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The Thelmoros library of Greek mythology guides
Six collections, forty-six guides, and not one of them behind a payment or a sign-up form. Each collection is self-contained, each guide names the ancient text it is drawing on, and every one of them can be read start to finish in an afternoon.
A collection is simply a group of guides that belong together, arranged so that reading them in order builds something. Each one opens with a map page — the family tree, the generations, the geography — then works through the individual myths, and closes with discussion questions that have no answer key.
Nothing here depends on anything else on the site. If your reading list sends you straight to the Athenian tragedians, start there; you will not be missing a prerequisite. The collections are organised by subject rather than by difficulty, and the table further down this page shows how they compare if you would rather choose by reading level.
What every collection shares is the source column. When a guide tells you that a god behaves a certain way, it also tells you which surviving text says so, and roughly where in that text to look. Where the ancient writers disagree with each other — which is often — the disagreement is shown rather than smoothed away.
Everything on this page is free
There is no paid tier, no membership and no online payment anywhere on this site. Printed classroom sets and in-person reading sessions for New Zealand schools and libraries are arranged individually on request, and are quoted case by case rather than listed here.
Mount Olympus and the Twelve Olympians
Nine guides that build the household of Olympus from the ground up: the mountain itself, the twelve usually counted as its residents, the two or three regularly swapped in and out, and what a city might be arguing for when it drew up a list of its own. The collection leans hardest on Homer — the divine assemblies of the Iliad and the quieter domestic scenes of the Odyssey — with the Homeric Hymns supplying the standalone portraits of Apollo, Hermes, Demeter and Aphrodite. It suits readers meeting the Olympian gods properly for the first time, and teachers who need a family tree that does not quietly invent relationships to make itself tidy.
9 guidesBeginner friendly
The Titans and the Older Order
Seven guides on what came before the Olympians: the first powers — Chaos, then Gaia and Ouranos — the Titan generation, Kronos swallowing his children, and the long war that ends with the older order shut away beneath the world. This is the most source-heavy collection on the site, because nearly all of it rests on a single poem — Hesiod’s Theogony — and the guides follow that poem’s structure closely so you can see how much of the standard modern account is Hesiod and how much was added by later compilers such as Apollodorus. It suits readers who already know the Olympian gods and want the succession problem set out properly rather than summarised in a sentence.
7 guidesSource heavy
Heroes, Labours and Long Journeys
The largest collection, and the one most readers arrive for. Eleven guides cover Perseus, Herakles and the labours, Theseus and the Athenian cycle, Jason and the voyage of the Argo, and the long return of Odysseus. The sources are deliberately mixed, because hero myth is where the surviving evidence is most scattered: the Odyssey for the journey home, Pindar’s victory odes for Jason and Pelops, Athenian tragedy for Theseus, and Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca — a Roman-era handbook, not an early witness — for the neatly numbered labours everyone remembers. Each guide marks which episodes are attested early and which arrive centuries afterwards.
11 guidesMost read
Oracles, Omens and Delphi
Six thematic guides on prophecy: how the sanctuary at Delphi was imagined, who the Pythia was, what an oracular answer actually looked like on the page, and the recurring plot in which the effort to avoid a prophecy is precisely what brings it about. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo supplies the founding story of the sanctuary, Sophocles supplies the sharpest dramatic use of an oracle, and Herodotus’ Histories shows how Greeks of the classical period reported consulting the oracle in practice, which is a useful corrective to the mythical version. It suits readers working on fate and free will, and classes reading Oedipus for the first time.
6 guidesThematic
The Underworld and the Dead
Five guides on the land of the dead: Hades as a place and as a person, the rivers and their crossings, judgement and the limits of it, and the small number of living visitors who went down and came back to describe it. Book 11 of the Odyssey is the anchor text, because it is the earliest sustained description that survives; the Homeric Hymn to Demeter supplies Persephone and the seasonal bargain; and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written in Latin centuries later, supplies the Orpheus most people actually picture. The guides keep those three layers apart. It suits readers who want to know why the underworld feels bleak in Homer and romantic in later retellings.
5 guidesThematic
Myth on Stage: Tragedy and Comedy
Eight guides on what happened to Greek mythology once Athens put it on a stage. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides each inherited stories that were already centuries old and reshaped them for a festival audience with a civic argument to make; Aristophanes then built comedy out of the whole apparatus, gods included. This is the advanced collection. It assumes you already know the myths and asks the harder question of what the dramatists changed and why the stage version is so often the one we now treat as canonical. If the difference between a myth, a legend and a folktale is still unsettled for you, read our note on myth, legend and folktale before you begin here.
8 guidesAdvanced
How the collections fit together
There is no compulsory order. The table sets the six side by side by reading level and by the ancient writer whose version you will spend the most time inside.
| Collection | Guides | Reading level | Ancient voice that dominates |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 — Mount Olympus and the Twelve Olympians | 9 | Beginner friendly | Homer, with the Homeric Hymns |
| 02 — The Titans and the Older Order | 7 | Demanding — source heavy | Hesiod, Theogony |
| 03 — Heroes, Labours and Long Journeys | 11 | Beginner to intermediate | Homer’s Odyssey, then Apollodorus |
| 04 — Oracles, Omens and Delphi | 6 | Intermediate | Homeric Hymn to Apollo; Sophocles |
| 05 — The Underworld and the Dead | 5 | Intermediate | Odyssey Book 11; Hymn to Demeter |
| 06 — Myth on Stage: Tragedy and Comedy | 8 | Advanced | Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes |
Two routes through the library work well. The story route follows the myths’ own internal chronology: the Titans first, then Olympus, then the heroes, then the underworld, with oracles and the stage as the two collections that cut across all of it. The evidence route follows the age of the sources instead, which means Hesiod and Homer first, the fifth-century dramatists next, and only then the later handbooks and Roman poems that fill the remaining gaps. Teachers building a unit tend to prefer the first. Students writing about sources usually need the second.
Later is not worse. It is just later.
Two of the writers you will meet most often here, Apollodorus and Ovid, worked centuries after Homer and Hesiod, and Ovid wrote in Latin for a Roman readership. They preserve stories that would otherwise be lost, and they are frequently the reason a myth has the shape we now recognise. Every guide labels them as later sources rather than presenting their versions as the earliest evidence.
Guide counts on this page describe what is published today, 31 July 2026. Collections grow slowly and in public: when a guide is added, it is dated, and when we correct one, the correction is dated too.
Read a note, or tell us what is missing
Alongside the collections we publish longer standalone reading notes on the questions readers keep sending us — how Homer and Hesiod differ, who keeps the cloud gate of Olympus, how to teach this material in a New Zealand classroom. If a subject you need is not covered anywhere in the library, or you have found a mistake in one of our guides, write to us and say so. We reply within two working days and we correct our errors in public.