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#Grief And Mourning

Loss, lament, and its consequences.

A white marble statue of a nude, laurel-crowned Theseus lunging forward with a club raised overhead in one hand, gripping the horned head of the bull-headed Minotaur with the other as the beast collapses beneath him over a fallen youth, set against a soft-focus ground of bare trees and pale stonework.
Greek

Theseus, Hero of Athens

A prince who chose the killers' road, unwound a thread through the dark to end a monster, and forgot a single sail. The founder Athens made in its own image, remembered for what he built and what he abandoned.

6 minPlutarch
An engraving of a colossal, heavily muscled Hercules standing frontally, the Nemean lion-skin worn as a hood over his head and draped down his left side, the knotted olive-wood club resting over his right shoulder; small background vignettes show his combats with Antaeus, Cacus and Achelous in a classical landscape.
Greek

Heracles, the Greatest Hero

The strongman son of Zeus strangled serpents in his cradle and cleaned the world of monsters, but the labour that made him a god began in the ruin of his own house.

6 minPseudo-Apollodorus
A Baroque painting of Daedalus and Icarus. The aged, balding, grey-bearded Daedalus stands behind his son in a russet-orange robe, one hand steadying a great feathered wing (one pinion pale, one dark) at the boy's shoulder while the other hand rises with a raised, admonishing finger, as though giving a warning. In front of him the youthful, bare-torsoed Icarus, with tousled golden hair and a red drape falling from his hips, gazes out past the viewer, one arm extended. The background is a plain, shadowed studio wall.
Greek

Daedalus and Icarus

A caged inventor reasons that if the sea and the land are watched, the sky at least lies open. He builds his son a pair of wings, and gives him one rule to keep him alive.

6 minOvid