Every Monster From Greek Mythology Explained in 12 Minutes

Medusa. Medusa is one of three snake-haired sisters called the Gorgons. She is the only one of the three who is mortal. That detail is the only reason she can be killed. Her two sisters, Stheno and Euryale, are immortal. No hero can touch them. But Medusa can die, and Perseus is the one who does it. The thing Medusa is known for is her face. If you look at her directly, The area around her lair is full of stone statues, people who came in looking at the wrong thing. Perseus gets around this with a polished bronze shield used as a mirror. He tracks her reflection and swings without ever looking at her directly. He cuts off her head while she is sleeping and bags it without looking at it. The weird part is what comes out of her neck. Two things emerge from the wound. A winged horse called Pegasus and a golden giant called Chrysaor. Poseidon was the father. The children had been trapped inside her all along. Perseus keeps the head, and it keeps working. He turns the sea monster Cetus to stone with it. He turns the Titan Atlas to stone with it. He turns a king named Polydectes to stone with it. Eventually the head ends up on Athena's shield where it stays permanently. That design has a name. The Gorgonian and real Greek soldiers painted it on their shields as protection. The Hydra. The Hydra is a giant water serpent with multiple heads. It lives in a swamp called Lerna in southern Greece, and it is Hercules's second labor. The basic problem with the Hydra is that cutting off its heads does not work. Cut one off and two grow back in its place. Hercules watches two heads return after every cut. The Hydra also has one head that is completely immortal. It cannot be killed by any normal means. Hercules solves the regrowth with fire. His nephew Aeolus burns each stump immediately after the cut, and a cauterized neck grows nothing. Cut. Burn. Next. It works. But here is where Hercules gets into trouble with the judges. His cousin Eurystheus, who assigned the labors, rules that this one does not count. Hercules used help. Aeolus did the burning. So officially, the second labor does not go on his record, which is part of why Hercules ends up with 12 labors instead of 10. For the immortal head, Hercules buries it under a large rock. It keeps living under there, but it cannot cause harm. Then he dips his arrows in the Hydra's blood. The blood is extremely toxic. Years later, one of those poisoned arrows ends up causing Hercules's own death. The monster's venom outlived the monster by decades, the Minotaur. The Minotaur is a creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull. It lives inside the labyrinth underneath the palace of King Minos on Crete. The labyrinth is designed so that no one who goes in can find the way out. It was built by a craftsman named Daedalus on direct orders from Minos. The story behind the creature, Minos was supposed to sacrifice a white bull to Poseidon. He kept the bull instead. Poseidon punished him by making his wife, Pasiphae, fall in love with the bull. The Minotaur is the result. Minos cannot kill it because it is technically his wife's child. He cannot let it roam free because it eats people, so he locks it in the labyrinth. The food supply is a tribute from Athens. Every nine years, Athens sends 14 young people to Crete, seven boys and seven girls. They go into the labyrinth. The Minotaur hunts them. None of them come back out. Theseus volunteers to go as one of the 14. The key to his survival is Minos' daughter, Ariadne, who falls in love with him and gives him a ball of thread. He ties one end to the entrance, unspools it as he walks, kills the Minotaur with his bare hands, and follows the thread back out. The Minotaur itself is not a clever creature. It is dangerous because of where it lives, and the labyrinth had a real-world address in the Greek mind, the palace of Knossos on Crete. A real ruin, with a genuinely maze-like floor plan that tourists still walk through today. Scylla. Scylla is a sea monster with six heads, each on a long neck, fixed to a rock face on one side of a narrow strait. She does not chase ships. She does not need to. Every ship that passes has to come within reach of the cliff, and when it does, each head grabs exactly one sailor. Six heads, six sailors, every time. She sits too high to be seen from the water, but her necks reach all the way down to the deck. By the time anyone realizes what is happening, the heads have already pulled back. Odysseus knows she is there before he sails through. The witch Circe warns him, do not fight her. Do not slow down. No crew has ever passed without losing men. The advice is to accept the Odysseus does not tell his crew what is waiting. He arms himself anyway, stands at the prow, and watches the cliff. He sees nothing. The heads come from above and behind, and six men are taken while he is looking in the wrong direction. He watches them call his name as they are lifted away. The strait is too narrow to avoid the cliff. The other side belongs to Charybdis, and Scylla cannot be killed. One strange detail, her name is related to the Greek word for puppy, and her voice is described as the yelp of a small dog. Six heads that take six men, and she sounds like a puppy. The Cyclops Polyphemus. Polyphemus is a cyclops, a giant with one eye in the center of his forehead. He is also the son of Poseidon. Odysseus and twelve of his men sail to his island and go into his cave without permission. Polyphemus comes home, rolls a boulder across the entrance, and finds them inside. He eats two men that night, two more in the morning. The cave is sealed with a stone so large the whole crew together cannot move it. Killing Polyphemus solves nothing. They need him alive to open the stone. The plan? Sharpen a wooden stake and get Polyphemus drunk on wine. When Polyphemus asks his name, Odysseus says his name is Nobody. While the cyclops is passed out, the men heat the stake and drive it into his eye. Polyphemus screams. The other cyclops outside ask what is wrong. He answers, Nobody is hurting me. They go back to sleep. In the morning, Polyphemus rolls the stone away for his sheep and feels every animal as it passes, checking for escaping humans. The crew hides clinging to the undersides of the sheep. They get out. Then Odysseus