Greek Mythology Trivia Questions and Answers, and the Story Behind Each One

Answer: Zeus.

Zeus did not inherit the throne, he took it: he led the revolt against his own father Cronus and the Titans. His weapon, the thunderbolt, was made for him by the Cyclopes, which is the detail most often missed. The name is one of the oldest words in the whole subject, going back to an Indo-European sky father whose name also produced the Latin Jupiter.

Answer: Poseidon.

After the Titans fell, the three brothers drew lots for the world and Poseidon got the sea, Zeus the sky and Hades the underworld. He also owned earthquakes and horses, and his standing epithet is Earth-shaker. That pairing is less strange than it looks to a modern reader: a Greek who had never seen a tsunami had still felt the ground move, and both were the same god's temper.

Answer: Hades.

Hades is the god and also the place, which is why the phrase "the gates of Hades" works. The Greeks were wary of using the name and preferred Plouton, "the wealthy one", partly as a politeness and partly because everything valuable that comes out of the ground, from silver to seed corn, comes from his territory. Rome took that nickname and gave us Pluto.

Answer: Hera.

Hera is goddess of marriage and married women and spends most of her surviving myths punishing Zeus's lovers and their children rather than Zeus, which tells you something about who ancient audiences thought was punishable. Her bird is the peacock. Her most famous victim is named after her: Heracles means something close to "glory of Hera".

Answer: Athena.

Wisdom is a thin translation. Athena's department is practical skill and applied cleverness: weaving, pottery, shipbuilding, horse-taming and battlefield tactics, as against Ares and brute force. She was said to have sprung from Zeus's head fully grown and already in armour, and her bird, the owl, ended up on the coinage of Athens.

Answer: Apollo.

Apollo holds the widest and strangest portfolio on Olympus: music, poetry, archery, prophecy, and both plague and healing, which are the same power pointed in two directions. His oracle at Delphi was the closest thing the Greek world had to a shared institution, consulted by cities before they founded colonies or went to war.

Answer: Artemis.

Artemis covers hunting, wild animals, young girls and, less obviously, childbirth, which is why women prayed to a virgin goddess in labour. Her temple at Ephesus, in what is now western Turkey, was counted among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and the surviving foundations are a good deal less impressive than the reputation.

Answer: Hestia.

Hestia, goddess of the hearth, has almost no myths at all, and that is the point: she never leaves, never quarrels and never travels, so nothing happens to her. She was said to be the eldest child of Cronus and Rhea, swallowed first and brought back last. The hymn is making a claim about the limits of Aphrodite's power rather than taking a census of Greek myth - Hecate and several other figures are called virgins elsewhere - which is why the question names its source.

Answer: Aphrodite.

Her name is usually connected to aphros, the Greek word for foam, which matches the story of her birth from the sea. She was credited with a girdle that compelled desire in anyone she chose, an object that gets borrowed in several myths. Rome matched her to Venus, which is why the Renaissance painting everyone knows is called The Birth of Venus rather than of Aphrodite.

Answer: Hermes.

Hermes covers messages, trade, roads, boundaries, luck and theft, a combination that makes sense once you notice they all involve crossing from one place or owner to another. The most important of those crossings is the last one: as Psychopompos he walked the dead down to the river. A separate custom took over at the bank - the Greeks buried their dead with a coin in the mouth to pay Charon for the ferry.

Answer: Hephaestus.

He is the only Olympian described as physically impaired, lame in both legs, and the only one thrown out of heaven by his own family. He is also the one who makes everything: Achilles' armour, Zeus's sceptre, the net that catches Ares and Aphrodite in bed, and, in Hesiod, Pandora herself. A pantheon in which the craftsman is mocked and indispensable at the same time is telling you how Greek cities felt about their own smiths.

Answer: Ares.

Greek writers did not like Ares. Homer has Zeus call him the most hateful of the gods, and Athena beats him in a fight. Rome took the same god, renamed him Mars, gave him a month and treated him as a founding father. His children by Aphrodite were Deimos and Phobos, Terror and Fear, whose names now belong to the two moons of Mars.

Answer: No.

The Twelve are defined by address rather than rank: they are the gods who live on Mount Olympus, and Hades rules his own kingdom below. The usual list runs Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes and Hestia, with Dionysus replacing Hestia in some versions. No ancient source treats the list as fixed, so a quizmaster should expect an argument and be gracious about it.

