The Greek society and Mythology

In ancient Greece, women were child-bearers confined to their homes with few rights, but Greek mythology features powerful and frightening female characters. Think of the Amazons, the women warriors; the snake-haired Medusa, who turns men to stone; and Medea, who murders her children. In myth, it seems, Greek women took their bloody revenge.

These deities, which to our more civilized understanding appear vain and passion-possessed, riddled with folly and so prey to humanlike faults and foibles as to be unworthy of being called divine, to the Greeks embodied and personified their belief in that which was, if grander than human in scale, yet human in spirit and essence.

The Greeks also saw work as a curse. The Greek god of hard labor was Ponos, taken from the Latin poena for sorrow. Manual labor was for slaves, and hard work was looked down upon. Plato and Aristotle believed work was for the majority so that the elite might “engage in pure exercises of the mind—art, philosophy, and politics.”

This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over

For me, the Greek gods reflect what happens to humans when we see only ourselves and our own needs. The great gods have such infinite power and resources that they have forgotten what it’s like to want, to suffer, to show empathy, to face all of life’s minor inconveniences. They have forgotten what it’s like to be told no, and it has turned them

By the 6th century BCE large numbers of Greeks were living and working in Egypt and a fully Greek city, Naucratis, had been founded on the Nile river, 70 kilometres (45 miles) from the open sea. Three hundred years later the Greek general Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, which effectively became part of the Greek world. It is fair to conclude

But not all societies and eras have seen success and failure in such a stark and forbidding light. In ancient Greece, another rather remarkable possibility – ignored by our own era – was envisaged: you could be good and yet fail. To keep this idea at the front of the collective imagination, the ancient Greeks developed a particular art form: tragic

The Goddess-centered art with its striking absence of images of warfare and male domination, reflects a social order in which women as heads of clans or queen-priestesses played a central part. Old Europe and Anatolia, as well as Minoan Crete, were a gylany.14 A balanced, non-patriarchal and non-matriachal social system is reflected by religion,

These are our origins: chaos, violence, and death. And this is the case wherever we turn in the ancient world. The Romans adopted much of the Greek mythology, performing more of a rebrand than a rewrite.