HOME



picture info

Orestes (mythology)
In Greek mythology, Orestes or Orestis (; ) was the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and the brother of Electra and Iphigenia. He was also known by the patronymic Agamemnonides (), meaning "son of Agamemnon." He is the subject of several Ancient Greek theatre, Ancient Greek plays and of various myths connected with his madness, revenge, and purification, which retain obscure threads of much older works. In particular Orestes plays a main role in Aeschylus' ''Oresteia.'' Etymology The Greek name Ὀρέστης, having become "Orestēs" in Latin and its descendants, is derived from Greek ὄρος (óros, "mountain") and ἵστημι (hístēmi, "to stand"), and so can be thought to have the meaning "stands on a mountain". Greek literature Homer In the Homeric telling of the story, Orestes is a member of the Atreus#The_House_of_Atreus, doomed house of Atreus, which is descended from Tantalus and Niobe. He is absent from Mycenae when his father, Agamemnon, returns from the ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Greece
Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. Located on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the east. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of the Geography of Greece, mainland, the Ionian Sea to the west, and the Sea of Crete and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean Basin, spanning List of islands of Greece, thousands of islands and nine Geographic regions of Greece, traditional geographic regions. It has a population of over 10 million. Athens is the nation's capital and List of cities and towns in Greece, largest city, followed by Thessaloniki and Patras. Greece is considered the cradle of Western culture, Western civilisation and the birthplace of Athenian democracy, democracy, Western philosophy, Western literature, historiography, political science, major History of science in cl ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Orestes And Iphigenia Mosaic - Palazzo Dei Conservatori - Musei Capitolini - Rome 2016
In Greek mythology, Orestes or Orestis (; ) was the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and the brother of Electra and Iphigenia. He was also known by the patronymic Agamemnonides (), meaning "son of Agamemnon." He is the subject of several Ancient Greek plays and of various myths connected with his madness, revenge, and purification, which retain obscure threads of much older works. In particular Orestes plays a main role in Aeschylus' ''Oresteia.'' Etymology The Greek name Ὀρέστης, having become "Orestēs" in Latin and its descendants, is derived from Greek ὄρος (óros, "mountain") and ἵστημι (hístēmi, "to stand"), and so can be thought to have the meaning "stands on a mountain". Greek literature Homer In the Homeric telling of the story, Orestes is a member of the doomed house of Atreus, which is descended from Tantalus and Niobe. He is absent from Mycenae when his father, Agamemnon, returns from the Trojan War with the Trojan princess Cassandra as ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Suitors Of Penelope
In Greek mythology, the suitors of Penelope (also known in Latin as the ) are one of the main subjects of Homer's ''Odyssey''. Role in the ''Odyssey'' In the ''Odyssey,'' Homer describes Odysseus' journey home from Troy. Prior to the Trojan War, Odysseus was King of Ithaca, a Greek island known for its isolation and rugged terrain. When he departs from Ithaca to fight for the Greeks in the war, he leaves behind a newborn child, Telemachus, and his wife, Penelope. Although most surviving Greek soldiers return shortly after the end of the fighting, Odysseus does not return to Ithaca until ten years after the end of the Trojan War. During Odysseus' long absence, unmarried young men start to suspect that Odysseus died in Troy or on the journey home. Under the pretense of courting Penelope, these youths, called "the suitors", take up residence in Odysseus' home and vie for her hand in marriage. Rather than simply rejecting the suitors, Penelope devises a plan to delay their courts ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Penelope
Penelope ( ; Ancient Greek: Πηνελόπεια, ''Pēnelópeia'', or , ''Pēnelópē'') is a character in Homer's ''Odyssey.'' She was the queen of Homer's Ithaca, Ithaca and was the daughter of Spartan king Icarius (Spartan), Icarius and Asterodia. Penelope is known for her fidelity to her husband Odysseus, despite the attention of more than a hundred Suitors of Penelope, suitors during his absence. In one source, Penelope's original name was Arnacia or Arnaea. Etymology gloss (annotation), Glossed by Hesychius of Alexandria, Hesychius as "some kind of bird" (today arbitrarily identified with the Eurasian wigeon, to which Carl Linnaeus, Linnaeus gave the binomial ''Anas penelope''), where () is a common Pre-Greek suffix for predatory animals; however, the semantic relation between the proper name and the gloss is not clear. In folk etymology, () is usually understood to combine the Greek word (), "weft", and (), "face", which is considered the most appropriate for a ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Telemachus
In Greek mythology, Telemachus ( ; ) is the son of Odysseus and Penelope, who are central characters in Homer's ''Odyssey''. When Telemachus reached manhood, he visited Pylos and Sparta in search of his wandering father. On his return to Ithaca, he found that Odysseus had reached home before him. Then father and son slew the suitors who had gathered around Penelope. According to later tradition, Telemachus married Circe after Odysseus's death. The first four books of the ''Odyssey'' focus on Telemachus's journeys in search of news about his father, who has yet to return home from the Trojan War, and are traditionally given the title '' Telemachy''. Etymology Telemachus's name in Greek means "far from battle", or perhaps "fighting from afar", as a bowman does. ''Odyssey'' In Homer's ''Odyssey'', Telemachus, under the instructions of Athena (who accompanies him during the quest), spends the first four books trying to gain knowledge of his father, Odysseus, who left for Troy w ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Athens