Answer: True.

The two gods competed to become the city's patron, each offering a gift. Athena produced the olive tree; Poseidon's gift is given as a saltwater spring in some versions and the horse in others. The citizens chose the olive, which is the commercially literate answer, since olive oil was food, lamp fuel, soap and Athens' main export all at once. The Erechtheion on the Acropolis was built over the spot where the contest was said to have happened.

Answer: Jupiter, also called Jove.

These two are not merely equivalent, they are relatives. Both names descend from the same Indo-European sky father, and the Latin form preserves the second half, pater, meaning father. The English adjective jovial comes from the astrological belief that people born under Jupiter's influence were cheerful, and the planet Jupiter is the largest in the solar system.

Answer: Mars.

The same job, a completely different reputation. Mars was one of Rome's most important gods, the father of Romulus and Remus in the founding legend, and his name is attached to the month of March, the campaigning season. The Greeks made their war god a bully who loses fights; the Romans made theirs an ancestor.

Answer: Neptune.

Rome grew up as a land power and acquired a navy late and reluctantly, which is roughly why Neptune never mattered to Romans the way Poseidon mattered to island and coastal Greeks. He appears to have begun as a god of fresh water and springs and acquired the sea along with the Greek identification. The planet named after him is the furthest from the sun.

Answer: True.

Pluto is not really a Latin invention but a Latin spelling of the Greek euphemism Plouton, "the wealthy one". Rome also had an older native god of the dead, Dis Pater, whose name means much the same thing. The name reached the solar system in 1930, when the newly discovered ninth planet was named following a suggestion from an eleven-year-old English schoolgirl, Venetia Burney.

Answer: False. Aphrodite's counterpart is Venus; Cupid is the Roman version of Eros, who is Aphrodite's son.

The mother and the child get swapped constantly on Valentine's cards. Cupid comes from the Latin cupido, meaning desire, and Eros from the Greek for the same thing. Worth knowing: in the oldest Greek accounts Eros is not a baby with a bow at all but one of the first forces in existence, older than most of the gods. The chubby infant is a later, largely Hellenistic and Roman invention.

Answer: Mercury.

Mercury's name is built on the same root as merx, merchandise, and merchant, so the Romans kept the commercial half of the job and quietly dropped most of the rest. His speed gave English the word mercurial and gave the fastest-orbiting planet its name. The liquid metal was named for the planet rather than directly for the god.

Answer: Bacchus.

Bacchus was already an alternative Greek name for the same god before Rome adopted it. His secretive festivals, the Bacchanalia, were suppressed by the Roman Senate in 186 BC amid claims of conspiracy and immorality, which makes it one of the earliest recorded acts of state religious repression in Europe. The word bacchanal still means a riotous party.

Answer: Vulcan.

His forge was placed under Mount Etna in Sicily, so an eruption was the god at work, and the English word volcano comes from his name by way of Italian. His August festival, the Vulcanalia, involved throwing live fish onto fires, an offering whose logic nobody has satisfactorily explained.

Answer: Ceres.

Ceres gave English the word cereal, which is as direct a survival as this subject offers: the goddess of grain became the aisle in the supermarket. Her name was also given to the first object ever discovered in the asteroid belt, in 1801, now classified as a dwarf planet. Unlike several Roman gods, Ceres was a genuine native Italian deity with her own priesthood before the Greek identification.

Answer: The Titans.

The war between them, the Titanomachy, was said to have lasted ten years and ended with the defeated Titans imprisoned in Tartarus, the deepest part of the underworld. Not all of them fought against Zeus, which is why Prometheus and Atlas end up with such different fates. The word titanic comes from them, and so, indirectly, does the name of Saturn's largest moon.

Answer: Cronus.

Hesiod's Theogony has him ambush his father with a sickle, an image the Romans kept when they identified him with Saturn, which is why Father Time still carries a scythe. His reign was remembered as the Golden Age, a paradise with no work and no law, and the Roman midwinter festival of Saturnalia was a licensed annual return to it.

Answer: Rhea.

Rhea was Cronus's sister as well as his wife, which is standard for this generation, and she is the one who breaks the cycle of a father destroying his children. Every later version of the story depends on her single act of deception. She was identified in the Greek world with Anatolian mother goddesses, especially Cybele, whose worship arrived in Rome in 204 BC.

