Collection 01
Mount Olympus and the Twelve Olympians
Who actually sits on the mountain, why the list of twelve keeps changing, and how the household of Olympus is organised in Homer and in the Hymns.
Wellington · Aotearoa New Zealand
Greek mythology, explained one source at a time
Thelmoros publishes free reading guides to Greek mythology. Every guide takes a single subject — Mount Olympus, the Titans, the journey poems, the oracle at Delphi — explains it in plain English, and tells you exactly which ancient text the story comes from so you can go and read it yourself.
6
Guide collections
46
Guides in the library
2017
Publishing since
What we do
A small publisher with one narrow job
Greek mythology is one of the best-documented story systems in the world, and also one of the most confusingly retold. The same god appears under three names, the same hero gets two fathers, and half of what circulates online has been quietly borrowed from a Victorian children's book rather than from anything an ancient writer put down.
Thelmoros exists to fix that for ordinary readers. We write guides that separate what the surviving texts actually say from what later retellings added, and we name the text and the line every time.
- Free to read, no account Every guide and every reading note on this site opens without signing up or paying.
- Sources named in the text When we say Homer describes something, we tell you which poem and roughly where in it.
- Written for New Zealand readers Levelled at senior secondary and first-year tertiary study here, with NCEA-friendly vocabulary.
- Disagreements left visible Where the ancient sources contradict each other, we show the contradiction instead of picking a tidy winner.
How to use the guides
Four steps from confusion to a clear reading
-
1
Start with the map, not the story
Each collection opens with a one-page overview: who is related to whom, which generation they belong to, and where the action happens. Read that first and the individual myths stop feeling random.
-
2
Read the plain-English retelling
We summarise the episode in a few hundred words, with no invented dialogue and no smoothing over of the strange parts. Ancient myth is frequently strange, and the strangeness is usually the point.
-
3
Check the source column
Beside the retelling sits a short list of where the episode is attested — Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, Pindar, the tragedians, or a later compiler such as Apollodorus. Later sources are labelled as later.
-
4
Follow the questions
Every guide closes with discussion questions you can take into a classroom, a book group, or an essay plan. They have no answer key, because most of them do not have a settled answer.
The library
Six collections covering the core of Greek mythology
Each collection is self-contained. You can start with Olympus and work outwards, or drop straight into whichever one your reading list demands.
Collection 02
The Titans and the Older Order
Chaos, Gaia, Ouranos and Kronos; the succession struggle; and why Hesiod's version of the world's beginning is the one most later writers argue with.
Collection 03
Heroes, Labours and Long Journeys
Herakles, Perseus, Theseus, Jason and Odysseus, with a clear note on which episodes are early and which were bolted on centuries later.
Collection 04
Oracles, Omens and Delphi
How prophecy actually worked in the myths: the Pythia, the ambiguous answer, and the recurring plot where avoiding a prophecy is what fulfils it.
Collection 05
The Underworld and the Dead
Hades as a place and as a person, the geography of the rivers, and the small number of living visitors who came back to describe it.
Collection 06
Myth on Stage: Tragedy and Comedy
What the Athenian playwrights changed when they put a myth on stage, and why the stage version is often the one we now remember as canonical.
Where most readers begin
Mount Olympus is a household before it is a heaven
Modern retellings tend to present Olympus as a shining palace in the clouds. The Homeric picture is more domestic and considerably more awkward. The gods on Olympus argue at dinner, hold grudges across decades, take sides in a war they are not fighting, and are repeatedly talked out of decisions by their relatives.
That matters for reading. If you approach Olympus expecting a court of remote, serene powers, half the plot of the Iliad stops making sense. If you approach it as an extended family with unlimited power and no external authority, the whole poem clicks into place. Our first collection sets that framing up before it introduces a single individual god.
- The list of twelve is not fixed Different cities and different periods swapped members in and out. We show three versions side by side.
- Olympus is also a real mountain The 2,917-metre massif in northern Greece, which the poems treat as both a physical place and a threshold.
- The Gates of Olympus have keepers In the Iliad the Horae, goddesses of the seasons, roll back the thick cloud that closes the way in and out of the mountain.
Reading notes
Longer pieces on questions readers keep asking
Mount Olympus and the twelve Olympians
Three competing lists of the twelve, what each city was arguing for, and how to keep the family tree straight.
The Horae and the cloud gate of Olympus
A short, strange Homeric detail about who opens and closes the way onto the mountain — and why the seasons were given the job.
Hesiod and Homer: two maps of the same world
Why the two oldest Greek poets describe the same gods so differently, and which one to trust for what.
From a reader
Used in classrooms around the motu
“I teach Greek mythology to Year 12s who have mostly met these gods through films and games. Thelmoros is the only free resource I have found that tells them plainly which bits are ancient and which bits are modern invention — without making the ancient material sound like homework.”
Nadia Fenwick
Year 12 English teacher, Palmerston North
Thelmoros does not publish star ratings or aggregate review scores, because we do not collect them.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, or a class that needs printed copies?
We answer reader questions, correct our own mistakes in public, and prepare printed classroom sets for schools and libraries in New Zealand on request. Send us a note and we will reply within two working days.