Athens ( ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Greece, largest city of Greece. A significant coastal urban area in the Mediterranean, Athens is also the capital of the Attica (region), Attica region and is the southernmost capital on the European mainland. With its urban area's population numbering over 3.6 million, it is the List of urban areas in the European Union, eighth-largest urban area in the European Union (EU). The Municipality of Athens (also City of Athens), which constitutes a small administrative unit of the entire urban area, had a population of 643,452 (2021) within its official limits, and a land area of . Athens is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, world's oldest cities, with its recorded history spanning over 3,400 years, and its earliest human presence beginning somewhere between the 11th and 7th millennia BCE. According to Greek mythology the city was named after Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom, ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Aegisthus
Aegisthus (; ; also transliterated as Aigisthos, ) was a figure in Greek mythology. Aegisthus is known from two primary sources: the first is Homer's ''Odyssey'', believed to have been first written down by Homer at the end of the 8th century BC, and the second from Aeschylus's '' Oresteia'', written in the 5th century BC. Aegisthus also features heavily in the action of Euripides's '' ''Electra'''' ( 420 BC), although his character remains offstage. Family Aegisthus was the son of Thyestes and Thyestes's own daughter Pelopia, an incestuous union motivated by his father's rivalry with the house of Atreus for the throne of Mycenae. Aegisthus murdered Atreus in order to restore his father to power, ruling jointly with him, only to be driven from power by Atreus's son Agamemnon. In another version, Aegisthus was the sole surviving son of Thyestes after Atreus killed his brother's children and served them to Thyestes in a meal. While Agamemnon laid siege to Troy, his estrange ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Cassandra
Cassandra or Kassandra (; , , sometimes referred to as Alexandra; ) in Greek mythology was a Trojan priestess dedicated to the god Apollo and fated by him to utter true prophecy, prophecies but never to be believed. In modern usage her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate a person whose accurate prophecies, generally of impending disaster, are not believed. Cassandra was List of children of Priam, a daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. Her elder brother was Hector, the hero of the Greek-Trojan War. The older and most common versions of the myth state that she was admired by the god Apollo, who sought to win her love by means of the gift of seeing the future. According to Aeschylus, she promised him her favours, but after receiving the gift, she went back on her word. As the enraged Apollo could not revoke a divine power, he added to it the curse that nobody would believe her prophecies. In other sources, such as Fabulae, Hyginus and Bibliotheca (Pseudo- ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Trojan War
The Trojan War was a legendary conflict in Greek mythology that took place around the twelfth or thirteenth century BC. The war was waged by the Achaeans (Homer), Achaeans (Ancient Greece, Greeks) against the city of Troy after Paris (mythology), Paris of Troy took Helen of Troy, Helen from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology, and it has been Epic Cycle, narrated through many works of ancient Greek literature, Greek literature, most notably Homer's ''Iliad''. The core of the ''Iliad'' (Books II – XXIII) describes a period of four days and two nights in the tenth year of the decade-long siege of Troy; the ''Odyssey'' describes the journey home of Odysseus, one of the war's heroes. Other parts of the war are described in a Epic Cycle, cycle of epic poems, which have survived through fragments. Episodes from the war provided material for Greek tragedy and other works of Greek literature, and for Latin literature, ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Mycenae
Mycenae ( ; ; or , ''Mykē̂nai'' or ''Mykḗnē'') is an archaeological site near Mykines, Greece, Mykines in Argolis, north-eastern Peloponnese, Greece. It is located about south-west of Athens; north of Argos, Peloponnese, Argos; and south of Corinth. The site is inland from the Saronic Gulf and built upon a hill rising above sea level. In the second millennium BC, Mycenae was one of the major centres of Greek civilisation, a military stronghold which dominated much of southern Greece, Crete, the Cyclades and parts of southwest Anatolia. The period of History of Greece, Greek history from about 1600 BC to about 1100 BC is called Mycenaean Greece, Mycenaean in reference to Mycenae. At its peak in 1350 BC, the citadel and lower town had a population of 30,000 and an area of . The first correct identification of Mycenae in modern literature was in 1700, during a survey conducted by the Venetian engineer Francesco Vandeyk on behalf of Francesco Grimani, the Provveditore Ge ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Niobe
Niobe (; : Nióbē) was in Greek mythology a daughter of Tantalus and of either Dione or of Eurythemista or Euryanassa. She was the wife of Amphion and the sister of Pelops and Broteas. Niobe is mentioned by Achilles in Homer's ''Iliad'', which relates her ''hubris'', for which she was punished by Leto, who sent Apollo and Artemis to slay all of her children, after which her children lay unburied for nine days while she abstained from food. Once the gods had interred the slain, Niobe retreated to her native Sipylus, "where Nymphs dance around the River Acheloos, and though turned to stone, she broods over the sorrows sent by the Gods". Later writers asserted that Niobe was wedded to Amphion, one of the twin founders of Thebes, where there was a single sanctuary where the twin founders were venerated, but no shrine to Niobe. Mythology Family Her father was the ruler of a city located near Manisa in today's Aegean Turkey that was called "Tantalis" or "the city ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Tantalus
Tantalus ( ), also called Atys, was a Greek mythological figure, most famous for his punishment in Tartarus: for either revealing many secrets of the gods, for stealing ambrosia from them, or for trying to trick them into eating his son, he was made to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, with the fruit ever eluding his grasp, and the water always receding before he could take a drink. This punishment, although the most well-known today, was a more unusual detail in surviving early Greek sources, where variants including a stone suspended above his head are more commonly recorded. The ancient Greeks used the proverb "Tantalean punishment" (: ) in reference to those who have good things but are not permitted to enjoy them. His name and punishment are also the source of the English word ''tantalize'', meaning to torment with the sight of something desired but out of reach; tease by arousing expectations that are repeatedly disappointed. 'The rock of ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]