Greek Myth and Religion

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Article

Tyche  

Noel Robertson and B. C. Dietrich

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
Fate, fortune both good and bad. The connection with τυγχάνειν always remains evident, reinforcing the sense of sudden change and fortuitous happenings in the individual's life. Like Moira (see fate), Tyche gives everything to mortals from birth (Archil. fr. 16; Eur. IA 1136; Philemon, in Stob. 1. 6. 11). The mightiest of the Moirai in *Pindar (Hymn to Tyche in Paus. 7. 26. 8), she is the child of *Zeus Eleutherius (Pind. Ol. 12. 1 f.). A splendid lyric fragment praises noble Tyche who dispenses more good than evil from her scales: grace shines about her golden wing, and she lights up the darkness (lyric fr. 473 Page, Lyrica Graeca Selecta; Stob. 1. 16. 13). Though ambivalent by nature, she tends to be favourable (Aesch. Ag. 664, saviour and guide of the Achaeans; cf. Hesychius τύχη, εὐτυχία), comparable with the *Agathos Daimōn (Ath. 15. 692 f.; 693e). *Oedipus is the child of beneficent Tyche (Soph.

Article

Tydeus  

Alan H. Griffiths

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
Tydeus (Τυδεύς), son of *Oeneus, legendary warrior of the generation before the Trojan War. Leaving his homeland in *Aetolia he came to *Argos (1), where *Adrastus(1) gave him his daughter Deipyle in marriage; she bore him *Diomedes(2), who is always conscious at Troy of the need to match his father's exploits. Enrolled as one of the *Seven against Thebes, he first—according to Homer's Iliad, drawing and no doubt embroidering upon earlier Thebaid traditions, see epic cycle—took part in an embassy to the city, triumphed over the locals in a series of games, then killed all but one of a fifty-strong band sent to ambush him on his return (4. 372 ff.). In the war itself, he proved himself a fierce fighter in spite of his stocky build (5. 801); his thirst for slaughter, vividly described at Aesch. Sept.

Article

Tyndareos  

Jenny March

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
Tyndareos (Τυνδάρεως or -ος), in mythology husband of *Leda and father, real or putative, of *Helen, *Clytemnestra, the *Dioscuri, Timandra, and Philonoe. His brothers were said to be Leucippus, Aphareus, and Icarius (Apollod. 3. 10. 3), and sometimes *Hippocoön (ibid. 3. 10. 4). Hippocoön drove him from Sparta, but he returned and succeeded to the throne after *Heracles had invaded the land and killed Hippocoön and his twelve sons (ibid. 3. 10. 5). When suitors came, wishing to marry Helen, Tyndareos made them take an oath to protect the marriage-rights of the chosen bridegroom (ibid. 3. 10. 9), which led in due course to the Trojan War (see homer; troy) when the Greek leaders marshalled troops to fetch back Helen after she deserted *Menelaus (1) for *Paris. *Hesiod (fr. 176 M–W) says that when sacrificing to the gods Tyndareos forgot *Aphrodite, so the goddess in anger made his daughters unfaithful, Helen with Paris, Clytemnestra with *Aegisthus, and Timandra, who had married Echemus, with Phyleus.

Article

Typhōn  

Ken Dowden

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
Typhōn (Typhaōn Typhōeus), monster and adversary of *Zeus. *Hesiod's Typhoeus (Theog.823–35) has 100 snake-heads, eyes blazing fire, and voices that cover the gamut of gods and animals. The final child (by *Tartarus) of Earth (*Gaia), he is blasted down to the place Tartarus by Zeus' thunderbolt, but remains the source of hurricanes (‘Typhoon’ merges Chinese dafeng—‘big wind’—with Greek myth). *Homer knows that Typhoeus lies amongst the Arimi (in Cilicia; Il. 2. 783, garbled by Verg.Aen. 9. 715–16). In Apollod. 1. 6. 3, the gods flee to Egypt in panic, turning themselves into animals (referring to Egyptian theriomorphism); Zeus with thunderbolts and an adamantine sickle wounds Typhon at Mt. Casius in *Syria, but is overpowered, his sinews cut out and both he and his sinews put in ‘the Corycian cave’ in Cilicia. *Hermes and Aegipan (‘Goat-*Pan’) steal the sinews and refit Zeus (in *Nonnus' Dionysiaca*Cadmus tricks the sinews from Typhon).

