mythology timeless tales of gods and heroes by edith hamilton

Homer makes Poseidon say that he rules the sea, Hades the dead, Zeus the heavens, but Olympus is common to all three. But only a little further on he says that if he willed he could hang earth and sea from a pinnacle of Olympus, clearly no longer a mountain. In one passage of the Iliad Zeus talks to the gods from “the topmost peak of many-ridged Olympus,” clearly a mountain. But even in the earliest Greek poem, the Iliad, this idea is beginning to give way to the idea of an Olympus in some mysterious region far above all the mountains of the earth. Olympus in Thessaly, in the northeast of Greece. There is no doubt that at first it was held to be a mountain top, and generally identified with Greece’s highest mountain, Mt. What Olympus was, however, is not easy to say. They were called the Olympians because Olympus was their home. The twelve great Olympians were supreme among the gods who succeeded to the Titans.

These alone among the older gods were not banished with the coming of Zeus, but they took a lower place. The other notable Titans were O CEAN, the river that was supposed to encircle the earth his wife T ETHYS H YPERION, the father of the sun, the moon, and the dawn M NEMOSYNE, which means Memory T HEMIS, usually translated by Justice and I APETUS, important because of his sons, A TLAS, who bore the world on his shoulders, and P ROMETHEUS, who was the savior of mankind. The Romans said that when Jupiter, their name for Zeus, ascended the throne, Saturn fled to Italy and brought in the Golden Age, a time of perfect peace and happiness, which lasted as long as he reigned. He ruled over the other Titans until his son Zeus dethroned him and seized the power for himself. The most important was C RONUS, in Latin S ATURN. There were many of them, but only a few appear in the stories of mythology.

They were of enormous size and of incredible strength. The Titans, often called the Elder Gods, were for untold ages supreme in the universe. THE TITANS AND THE TWELVE GREAT OLYMPIANS The Titans were their children, and the gods were their grandchildren. Before there were gods heaven and earth had been formed. It was the other way about: the universe created the gods.

The Greeks did not believe that the gods created the universe. They breathe of that far world wherefrom they come, Strange clouded fragments of an ancient glory,

Mythology timeless tales of gods and heroes by edith hamilton