#Hubris — The Mytheum

The Victory Stele of Naram-Sin: a tall pink-sandstone monument carved in relief. The Akkadian king Naram-Suen, wearing a horned helmet of divinity and carrying a bow and spear, climbs a wooded mountain above his soldiers, who advance in file; his defeated enemies fall, flee and beg beneath him, and sun-and-star glyphs of the gods shine over the peak.

The Curse of Agade

A king took axes to the god's own house, packed the temple's gold into leather bags, and loaded it onto ships. So the poets, four centuries after the city fell, explained why Agade vanished from the earth.

6 min'The cursing of Agade'

Diana the huntress striding through a dark wood, a gold mantle slipping from her shoulders, reaching back to draw a white-fletched arrow from the quiver at her side while a red recurve bow hangs in her lowered hand. A lean white hound courses at her feet, and a lake glimmers through the trees behind her.

Greek

Artemis, the Huntress

The small child who climbed onto her father's knee and asked for a bow, eternal maidenhood and all the mountains in the world, then took them.

5 minHomeric Hymn 27

A black-figure Panathenaic prize amphora: the goddess Athena Promachos strides to the left between two columns, helmeted, brandishing a spear and holding a round shield, her aegis across her chest.

Greek

Athena, Goddess of Wisdom and War

She was born from her father's skull in full armour, spear already levelled, and the whole of Olympus reeled at the sight of a daughter equal to Zeus.

5 minHesiod

A Roman fresco in the Third Style: the Cyclops Polyphemus, a giant seated in a landscape, receives the cup of wine as the sea-nymph Galatea rides a dolphin across the sea at the panel's edge, under a violet-blue sky.

Greek

Odysseus and the Cyclops

He beat a giant with a lie and a sharpened stake, then threw it all away for the pleasure of hearing the monster learn his name.

7 minHomer

Greek

Daedalus and Icarus

A caged inventor reasons that if the sea and the land are watched, the sky at least lies open. He builds his son a pair of wings, and gives him one rule to keep him alive.

6 minOvid

A youthful Bacchus reclining behind a stone table, bare-shouldered in a loose white robe and crowned with an autumnal wreath of grapevine leaves and dark grape clusters. He holds out a shallow footed glass of red wine in his left hand while the fingers of his right toy with the black bow of his sash. A large glass carafe of red wine stands at the lower left, and a heaped bowl of fruit — grapes, apples, a pear, a split pomegranate and figs — sits before him against a dark ground.

Greek

Dionysus, God of Wine and Ecstasy

The twice-born stranger who turns pirates into dolphins and a mother into her son's killer, the loosener of cares who is lethal to anyone who denies him.

6 minEuripides

A severed, snake-haired head with wide staring eyes and mouth open in a scream, blood streaming from the neck, dark serpents writhing outward from the scalp against a green convex ground ringed by a gilt border — Caravaggio's Medusa, painted on a ceremonial parade shield, showing the Gorgon's face in the instant after decapitation.

Greek

Medusa and the Gorgons

A face no one could look at and live, and a hero who beat it by refusing to look. The only mortal monster in a family of immortal ones, killed in her sleep.

5 minHesiod

A nude young hero in a winged cap holds aloft the severed, snake-haired head of Medusa in his raised left hand and a curved sickle in his lowered right, his own gaze cast down and away from the trophy; the Gorgon's decapitated body slumps beneath his feet on an ornate pedestal against a plain pale wall — Benvenuto Cellini's bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence.

Greek

Perseus, Slayer of Medusa

Locked in a bronze cell, cast to sea in a chest, sent for a head no man could look at and live. The hero who won by never looking, and killed his grandfather by accident.

6 minPseudo-Apollodorus

A white marble statue of a nude, laurel-crowned Theseus lunging forward with a club raised overhead in one hand, gripping the horned head of the bull-headed Minotaur with the other as the beast collapses beneath him over a fallen youth, set against a soft-focus ground of bare trees and pale stonework.

Greek

Theseus, Hero of Athens

A prince who chose the killers' road, unwound a thread through the dark to end a monster, and forgot a single sail. The founder Athens made in its own image, remembered for what he built and what he abandoned.

6 minPlutarch