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#Kingship And Power

Sovereignty among gods, succession, rule and its legitimacy.

An Attic red-figure pelike, the whole black-glazed vessel standing against a plain grey ground, its belly panel bordered by a band of tongues above and running dot-chains at the sides. In the scene the Titaness Rhea, at left in a long pleated chiton and mantle with her hair bound in a fillet, steps forward and holds out in both hands the stone wrapped in swaddling clothes; facing her at right the bearded Kronos, in a himation that leaves one shoulder bare and a soft cap, grips a long sceptre in his trailing hand and raises his other hand to receive the bundle he believes is his newborn son — the swaddled-stone deception that founds the ruling family.
Greek

The Twelve Olympians: The Ruling Family

There is no ancient list of the Twelve. What the oldest poets give us instead is a household with a throne room, a swallowed generation, and a family quarrel that never quite ends.

7 minHesiod
A dark, teeming Mannerist canvas of the defeated Titans hurled from the sky. From a luminous break in the storm-clouds at the top, a mass of muscular nude figures tumbles headlong and foreshortened into the depths, limbs flailing and faces contorted in terror. They pile into a heap of straining bodies across the foreground, ruddy and pale flesh tangled together; one massive figure sprawls face-up at the centre, mouth open in a scream, his hair standing on end. At the lower left a standing youth grips a burning torch while a black hound's fanged head snarls beside him, and a few small butterflies and insects — the painter's emblems of the fleeting — rest on the fallen limbs.
Greek

The Titanomachy

For ten years the sky itself hung in the balance, until Zeus loosed the hundred-armed prisoners of the deep and the world caught fire.

8 minHesiod
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
A grey-bearded, muscular sea-god shown half-length and nude to the waist, a grey-green drape at his hips, gripping a three-pronged trident in his right hand. Behind his shoulder a ship's spar wound with rope and a carved trident emblem sit against a dark wooden ground, with the incised inscription "A·DORIA" at upper left.
Greek

Poseidon, Lord of the Sea

He drew the grey sea by lot and never forgave a slight, splitting rock with his trident to raise storms, drown heroes and shake the earth itself.

5 minHesiod
A nude young hero in a winged cap holds aloft the severed, snake-haired head of Medusa in his raised left hand and a curved sickle in his lowered right, his own gaze cast down and away from the trophy; the Gorgon's decapitated body slumps beneath his feet on an ornate pedestal against a plain pale wall — Benvenuto Cellini's bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence.
Greek

Perseus, Slayer of Medusa

Locked in a bronze cell, cast to sea in a chest, sent for a head no man could look at and live. The hero who won by never looking, and killed his grandfather by accident.

6 minPseudo-Apollodorus
Marble statue of Hera as queen, standing veiled in a long chiton and himation with a diadem band across her brow, her raised right hand holding a sceptre and her extended left hand bearing a shallow offering dish.
Greek

Hera, Queen of Olympus

The goddess of marriage who ruled beside Zeus and warred against him in the same breath, dressing for seduction as a strategy of state.

6 minHomer
A marble bust of Hades — a mature, heavy-bearded god with thick wavy hair falling to the shoulders, deep-set blank eyes and a furrowed, stern brow, gazing off to the side. A dark near-black marble mantle (a modern restoration) is draped over his right shoulder, set against a plain grey ground.
Greek

Hades, Lord of the Dead

He drew the darkness by lot, not by choice, and the Greeks feared his name so much they called him the Rich One instead.

5 minHesiod
The birth of Minerva. High on the clouds of Olympus the newborn goddess strides out full-grown in a golden plumed helmet, a levelled spear in one hand and a round shield at the other, her violet and grey mantle streaming behind her. Below reclines Jupiter in rose drapery with his eagle at his feet; at his side a muscular bearded god raises the double axe that has just split the god's skull, while Mercury, a trident-bearing Neptune and other Olympians look on from the surrounding clouds.
Greek

Athena, Goddess of Wisdom and War

She was born from her father's skull in full armour, spear already levelled, and the whole of Olympus reeled at the sight of a daughter equal to Zeus.

5 minHesiod
A luminous creator-figure sits enthroned at the centre of the newborn cosmos, arms outspread to draw the concentric spheres of the world out of formless Chaos, while personified winds and elements billow in the four corners — an engraved frontispiece to Ovid's Metamorphoses Book I
Greek

The Birth of the Cosmos

Before there was a world there was only a gap, and out of that yawning dark the first gods came to be.

8 minHesiod