Figures

The Figures section gathers mythological characters who belong to no single family or category: sea-gods and sea-nymphs, ferrymen and judges of the dead, seers, lovers of the gods, and the children of heroes. Their stories are usually short episodes in a larger cycle, found in Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians and Apollodorus’ Library.

Sea and underworld figures

Nereus and his wife Doris were the parents of the Nereids, the fifty sea-nymphs whom Hesiod names one by one in the Theogony (240–264); the best known of them, Thetis, became the mother of Achilles. Triton, the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite (Theogony 930–933), also belongs to the sea, as does Glaucus. Charon, the ferryman of the dead, appears here beside Minos and Rhadamanthus, who in Plato’s Gorgias (523–524) are two of the three judges of the dead.

Seers, kings and favourites of the gods

Teiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, and Minos, the king of Crete whose wife Pasiphae bore the Minotaur, are among the most widely told. Ganymede, the Trojan prince whom the gods carried off to be the cupbearer of Zeus because of his beauty (Iliad 20.232–235), and Deucalion, who with his wife Pyrrha survived the great flood and repeopled the earth (Apollodorus 1.7.2), also have their pages here. Phaethon, Amphion, Ceyx and Myrtilus have their own short stories.

Groups

The Amazons, the Telchines and The Pleiades are treated as groups rather than single characters.

See Also: Nereids, Nereus, Minos, Rhadamanthus, Teiresias, Charon, Amazons, Ganymede