Homer
HOH-mur
Attested elsewhere in ancient sourcesThe poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the nearest thing the Greeks had to scripture.
Herodotus says flatly that Homer and Hesiod made the Greek gods: gave them their titles, distinguished their honours and skills, and described their appearance. He dates them to about four hundred years before his own time and says nobody before them had done it.
Every god named in this account carries the shape those two poets gave it.
Sources
- Hdt. 2.53
References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.
Discussed in the papers
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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