makes the mistake. He yells his real name back from the boat. He wants credit. Polyphemus prays to his father, and Poseidon hears, Make his journey home as painful as possible. That prayer is the reason Odysseus spends ten more years at sea. The Sirens The Sirens are creatures that live on an island and sing. Their song pulls sailors toward the rocks. Ships wreck. Sailors drown. The Sirens keep singing. The common picture is beautiful women. In the older versions, they are part bird. Either way, the song works the same. It is specific. It names what each sailor wants most, and promises to give it. For Odysseus, the lure is knowledge. Everything that happened in the Trojan War, and everything that will happen in the future. Cersei gives him the survival rule before he arrives. Either you do not hear the song at all, or you hear it and cannot act on it. Odysseus takes the second option. His men plug their ears with beeswax. He has himself tied to the mast with his ears open. The orders are clear. Whatever he says, do not untie him until the island is behind them. He hears the whole song. He screams to be released, makes promises, makes threats. His men tighten the ropes and keep rowing. The island passes. The song fades. He is untied. The weird part is that the Sirens die when a ship survives them. The prophecy says, if any mortal passes and lives, they lose their power and die. Odysseus's ship passes. One of them is still around, in a different form. The two-tailed creature on the Starbucks logo is a siren from the later medieval version of the legend, Typhon. Typhon is the last great monster that challenges Zeus directly for control of the world. He is enormous. His upper body reaches the stars. His arms stretch from east to west. His lower body is made of coiling serpents, and a hundred serpent heads grow from his shoulders, each one breathing fire. He roars, hisses, barks, and screams all at once. The gods are afraid of him. When he charges Olympus, most of them flee to Egypt disguised as animals. Zeus does not flee. He fights. At one point, Typhon tears the sinews out of Zeus's hands and feet and leaves him helpless in a cave. Hermes and Pan recover the sinews, put them back, and Zeus heals. Then, Zeus chases Typhon across the sky, hurling thunderbolts. The fight ends in Sicily. Zeus throws Mount Etna on top of Typhon and pins him under it. Typhon is still there. Ancient Greeks explained the region's volcanoes and earthquakes as Typhon struggling under the mountain. The Titans and the Giants fell before him. Typhon is the last challenger. After him, the order of the world is set. Zeus rules. Every monster that comes after is a problem for heroes, not a threat to the gods, and his name survived him. The English word typhoon got its spelling from Typhon, the Greek father of storm winds, the sphinx. The sphinx is a creature with the head of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of an eagle. She sits outside the city of Thebes and stops every traveler. She asks each one a riddle. Answer correctly, and you pass. Answer wrong, and she kills you. Thebes is effectively under siege. No one has ever answered correctly. The riddle. What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? The answer is a human being. A baby crawls. An adult walks upright. An old person leans on a stick. Morning, noon, and evening are the ages of a life. Oedipus meets her on the road, hears the riddle, and answers. The sphinx throws herself off a cliff and dies. The weird part is that she was never a random obstacle. She was sent to Thebes as a punishment. Versions differ on the offense, but the sphinx is the punishment. When Oedipus wins, the city treats him as a hero. They make him king. They give him the widowed queen Jocasta as his wife. Oedipus does not know that Jocasta is his mother. The riddle, the crown, and the marriage all happen because of the sphinx in a single afternoon. The Greeks did not invent her shape, by the way. The great sphinx of Giza, in Egypt, was already about 2,000 years old when the Thebes story was first written down. Cerberus. Cerberus is the three-headed dog that guards the entrance to the underworld. He is not there to keep the living out. He is there to keep the dead in. The dead enter freely. Leaving is the problem. No soul is supposed to get out, and Cerberus makes sure of that. Three heroes manage to get past him, each one differently. Orpheus plays his lyre, Cerberus falls asleep from the music, and Orpheus walks past him to find his dead wife. The Sybil, guiding Aeneas, throws him honey cakes laced with a sedative. He eats them, goes drowsy, and they walk through. Hercules, in his twelfth and final labor, is ordered to bring Cerberus to the surface without weapons. He drags the dog up, shows him to Eurystheus as proof, and brings him back underground. The weird part about Cerberus is how easy it is to get past him if you come prepared. Music, food, and overwhelming strength have all worked. No one storms past him with a sword, and astronomers kept the dog close to his Cerberus is the name of one of Pluto's moons orbiting the planet named after the god of the underworld, the Chimera. The Chimera is a fire-breathing lion with a goat growing out of its back and a serpent for a tail. It lives in Lycia, in what is now southern Turkey, and it burns the countryside with its breath. The king of Lycia sends a hero named Bellerophon to kill it, expecting him to die in the attempt. Bellerophon does not go on foot. He tames the winged horse Pegasus, which lets him attack from above the fire. Getting close is still the problem. The fire keeps attackers at a distance, so his weapon is a lump of lead fixed to the tip of his spear. He dives low and drives the lead into the Chimera's mouth. The monster's own fire melts it, and the molten metal runs down its throat and kills it from the inside. Bellerophon's own story ends badly. He later tries to fly Pegasus up to Olympus, and the gods knock him out of the sky, but the kill itself is clean and complete. The Chimera gave its name to an entire category, any creature assembled from the parts of different animals, and the word is still a working science term today. In biology, an organism carrying two different sets of DNA, which really happens, including in humans, is officially called a Chimera.