Answer: True.

He swallowed each newborn as it arrived. Rhea saved the youngest by handing Cronus a stone wrapped in baby clothes, and the grown Zeus later forced him to bring the others back up, which is why his siblings are simultaneously older and younger than he is. The pattern, a ruler destroyed by the very act of trying to prevent a prophecy, runs right through Greek storytelling to Oedipus.

Answer: Crete.

The usual sites are the caves of Mount Ida or Mount Dikte. In the best-known version the infant was nursed by a she-goat, Amalthea, and guarded by attendants who clashed their shields and spears so that Cronus could not hear the crying. Crete pushed this story hard in antiquity, much as towns today advertise a famous resident, and rival caves competed for the trade.

Answer: Gaia.

Gaia is the earth itself, and with Uranus, the sky, she produced the Titans, the Cyclopes and the hundred-handed giants. She is not a retired ancestor: she keeps intervening, supplying the sickle that maims Uranus and later bearing the monster Typhon, to Tartarus, to avenge the defeated Titans. Her name is the root of geography, geology and geometry, all of which begin as measuring the earth.

Answer: Aphrodite.

This is Hesiod's version, in which Aphrodite has no mother and is older than Zeus: Cronus casts his father's severed parts into the sea and she rises from the foam near Cyprus. Homer flatly contradicts it and calls her a daughter of Zeus and Dione. Both were current at the same time, and by the fifth century BC Greek writers were distinguishing two Aphrodites to cope with the clash.

Answer: Metis.

Zeus swallowed Metis while she was pregnant, having been warned that her child would displace him, and Athena was later born from his head. Metis is not a random name: the word means cunning, resourceful intelligence, the quality Odysseus is praised for. Zeus does not merely marry cleverness in this story, he absorbs it. In the most graphic version Hephaestus splits his skull open with an axe to let Athena out.

Answer: Mnemosyne.

Mnemosyne is Memory, a Titaness, and making her the mother of the arts is a precise piece of thinking rather than decoration. In a culture where poetry was performed and not read, memory was the whole technology of literature, and a poet opening a work by calling on the Muse was asking to remember correctly. Her name survives in English as mnemonic.

Answer: Semele.

Semele was a mortal princess of Thebes who asked Zeus to show himself in his true form and was destroyed by the sight. Zeus rescued the unborn child and carried him to term sewn inside his own thigh, which earned Dionysus the epithet "twice-born". It also makes him the only one of the Twelve born to a mortal woman. Heracles is the other god in the pantheon with a human mother, and he had to die before he was let in.

Answer: Prometheus.

He carried it off hidden in a hollow fennel stalk. Zeus had him chained to a rock where an eagle ate his liver every day, and since he was immortal it regrew every night; Heracles eventually shot the eagle. His name means "forethought", and Aeschylus turned the story into a play about a tyrant and a benefactor that has been read politically ever since, most famously by Mary Shelley, who subtitled Frankenstein "The Modern Prometheus".

Answer: Persephone.

Hades carried her off to the underworld, and the compromise Zeus brokered was that she spend part of each year below and part above. The hinge of the story is a handful of pomegranate seeds she eats while down there, the number varying between versions. Her mother's grief while she is gone is the Greek explanation of winter, and the story was the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most important secret cult in the Greek world.

Answer: Cerberus.

Three heads is the familiar count, but Hesiod gives him fifty and Pindar a hundred, so the number is a matter of taste. His job is usually misremembered: he is there to stop the dead getting out, not the living getting in. Fetching him alive was the twelfth and last of the labours of Heracles, and he is a child of Typhon and Echidna, which makes him brother to the Hydra and the Chimera.

Answer: A bull.

The name means "bull of Minos", after the Cretan king in whose labyrinth it was kept, and the creature was the son of Minos's wife Pasiphae and a bull sent by Poseidon. The labyrinth was built by the craftsman Daedalus. Real Bronze Age Crete left behind a palace at Knossos of famously confusing plan and frescoes of young athletes vaulting over bulls, which is probably not a coincidence.

Answer: A winged horse.

He sprang from the blood of Medusa when Perseus beheaded her, alongside a brother, Chrysaor. His rider was not Perseus but Bellerophon, who used him to kill the Chimera and then tried to fly to Olympus, at which point Zeus sent an insect to sting the horse and Bellerophon fell. The name has since become a generic word for any winged horse.

