The twelve Olympian gods

The Greeks always spoke of twelve great gods, yet no ancient writer left a list that everyone agreed on.

Gods who live on a mountain

Mount Olympus is a real mountain in northern Greece, the highest in the country at a little over 2,900 metres. Its summit is often hidden in cloud, and Greek poets placed the palace of the gods there, above the weather and out of human reach. The gods who lived on Olympus are called the Olympians. In Homer’s Iliad they eat ambrosia, drink nectar, quarrel at dinner and take sides in a human war. They are powerful and do not die, yet they act very much like a large and difficult family.

Greek religion had no single holy book and no church that fixed what people had to believe. Stories changed from city to city and from poet to poet. Our oldest long sources are the poems of Homer, usually dated to the 8th century BCE, and of Hesiod, placed by many scholars not long after 700 BCE. Later writers, painters and potters added their own versions. When this course says "the myth says", it means a particular poem or writer, and it names that source.

Who counts as an Olympian

Eleven names appear on almost every list. Zeus rules the sky and throws the thunderbolt. Hera, his wife and sister, watches over marriage. Poseidon rules the sea and causes earthquakes. Demeter makes the grain grow. Athena is the goddess of wisdom, crafts such as weaving, and war fought with skill. Apollo is the god of music, healing and prophecy, and his twin sister Artemis is the goddess of hunting and wild animals. Ares is the god of war at its most violent. Aphrodite is the goddess of love and desire. Hephaestus is the smith who works metal in his forge, and Hermes is the messenger of the gods and the patron of travellers, traders and thieves.

The twelfth place is where the sources split. Most modern lists add Dionysus, the god of wine and theatre. Others add Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, the fire at the centre of every home. The Theoi Project notes that Hestia was sometimes counted among the Twelve. One ancient list, preserved in a note on the poet Apollonius of Rhodes, includes both Hestia and Hades and leaves out Ares and Dionysus altogether. Hades, the brother of Zeus who rules the dead, is usually left off because he lives below the earth, not on Olympus.

An altar for the Twelve

The Twelve Gods were worshipped together as a group. In Athens an Altar of the Twelve Gods was set up in the agora, the public square, in 522 or 521 BCE by Pisistratus the Younger, grandson of the ruler Pisistratus. It worked as the city’s central point: an inscription gave the distance from the harbour to the altar, and the historian Herodotus measured a route in Egypt by comparing it with the road from this altar to Olympia. Most of the altar now lies under the Athens to Piraeus railway line.

Greek names and Roman names

The Romans matched their own gods to the Greek ones, so many English books use Roman names. Zeus became Jupiter, Hera became Juno, Poseidon Neptune, Demeter Ceres, Athena Minerva, Artemis Diana, Ares Mars, Aphrodite Venus, Hephaestus Vulcan, Hermes Mercury, Dionysus Bacchus and Hestia Vesta. Apollo kept his name. The match was never exact, because the Roman gods had their own older cults, but it explains why the planets carry Roman names such as Mars, Venus and Jupiter.