Ancient Greece

Click here to visit a web site describing the Greek pantheon.

Cool. I didn't know about the first 4 classes before.

There almost seems to be a hierarchy of "Godness" moving from something like Deism in the first class toward more "human" gods and minor magical creatures. Very interesting.

Yes, it is. I highly recommend Edith Hamilton's mythology, and her excellent book, The Greek Way. Old Edith was somewhat obsessive about them Greek boys and girls.

Of equal interest, in my never humble opinion, are the novels of Mary Renault, who wrote novels bringing to life the heroes and heroines admired by classical Greece. I'm off to find a list of those novels for you . . .

Here ya go, the historical novels of Mary Renault. Any good library can get these for you, they were always very popular.

The Last of the Wine
The King Must Die
The Bull from the Sea
The Mask of Apollo
Fire from Heaven
The Persian Boy
Funeral Games

For just this once, I totally agree with Set on both counts.

Is the world about to end?

(Mary Renault, btw, wrote not only of Greek divinities but her novels based on the life of Alexander of Macedon (Alex the 'Great') are among the best reading of this sort I've ever run across.)

Addendum: I was particularly fascinated by Fire from Heaven, an account of Alexander's childhood in the palace of his besotted father (Philip) and his homicidally psychotic mother.

Ah . . . his ma weren't psychotic . . . she was just misunderstood . . .

In the book '100 Tyrants' Alexander the Great is in the list. It is rumored that he or his mother poisoned Philip of Macedon fearing losing his heir to the throne as Philip married a second wife. Alexander's success really was his father's system of phalanges and siege buckets and greek-fire that he used on Tyre.

I would agree that Alexander profited from his father's very thorough military machine, and in particular the officers who had served under Philip. However, you need to read further. Philip who was polygamous for political reasons, took a seventh wife, Cleopatra, and she bore him a son and daughter. After the assassination of Philip, his fourth wife, Olympias of Epirus, the mother of Alexander, murdered Cleopatra's children, and Cleopatra ended up taking her own life. Philip was not poisoned, he was assassinated by Pausanias, who was himself cut down and killed at the scene of the murder.

That's about three seasons of daytime drama right there.

Thanks!

From childhood he was a sort of a hero of mine but further reading shows he had a very dark side. There is an author who has written an historical novel of Aristotle tutoring young Alexander. She was a Philosophy major at University.

Oh man, Philip and his seven or eight wives put Henry VIII to shame. Philip married them serially, without recourse to death or divorce. At least three seasons . . .

Alexander certainly had a screwed up childhood, but i don't happen to have a very high opinion of him. Philip was pretty screwy, but not really that odd by the standards of his day. I ascribe most of Alexander's success to the military organization created by Philip, the officers trained by Philip, and the excellent logistical system which he had already put in place for the Persian expedition before he was assassinated.

By the way, although i should have done it before i posted, i did later check several of the near contemporary sources for the lives of Philip and Alexander (i know of no reliable contemporary sources), and it is entirely possible that Olympias murdered Cleopatra Eurydice, rather than that she committed suicide, and even that Alexander conspired in that. There is nothing like general agreement about these events among ancient sources, so i probably should not have spoken wish such an air of authority.

Given what we know of Epirus, and the likelihood that Philip relied upon Epirote officers and levies, the marriage to Olympias may well have been the most important marriage he contracted. In terms of their military culture, the Epirotes were every bit as formidable as the Macedonians. A couple of generations after the death of Alexander, Pyrrhus, the King of Epirus, was contracted by the Italic League--the Greek colonial city states of the south of what is now Italy--to deal with the Romans, who were then threatening the autonomy of those cities. He defeated the Romans several times, although at great cost to himself--the term "Pyrrhic victory" means a battle won at a cost to the victor greater than what has been accomplished. After the battle of Heraclea, in which the more extravagent ancient accounts have him destroying the equivalent of a full consular army (about 12,000 men), he was said to have looked on the Roman dead, all lying in windrows in their former lines, facing the army which had vanquished them, and wept, saying that with an army such as that, he could conquer the world. He went on to conquer and briefly hold Sicily (for about three years), but the Gauls overran Macedonia, which was to have protected Epirus in his absence, and he was an unsettled man, constantly eaten up by dreams of conquest, and he eventually died fighting the Spartans and the Argives in the Argolid.

Nevertheless, three generations before the birth of Pyrrhus, the marriage of Philip to Olympias would have secured a valuable ally for Macedonia, and at the least would have secured his only threatened flank on the eve of his invasion of Greece. It is not certain, but many modern historians believe that the Epriotes were an important part of Philip's military machine, both in terms of troops and of capable officers. Not every Epirote was a Pyrrhus--reckoned by many writers of antiquity to have been one of the greatest generals of the antique world--but they were good material.

I read that Alexander was a sociopath, had a very bad temper and very violent. He had a deformity of the neck was of short stature but very athletic and was very intelligent.

My grandmother kept ancient Greece in an old soup-tin by the sink. I'm not exactly sure how many gods and goddesses were in the ancient Greece, but they must have been rather small ones.