Art By: Nikita Gautam 

Heroes, gods and monsters; that sums up every story of Greek Mythology I have ever read.

The heroes are ridiculously strong and have the basic “Of course, I am going to win” attitude. The gods are crazy, powerful and deal with everything including beauty, love, mechanics, wisdom, fighting and messaging. There are also monsters which are all kinds of scary, every kind of scary possible and every kind of scary imaginable.

Obviously when heroes and monsters get together, they fight. They cannot “not fight”. They cannot just be like “not now”. When a hero sees a monster he attacks it to defend the innocent. After all, who knows what the monster might do if he is left alone. A monster sees a hero; he attacks with no ulterior motives. That’s the logic.

But that’s every hero and villain story.

What makes Greek Mythology stand out is that it seems as if everything is bad and everyone is evil, and pardon me when I say, even the gods.

The monsters are all bad, all right. They kill in every way imaginable. The heroes make promises that they break and desert any damsel in distress that happen to fall in love with them in the worst way possible (that includes even Hercules). The gods are powerful and yet with all their power they manage to do more harm than good. After ganging up to get rid of the Titans together, one might think the gods are on good terms, but no. They all seem to be jealous of each other and want to spite each other in every way possible. Even the almighty Zeus was the same. He threw his son Hephaestus off a mountain because he was born damaged. Also, the goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite, cheats on her husband, Hephaestus, mainly with Ares, the god of war. And the fun fact is that they are all family, related to each other is directly (Hephaestus and Ares are brothers) or indirectly (Hercules and Perseus being step brothers, each having Zeus as their father and a mortal as their mother despite the fact that Zeus is married to Hera, the goddess of marriages nonetheless).

One of the best parts of Greek Mythology is that the women are either damsels in distress (sometimes due to the faults of their parents or lovers), or they are listed under notable women in Wikipedia right after the list of heroes.

And lastly, the most amusing part is that there is a god or a goddess for about everything. You name it and there it is. The god of hermaphrodites, the goddess of amusement, the goddess of creativity, the goddess of rest and relaxation, the goddess of flower wreaths, the demi-god of making bread, goddess of celebrations and banquets, the demi-god of wine mixing, the god of silence, the demi-god of kneading the dough, the goddess of sewing and so on and on and on.

Greek Mythology is a messed up story and a story that takes years and years to read and master. But then again we do not want to read it all. Just the good parts like princess killing off a powerful king by pouring hot oil into his bath to save their teacher, their teacher who pushes his nephew off a cliff just because he is jealous of the latter’s genius.

Intrigued? Read a Greek Mythology.