#Poseidon

God of the sea, earthquakes and horses; brother of Zeus and Hades.

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.

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 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

A severed, snake-haired head with wide staring eyes and mouth open in a scream, blood streaming from the neck, dark serpents writhing outward from the scalp against a green convex ground ringed by a gilt border — Caravaggio's Medusa, painted on a ceremonial parade shield, showing the Gorgon's face in the instant after decapitation.

Greek

Medusa and the Gorgons

A face no one could look at and live, and a hero who beat it by refusing to look. The only mortal monster in a family of immortal ones, killed in her sleep.

5 minHesiod

A dim rock cave opening onto a sunlit autumn wood. Two nude, bearded men creep out beneath the bellies of Polyphemus's heavy-fleeced rams: one at left, half in shadow, clings low against a dark ram's underside with his legs drawn up, watching warily; a second, already at the bright mouth of the cave at right, twists his head back over his shoulder as he clears the entrance. The blinded giant is not shown — only his flock and the escaping men — so the whole picture is the ram-escape held at the knife-edge instant before the open air, tense and hushed in Eckersberg's cool Neoclassical light.

Greek

Odysseus and the Cyclops

He beat a giant with a lie and a sharpened stake, then threw it all away for the pleasure of hearing the monster learn his name.

7 minHomer

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