by Andrew Post

Created on: May 01, 2008

Among the elder civilizations, the Greeks had quite a few myths concerning the stars. It is a testament to the power of those legends that, millennia later, we still use the names the Greeks gave to the constellations: Pegasus, Cassiopeia, Orion, Leo, Taurus, Cancer, the Hydra, and a dozen others. Those names in a large part represent the mythology of ancient Greece; the Greeks embedded the tales of their heroes, demons, and creators in the skies for all the world to see and remember.

The Greeks gave credit for the stars (like they did with practically everything) to their collection of gods. Whenever a particularly dashing young hero went on a quest, fought monsters, braved perils, survived treachery, and won the girl and the kingdom, they were all hung in the sky by Zeus, the king of the gods, as a reminder to the people of the reward for brave deeds...and the punishment for evil ones.

Take, for example, the myth of Perseus. One of the many illegitimate sons of Zeus and a mortal woman, Perseus was a bold, stalwart lad who got off to a shaky start but wound up a hero. Perseus's mother, Danae, was the daughter of a king named Acrisius. After being informed by a soothsayer that Perseus would one day kill him, Acrisius set his daughter and her child out to sea, presumably to die. Polydectes, the king of the nearby land of Seriphus, took the woman and the boy in. A few years later, Polydectes fell in love with Danae and would have forcibly married her, but Perseus proved to be too diligent a guardian. So Polydectes sent the young man off on a quest to bring back the head of the Gorgon, Medusa, whose gaze could turn living creatures to stone. Polydectes was sure that Perseus would be killed, but Perseus's father was watching over him and the goddesses Hermes and Athena aided him.

Perseus went to see Medusa's three sisters, the Gray Ones, old women with only one eye and one tooth that they shared between them. Perseus stole the eye and the tooth and used them to secure the Gray Ones' help. They told him how to obtain a hero's shopping list of world-saving equipment: a pair of winged sandals, a magic satchel to carry Medusa's head in, and the cap of Hades, the god of the underworld, which granted invisibility to the wearer. Thus equipped, Perseus stole up to Medusa unseen, looking at her reflection in his shield so he wouldn't be turned to stone. He cut off her head and put it in the satchel.

That head came in handy for Perseus. Flying by Ethiopia on his way home, he

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>