Article

Tyro  

Richard Hunter

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Literature
  2. Greek Myth and Religion
Tyro, in mythology, daughter of *Salmoneus and mother (by Cretheus) of *Jason(1)'s father Aeson and (by *Poseidon) of the twins *Pelias and *Neleus. Tyro loved the river *Enipeus, but Poseidon tricked her by assuming that river's form and lay with her (Hom. Od.

Article

Tyrrhenus  

Herbert Jennings Rose

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
Tyrrhenus (Τυρρηνός), eponym of the Tyrrhenians (i.e. *Etruscans, though see West on Hes. Theog. 1016), Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1. 27. 1, where he is son of King Atys and comes from Maeonia (Lydia); in schol. Pl. Ti. 25b, he is Atys' grandson; son of *Heracles, Dion.

Article

underworld  

Radcliffe G. Edmonds III

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
26 April 2019
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Geography
  2. Greek Myth and Religion
  3. Roman Myth and Religion

Depictions of the underworld, in ancient Greek and Roman textual and visual sources, differ significantly from source to source, but they all draw on a common pool of traditional mythic motifs. These motifs, such as the realm of Hades and its denizens, the rivers of the underworld, the paradise of the blessed dead, and the places of punishment for the wicked, are developed and transformed through all their uses throughout the ages, depending upon the aims of the author or artist depicting the underworld. Some sources explore the relation of the world of the living to that of the dead through descriptions of the location of the underworld and the difficulties of entering it. By contrast, discussions of the regions within the underworld and existence therein often relate to ideas of afterlife as a continuation of or compensation for life in the world above. All of these depictions made use of the same basic set of elements, adapting them in their own ways to describe the location of, the entering into, and the regions within the underworld.

Article

Uranus  

Emily Kearns

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
Uranus (Greek Ouranos), the divine personification of the sky in Greece. Scarcely known in cult, his best-known appearance is in *Hesiod'sTheogony (126 ff.). He is produced by *Gaia (Earth), then becoming her consort, but hating their children, he causes them to remain confined within her. At the instigation of Gaia, he is castrated by their son *Cronus; the severed genitals are cast into the sea and engender *Aphrodite.

Article

votive offerings  

Irad Malkin

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
Votive offerings are voluntary dedications to the gods, resulting not from prescribed ritual or sacred calendars but from ad hoc vows of individuals or communities in circumstances usually of anxiety, transition, or achievement. Votives display a considerable number of constant features in both Greek and Roman religions. Dedications consisted in renunciation and long-term symbolic investment in the divine, in expectation of good things to come. Unlike *sacrifice, where one ‘destroys’, by depositing a perceptible object in a sanctuary one both loses it and makes it eternal. One of the primary functions of *temples was to house expensive dedications; the temple itself was a communal dedication, anathēma, to the god (cf. Plut. Per.12, 14).On a personal level, just like prayers, votive offerings emphasize the individual's ‘if–then’ relations with the gods. The gift to the sanctuary both mediates and serves as testimony to the occasion of the vow. ‘If my ship arrives safely, if I recover from illness, if my crop succeeds, etc.…I shall dedicate a statue, a *tithe, a temple’, and so on.

Article

wind  

Liba Taub

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
27 February 2017
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Geography
  2. Greek Myth and Religion
  3. Science, Technology, and Medicine
In classical times, wind was in some cases understood to be a god, or as being under the influence of a god; it was understood by some to be a phenomenon liable to prediction and/or explanation as a natural (often regarded as seismic) phenomenon. Wind was important for navigation, agriculture and town planning, as well as managing health and disease.Wind, and both its beneficial and destructive powers, features importantly in the earliest Greek texts. Individual winds are themselves gods, or associated with gods. The epic poets offer names for several specific winds: Boreas (the north wind; Op. 505–518), Notus (south), and Zephyrus (west) are described by Hesiod as sons of Astraeus and Eos (Theog. 378–380; see also 869–880), while a fourth wind, Eurus, also features in the Homeric poems (Od. 5.295); other, unnamed winds are also mentioned. Such conceptions of wind pervaded Graeco-Roman popular culture. Aristotle refers to painters’ depictions of wind (Mete.

