10 Intriguing creatures from Greek Mythology

Mythological stories are filled with crazy, magical, and bizarre creatures who usually are not very fond of us humans. In this video, I'll discuss 10 of the most interesting ones from Greek mythology, starting with Cerberus, the dog of Hades, the god of the underworld. He is usually depicted with three heads and a serpent-like tail. He protects the gates of the underworld to prevent the living from entering and the dead from leaving. In that role, there are two scenes in which Cerberus most frequently appears. The first one is when the people who had just died and had to go to the underworld would have to take the boat of Charon to cross the Styx river to enter the underworld. Cerberus would be waiting for them there and made sure they could never get out of the underworld. The second story related to Cerberus is when he was captured by Heracles in the last of his 12 works, something captured, for example, in 1634 by Francisco de Zurbarán. The winged horse Pegasus was born from the love between the Gorgon Medusa and the sea god Poseidon. He was born from the blood of the Gorgon Medusa's head. The best-known story about Pegasus is when Bellerophon mounted a flying horse to fly to Mount Olympus where the gods resided. But the gods interfered and made Bellerophon fall off his horse mid-flight, killing him, while they did allow Pegasus to arrive to the Olympus, where he would become the carrier of the lightning bolts of the god of gods Zeus. An earlier story in the life of Pegasus is when the same Bellerophon would ride him to kill the monster Chimera, as shown in this work from almost two millennia ago. The last Roman mosaic, entitled Bellerophon Riding Pegasus and Killing the Chimera, nicely introduces the Chimera, a monster that is typically depicted as a lion with the fire-breathing head of a goat coming from its middle, and his tail ends with the head of a snake. But as you can see here, there are some variations to this, with the general idea that it is a mix of various creatures. The Minotaur is a creature with the head and tail of a bull and the body of a man. He was the son of the wife of King Minos and a bull. He ate human meat, and as that made him very dangerous, he was locked inside the labyrinth built by Daedalus and his son Icarus. Each year, the people from Athens would have to send 14 noble citizens to feed the Minotaur. But he was eventually killed by the Athenian hero Theseus. This artwork from 1861 by Edward Burne-Jones nicely illustrates the moment just before the Minotaur was killed, and notice the threat he is holding, such that he could find his way back out of the labyrinth. In addition, the Minotaur makes an appearance in Hell in Dante's book Inferno, which is a scene also depicted by some artists, like this illustration by Gustave Doré. Sirens are bird-like women, whose irresistible songs would lure sailors to their death. The most famous story is the one depicted here by John William Waterhouse, where the sirens are trying to lure Odysseus and his crew to shipwreck. Odysseus, however, was prepared and had his crew fill their ears with beeswax. But Odysseus wanted to hear their songs and was bound to the mast of the ship, so he could not do anything to follow the sirens. The sirens are first mentioned by Homer in his Odyssey. But interestingly, he does not describe their appearance, other than that they were very beautiful. And that is the reason that sirens are also just simply depicted as very beautiful women. In a later mythological story, the sirens were described as half-woman, half-bird. The Gorgons were three sisters who were able to turn anyone who looked at them into stone. Two of the sisters, Steno and Euryale, were immortal, while the third one, Medusa, was the only mortal one. And she has become the most famous of the three, as she was eventually killed by Perseus, who would later use her head to turn others into stone. Interestingly, the Gorgons are sometimes portrayed as ugly, monstrous women, especially in early art, like this work from the 6th century BC. But over time, artists chose to portray them more often as very beautiful, though still often showing Medusa with her hair made of living snakes, as in this famous work by Caravaggio. Cyclopes were giant monsters with only one eye. There are various types of cyclopes across the mythological stories, but the most famous ones are probably the man-eating ones whom Odysseus met during his 10-year journey home. Those cyclopes were shepherds, and one of them, named Polyphemus, held Odysseus and his crew captive on his island. After eating several crew members, Odysseus tricked him to escape, and this painting from 1640 by Guido Reni shows how they have escaped in their ships when the giant still tries to throw an enormous rock at them. Another man-eating monster from Homer's Odyssey is called Scylla, whom we see here on the left side of this painting from 1581 by Bartholomeus Springer. Scylla lives together with the sea monster Charybdis along a small water strait. It made it nearly impossible for sailors to pass them, as when they tried to avoid the dangerous whirlpool of Charybdis, they would get close to Scylla and the other way around. Perhaps a lesser-known monstrous creature was Lamia, depicted here in 1905 by John William Waterhouse. She was originally a child-eating monster after the goddess Hera had robbed her of her children. But in the artworks here, she is actually seducing young men with whom she would have intercourse first, and she would divorce them afterwards. This variation of the story was mainly inspired by a 19th-century poem by John Keats. She is usually depicted as a beautiful, seductive woman, but she is also captured as half-woman, half-serpent, as you can see on the right here. Probably the least-known Greek mythological creature in this list of ten is the Stymphalian bird, man-eating birds with beaks of bronze and sharp metallic feathers which they could lounge at their victims. They are best known from the sixth labor of Heracles, where he would shoot many of these dangerous birds with feathered arrows of which the tip was dipped into a poisonous blood of the slain Hydra. Well, I hope that you found this a fun little overview of some of the intriguing creatures described in Greek mythology. There are of course many other mythological creatures which I could have included, but to avoid confusion, I have not chosen for some of the more famous ones who also appear in myths and stories from other cultures, like the Sphinx, Phoenix, and Unicorn. Finally, if you want to help out the channel, please consider hitting the thumbs-up button, subscribe, and click the notification bell. Thanks for watching.