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#Zeus

Sky-father, king of the Olympians.

A young woman with loose auburn hair, in a blue gown under a rose-red mantle with a jewelled clasp, rests her right hand on the ornamented lid of a great lidded ceramic jar at the left — a satyr-mask moulded on its swelling belly — as if about to lift it; ivy climbs a broken pillar behind her against a stormy blue sky.
Greek

Pandora, the First Woman

The gods pooled their gifts to build one flawless girl, then handed her to mankind as a punishment; when she lifted the lid of a jar, only Hope stayed behind.

5 minHesiod
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 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
The young Hermes, unbearded and long-haired, wearing the winged traveller's hat (petasos) with its pale feathers spread at either side. A coral-rose mantle is clasped at one shoulder with a gold brooch and falls across his bare torso; he stands against a dark ground, his head turned to gaze aside.
Greek

Hermes, the Messenger God

Born at dawn, he had invented the lyre and stolen a god's cattle before nightfall. The trickster who talks his way onto Olympus and walks the dead down to Hades.

6 minHomeric Hymn 4
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
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 youthful Bacchus reclining behind a stone table, bare-shouldered in a loose white robe and crowned with an autumnal wreath of grapevine leaves and dark grape clusters. He holds out a shallow footed glass of red wine in his left hand while the fingers of his right toy with the black bow of his sash. A large glass carafe of red wine stands at the lower left, and a heaped bowl of fruit — grapes, apples, a pear, a split pomegranate and figs — sits before him against a dark ground.
Greek

Dionysus, God of Wine and Ecstasy

The twice-born stranger who turns pirates into dolphins and a mother into her son's killer, the loosener of cares who is lethal to anyone who denies him.

6 minEuripides
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
Diana the huntress striding through a dark wood, a gold mantle slipping from her shoulders, reaching back to draw a white-fletched arrow from the quiver at her side while a red recurve bow hangs in her lowered hand. A lean white hound courses at her feet, and a lake glimmers through the trees behind her.
Greek

Artemis, the Huntress

The small child who climbed onto her father's knee and asked for a bow, eternal maidenhood and all the mountains in the world, then took them.

5 minHomeric Hymn 27
The young Apollo, unbearded and golden-curled, a soft halo of light behind his head, a rose mantle slipping from one shoulder. He holds a laurel branch in his right hand; a lyre rests at his left side and the white-fletched arrows of his quiver show above his shoulder.
Greek

Apollo, God of Light and Prophecy

The newborn who burst his swaddling bands to claim the lyre, the bow and the truth of Zeus, then killed a dragon to found the oracle that spoke for him.

5 minHomeric Hymn 3
A nude Aphrodite risen waist-deep from a grey-blue sea, wringing the water from the long rope of her hair as she looks aside, a scallop shell adrift on the swell beside her.
Greek

Aphrodite, Goddess of Love

Born from sea-foam and the severed flesh of Heaven, the goddess whose power bent gods and beasts alike, and whom only three could resist.

5 minHesiod