Article

wind-gods  

Alan H. Griffiths

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
Wind-gods are attested as the object of anxious cultic attention as early as the Mycenaean period, when a priestess of the winds (anemōn iereia) is recorded on the *Cnossus tablets (see mycenaean civilization and mycenaean language); *Hesychius provides the names Anemokoitai ‘Windbedders’ and Heudanemoi ‘Windlullers’ for specialized *priests at *Corinth and Athens respectively. Most *rituals (for which hilltops were the favoured site) aimed at pre-emptive placation of these powerful forces, though the conjuring of beneficent winds also had its place (priests on *Ceos who summon the Etesian winds, Callim. Aet. fr. 75, 36 f.; Achilles' prayer to *Boreas and *Zephyrus to blow on *Patroclus' pyre, Il. 23. 194 ff.). At *Methana, the *sacrifice of a white cock sought to protect the budding vines from the onslaught of the Lips, the SW gale (Paus. 2. 34. 2 f.), while a black lamb is a suitable victim to appease ‘Typhos’ at *Aristophanes(1), Frogs 847 f.

Article

women in cult  

Emily Kearns

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
Women played a prominent part in the public religious life of the Greek cities, their roles being in many respects different from those of men. Most, though not all, cults of a female deity were served by a female rather than a male priest, each local sanctuary following its own tradition here. A few cults of male deities, as for instance frequently those of *Dionysus, were also served by priestesses (ἱέρειαι). Some cults stipulated that the priestess must be virgin (thus a little girl), a few (e.g. Paus. 8. 5. 12) that she have ‘finished association with men’, but the majority made no such provision; thus Lysimache was priestess of *Athena Polias in Athens for 64 years in the 5th cent. The role of a priestess was exactly parallel to that of a priest (see priests). Both sexes mediated between worshippers and worshipped, principally by presiding over sacrifices. A woman would not normally deal the fatal blow to the sacrificial victim, but except in the case of very small cults, neither did a male priest; that act was the preserve of a special official. Women other than the priestess also normally had a special role in the act of sacrifice: the basket containing the sacrificial knife was carried in the procession by an unmarried girl (see kanēphoroi), while the moment of the victim's death was marked by ululation (ololygmos) from all women present.

Article

worship, household  

J. D. Mikalson

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion

The domestic cult of a Greek family concerned the protection and prosperity of the house and its occupants, with daily small offerings and prayers to *Zeus Ctesius (protector of the stores), Zeus Herceus (protector of the wall or fence surrounding the house), and *Apollo Agyieus (of the streets) whose image stood at the house's street entrance. The hearth, as Hestia, was sacred, and at mealtimes a bit of food was placed there as a *first-fruits offering (Plut.Mor. 703d; Theophrastus in Porph. Abst. 2. 20). Similarly, before drinking wine, libations were poured on the floor to *Hestia (h. Hom. 29. 4–6) or at formal banquets to Zeus and the heroes, to the *Agathos Daimon, or to other deities (Ath. 15. 692f–693f; Arist. fr. 55 Rose). In these family cults the rituals seem of primary importance and hence were widespread while the deities honoured varied from place to place. The father served as priest for the family, however, and that may partially explain the regular appearance of Zeus, father of the gods. The admission of new members to the family (brides, babies, and slaves) was marked by initiation rites, often involving the hearth and featuring fertility symbols. Death brought to the household a pollution which was effaced only by the passage of a set period of time.

Article

Xuthus  

Emily Kearns

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
Xuthus, a mythological figure connected with the perceived racial divisions among the Greeks. According to *Hesiod (fr. 9 M–W) he was son of *Hellen and brother of Dorus and Aeolus (2), the eponyms of the *Dorians and Aeolians; his sons by the Athenian Kreousa, *Ion(1) and Achaeus (fr.

