The major gods are the Twelve Olympians, the council that ruled from the top of Mount Olympus. But the number twelve is doing real work, and two of the most interesting facts in Greek religion live right at the edges of it.
The first wrinkle is the twelfth seat. Ten of the chairs are never in question: Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, and Hermes. The last one is contested, and the honest answer is that the Greeks never fixed the roster: the Twelve varied by city and by century. The two figures it swaps between are Hestia, goddess of the hearth and the eldest, and Dionysus, the latecomer god of wine. Some lists count her; most count him. The tidy story that Hestia politely gave up her chair for Dionysus is a modern harmonization, not anything a classical source records. I have kept both below and marked the seat they share, because the contest is the interesting part: the oldest and steadiest god, the newest and wildest one, and a canon that could not hold them both.
The second is Hades. People assume the lord of the dead is one of the Twelve, and he is not, on purpose. When the three brothers divided the cosmos by lot, Zeus drew the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the underworld, and a god who rules below does not keep a throne on the mountain. He is the thirteenth here, set apart, exactly as the Greeks set him apart.
Meet the twelve, one at a time
The grid is the whole council at a glance. Tap any god to open the grounded entry: domain, parents, symbols, the animals and plants sacred to them, the signature myths, and the one thing the figure is for. Several of them are pinned on the home map, and the entry will say where.
Zeus
Roman: Jupiterelder OlympianKing of the gods; sky, thunder, law
Sky, thunder and lightning, kingship, justice, oaths, and the order of the cosmos. Zeus is the guarantor of guest-friendship (xenia) and the one who keeps the other gods in line.
Parentage
Cronus and Rhea (youngest son)
Birth
Cronus swallowed each of his children at birth to forestall a prophecy that one would overthrow him. Rhea hid the infant Zeus in a cave on Crete and gave Cronus a swaddled stone instead. Grown, Zeus freed his swallowed siblings and led them against the Titans.
Symbols
Sacred to them
The signature myths
The Titanomachy
The ten-year war in which Zeus and his siblings overthrew the Titans and took Olympus.
The swallowing of Metis
Warned that Metis's child would surpass him, Zeus swallowed her while pregnant — and Athena was later born from his own head.
The many disguises
Bull for Europa, swan for Leda, golden rain for Danae. Half the heroes of myth trace back to one of Zeus's affairs.
What the figure is for
Power is what gets the final say, and it is never neutral. Zeus keeps the order of the cosmos and bends it for himself the moment he wants someone.
On the home map →The family tree, in four generations
The gods are not a flat cast. They are a genealogy, and the genealogy is a story about power changing hands by force, twice, before it settles on Zeus.
The family tree
tap a figure to trace its line
Four generations, and a single story underneath: power changes hands by force. Uranus is castrated by his son Cronus; Cronus is overthrown by his son Zeus (the gold line). Tap any figure to light up its parents and children.
Greek gods, Roman names
Every god here has a second name. When Rome absorbed Greek religion it kept the gods and changed the labels: Zeus became Jupiter, Hera Juno, Poseidon Neptune, Athena Minerva, Aphrodite Venus, Ares Mars, Hermes Mercury. The planets still carry the Roman set. This is also the seam Percy Jackson works in the later books, where the same gods have a Greek aspect and a Roman one that do not entirely get along. The entries above give both names so the two halves line up.
Sources & reading
- The lineage. Hesiod, Theogony (c. 700 BC) for the generations from Chaos to the Olympians, and the birth of Aphrodite from the sea.
- The individual gods. The Homeric Hymns (to Demeter, Apollo, Hermes, Aphrodite, Dionysus), and the Library of Apollodorus as the standard mythographic handbook.
- The twelve. The canonical council and the Hestia/Dionysus seat: see the Twelve Olympians. Hades's exclusion follows the division of the cosmos by lot in the Iliad 15.187–193.
- Placement. Domains, symbols, and sacred animals follow standard iconography; the entries simplify a tradition that was never perfectly consistent across regions and centuries.