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Heracles shows his capacity for thinking outside the box, but spoils it by trying to be just a little bit too clever.
Heracles has murdered his children in a fit of anger, and is performing a series of ‘Labours’ for his cousin King Eurystheus, to work off his guilt. Eurystheus would be just as happy if Heracles perished in his Labours, and in sending him now to clean out the stables of Augeas, King of Elis, appears to hope he can disgust him to death.
As penance for involuntary manslaughter, Heracles was sentenced to slavery under the playful rod of Omphale, Queen of Lydia.
After completing his Twelve Labours for King Eurystheus, Heracles gave his wife Megara a divorce, since he had killed their children in a fit of madness, and turned his attention to Iole, daughter of King Eurytus. Eurytus was not keen for Iole to suffer Megara’s fate, but Iole’s brother Iphitus backed the hero; which made it all the more unfortunate that Heracles then accidentally killed him.
Now that King Odysseus has failed to return from the Siege of Troy, the earls of Ithaca are eager to marry his lovely widow.
Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey tells of the many adventures of Odysseus, King of the island of Ithaca in the Ionian Sea, as he returned home from the Trojan War after almost two decades away. Penelope, his grieving queen, has all but given up hope of seeing him again, and is under increasing pressure from Odysseus’s greedy earls to marry again.
A little fable from ancient Greece about those political activists who make a living from stirring up controversy.
The ancient Greeks were the first European people to form democratic governments. The experiment was not without its problems, chief among them being the ambitious ‘demagogues’ or ‘leaders of the people’ who made a living out of setting citizens against each other. The phenomenon did not escape the notice of the storyteller Aesop.
By day Danaus had to watch his fifty unhappy daughters marry their fifty cruel cousins, but the wedding night was yet to come.
The fifty daughters of Danaus, a mythical ruler dwelling on the banks of the River Nile, are chiefly remembered for murdering all but one of their fifty husbands on their wedding night, and for the hopeless doom to which the stern rulers of Hades put them. And yet what mortal, knowing the girls’ whole story, could not feel pity for them?
Trapped in Crete with his son Icarus, the craftsman and inventor Daedalus realises a bold and desperate plan to get away.
In a paroxysm of envy, the great craftsman Daedalus murdered his nephew, who seemed likely surpass him in skill, and the sentence of Athens’s highest court was death. Daedalus managed to flee to Crete, but King Minos made life as hateful there as in any prison. So Daedalus fashioned wings for himself and his son Icarus, and prepared to fly to freedom.
Joseph Addison tells the legend of the great Greek poetess Sappho and the Lover’s Leap.
Sappho was born in about 612 BC on the island of Mytilene (Lesbos), and became one of the great love poets of ancient Greece. She belonged to an intimate sorority dedicated to Aphrodite and the Muses; she had a daughter named Clëis; and she had three brothers. Few other facts are known. Even the tale of her death is a melodramatic legend; but it has furnished us with the ‘lover’s leap’.