Article

Zagreus  

Radcliffe G. Edmonds III

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
The ancient lexica (Etymologicum Magnum, Photius, Hesychius, Suda) identify Zagreus as a poetic name for Dionysus in a chthonic aspect, χθόνιος Διόνυσος, and he is invoked along with Gē (Earth), in the early, lost epic Alkmaionis (fr. 3 Bernabé). Other early evidence identifies Zagreus as an underworld deity, Plouton or the son of Hades. In the Sisyphos (fr. 228 TrGF), he is the son of Hades, while the fragment from Aeschylus’s Aigyptioi identifies him as the savage Zeus of the deceased (fr. 5 TrGF, cp. Supp. 157). The name “Zagreus” here seems to be understood as the “mighty hunter” (ὁ μεγάλως ἀγρεύων in Etymologicum Gudianum) who snatches away mortals into the kingdom of the dead, hence the application of the euphemistic epithet of the lord of the dead, the “host of many,” πολυξενώτατος.In other sources, Zagreus is chthonic because of his mother, Persephone, queen of the underworld, a genealogy first attested in a fragment of the Hellenistic poet Callimachus (Aetia fr.

Article

Zalmoxis  

Alan H. Griffiths

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
According to *Herodotus(1) (4. 94–6), a god of the *Getae in Thrace (‘also called Gebeleizis’) who promised immortality to his devotees; the tribe communicated with him by despatching a messenger-victim every four years. Also offered is an alternative, euhemeristic version (cf. euhemerus) in which Zalmoxis was a charlatan who imported ideas picked up from *Pythagoras (1), whose slave he had been, and faked a ‘resurrection’ by reappearing from a hidden underground chamber after three years.

Article

Zephyrus  

Alan H. Griffiths

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
Zephyrus (W), Boreas (N), and Notus (S) winds catalogued by *Hesiod at Theog.378–80. But epic may conceive of them, as convenient, either as minor gods who feast in their own palaces (Il. 23. 200 ff.) or as unruly elemental forces who are controlled by *Aeolus(1) from his floating prison-island and can be confined in a leather bag (Od.

Article

Zeus  

Fritz Graf

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 July 2015
Subjects:
  1. Greek Myth and Religion
Zeus, the main divinity of the Greek pantheon (see olympian gods; religion, greek) and the only major Greek god whose *Indo-European origin is undisputed. His name is connected with Latin Iu-p̣-piter, Rigveda Dyaus pitar, derived from the root †diéu-, ‘day (as opposed to night)’ (Lat. dies), (clear) sky’; as the Rigveda and Latin parallels suggest, his role as father, not in a theogonical or anthropogonical sense, but as having the power of a father in a patriarchal system, is Indo-European too. Thus in *Homer, Zeus is both πατήρ, ‘father’, and ἄναξ, ‘king’ or ‘lord’. His cult is attested in bronze-age Greece (see religion, minoan and mycenaean); the Linear B texts (see mycenaean language) attest several sanctuaries (*Pylos, Chania) and, at Minoan Cnossus, a month name or a festival, if in fact the Mycenaean names of months derive from festivals (KN Fp 5, 1). Another Cnossian text attests the epiclesis Dictaeus, Zeus of Mt. Dicte (KN Fp 1, 2), which remained an important place of cult in the first millennium. A text from Chania gives a common cult of Zeus and *Dionysus, a Pylos text (PY Tn 316, 8–10) one of Zeus, *Hera, and (a figure later unknown) Drimios son of Zeus, which suggests Hera as the consort of Zeus, as in later mythology.

Article

Zeus in art  

Karim Arafat

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Material Culture
  2. Greek Myth and Religion
Although 8th-cent. figurines may represent Zeus, he does not assume a type until early Archaic, when he strides with thunderbolt and, rarely, eagle. In the Classical period, Zeus is quieter, often seated and with a sceptre: the prime example is *Phidias' cult statue at *Olympia, familiar from literature (esp. Paus. 5. 11), coins, gems, and echoes on vases. The type continues in the Hellenistic period.Zeus participates in many scenes. The east pediments of Olympia and the *Parthenon centred on him. He fights in the Gigantomachy (see giants) from Attic and S. Italian Archaic and Classical vases to the Hellenistic Pergamum altar frieze. On Classical vases and sculpture, his pursuits include Aegina (the eponymous heroine of *Aegina, see eponymoi) and *Ganymede. His transformations occur, particularly in depictions of his seduction of Europa from early Archaic, and *Leda from late Classical. He is common on coins. Zeus was favoured by *Alexander(3) the Great and some Roman emperors, especially *Hadrian (see olympieum).