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The stories in A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys are all stories within a story. The frame story is that Eustace Bright, a Williams College student, is telling these tales to a group of children at Tanglewood, an area in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne lived for a time. All the tales are modified versions of ancient Greek myths:
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.
Earlier, however, an alternative version of the story about the tortoise had been mentioned by the late 4th century CE author Servius in his commentary on Virgil's Aeneid. There it is a mountain nymph called Chelone (Χελώνη, the Greek for tortoise) who did not deign to be present at the wedding of Zeus.
This story about Athena and Pallas inspired a yearly festival in Libya dedicated to the goddess. A passage by Herodotus recounts this custom: [2] "Next to these Machlyes are the Auseans; these and the Machlyes, separated by the Triton, live on the shores of the Tritonian lake. The Machlyes wear their hair long behind, the Auseans in front.
Medea is known in most stories as a sorceress and is often depicted as a priestess of the goddess Hecate. She first appears in Hesiod's Theogony around 700 BCE, [2] but is best known from Euripides's tragedy Medea and Apollonius of Rhodes's epic Argonautica.
Lamia (/ ˈ l eɪ m i ə /; Ancient Greek: Λάμια, romanized: Lámia), in ancient Greek mythology, was a child-eating monster and, in later tradition, was regarded as a type of night-haunting spirit or "daimon". In the earliest stories, Lamia was a beautiful queen of ancient Libya who had an affair with Zeus.
In a late version of the Medusa myth, by the Roman poet Ovid, [10] Medusa was originally a beautiful maiden, but when Neptune (the Roman equivalent of the Greek Poseidon) mated with her in Minerva's temple (Minerva being the Roman equivalent of the Greek Athena), Minerva punished Medusa by transforming her beautiful hair into horrible snakes ...
In Greek mythology, Cleostratus (Ancient Greek: Κλεόστρατος, romanized: Kleóstratos, lit. 'renowned army') is a teenage boy from Thespiae, a town in Boeotia, who is chosen to be offered to a dragon in a yearly sacrifice to the monster, until he is saved by his lover Menestratus.