96 pages • 3 hours read
Bernard EvslinHeroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths
Fiction | Short Story Collection | YA | Published in 1966A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Introduction-Part 1, Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “The Gods”
Introduction Summary
When Evslin was a child, his uncle read him the Iliad and the Odyssey (tales of the Trojan War and its aftermath) in Greek, translating into English as he read. Evslin welcomed knowing what the stories were about, though the English words did not have the beauty of the Greek. When he went on to study the stories in Greek and Latin as an adult, Evslin found that the English versions always left him with “this terrible loss” (9), and decided to retell them in English himself.
Evslin asks what they are like, “these stories so often retold” (9), and lists some of their core qualities. He notes that in Greek myths, “both good and evil come from the gods,” and that since heroes and monsters come from the same source, battles between the two are “family quarrel[s]” (10). What makes the monsters monstrous is rage: “the wrath of a god—or, more often, a goddess—carving a dangerous, ugly form for itself out of living flesh” (10). Heroes are associated with sunlight, monsters with darkness. These associations have “a moral quality,” and represent an “eternal struggle between the powers of Light and the powers of Darkness” (10).
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Zeus”
Zeus was the son of Cronos, the gods’ father, and of Rhea, the goddess of earth. Cronos killed his father, Uranus, who prophesied that his son would die the same way. To prevent this prophecy from coming true, Cronos swallowed his children upon their birth, three daughters (Hestia, Demeter, and Hera) and two sons (Hades and Poseidon). Angry, Rhea hid her third son, Zeus, from Cronos, giving him a swaddled rock to swallow instead. When Zeus became older, Rhea brought him back to court disguised as a cupbearer.
Together, mother and son prepared a drink for Cronos that made him vomit up the five now fully-grown gods, who chose Zeus as their leader. Cronos and the Titans (giants who were also Uranus’s children) fought the young gods and their allies, the Cyclopes (one-eyed giants) and the Hundred-handed ones. To mortals, the battle seemed to be thunder, earthquakes, and tidal waves. The goat-god Pan’s joyful shout, said to have caused the Titans to flee, is the origin of the word “panic” (14). The young gods ascended onto Mount Olympus and, with Zeus as their king, “reigned for some three thousand years” (15).
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Hera”
Zeus’s sister Hera, “queen of intriguers,” became his wife (15). Their union was quarrelsome because of his infidelity and her suspicions. Hera led the other gods in a revolt against Zeus, but his hundred-handed cousin Briareus rescued him. Zeus bound Hera in golden chains and freed her only after she “swore never to rebel again” (16). Both promised to change their ways but continued to watch each other carefully. Hera resumed her post as Zeus’s wife and the gods’ queen.
Zeus had become the gods’ king and “lord of the sky” (16). His sister Demeter became goddess of earth and growth. His brother Poseidon was god of the sea, while Hades ruled the underworld, “the land beyond death” (16). The Olympian pantheon also included Hera and Zeus’s children: Ares (god of war), Hephaestus (god of the forge), and Eris (goddess of discord). Three of Zeus’s children born to other women also became part of the pantheon, including Athene, Artemis, and Apollo.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Athene”
Athene was the daughter of Zeus and Metis, a Titan maiden Zeus fell in love with at first sight. After she became pregnant, Zeus heard a prophecy that if she bore a second child, it would be a son who would depose Zeus, so he swallowed pregnant Metis. Later that day, he suffered from a terrible headache. His son Hephaestus split his father’s head open and grey-eyed Athene sprang out of it, holding a spear.
Athene’s domain was “intellectual activities” (18). She taught men to invent and use tools for farming and sailing and women to spin and weave. To men she also taught numbers, “but never to woman” (18). The goddess of strategy and wisdom, Athene despised her brother Ares and often beat him, despite his greater physical strength. She “stated that compassion was the best part of wisdom” and was “perhaps the best-loved god in the Pantheon” (18). The Athenians even named their city for her.
Stories about Athene’s skill, wisdom, and kindness abound, but she could also be jealous, as evidenced in the story of Arachne. A talented weaver called Arachne became so acclaimed that she “soon began to praise herself” as “the greatest weaver in all the world,” greater even than Athene (19). Hearing her make these declarations, Athene told Arachne she would have to die for defying the gods. The terrified girl offered one of her own cloaks to the goddess, who challenged her to a weaving contest to be judged by the villagers. If Arachne won, Athene would revoke her punishment. Arachne agreed.
