Reading notes on Greek mythology

A reading note is longer than a guide and narrower in aim. Where a guide walks you through a whole subject from the beginning, a note takes one question readers keep sending us — why the list of twelve Olympian gods keeps changing, who rolls back the cloud that closes the way onto Olympus, what to actually do with a myth unit in Term 3 — and works it through to an answer, naming the ancient text behind every claim as it goes. There are six so far, listed here newest first. All of them are free, none of them need an account, and every one is written so that you can disagree with it and check.

Six notes, newest first Seven to twelve minutes each Free to read, no account

Illustration of two readers beside a bookshelf with an open reading guide

For teachers

Teaching Greek mythology in New Zealand schools

Written for the teacher or school librarian who has inherited a myth unit and a shelf of mismatched retellings. The note argues that the hard part here is not the content but the sourcing: students arrive fluent in film and game versions and cannot tell those apart from Homer. It sets out a four-week shape that begins with the family tree rather than a single story, suggests which ancient passages survive translation into a junior classroom, and gives the discussion questions that reliably produce argument instead of plot summary. Printed classroom sets can be organised on request.

12 min read7 July 2026

Night illustration of Mount Olympus with a small temple and a constellation above the peaks

Close reading

The Horae and the cloud gate of Olympus

One small Homeric detail, read slowly. In the Iliad the Horae, goddesses of the seasons, are the ones who roll back the thick cloud that seals the way in and out of Olympus. The note asks why that job was handed to time itself rather than to a warrior or a herald, gathers what Hesiod’s Theogony adds about their names and parentage and what the Homeric Hymns show them doing, and traces how later art quietly reduced them to decorative attendants. It closes on what the image tells us about how the mountain’s boundary was imagined.

8 min read3 June 2026

Ring diagram showing the twelve Olympian gods arranged around a central label

Guide

Mount Olympus and the twelve Olympians

The list of twelve is treated everywhere as fixed, and it never was. This note lays three versions side by side — the grouping implied by Homer, the gods assembled on the Parthenon frieze, and the tidy handbook list of later antiquity — and asks what a city was arguing for when it moved Hestia out or Dionysus in. It sorts the Olympian household into generations, explains why Hades is not counted among the twelve despite being a brother of Zeus, and offers a way of holding the family tree in your head that survives the arrival of Persephone.

11 min read12 May 2026

Illustration of an open scroll with a stylus lying across it

Method

Hesiod and Homer: two maps of the same world

Our two oldest Greek poets describe the same gods and barely agree on what those gods are for. Homer shows a household in motion, quarrelling over a war it is not fighting; Hesiod’s Theogony gives an ordered genealogy in which every power has a parent and a place. The note argues this is a difference of purpose rather than a contradiction to be resolved, and that much of the muddle in modern retellings comes from splicing the two. It ends with a practical rule for which poet to reach for, and when.

10 min read28 April 2026

Comedy and tragedy masks from Greek drama

Foundations

Myth, legend and folktale: what is the difference?

The three words get used interchangeably, and the distinction is more useful than it looks. This note works through the standard scholarly split — myth as a story about gods and the shape of the world, legend as a story anchored to a named place or a supposed historical person, folktale as a portable plot that travels between cultures and swaps its cast on the way. It then tests those categories against Greek material where they blur, notably the Trojan War, admits that no classification survives every story intact, and explains why the labels still earn their keep in an essay.

7 min read15 March 2026

Stylised thunderbolt set inside a round shield

Guide

Zeus and the division of the cosmos

After the older order falls, three brothers draw lots and the world is split: the sky to Zeus, the sea to Poseidon, the realm of the dead to Hades, with the earth and Olympus left common to all. The note takes that division seriously as an act of political imagination — a settlement by lot rather than by conquest — and follows its consequences into the Iliad, where Poseidon can remind his brother that they drew as equals. It also separates what Homer and Hesiod say about Zeus’s authority from the king-of-the-gods summary later handbooks handed on.

9 min read19 February 2026

In progress

What we are still working on

We publish a note when it is finished and checked, not when it is due, so we do not announce dates. These four are the ones currently on the desk. If one of them is what you actually need, say so — reader interest is how we decide what to finish next.

Persephone and the two tellings of the abduction Drafted, not yet checked against the Homeric Hymn to Demeter line by line, which is the whole point of the piece.
Reading a family tree that contradicts itself A method note on what to do when two ancient sources give a god different parents. Currently too long and too pleased with itself.
What Ovid changed Why a Roman poet writing centuries after Homer shaped so much of what we now picture as Greek mythology. Needs a specialist reader before we publish it.
Dionysus and the thirteenth seat A companion to the Olympus note, on the god who arrives late and unsettles the count. Half written.

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Corrections welcome

Found a mistake in one of these notes?

Tell us. We would rather be corrected than quoted. If a translation is doing more work than we admitted, a name is misspelled, or a claim needs a source we did not name, email the note title and the paragraph and we will check it against the text. Corrections we accept are made on the page itself, and we say what changed rather than editing quietly.

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