Zeus

6.8 Religion and myths

O

BJECTIVE

: What will your students be able to do by the end of class?

K

EY

I

DEAS

: What 3-5 key knowledge or skills will students need to master the objective?

SWBAT describe cultural Advancements such as

Greek Mythology

Greek Mythology

Greek Gods (Zeus, Athena…etc)

Myths o Used to explain daily events o Stories of Gods

A SSESSMENT : How will you assess to determine which students mastered the objective?

Homework

D

RILL

/D

O

N

OW

/O

PENING

: How will you focus, prepare, and engage students for the lesson?

M

ATERIALS

:

Why is it that the sun comes up rise on the east and set in the west?

Why is the sky blue?

Why do we fall in love with people?

If you don’t know why make something up!

Explanation of the days actiity (gallery walk). Discussion of the rules and expectations of the gallery walk. Invest students in the idea that walking around a class is a privledge not a right.

I

NTRODUCTION OF

N

EW

M

ATERIAL

: How will you convey the knowledge and/or skill of the lesson? What will you student be doing to process this information?

Religion review:

Greeks were polytheistic

-

Greek Gods explained many of the phenomenon’s (impressive,

Handout and

PowerPoint extraordinary) and disasters of the world

Also used as stories to teach lessons

Myths

• Stories told about the Gods and Goddess to explain tragedies

•

Why do people do what they do?

• explain natural disasters, or actions people take.


1.

How did ancient Greeks explain natural disasters? Actions of people?

2.

Why does Greece have many gods and goddesses?

3.

How did Greek Gods affect the culture of Greece?

4.

Echo- Reflection of sound & Narcissus- to be in love with oneself

5.

Zeus Family Tree

G UIDED P RACTICE : In what ways will your learners attempt to explain or do what you have outlined? How will you monitor and coach their performance?

Speed Dating

I NDEPENDENT P RACTICE : In what ways will your different learners attempt the objective on their own? How will you gauge mastery?

Facebook page for HW

C

LOSING

: How will you have students summarize what they’ve learned? How will you reinforce the objective’s importance and its link to past and future learning?

Facebook page for HW http://www.classtools.net/FB/home-page



What is social media? What are some examples? How does it affect our lives?



How might having access to social media affect the relationships between the Greek gods/goddesses and the relationships between the gods/goddesses and the mortals?

D IFFERENTIATION : How will you differentiate your instruction to reach the diversity of learners in your classroom?


Greek Gods/Goddesses Graphic Organizer

A. What is the sign and/or responsibility of this god or goddess?

B. How do you think this god/goddess affected the daily lives of the ancient

Greeks?

C. How do you think life would have been different for the ancient Greeks without this god/goddess?

D. Where do we see the influence or influences of this god/goddess today?

1. Hades

2. Dionysos

3. Hera

4. Demeter

5. Athena

6. Apollo

7. Aphrodite

8. Hermes

9. Zeus

10. Artemis

11. Hephaestus

12. Hestia

13. Ares

14. Poseidon


Name: Zeus  

Parents: Cronus, Rhea  

God of: Heaven, Earth, Men

Symbol: Eagle, Oak  

Roman Name: Jupiter  

Also Known As: Jove, Adultus, Brontaeus, Fulgur, Muscarius  

Notes: Although powerful in battle, Zeus was unfaithful to his wife, Hera, and often spent time with nymphs and mortal women, thus producing many great heroes.

Name: Hades  


God of: Underworld  

Roman Name: Pluto  

Also Known As: Ades, Aides, Aidoneus, Dis, Pluton, Orcus  

Notes: Being with dead people doesn't improve one's disposition much. Although he was one of the major gods, Hades didn't even have a throne on Olympus. He spent most of his time in the Underworld.

Name: Hera  


Goddess of: Women, Childbirth  

Symbol: Peacock  

Roman Name: Juno  

Also Known As: Here  

Patroness of:  

Notes: A very powerful goddess, Hera did not take nicely to her husband, Zeus, and his many love affairs. Unable to kill Zeus, she often persecuted his lovers instead.

Name: Hephaestus  

Parents: Zeus, Hera  

God of: The Forge, Fire  

Roman Name: Vulcan  

Also Known As: Halciber

Notes: The only crippled god, Hephaestus was also very ugly. Even so, he was an excellent blacksmith, and he forged lightning bolts for Zeus.

Name: Hermes  

Parents: Zeus, Maia  

God of: Trade, Travelers, Tricksters, Thieves, The Wind  

Symbol:   Roman Name: Mercury  

Also Known As:  

Patron of: Trailers and Thieves  

Notes: Best known as the messenger god, Hermes was a clever boy ever since his birth.