Answer: False. A centaur is half man and half horse; the half-man, half-goat creature is a satyr.

This is the single most common error in Greek mythology quizzes, so it is worth asking deliberately. Centaurs were remembered as violent drunks, with Chiron as the famous exception, and one suggestion is that the image reflects the shock of encountering mounted riders for the first time. Whether or not that is true, the split is easy to fix in the memory: horses are centaurs, goats are satyrs.

Answer: Satyrs.

They were not only decoration. At the Athenian dramatic festivals every tragedian presented three tragedies followed by a satyr play, a bawdy comic piece with a chorus dressed as satyrs, so the form has a place in the history of theatre. The goat legs are largely a later development; on early Greek pottery satyrs tend to be men with horse ears and tails.

Answer: In trees.

The name comes from drys, the Greek word for oak, though it broadened to cover tree nymphs generally, with the ash-tree nymphs called Meliai. The strictest kind, the hamadryads, were bound to one particular tree and died when it was felled, which functioned as a straightforward piece of conservation law: someone lived in that trunk.

Answer: A single eye, set in the middle of the forehead.

There are two separate traditions wearing the same name. Hesiod has three divine smiths, Brontes, Steropes and Arges, imprisoned by Uranus, freed by Zeus and repaying him by forging the thunderbolt. Homer has a race of lawless one-eyed shepherds, one of whom, Polyphemus, eats Odysseus's crew. The name means something close to "round eye".

Answer: Bird-women, with women's heads and the bodies and wings of birds.

Homer never says what they look like; the bird body comes from Greek vase painting from the seventh century BC onward. The fish-tailed siren is a medieval European development, helped along by the fact that several Romance languages still use the word for mermaid. What makes the Odyssey's sirens frightening is also usually forgotten: they do not offer beauty, they offer knowledge, promising to tell any passing sailor everything that happens on earth. Odysseus has himself tied to the mast because he wants to hear it.

Answer: Half woman, half serpent.

Her name means "she-viper", and with the monster Typhon she was called the mother of most of the great monsters of Greek myth, including Cerberus, the Hydra and the Chimera. The spiny Australian egg-laying mammal is named after her, because early naturalists thought it looked like a cross between two kinds of animal and needed a word for that.

Answer: Typhon.

Typhon was the last challenge to Zeus's rule, produced by Gaia to avenge the defeated Titans, and after a fight that scorched the world Zeus pinned him under Mount Etna, so an eruption is the monster struggling. English speakers often assume the word typhoon comes from him; the derivation is disputed and the storm word probably has Chinese and Arabic roots, with his name pulling the spelling into shape.

Answer: Chiron.

Chiron is the exception among centaurs: wise, civilised and the tutor of an improbable number of heroes, including Achilles, Jason and the healer Asclepius. He was immortal, but an accidental wound from a poisoned arrow left him in permanent agony, so he traded his immortality away to be released from it. A teacher who gives up eternal life to stop hurting is a strange thing to find in a story about monsters.

Answer: Caught between two dangers, where avoiding one takes you into the other.

Both were placed in the narrow Strait of Messina between Sicily and mainland Italy, Scylla a many-headed creature on one side and Charybdis a whirlpool on the other, close enough that a ship could not avoid both. In the Odyssey the sorceress Circe advises steering towards Scylla and losing a few men rather than risking the whole ship. The modern English equivalent is "between a rock and a hard place". One last thing worth saying out loud now the round is over: most of the famous monsters are relatives. Cerberus, the Hydra and the Chimera are all children of Typhon and Echidna, which is why the second half of a monsters round becomes guessable once a table spots the pattern.

Answer: Theseus.

The sword matters less than her other gift, a ball of thread that let him find his way back out of the labyrinth, which is why "Ariadne's thread" is still a phrase for a method of working through a problem. He abandoned her on the island of Naxos on the way home, and then forgot to change his ship's black sail for a white one, so his father Aegeus saw it, assumed the worst and drowned himself in what became the Aegean Sea.

Answer: Killing his own wife and children, in a fit of madness sent by Hera.

