Greek mythology

Who they were, where, and how we know

The ancient Greeks lived in Greece, on the islands of the Aegean Sea, on the coast of today's Turkey and, from the 8th century BC, also in Sicily and southern Italy, the so-called Magna Graecia. They had no single holy book: myths passed from mouth to mouth, changed from city to city, and every poet told them in his own way.

We know them because they were written down. The oldest are Homer's poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey (about the 8th century BC), and Hesiod's Theogony (around 700 BC), which tells how the gods were born. Then came the great tragedians of the 5th century BC and, much later, the «Library» attributed to Apollodorus (1st-2nd century AD), a handbook that puts the stories in order.

At the centre are the twelve gods of Olympus: Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes and one of Hestia or Dionysus. Beside them stand heroes such as Heracles, Theseus and Odysseus, and monsters such as the Minotaur, Medusa and the Hydra.