Zeus
Zeus was infamous for hopping into bed with every goddess, nymph, or mortal who caught his fancy. Then he heard a prophecy that if he had a son by Metis, goddess of Thought, the child would rule in his stead.
Since he had already deposed his father Cronos, who had deposed his father, this looked like yet another chain-of-revenge story so common in Greek myth.Which of these two battles were fought before the Athenians went to help the Egyptians revolt from the Persians around 460 or 459 BC?
Battle of Aegina and Battle of the Megarid:
Athens’ attempts to gain a foothold in the west of the Saronic Sea was alarming and provoking to the Aeginetans who then joined the war against Athens, her old enemy and rival. She realized that if Greek Corinth were to lose against Athens, then Athens would become ‘sole mistress of the Saronic Sea.’ (Bury.)
The Athenians were victorious in a naval battle against Aegina and laid siege upon the city which succeeded in 457 BC when Aegina was forced to surrender. The Corinthians meanwhile had invaded Megara in the hope that Athens would raise the siege to fight them, but Athens was resourceful enough to gather an army of the too young and the too old who defeated the Corinthians in the Battle of the Megarid.
It was in this victorious state of mind that Athens set off to help the Egyptians rebel against the Persians, around 460 or 459 BC.Peisistratus’ close friend was the longtime archon of Athens. Who was he?
Solon was powerless to stop his friend from becoming tyranny after his retirement from public life.After Peisistratus died in 527 BC, his two sons took over control of Athens jointly. During a botched assassination plot, one was killed and one survived. Which brother was killed?
The controversial Greek God
Zeus is one of the sexually controversial gods in Greek mythology, with at least about 57 sexual partners and having married two of his sisters, his aunt, cousins, and even his daughter, Aphrodite.
Birth of Zeus
Zeus is one of the sexually controversial gods in Greek mythology, with at least about 57 sexual partners and having married two of his sisters, his aunt, cousins, and even his daughter, Aphrodite.
Nude trainings
The gymnasium was one of the slaves young males spent their time in, practicing for the games and also improving their physique which was a very important measure of beauty for men in ancient Greece. Most of them even used to train naked showing off their entire nude torsos.
Weird romances
The love stories between husband and wife were rarely popular in ancient Greek literature. But instead, the concept of infidelity was more romanticized in their literature, especially between an adult Male and a young teenage boy which was quite common in ancient Greek barracks where young students had physical relations with their adult seniors.
The First Computer
The Antikythera mechanism is said to be the first computer discovered in the history of human civilizations and was used for predicting astrological events like solar and lunar eclipse.
Colorful statues
We very regularly come across pictures or visuals of ancient Greece statues which are mostly white in color, and made of white marble which makes us think that white was the color of ancient Greek statues. But in reality they were adorned with a lot of colours which have faded away in the course of the years went by.
Hipparchus
Hipparchus made advances to one young gentleman. When his advances were spurned, he refused to let this man’s niece participate in the Panathenaic festival to honor the god Athena. It was this that led to the plot being hatched. After Hipparchus’s death, Hippias became even more paranoid, executing or banishing entire families from Athens.
Apollo was the god of reason, mathematics, music, medicine, and self-control. Therefore it’s a little surprising to find that he traded place with Dionysos, god of wine and loosened inhibitions, the flip side of everything Apollo stood for. Or is it? In a way, giving Dionysos part-time in Delphi was a sort of counterbalance to Apollo’s extreme rationality.
Who was the ruler of Athens after the death of Pericles in 429 BC?
Cleon. Cleon ruled Athens from 429 BC until his death in 422 BC. He was the son of a tanner, and his probable profession was a Lyre maker. His reign was marked by internal struggle and strife. The people of Athens did not respect him because of his modest beginnings. He was the most outspoken opponent of Pericles throughout his reign.Which Greek philosopher theorized that solar eclipses were caused by the passage of the moon between the sun and the earth?
With which two states did Athens ally herself with directly after her rejection of help from Sparta?
Thessaly and Argos. Sparta’s rejection of Athenian help in their time of need deeply offended Athens and completely ruined Cimon’s foreign policy based on friendliness towards the Lacedaemonians. As an act of revenge, Athens allied herself with two of Sparta’s chief enemies, Argos and Thessaly!
The formation of this new alliance is reflected in Aeschylus’s trilogy on the murder of Agamemnon which he wrote at the time; this playwright had no doubt that Athens’ future lay with Argos and not Sparta, and stressed the importance of a military alliance between Athens and Argos.
The fatherly Greeks
Ancient Greece was full of extremely talented people who became pioneers in many fields, which had made the general propped calling them fathers of their fields and ancient Greece is full of them. Herodotus is known as the father, Hippocrates the father of medicine, while Pythagoras was known as the father of numbers and many such along with these.
Alexander was a Work Hard, Party Harder type of a person
Alexander was known for organizing lavish drinking competition. He got into a drinking habit which many scholars have pointed out to as a cause of huis early death. He had his friend, cleitus executed in his drunk form and even is said to have ordered his soldiers to burn the city of Persepolis as a revenge for the burning of Athens while drunk.
Marathon
The world-renowned sport, the marathon we know today originated in ancient Greece and hosted a long-distance race in honor of Pheidippides, the Athenian messenger who ran all way from Marathon to Athens to deliver the message of the Greek victory against the Persians, a distance of about 40 km before dropping dead by exhaustion.
Obsession with names
Alexander named almost 400 cities across central Asia up to the Indian subcontinent upon his name as Alexandria and even named a city after his horse Bucephalus near the northwestern part of India.
Alexander was once offered 300 women for impregnation
An Amazonian princess supposedly brought 300 women to him once begging him to impregnate all of them. She said that this was in the hope that she could build a race of men who were all as strong and intelligent as he was!
More info on- Ancient Greek mythology trivia