Reels tagged #greek
Medusa was cursed, not born a monster
In Ovid's telling, Medusa was a beautiful priestess of Athena. After Poseidon assaulted her in the goddess's temple, Athena punished Medusa instead of him, turning her hair into serpents and her gaze to stone.
Icarus fell because he ignored both warnings
Daedalus told his son not to fly too high, where the sun would melt the wax of his wings, nor too low, where sea spray would soak the feathers. Icarus soared toward the sun and the wings came apart over the Aegean.
The labyrinth was designed to be inescapable
Daedalus built the Cretan labyrinth so cunningly that he barely escaped it himself. Theseus survived only because Ariadne gave him a thread to unwind as he walked into the dark.
Pandora's box was actually a jar
The Greek original describes a pithos, a large storage jar. A mistranslation in the 16th century turned it into a box. When it opened, every evil escaped and only hope was left inside.
Sisyphus was punished for cheating death twice
He tricked Thanatos into chains so no one could die, then talked his way out of the underworld. Zeus sentenced him to roll a boulder uphill forever, watching it roll back each time.
Cerberus guarded the exit, not the entrance
The three-headed hound of Hades let the dead walk in freely. His job was to make sure none of them ever walked back out, which is why Orpheus had to charm him with music.
Atlas holds up the sky, not the earth
Greek myth punishes Atlas by making him carry the celestial sphere on his shoulders. Renaissance artists drew him holding a globe, and books of maps have been called atlases ever since.
Orpheus lost Eurydice with one glance
His music persuaded Hades to release his wife on one condition: he must not look back until both reached the surface. Steps from daylight he turned, and she was pulled back forever.
Mount Olympus is a real mountain you can climb
The home of the Greek gods is a genuine 2,917-metre massif in northern Greece. Its summit, Mytikas, was first recorded as climbed in 1913 and now draws thousands of hikers a year.
Troy turned out to be a real city
For centuries the Trojan War was considered pure legend, until excavations in the 1870s in northwest Turkey uncovered a layered city at Hisarlik matching Homer's descriptions.