Greek Mythology

"The Greeks shape bronze statues so real they seem to breathe, And carve cold marble until it almost comes to life. The Greeks compose great orations, and measure The heavens so well they can predict the rising of the stars. But you, Romans, remember your great arts; To govern the peoples with authority, To establish peace under the rule of law, To conquer the mighty, and show them mercy once they are conquered."

– Virgil, Aeneid VI

"AND THEN ALONG CAME ZEUS"

– What happens in 99% of all Greek Myths

In the days when printing was not a thing, when people partook in wars and fought in arenas, there were poets and scriptors who's pen is yet unmatched by modern orators. In the ancient times of the Bronze Age, and even before, were forged tales of might, gods and heroes. Tragedies written in the name of immortal beings who ruled over every element of this very world. This was an age undreamed of. Without these tales, perhaps men would have not heard of magical stories, of divinity, of fantastic beasts and impressive feats beyond all that is earthly and orderly... And the many tall tales of gods fucking like rabbits.

This is Greek Mythology.

No seriously, perhaps the closest we ever got to ancient ass fantasy lore (along with the lost texts of Norse Mythology) is this. Greek poets and artists from all across the land spent centuries, perhaps even beyond a millenia, forging the stories that would inspire modern authors, which would in time lead to the creation of the Fantasy genre as a whole.

The Roman Connection

The civilization of Rome had its own original native mythology. However, they also hugely admired the Greeks, their neighbors and also the guys who kind of beat them to the civilization game. With both civilizations being polytheists, the result was that the Romans did a lot of mythological cross-pollination, adopting many of the Greek gods as their own, just giving them different names and sometimes putting different spins on them. For example, we draw the current names of the planets in Earth's solar system - Mercury, Mars, Venus, Uranus, Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, Pluto - from the Roman names for Greek gods, such as Hermes, Ares, Aphrodites, Poseidon, Zeus and Hades. Greeks viewed Ares with disdain, denouncing him as the embodiment of bloodlust, savagery and the ugly brutalities of War, whilst the Roman Mars was a revered god of honor, courage, strength and leadership, closer more to the Greek Athena.

Classical Mythology?

A common alternative name for Greek Mythology, after "Greco-Roman Mythology", is "Classical Mythology". That's because Greco-Roman Mythology is the one ancient pre-Christian religion that survived best during the rise of the Christian powers of Europe during the Dark Age. Whilst the Christians of the Roman Empire had stamped out the political powers once held by the pagan priesthoods, the lore of Rome and through it Greece was still very strongly baked into Roman culture, and it resisted the erasure that other pagan cultures like the various Celtic peoples of Europe or the Vikings would experience. Plus, the Greeks and the Romans wrote shit down, so there were lots and lots and we mean lots of texts written by pagan Greeks and Romans rather than all of the responsibility for passing on that lore being instead left to Christian monks who had... shall we say a certain bias about what they actually wrote down? That helped a lot in making sure there Greco-Roman myths and tales were never lost like the Celtic lores would be.

Enter the Renaissance, when the newly emerging non-Christian Monk-based scholarly class looked to these ancient Greek and Roman texts (often copies of copies traded over from the Islamic world), and basically went "wow, that's really neat!" Add to it the huge importance that being able to trace their roots back to the Roman Empire was given by the early Christian monarchies of Europe and the end result was that Greek and Roman Mythology experienced a resurgence of popularity throughout Europe, often being romanticised in all sorts of ways

This meant in turn that, until the mid-1900s or so, the Greek and Roman Mythologies were the only Pre-Christian Mythology that European students had to study, so they became associated heavily with the lost "golden age" of the Classical Period.

Gods

Primordial Gods

• Chronos
• Uranus
• Gaea

Olympian Gods

• Zeus
• Hera
• Hades
• Ares
• Apollo
• Athena
• Artemis
• Dionysius

Sea and Water Gods

• Poseidon

Demi-Gods

• Heracles/Hercules

Monsters

• Minotaur
• Medusa and the Gorgons
• Harpy
• Centaur
• Nymph - Oread, Dryad, Naiad
• Satyr
• Faun
• Hydra