Tag: Greek Mythology
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Andromeda
Unknown Artist, c.1800, National Trust for Scotland, Brodick Castle, Garden & Country Park Andromeda was the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, Cepheus being the King of the Ethiopians. When Cassiopeia boasted of her beauty being greater than that of the Nereids (the 50 daughters of the ‘Old Man of the Sea’ Nereus and the Oceanid…
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Myth – A world of the imagination
“Zeus, first cause, prime mover; for what thing without Zeus is done among mortals?”– Aeschylus, Agamemnon The Greek gods were not local in their interests or powers: they held sway over the whole world. Ancient Greeks had access to a huge reserve of fabulous tales about these gods’ about a very different universe, one full of not…
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The Argonautica
The Argo, by Constantine Volanakis, c. 1800 One of the oldest sources for the story of Jason and the Argonauts is the Argonautica, an epic poem in the same vein as Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey, written by Apollonius of Rhodes. Apollonius was an inspiration to the Latin poets Virgil and Flaccus when they wrote their own epic poems, and he was both innovative and…
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The Death of Cygnus
Praise for Tales from Ovid: ‘A breathtaking book…To compare his versions with the Latin is to be awestruck again and again by the range and ingenuity of his poetic intelligence…He rescues the old gods and goddesses from the classical dictionaries and gives them back their terror. There should be a copy of his book in…
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Hesiod & The Five Ages of Mankind
Marble bust of Hesiod The Five Ages of Man is a creation story written by a Greek shepherd named Hesiod, who lived somewhere between 776 BC and 650 BC, who along with Homer was one of the epic writers of Greek poetry. It is likely that Hesiod ‘borrowed’ some of his poem from an unidentified…
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Peleus and Thetis
Praise for Tales from Ovid: ‘A breathtaking book…To compare his versions with the Latin is to be awestruck again and again by the range and ingenuity of his poetic intelligence…He rescues the old gods and goddesses from the classical dictionaries and gives them back their terror. There should be a copy of his book in…
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Ovid
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) Ancient Italy — Ovid Banished From RomeExhibited 1838 Oil on canvas © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY This work treats the ancient poet Ovid’s purported exile from Rome, reconstructed here as a panoply of temples, triumphal arches, and statuary from different periods of the city’s…
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Erisychthon
Adam Cvijanovic (American citizen, born 1959) Erysichthon, oil on Masonite Praise for Tales from Ovid: ‘A breathtaking book…To compare his versions with the Latin is to be awestruck again and again by the range and ingenuity of his poetic intelligence…He rescues the old gods and goddesses from the classical dictionaries and gives them back their…
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Prometheus – The Titan who created Mankind
Prometheus, possibly meaning “forethought” is a god of fire and his adaptability in the face of brutality has become legendary. He is known across the world for defying the Zeus by stealing fire from him and giving it to humanity in the form of technology and civilization. His story inspired the famous Greek play Prometheus Bound. In the time before…
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Actaeon
Praise for Tales from Ovid: ‘A breathtaking book…To compare his versions with the Latin is to be awestruck again and again by the range and ingenuity of his poetic intelligence…He rescues the old gods and goddesses from the classical dictionaries and gives them back their terror. There should be a copy of his book in…
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