Arachne wove beautiful scenes of young love and marriage into her cloth, then Athene spun “cloud-wool, the finest stuff in all the world,” dyed from “the colors of the dawn,” sunset, sleep, and storm, on a loom made of “the whole western part of the sky” (22). Her scenes were of sights more terrible than human eyes could bear—the gods’ violent, bloody history, Athene’s benevolent teachings, and humanity’s terrifying future. Athene won the contest, and Arachne hung herself, after which Athene turned her into a spider, who might “spin without rivalry until the end of time” (23). This story explains why spiders are called arachnids.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Poseidon”
After defeating Cronos, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades cast lots for his empire. Zeus won, choosing the sky. Poseidon happily claimed the sea, as “it is the best place for adventures and secrets and makes claim on land and sky” (24). Unlucky Hades received the underworld, and the goddesses managed the earth as a commonwealth.
Poseidon built himself a palace underwater. His wife was Amphitrite, but like Zeus, Poseidon had many children with different women around the world. He could be curious, mercurial, quarrelsome, and greedy. He invented sea creatures to amuse, frighten, and appease other immortals. He claimed the region of Attica for himself, gifting them a spring, but the Athenians feared Poseidon and prayed for deliverance from him. Athene came to them and planted an olive tree beside the spring. Poseidon challenged her to a contest, but Zeus ordered them to declare a truce. In council, the gods decided that the olive tree was the better gift and awarded Athene the city.
In another story, Poseidon fell in love with Demeter. Frightened of his greater strength, Demeter distracted him by demanding a gift. He produced a horse for her, but his own creation enraptured him so fully that he forgot about Demeter and rode off, eventually creating a green underwater version of the horse. In some versions of this tale, Poseidon took a week to perfect the horse, creating other animals in the process, including camels, giraffes, and zebras. In another version, Demeter turned herself into a mare to escape Poseidon, but he caught her by turning into a stallion. Their union produced the wild horse Arion and the nymph Despoena. Demeter is a moon goddess, and her presence in Poseidon’s stories ties together the moon, the sea, and horses.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Hades”
Hades’s domain was the underworld. When ancient Greeks died, they were buried with coins under their tongues. This coin paid for their passage across the river Styx, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. The ferryman, Charon, would not carry anyone across who could not pay. After crossing, souls encountered a large wall with a gate guarded by the three-headed dog Cerberus. Inside, in Tartarus, lived the souls of mortals from all segments of society.
Three judges tried the souls: Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aeacus. They chose a select few for punishment or reward: Sisyphus had to roll a rock uphill eternally, and Tantalus suffered from unquenchable thirst. However, most souls simply waited forever in the Field of Asphodel. The most virtuous souls lived in eternal celebration in the Elysian Fields and could be reborn on earth. The bravest, who were born and died three times, lived on the Isles of the Blest.
Possessive and violent, Hades never allowed any souls to escape or any mortals who visited the underworld to leave. In the area around his palace, called Erebus, the Erinyes, or Furies, resided. Older than the Olympians, the Erinyes—Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera— were “hags, with snaky hair, red-hot eyes, and yellow teeth” whose job was to punish evil mortals (29). After tormenting mortals, sometimes to the point of suicide, the Erinyes returned to the palace screaming and gossiping. Hades appreciated their contributions to his kingdom.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “Demeter”
Demeter was the goddess of planting, harvesting, and the moon. Zeus valued her and gave her a daughter called Persephone. One day when Persephone was playing in a glade, she saw a strange bush that she did not like. She pulled it out, creating a chasm out of which leapt six black horses drawing a golden chariot that carried Hades. Before Persephone could scream, Hades snatched her and carried her back to the underworld.
When Persephone failed to return home, Demeter grew distraught and spent the night searching and calling for her daughter. At dawn, she discovered Persephone’s paint pot overturned next to the uprooted bush and “howled like a she-wolf” (32). Hearing the birds gossiping about what happened to Persephone, Demeter questioned them and learned that Hades had kidnapped her. A little boy laughed at Demeter’s tears, and she turned him into a lizard, which a hawk quickly ate.
Demeter stormed into Zeus’s throne room, noticed his “marvelously wrought” new thunderbolt, and understood that Zeus and Hades had struck a deal: an exchange of the thunderbolt for her daughter (33). After Zeus sent her back to Earth, Demeter caused the crops to die, which caused the humans to starve, which starved the gods in turn of human prayers and praise. Calling Demeter back to Olympus, Zeus promised that Persephone could return home provided she had not eaten anything while in the underworld.
