The Greeks were primarily pastoral (farming communities). For that reason, much of their vision of the world is related to animal husbandry.
At first, the universe was only disorder, called CHAOS. Gradually, from Chaos was formed the earth (GAEA), the underworld (EREBUS), and the darkness above the earth (NYX). Erebus and Nyx were lonely in all that darkness, so they married and gave birth to three children: AITHER, the light of heaven; and DAY, the light of earth. The third child was so important, I am allowing the grammatical error of the previous sentence. This was EROS, who emerged from a silver egg. Eros means LOVE.
Love, then, is the basic force of the universe.
Eros married Gaea. They had three children: the mountains, the seas, and the heavens (URANUS). Uranus (this is the weird part) fell in love with Gaea and married her, but the result of their union was some very strange children:
Uranus was wounded in a war with his son, CRONUS. From his blood came the ERINYES (Furies), who act as consciences for us (Like Jiminy Cricket.)
Cronus (called Saturn by the Romans) married another Titan, RHEA (Ops).
He ate his first five children:
In place of her sixth child, Zeus (Jupiter), Rhea gave Cronus a rock wrapped in swaddling clothes, and he threw up the other five children.
This resulted in a huge war, which shook up the universe. With the help of Prometheus, another Titan, Zeus won the war.
Zeus and his two brothers divided up the universe between themselves:
Hades took the underworld
Poseidon took the sea
Zeus took over heaven ruling, with his sisters
and their children on Mount Olympus, where they ate
only ambrosia and drank Nectar.
If both parents of a god are gods, their child is also a god. (Although some are born from a single parent; they are, after all, gods.)
and their children:
Once the hierarchy of the gods was established, it was time to make people.
Prometheus was given the task of making people out of mud. He liked people so much, he stole fire from the gods and gave it to them. For this, he was punished by Zeus.Zeus also decided to punish mankind for this deed, as he could not take fire back again, so he created WOMAN.
Pandora was given as wife to Epimetheus, Prometheus' brother. Like Eve, in Hebrew mythology, Pandora was ordered not to touch the jar given her by the gods. When she did, all the evils of the world poured out: disease, hate, old age, war, etc.
The tale of Pandora's Jar marked the end of the GOLDEN AGE, when life was easy for men. They now had to labor; they now grew old and died, etc. The one gift that remained in the jar was HOPE, that eternal spark in all of us.
The blood of Uranus had mixed with the earth and formed a race of GIANTS who intermarried with mankind and further corrupted the race, until Zeus decided to destory all people with a great flood.
Two humans survived the flood, landing on the peak of
Mount Parnassus. These were Deucalion, son of Prometheus,
and Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus, the parents of the human race
as we know it.
Heroes came next. A hero is the child of a god and a human.
Mythology tells us of the adventures of many heroes, among them are:
Homer, which tells the story of the Trojan war. Here are the major characters:
Priam, king of Troy
Paris,
his son
Hector,
Paris' brother, hero of Troy
Helen,
the face that launched a thousand ships.
Menelaus,
her husband
Agamemnon,
his brother
Achilles,
Greek Hero
Ajax,
strongest of the Greeks
Patroclus, Achilles' best friend)
Odysseus
(Ulysses), smartest of all the Greeks, hero of
another
great classic, The
Odyssey.
Hubris is defiance; Hubris is arrogance; Hubris is thinking you can outsmart the gods.
Hubris is Oedipus, who refused to believe that he had killed his father and married his mother; Hubris is Creon, who insisted on leaving the body of Polyneices to rot in the fields; Hubris is the crew of Odysseus, who slaughtered the sacred cattle of the sun god.
Hubris is also the student who continues to chew gum in my class after I tell him to get rid of it; or the driver who curses the police officer who gives him a ticket; or the clerk who tells the president of the corporation he's acting stupidly.
Make no mistake: Hubris can feel good to do, but we have to understand that the punishment will necessarily follow the act of hubris. That is where Tragedy can help us. We watch the other fellow commit hubris, and if it's a well-written play, we can share in the hero's feelings, thus freeing us from the need to commit hubris ourselves. This is called CATHARSIS.
GO TO BULFINCH'S MYTHOLOGY FOR MORE INFORMATION
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