Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Briseis (/ b r aɪ ˈ s iː ɪ s /; Ancient Greek: Βρισηίς, romanized: Brīsēís, lit. 'daughter of Briseus', pronounced [briːsɛːís] ), also known as Hippodameia ( Ἱπποδάμεια , [hippodámeːa] ), [ 2 ] is a significant character in the Iliad .
The plot begins when Greeks led by Achilles sack Lyrnessus, describing the looting and burning of the city, the massacre of its men and the abduction of its women including Briseis, the childless wife of king Mynes. When the women are handed out to the leaders of the Greek raiders, Briseis, as beautiful and of royal blood, is given to Achilles.
It was a basic aspect of religion in ancient Greece, and possibly the most common religious practice. [2] It was common to perform libations at the beginning and end of every day, and also at the beginning of meals, and was customarily paired with prayer to the gods, which was performed while standing upright and sometimes with their arms ...
The works and writers of Greek literature held a great influence over Roman culture. [22] Beyond impacting Roman writing itself, scenes from Greek literature have been discovered throughout Pompeii. For instance, The House of the Tragic Poet displays a series of frescos which illustrate events from the Iliad by the Greek poet Homer .
Mainstream Greek religion appears to have developed out of Proto-Indo-European religion and although very little is known about the earliest periods there are suggestive hints that some local elements go back even further than the Bronze Age or Helladic period to the farmers of Neolithic Greece.
Greek mythology has changed over time to accommodate the evolution of their culture, of which mythology, both overtly and in its unspoken assumptions, is an index of the changes. In Greek mythology's surviving literary forms, as found mostly at the end of the progressive changes, it is inherently political, as Gilbert Cuthbertson (1975) has argued.
Greek myths were narratives related to ancient Greek religion, often concerned with the actions of gods and other supernatural beings and of heroes who transcend human bounds. Major sources for Greek myths include the Homeric epics , that is, the Iliad and the Odyssey , and the tragedies of Aeschylus , Sophocles , and Euripides .
In the Homeric poems Artemis is mainly the goddess of hunting, because it was the most important sport in Mycenean Greece. An almost formulaic epithet used in the Iliad and Odyssey to describe her is ἰοχέαιρα iocheaira , "she who shoots arrows", often translated as "she who delights in arrows" or "she who showers arrows". [ 35 ]