Persephone, meanwhile, pouted, complained, and refused to eat in the underworld, prompting Hades to shower her with gift after gift. She grew to enjoy her power and the lengths to which gloomy Hades would go to please her. The soul of the little boy Demeter had turned into a lizard convinced Persephone to eat six pomegranate seeds when no one was looking. Because she had eaten, Zeus ruled that she would have to live six months of each year with Hades. The six months that she remained with her mother account for the spring and summer months, when happy Demeter allows the earth to bloom. The months mother and daughter spend apart explain the months when Demeter allows nothing to grow.
Introduction-Part 1, Chapters 1-6 Analysis
Evslin’s brief introduction provides a framework for understanding why he has curated these particular stories and figures from among the massive body of ancient Greek and Roman myths. Evslin believes that the essential project of Greek mythology was to provide a moral education by sharing entertaining stories that also educated listeners about the universe’s most powerful forces and how humans have responded to them, with both positive and negative outcomes. In his retellings, Evslin strives to shape the stories in ways that illustrate their continued resonance in the contemporary world. To set the scene, he devotes the first and largest section of the book to descriptions of and anecdotes about eleven central figures in the ancient Greek pantheon, and about some of their children.
In antiquity, individual poets retold stories in their own way. Over time, as they were retold, some of the myths we call “Greek mythology” come down to the present via Roman sources. The myths may have Greek roots, but the way Greeks told them may have differed from how Romans told the same stories. For instance, Evslin uses the gods’ Greek names, but Roman mythology gives different names to the gods with corresponding functions and narrative roles.
Evslin’s desire to retell the stories in his own way, through his own lens, reflects how ancient poets reshaped the same basic stories with each retelling. Innovation and preservation were not seen as contradicting projects in ancient Greece. Rather, poets were authorized to adapt myths as they told them. Their innovations—changing certain details, drawing out others, moving the locations of events, etc.—enabled the preservation of the broader truths expressed in the stories and thus of the culture that they defined.
Evslin illustrates this emphasis on cultural beliefs and values in the way he shapes his narratives about the gods, pointing out how their actions accounted for natural events that in ancient times would have had no other explanation. Since Zeus’s domain is the sky and Poseidon’s the sea, for example, they are associated with natural phenomena that occur in these two realms. Likewise, Evslin records that mortals perceived the war between the old and new gods as tidal waves, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. The extended narrative of Hades kidnapping Persephone and Demeter’s desperate search for her culminates in an explanation for why we have seasons: Fall and winter exist because Demeter grieves when she is separated from her daughter. Myths also explain the origins of animals and human language. Arachnids received their name from Athene’s conflict with a mortal girl called Arachne. Panic derives from the terrifying cry of the god Pan. Zebras and giraffes exist as a result of Poseidon’s trial and error while creating horses. Though these phenomena no longer require narratives to explain them, the associations with myth remain, embedded in language. The final section of the book collects these terms in a glossary.
The “moral quality” that Evslin ascribes to the myths, which he characterizes as the opposition of light and dark, appears more clearly in his introduction than in the myths themselves (10). This disparity highlights the fact that Evslin is not the author of the myths, but their interpreter.
In ancient versions of the myths, light is associated with life and consciousness, but not necessarily with moral good. Similarly, darkness is associated with death and the underworld but not necessarily with evil. When blindness, death, and anger appeared in ancient versions of the myths, they were not necessarily negative. When seers and poets were portrayed as blind, they exchanged physical blindness for access to knowledge of the past, present, and future typically denied to mortals. In death, some heroes entered a larger consciousness or even absolute knowledge. Finally, ancient depictions of gods, heroes, and monsters show all three as capable of rage and excess.
In his introduction, Evslin describes the myths through an “all or nothing” lens: He characterizes good and evil as opposing forces that come from the gods, and he identifies rage as the feature that distinguishes gods from monsters. However, his descriptions of the gods in his retellings are more complex and reflect ancient representations: Here, good and evil are not a strict binary. They do not exist as discrete categories but coexist within individual gods and heroes.
In Evslin’s retellings, it is not only monsters who are prone to what modern people would call moral weaknesses and failings. Zeus hoards power, swallowing Athene’s mother, Metis, to prevent her from giving birth to an heir who would depose him. Demeter’s grief and rage lead to the death of an innocent child. Gods do monstrous things. Poseidon, Athene, and Apollo all act violently when they are jealous. All of the gods, at some point, become monstrous through excessive use of power. At these times, Evslin’s message is not that they are evil. Instead, these stories suggest the importance of restraint and love as counterbalancing forces.