He often acted as a messenger between gods and mortals.


Name: Aphrodite  

Parents: Unknown  

Goddess of: Love, Beauty, Laughter, Pleasures  

Symbol: Rose, Swan, Dove, Myrtle  

Roman Name: Venus  

Also Known As: Aligena, Candarena, Chrysenios, Urania  

Patroness of:

Courtesans   Notes: Aphrodite was not on the friendliest terms with Apollo and Artemis .

She believed that every human needed a companion to love and be with. Aphrodite herself was greatly worshipped by many hopefuls.

Name: Artemis  

Parents: Zeus, Leto  

Goddess of: The Moon, Hunting, Wild Things, Childbirth, Virginity  

Symbol: Cypress

Roman Name: Diana   Also Known As: Cynthia, Delia, Hecate/Hekate, Luna, Phoebe  

Patroness of: Unmarried girls, chastity  

Notes: Young and free, Artemis did not think it right that girls should be forced to marry and have children. Strangely enough, she is also the goddess of childbirth. This comes from the fact that when she was born, she caused her mother no pain.

Name: Ares  

Parents: Zeus, Hera  

God of: War  

Symbol: none  

Roman Name: Mars  

Notes: Unlike Athena , Ares loved war and reveled in violence. His constant companion was Eris , goddess of discord. Ares also romanced Aphrodite from a distance, enthralling her with tales of his victory and might. Unfortunately, he was actually a big coward, and often ran to his mother, Hera, when he was hurt.

Name: Apollo  

Parents: Zeus, Leto  

God of: The Sun, Fine Arts, Medicine, Poetry, Eloquence, Prophecy  

Symbol: Laurel Tree  

Roman Name: Apollo  

Also Known As: Hyperion, Helius, Sol, Phoebus  

Patron of: Unmarried men, oracles  

Notes: Like his sister, Apollo was a patron of the unmarried. Even so, he had many loves, the most famous being Daphne. She did not want to marry him, and her father turned her into a laurel tree to save her from Apollo. From then on, the laurel tree has been Apollo's sacred tree.


Name: Hestia  


God of: The hearth and domesticity

Roman Name: Vesta  

Also Known As:   The oldest of the olympians

Notes: She was one of the original 12 olympians but she gave her throne to Dionysus in order to keep the peace, making her the most generous and gentlest of the gods.

Name: Poseidon  


God of: The Sea  

Roman Name: Neptune  

Also Known As:  

Notes: Although mainly a god of the sea, Poseidon created the horse as a gift for a nymph who he loved. The horse became his favorite animal, and he even created a flock for himself in the ocean.

Name: Athena  

Parents: Zeus, Metis  

Goddess of: Wisdom, War, Weaving, Skill  

Symbol: Owl  

Roman Name: Minerva  

Also Known As: Bright-eyed, Athene, Pallas Athena, Caesia, Hoplosima  

Patroness of: Athens  

Notes: Although wise, Athena was also fiercely jealous and could hold a grudge for as long as it took to repay those who had offended her. Athena was also a warlike goddess whose cunning allowed her to win any battle, even one against Ares.

Name: Dionysos

Parents: Zeus, Semele (mortal)

God of: madness, vegetation

Symbol: wooden stick wrapped in ivy leaves

Roman Name: bacchus  

Patroness of: Art  

Notes: character in Euripidies the bacchae

Name: Demeter

Parents: Chronos &Rhea

Goddess of: The Earth

Symbol: Wheat, cornocopia

Roman name:Ceres (cereal)

Notes: Daughter pursephone married to hades. Demeter fell in love with the mortal

Iasion of Samothrake and lay with him in a thrice-plowed field. Zeus discovered the affair, and struck Iasion dead with a thunderbolt.


Hades

Hades was the god of the dead, who ruled the place where dead people went after they died. He is a rather shadowy figure in more ways than one, spooky, and the Greeks preferred not to talk about him too much. Generally people who had good intentions did not sacrifice to Hades either. When they did, instead of burning the fat and the bones so the smoke would go up to the sky, instead they poured blood into pits or ditches dug into the ground (as in the part of Homer 's Odyssey where Odysseus visits the Underworld ).

Hades was thought of as the brother of Zeus and Poseidon , and therefore also the brother of Demeter and Hera .

h

Like Poseidon, Hades does not appear in very many Greek myths. The bestknown of the myths he is in are those of Persephone and Orpheus .

People sacrificed to Hades when they wanted something bad to happen, like if they were trying to get revenge on an enemy.


