The Beginning: Chaos and Creation
In the beginning, there was Chaos — a formless void from which everything emerged. From Chaos came the first primordial beings: Gaia (Earth), Tartarus (the Abyss), Eros (Love), Erebus (Darkness), and Nyx (Night).
Gaia gave birth to Uranus (the Sky), and together they produced the twelve Titans, the three Cyclopes, and the three Hecatoncheires (Hundred-Handed Ones).
The Age of Titans
Uranus, fearing his children's power, imprisoned the Cyclopes and Hecatoncheires in Tartarus. Gaia, furious, convinced her youngest Titan son Cronus to castrate his father with an adamantine sickle.
Cronus took power and ruled during the Golden Age — a paradise where humans lived without toil or suffering. But Cronus too became a tyrant, swallowing each of his children to prevent a prophecy that his own child would overthrow him.
The Titanomachy: War of the Titans
Rhea saved baby Zeus by hiding him on Crete and feeding Cronus a stone wrapped in blankets. Zeus grew to adulthood, freed his swallowed siblings (Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon), and waged a ten-year war against the Titans.
With the help of the Cyclopes (who forged Zeus's thunderbolt, Poseidon's trident, and Hades' Helm of Darkness) and the Hecatoncheires, the Olympians won. The Titans were cast into Tartarus.
The Olympian Era
Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades divided the cosmos by drawing lots. Zeus got the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the Underworld. Mount Olympus became the seat of divine power.
The Olympians then faced Typhon, the most terrifying monster ever born — a creature with a hundred dragon heads. Zeus defeated him after a tremendous battle and buried him beneath Mount Etna.
The Age of Heroes
The gods began interacting with mortals, producing demigod heroes. The great heroic sagas unfolded: Perseus slaying Medusa, Heracles completing his Twelve Labors, Jason sailing for the Golden Fleece, Theseus defeating the Minotaur, and Bellerophon riding Pegasus against the Chimera.
Oedipus solved the Sphinx's riddle and became king of Thebes, only to discover he had fulfilled the terrible prophecy of killing his father and marrying his mother.
The Trojan War
The single greatest event in Greek mythology began when Eris threw a golden apple "For the Fairest" among the goddesses. Paris of Troy judged the contest, chose Aphrodite, and was rewarded with Helen of Sparta — the most beautiful woman alive.
Paris took Helen to Troy, and a thousand Greek ships launched to bring her back. The war lasted ten years and involved nearly every major hero and god. Achilles, Hector, Ajax, Odysseus, Patroclus, and countless others fought and died.
Troy fell to Odysseus's trick: the Trojan Horse. The city was sacked, and the surviving Greeks began their journeys home — the most famous being Odysseus's ten-year odyssey.
The Aftermath
After the Trojan War, the Age of Heroes drew to a close. Agamemnon returned home to be murdered by his wife. Orestes avenged his father. Odysseus finally reached Ithaca after twenty years away. And the great mythological era faded into the age of ordinary mortals.
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Hesiod's Five Ages of humankind
Alongside the succession of gods, Hesiod's Works and Days gives a separate timeline for human beings, told as a decline through five races, each made by the gods:
- The Golden Race lived under Cronus, free of toil and old age, and died as if falling asleep. They became kindly spirits who watch over mortals.
- The Silver Race stayed children for a hundred years, then lived briefly and foolishly, refusing to honour the gods. Zeus put them away.
- The Bronze Race was violent, with bronze weapons and bronze houses, and destroyed itself.
- The Race of Heroes, the demigods, is the one exception to the decline: better and more just than the bronze men. These are the warriors who fell at Thebes and Troy; some were taken to the Islands of the Blessed.
- The Iron Race is Hesiod's own: endless labour, grief, and injustice, a race Zeus will also destroy.
Ovid's Metamorphoses drops the Heroes and uses four metal ages, which is why some modern books list only Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron.
Events the usual timeline leaves out
Prometheus and Pandora. Between the Olympian victory and the heroes come the stories of how mortals got their lot. At Mekone, Prometheus tricked Zeus into choosing bones wrapped in fat as the gods' share of sacrifice. Zeus withheld fire; Prometheus stole it; Zeus answered with Pandora and her jar of evils.
