   guide the hearts and reason of humanity or do they  turn the heavens themselves? How many of them are   there? What's the point of them? Who "gets" them  and why? Even by roman times, the muses aren't   locked into their "classical domains". That farmer  in the Quaestiones Convivales says Thalia should   be the muse of farmers, and that doesn't make  any sense from a "muse of comedy" standpoint,   but it does make sense if we go back to the  literal meaning of her name: "Flourishing. "   Only Urania's role as the muse of astronomy  is even halfway consistent, and even then,   is she the god of those who study the stars or  is she the god that moves the stars themselves?   The Orphic Hymn to the muses, written sometime  between the third century BCE and the second   century CE, so a pretty wide spread on that  one, describe the muses not as gods of the arts,   but as gods of knowledge and truth. Their domain  is framed as teaching humanity divine knowledge,   inspiring with truth and guiding away from  error. If the muses are gods of storytelling,   then this angle suggests that the purpose  of storytelling is to reveal truth.   Storytelling is how we make sense of  the world around us and turn it into   something we can share. It's a foundational  pillar of communication, society and history.    It introduces causality and pattern-recognition  into what was originally just A Big Pile Of Things   That Happened. Of course gods of artistic  inspiration and creation feel universal,   filling every aspect of life from the literal  heavens down to the farmer's fields. They haven't   yet invented a thing that can't be thought about,  can't be talked about, can't have art made out of   it. What's the difference between being a god  of telling stories and being a god that moves   the heavens themselves? Both of those things  still need to be turned into stories before   we can understand them. The arts become the  largest, most universal domain by default.    Every myth we have belongs to the muses. No  wonder they feel more godly than the rest. They   can't be contained by their own framing device. Inspiration isn't just about Making Creative   Brain Go Brrr. Its oldest meaning is divine  guidance, being breathed into a mortal from   an unseen and unknowable source. We've  circled back to the foundational truth   that inspiration can't be fully understood or  controlled. Why are these stories told about   the gods? Why do we tell the stories we tell? I don't know. Maybe the muses will tell me.

It's fitting that the ancient Greeks gave names  and faces to the arts, because I've always thought   of stories as, basically, living things. To  retell a story is to spawn a new generation,   one that inherits some traits of its  parent narrative but expresses them in   a different way. Lineages of folktales can  be geographically tracked across the world,   followed as they were told and changed and  adapted to new environments. A local folk   figure gets picked up and carried to new frontiers  and becomes a hero becomes a legend becomes a god.    A bedtime story becomes the groundwork for a saga. Stories live and grow, but, like the gods, stories   are also immortal. As long as they're cultivated  in collective memory and told over and over again,   stories and gods can endure forever. And they also  reinforce each other: from a certain perspective,   the gods are fuel for the stories of the  mythology; their strong personalities and   symbolic meaning feed the myths conflict and  characterization and pathos, and in turn the   myths sustain the gods, reinforcing their presence  in the lives of the everyday Ancient Greeks. The   gods took form in the world through the stories  shared by Homer and Hesiod and the Athenians and   the Achaeans overall, brought down from the  heights of Olympus into the human everyday,   carried by the stories that humans shared. Greek Mythology is one of the first spaces of   stories that I was exposed to, and I think part  of what's always fascinated me about it is that   these tales of gods and heroes are the ancestors  of so many stories we're much more familiar with   now. But unlike biological ancestors, stories  don't naturally die of old age. We have these   ancestral stories here, now, today. With a little  translation or a few years of language study,   they can be directly compared with their cousins  and descendants. We can hold up Eros and Psyche   next to Beauty and the Beast and East Of The Sun  West Of The Moon and see them resonate with each   other. And by unpacking and understanding these  foundational stories that so many writers have   internalized and reimagined and retold, we can  start to see how their traits are manifested   in the new stories that are branching out of the  family tree. I love tracing a theme or a motif or   a trope through a chain of different stories and  seeing all the different ways it can be expressed.    I've been doing it for a while now, and I really  hope I get to keep doing it for a while yet.