Dionysos

For the Greeks , Dionysos was a fertility god like Demeter . But while Demeter was the goddess of dry things growing, like grain, Dionysos was the god of wet things growing, like fruit of all kinds, but especially grapes (and the wine that people made from grapes). In fact, Dionysos is in some ways more like Persephone than like Demeter, because he is often thought of as being the wine itself, just as Persephone is the wheat .

For instance, when people drank wine, they said that they were taking the god into their own bodies, and when they became tipsy, they said that the god had taken over their minds and hearts. The Greek word for this is "enthusiastic", en= in and thus = god, taking the god into you.

You were not really responsible for things you did while you were drunk, because the god made you do them.

Mythologically, Dionysos is one of the younger gods, like Apollo , Artemis , and Athena . He is even younger than they are. In fact, he is so young that Homer , in the Iliad and the Odyssey , seems not to know about him yet - although his name does show up in written documents from the Late Bronze Age in Greece (about 1300 BC ). He is the son of Zeus, and a mortal women named Semele (SEH-muh-lay). The story goes that Zeus and Semele were in love, and she was going to have his baby, and he was so happy about it that he told her (foolishly) that he would give her whatever she wished for, anything at all (in fairy tales, and maybe in real life, this is

ALWAYS a bad idea! - compare for instance the Christian story of Salome ).

Semele wished to see Zeus in his true form, but Zeus' true form is that of a lightning bolt! That would kill her! Zeus tried to talk her out of it, but she insisted. So he had to do it. But when he appeared right next to her as a lightning bolt, of course she was killed. Zeus managed to rescue their unborn child and sewed the baby up in his own leg until it was born, and that was the baby

Dionysos.

Because wine makes people lose control of themselves, a lot of stories about Dionysos have to do with the Greek idea of sophrosyne , or self-control. As you can see in the story of

Phaedra , the Greeks thought it was good to be able to control your emotions, but not all the time. People should also be able to let themselves go enough to fall in love, or enough to just relax and enjoy themselves sometimes. The story of the Bacchae is Euripides ' version of this idea.


HERA

Hera is the sister and wife of Zeus (the Greeks did not approve of this arrangement for real people but they thought it was okay for gods ). (Compare the Egyptian gods , who also marry their sisters). So Hera is also the daughter of Earth ( Rhea ) and Time ( Chronos ).

Hera is usually thought of as responsible for marriage and the family, and Greek men thought of her as mean and selfish and generally unpleasant to be around. She's always getting mad at Zeus about something. But people did sacrifice to her, especially at a wedding.

Hera is the mother of Hephaistos , the god of volcanoes and blacksmithing. That's appropriate, because she is an Earth goddess and volcanoes are born out of the earth . She's also the mother of Hebe, the goddess of youth, and Ares , the god of war (maybe because she is associated with agons ). Different Greek story-tellers disagreed about whether Hera's husband Zeus was the father of these children, or maybe Hera just made them on her own, with no father.

Throughout all the stories, Hera spends a lot of her time trying to get back at Zeus for having other girlfriends besides her. When one of Zeus's girlfriends has a baby, Hera hates that baby and tries to get rid of it. The most famous of these babies is Hercules , who was the son of Zeus and a human woman named Alcmena. Another famous story about Hera is the one about Echo and Narcissus - here's a video of it:


Demeter

For the Greeks , Demeter is an earth goddess; her name is De, which means earth (the same word as Gaia) and meter, which means mother. Demeter is the goddess of growing things, especially of grains like wheat and barley and millet .

Demeter's daughter, Persephone , is the grain itself, so Demeter is the earth giving birth to the grain.

Mythologically, Demeter is the sister of Zeus , Poseidon , Hades , and Hera , and so, like them, she is the daughter of Gaia , or Earth. This makes a lot of sense for a goddess of growing crops, because that is exactly what produces crops: earth.

Demeter, Persephone, and Triptolemos (the boy), an 1899 drawing from a stone carving found at Eleusis .

The most important story about Demeter is that of her daughter Persephone .

Demeter also plays an important part in the Greek religious mystery cult at Eleusis .


ATHENA

Athena is one of the younger goddesses; she is the child of Zeus . She has no mother. The story is that Athena was born, fully grown and armed , out of the head of Zeus. One day Zeus complained that he had a headache, and Hephaistos came and banged him on the head with an axe and out popped Athena!

Athena has no husband either. She doesn't fall in love and she doesn't have children.

Athena helps Hercules hold up the sky.

Athena is the goddess of wisdom; her symbol is the owl (the wise bird). She's the patron goddess of the city of Athens, and her owl appears on Athenian silver coins . She is also a war goddess, which is why she is usually shown fully armed, with her shield and sword.