The Flood. Zeus later sent a great flood to wipe out humanity. Deucalion, son of Prometheus, and his wife Pyrrha, daughter of Pandora, survived in a chest (Apollodorus) or a small boat (Ovid) and repopulated the earth by throwing stones over their shoulders. Their son Hellen gave his name to the Hellenes, so the flood marks the start of Greek genealogy in many accounts. In Ovid, it follows the crime of Lycaon, who served human flesh to Zeus.
The founding houses. The heroic age is organised by families. Cadmus founded Thebes after following a cow and sowing the teeth of a dragon. Danaus came to Argos from Egypt, and from his line came Perseus, and from Perseus' line came Heracles. Minos ruled Crete. Pelops won his bride by chariot race and gave his name to the Peloponnese; his grandsons were Agamemnon and Menelaus.
Fitting the heroes into generations
Myths become much easier to follow when you line up the heroes by generation, because the ancient poets did exactly that.
- Generation of Heracles and the Argonauts. Jason's crew included Heracles (in some versions only for part of the voyage), Peleus, Telamon, Castor and Polydeuces, and Orpheus. The Calydonian Boar Hunt gathered many of the same people, along with Atalanta. Heracles also sacked Troy a first time, after King Laomedon refused him the promised horses; Homer mentions this raid in the Iliad.
- Generation of Theseus and Oedipus. Theseus overlaps with Heracles in some stories; in Euripides' Heracles he takes in his friend after Heracles has killed his own children. In Thebes, Oedipus' sons fought the war of the Seven Against Thebes.
- Generation of the Epigoni. The sons of the Seven, the Epigoni ("the after-born"), returned and took Thebes ten years later. Two of them, Diomedes and Sthenelus, then fought at Troy. In the Iliad Sthenelus boasts that they captured seven-gated Thebes, which their fathers could not.
- Generation of Troy. The Trojan heroes are the children of the Argonauts: Achilles is the son of Peleus, Great Ajax the son of Telamon.
- Generation of the returns. Orestes, Telemachus, and Neoptolemus close the cycle. Later legend took the sons of Heracles, the Heraclidae, back into the Peloponnese, and the Greeks connected this "return" with the arrival of the Dorians.
How the Greeks dated mythical events
Ancient historians treated the heroic age as real history and tried to give it dates. Herodotus placed Homer and Hesiod about four hundred years before his own time and Heracles about nine hundred years before. Thucydides wrote that the Boeotians settled Boeotia sixty years after the fall of Troy and that the Dorians came twenty years after that. The scholar Eratosthenes fixed the fall of Troy at what we call 1184/3 BC, and the Parian Marble, an inscribed chronicle from the third century BC, gives a date close to it. These dates broadly fit the end of the Late Bronze Age, when the Mycenaean palaces fell and when the city at Hisarlık, generally identified as Troy, was destroyed. Whether a real war lies behind the legend is still debated. For a full account of the war itself see the Trojan War page, and for the earlier divine wars, the Titanomachy.
Ancient sources
- Hesiod, Works and Days 106–201 — the myth of the five races of humankind, from the Golden to the Iron.
- Ovid, Metamorphoses 1 — the four ages, the crime of Lycaon, the flood, and Deucalion and Pyrrha.
- Apollodorus, Library — the most complete genealogical framework, family by family, from the gods to the Heraclidae.
- Homer, Iliad 4 and 5 — Sthenelus' boast about the capture of Thebes, and Heracles' earlier sack of Troy under Laomedon.
- Herodotus, Histories 2.53 and 2.145 — his estimates for the dates of Homer, Hesiod, and Heracles.
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.12 — the movements of peoples after the Trojan War.
Frequently asked questions
What came first in Greek mythology?
In Hesiod's Theogony, Chaos came first. Then came Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros. Other traditions, such as the Orphic poems or Homer's passing reference to Oceanus as the origin of the gods, start differently.
When did the Trojan War take place?
Within myth, it falls in the last generation of the heroic age. Ancient scholars dated the fall of Troy to around 1184 BC, which matches the destruction of Bronze Age Troy that archaeologists have found, though that does not prove the war happened as the poems describe.
Did Heracles live before or after the Trojan War?
Before. Heracles belongs to the previous generation; he sailed with the Argonauts and sacked Troy once himself. His son Tlepolemus fought at Troy, and Philoctetes used Heracles' bow to help take the city.
What are the ages of man in Greek mythology?
Hesiod lists five: Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron. Ovid's later version leaves out the Heroic Age, giving four.