The legends of ancient Greece and Greek mythology provide an idea of the alternative world, told in the great stories narrated using singular characters surrounded by monsters of all kinds.
Greek mythology tales
Greek mythology gathers all the classic myths and legends descending from ancient Greece, concerning the heroic gods and characters with their beliefs and practices imbued with religiosity according to their worldview.
With the life and actions of numerous gods and characters, Greek mythology expresses, through an innumerable collection of stories, its idea of the origin of the world seasoned by mythological characters with different personalities and monsters of various types.
The tales of Greek mythology have been handed down over the ages by the literary tradition of Greece, through written texts, while at the beginning they were exclusively verbal poetic compositional forms.
Greek mythology sources
Iliad and Odyssey, written by Homer, are among the most ancient literary sources intended as epic poems and mainly describe the events revolving around the Trojan war.
The poet Hesiod instead wrote Theogony, the works and the days that are poems centered on the subject concerning the genesis of the world and which tell the chronological order of the celestial gods, the passing of man's ages, when the sufferings of the humans and where sacrifice practices originated.
Many legendary tales are included in the Homeric hymns, in what are the fragments of the poems of the epic cycle, in the poetic compositions of the Greek lyric, in the works of the writers of tragedies lived in the fifth century before Christ, in the writings left by scholars and poets belonged to the Hellenistic age, in the writings left by writers from ancient Rome including Plutarch and Pausanias.
Influence of Greek mythology in the west
Overall, Greek mythology has also influenced the civilization of the West and in particular its culture, the arts and literature with characteristic features that remain current in today's languages used by various cultures, especially thanks to the school system that has always left a space reserved for these intriguing mythological themes.
