Classical Mythology A to Z: An Encyclopedia of Gods & Goddesses

This book is a collection of the gods, heroes, and monsters that populate Classical mythology as well as of the places that feature in stories told about them. The number of myths that have been preserved in the works of ancient authors is enormous, and the numbers of characters and places appearing in them vast. While Classical Mythology A to Z is an encyclopedia of myth, it is not comprehensive. Rather, it is limited to those Greek and Roman characters and places that appear in Edith Hamilton’s classic work, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, for which it has been designed as a companion. In her own words, it was Hamilton’s hope that by reading her book, those unfamiliar with the Greco-Roman world would “gain in this way not only a knowledge of the myths, but also some little idea of what the writers were like who told them—who have been proved, by two thousand years and more, to be immortal” (Preface, Mythology, 1942). She indisputably achieved her goal, doing so by telling the myths of Classical antiquity in a manner that was faithful to the original sources and, at the same time, fresh, relatable, and timeless in terms of language and expression. For this reason, Hamilton’s work continues to serve as an authoritative and accessible introduction to Classical mythology in all its complexities over three quarters of a century beyond its original publication.

While Hamilton’s Mythology established this book’s scope, its contents will be useful to all those wishing to dig more deeply into the world of myth out of curiosity about individual characters’ genealogies, their exploits, and places they inhabited. Greco-Roman mythology has persisted for millennia beyond its origins, retaining its ancient meanings and accruing new ones while serving as a foundation of cultural memory that has been alluded to in myriad ways and in all manner of creative media. For this reason, Classical Mythology A to Z will be indispensable to anyone looking to verify, clarify, or connect mythological characters and places to any number of literary, musical, artistic, or even pop culture references. This is a companion to Hamilton, but also so much more.

Entries in this collection have been grouped into four basic categories: deities, humans, monsters, and places. The first category includes immortal gods and goddesses as well as mortal ones. Nymphs, for example, were spirits that were believed to inhabit trees, bodies of water, and other components of the natural world, but they were subject to decline and death. The second category, which focuses on humans, encompasses individual heroes and heroines as well as groups of people, such as the female warriors called the Amazons. Characters of prodigious size and hybrid creatures are here all classed as monsters, regardless of whether they were benign or fearsome; in this case, “monster” is conceived of in the sense of its Latin etymology, monstrum, a thing or person that is strange but not necessarily evil. Landmarks, regions, bodies of water, mountains, and cities are naturally categorized as places. One particularly interesting aspect of mythological characters and places is the degree to which they resist strict categorization. Inevitably, the categories overlap, as in cases where a human hero becomes divine, or a river is conceived of both as a geographic feature and as a divine personification of the river. Hercules and Asclepius are examples of the former; the Peneus and Achelous rivers are examples of the latter. Gaia was the earth and also the earth goddess. The hunter Orion was a giant, being in this respect a prodigy or monster, but he was neither entirely mortal nor was he entirely divine. Satyrs, hybrid creatures that most would classify as monsters, were, at the same time, woodland spirits. And so on. A system of cross-referencing ensures that entries appropriate to multiple categories can be found in all of them.

Just as categorization poses challenges, so too does the spelling of names. The spellings here follow those used in Hamilton’s work, although an effort has been made to indicate alternate spellings as well. The issue of spelling is complicated by several factors. One of them is the transmission of names from the original Greek to Latin and then to English, at least in many cases. An example is Ouranos, Greek god of the heavens. For the Romans, he was Uranus, and this is the spelling with which most speakers of English will be familiar. The Greeks had no letter “c,” but the Romans used “k” only infrequently; as a consequence, the Greek god Kronos became Cronus in Latin. Another factor influencing spelling is inconsistency among the ancient authors, even those writing in the same language.

Varying spellings of a given character’s name went hand in hand with varying, sometimes conflicting traditions concerning their lives and exploits. The myths themselves, as well as the characters in them, evolved over millennia. When confronted with variants and conflicts, it is important to remember that many or most myths were transmitted orally at some stage, being influenced by cultural shifts and factors such as depictions in art. One example is the cycle of myths surrounding the Trojan War. It has long been known that these tales had their origins in the Bronze Age (very roughly 1800–1150 BCE), the time of the Trojan War itself—and, yes, there was a Trojan War, or, more properly, a number of Trojan wars. Aspects of the story of Achilles, as well of his comrades and adversaries, so familiar from Homer’s Iliad, were, at the time when it was committed to writing—perhaps 750 BCE or later—hundreds of years old, having been passed on orally previously, and doubtless altered at least to some degree with each telling. In those hundreds of years, the Greek world had changed dramatically, witnessing the flowering and fall of powerful kingdoms, a Dark Age, and the birth of city-states no longer governed by monarchs.

Not all variants of the myths surrounding the characters and places featured in this book have been documented here. The particular details included are derived from what today are the best-known sources of Greek and Roman myths, among them Homer, Hesiod, Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil, and Ovid, all of them authors of epic poetry; the lyric poets Sappho, Stesichorus, Pindar, and Bacchylides; the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the historian Herodotus; the geographer Strabo; the travel writer and ethnographer Pausanias; the natural historian Pliny the Elder; and the mythographers Apollodorus and Hyginus. All of the ancient sources referenced in this book, complete with biographical details, have been assembled in a bibliography for quick reference. A number of these authors recorded more than one version of a given myth, even when they themselves were skeptical about some of them. In the spirit of Diodorus Siculus (first century BCE), who relates several alternate versions of the origins of the Pillars of Hercules—namely that Hercules created them to memorialize his extraordinary journey to the edges of the world, as a means by which to prevent sea monsters from penetrating the Mediterranean from the ocean beyond, or to create a channel allowing ships to pass between the seas—I invite readers of this book to select the versions most entertaining, credible, or far-fetched.