The labours are almost always presented as adventures and they are in fact a sentence. His cousin Eurystheus set them, and the count rose from ten to twelve because two were disallowed on technicalities: his nephew Iolaus helped him with the Hydra, and he accepted payment for cleaning the Augean stables. Deciding that assisted work does not count is a very Greek piece of bureaucracy. The order is not agreed, and it is worth saying so if a player objects: Apollodorus has the murders first and the labours as the penance, which is the version this question follows, while Euripides' Heracles reverses it and has the hero come home from the labours before the madness falls on him.

Answer: It could not be pierced.

Because arrows and blades were useless, Heracles had to wrestle the animal and strangle it, and he then wore the skin as armour, which is why he is nearly always shown in a lion pelt with the head as a hood. The problem of skinning a hide that nothing can cut was solved, in one version, by using the lion's own claws.

Answer: Heracles.

The Hydra grew two heads for every one cut off, so the fight was unwinnable by force: Iolaus burned each stump as Heracles severed it. That is the labour Eurystheus refused to count because of the help. The creature has given modern English a standard metaphor for a problem that multiplies when you attack it directly.

Answer: Perseus.

He avoided her petrifying gaze by watching her reflection in a polished shield, and he was equipped for the job with winged sandals, a cap of invisibility and a special bag, the kibisis, because the severed head kept working. That is the point of the myth's ending: he used it as a weapon and then gave it to Athena, who mounted it on her shield, the aegis.

Answer: Jason.

He sailed to Colchis, at the far end of the Black Sea, where King Aeetes set him impossible tasks and his daughter Medea solved them for him. The voyage is the oldest great crew story in European literature and reads as a catalogue of the edge of the known world. It ends badly: Jason later abandoned Medea, and Euripides built one of the most brutal plays in the Greek repertoire out of what she did next.

Answer: Aphrodite.

The apple was thrown among the guests at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis by Eris, goddess of discord, who had not been invited, and it was inscribed "to the fairest". Hera offered Paris power and Athena offered victory in war; he took the woman. The bribe started the Trojan War and, just as importantly, explains why Hera and Athena spend the Iliad working relentlessly for the Greek side.

Answer: The Styx.

This story is not in Homer, and that is the interesting part. The Iliad's Achilles is simply the best fighter alive and can be wounded like anyone else, and Apollodorus kills him with an arrow in the ankle without any invulnerability in sight. The immersion in the Styx is first alluded to by the Roman poet Statius around AD 95; the detail everyone actually knows, that his mother held him by the heel and left that spot dry, is later still and survives only in the late-antique commentators Servius, Lactantius Placidus and Fulgentius. The phrase "Achilles heel" rests on a footnote to a footnote.

Answer: Apollo.

Apollo backs Troy throughout the Iliad, opening the poem by sending a plague on the Greek camp. Achilles' death is not narrated in the Iliad at all, which ends with the funeral of Hector, and comes to us from later poems and from summaries of works that no longer survive. That is normal for this material: the famous episodes are often outside the famous book.

Answer: Zeus.

Zeus's habit of approaching women in animal or altered form runs through the mythology, from the bull that carries off Europa to the shower of gold that reaches Danae. The consequence in Leda's case is a set of siblings who are half divine and half mortal in odd combinations: Helen and Polydeuces on one side, Clytemnestra and Castor on the other. The story was a favourite subject of Renaissance painters for reasons that had little to do with mythology.

Answer: False. The thousand ships were the Greek fleet that sailed to Troy to bring her back.

The phrase is not Greek at all. It comes from Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus, written in the 1590s, where Faustus says it on being shown Helen's spirit. Homer does supply a number, of a sort: the catalogue of ships in the second book of the Iliad lists the contingents of the Greek army and comes to something over eleven hundred vessels.

Answer: True.

It is one of the first stops of the return voyage in the ninth book of the Odyssey. The men who ate the lotus lost all desire to go home and had to be dragged back to the ship in tears, which makes it the earliest well-known image in European literature of a substance that takes away the will rather than the life. English still calls someone a lotus-eater when they have stopped caring about anything demanding.

Answer: Odysseus.

Odysseus escaped the cave by telling the cyclops his name was Nobody, blinding him and hiding his men under the bellies of the sheep, and the trick worked perfectly. Then, safely aboard, he shouted his real name back at the shore so he would get the credit, which gave Polyphemus something to name in his prayer to Poseidon. Every disaster in the remaining nine books follows from that one boast.