Myths about Athena: the stories of Arachne and Medusa . Athena also plays a big part in the

Odyssey .


Apollo

Apollo is a younger god, the son of Zeus and the nymph Leto, and the twin brother of Artemis .

The Greeks often thought of Apollo as being the same as Helios, the Sun god, or the same as the sun , and so he is one of the sky gods who always beat out the earth gods in Greek myths.

Apollo's younger brother is Hermes .

Apollo does not marry or have many children, though sometimes he falls in love. Apollo is a wise god who can tell the future, and his temple at Delphi was a famous oracle , a place where people went to find out what was going to happen. One of his sons is Asclepius , the god of medicine . Apollo is also a musician who plays the lyre .

Apollo's temple at Delphi

The Greeks told a story that when Apollo first came to Delphi there was a great snake living there, a sort of dragon, the Pythia. Apollo killed the dragon and that was how Delphi became his temple. This might mean that there was an earth goddess who was worshipped at Delphi before the Greeks came with their new god Apollo. It is a lot like the story of Medusa .

Apollo driving the chariot of the sun on a metope

Another story about Apollo is the story of Cassandra . Also check out the story of Helios and

Phaethon .


Aphrodite

Aphrodite (a-fro-DIE-tee) was the Greek goddess of love. Naturally she was always falling in love with somebody, or somebody was falling in love with her. She is one of the oldest goddesses, the daughter of Ouranos . The most famous story about Aphrodite is that she started the Trojan War .

Another story is the one about

Actaeon . She is supposed to have had Ares for her boyfriend, and to have been married to Hephaistos .

Nobody is sure yet what the relationship is between

Aphrodite and West Asian love goddesses like Astarte .

The Romans thought

Aphrodite was like their goddess Venus . And the

Germans thought she was like their goddess Freya .

Aphrodite is a fertility goddess, like Demeter . But while Demeter makes the earth grow grain , Aphrodite makes women have babies. Aphrodite herself, however, does not have children.


Hermes

Hermes is a god of boundaries, borders and edges. Because of this, he's also in charge of things that cross borders, like messages or travelers. He is the messenger of the Greek gods; his father,

Zeus , often sends Hermes to earth when he has something to say to a person. For instance,

Hermes carries messages to Odysseus in Homer 's Odyssey , and to Alcmena in Plautus '

Amphitryo.

Hermes was also the god who took care of you when you went on a trip. Many Greek people always sacrificed to Hermes before they traveled. Hermes also guided dead souls to the afterlife .

People thought of Hermes as being younger than the other gods , clever, quick and tricky. He likes to play tricks on the other gods: crossing boundaries in another way. You could compare him to other trickster figures in other cultures, like Anansi in Africa or Br'er Rabbit in North

America.

He's also like the Egyptian god

Thoth .

Here's one story about Hermes being tricky:

Hermes invented the lyre on the first day after he was born. Later that day, he also stole Apollo's sacred cattle (cows) and cleverly made the cattle walk backward so their tracks wouldn't point to his house. When

Apollo accused Hermes of stealing the cattle, Hermes' mother Maia insisted that Hermes couldn't have because he was with her the whole time. But Hermes' father Zeus , who knew all about it, said Hermes had stolen them really and he should give them back. At this point

Hermes began to play his lyre, and

Apollo loved the music so much that he agreed to let Hermes keep the cattle in exchange for the lyre. (For another reference to Apollo's sacred cattle, check out the Odyssey ).


Zeus

Zeus was, for many Greeks , the king of the gods . He is shown this way in Homer's Iliad , for example.

He is a sky god: people thought of him as living on top of a mountain (Mount Olympus), and when he is angry he throws lightning bolts out of the sky at people. Zeus probably was not worshipped in Greece before the Indo-

European Greeks arrived there in the Middle Bronze

Age .

He is an Indo-European god, and he is basically the same as other Indo-European sky gods like Jupiter (this is really even the same word: Ju= Zeus and piter means father) or Odin . He's related to Indra , a

Hindu sky god, the son of Dyeus Pita.

In some ways Zeus represents the Indo-Europeans in the minds of the later Greeks. When he arrived in Greece, he seems to have married the local earth goddess, Demeter (De for earth and meter means mother). This may be a sort of religious representation or memory of the actual mixing that took place between the invaders and the local people in the Middle Bronze Age . It is also a fertility ritual, where as with Gaia the sky and the earth come together to make the grain grow: and the child of Zeus and Demeter is Persephone , the grain .

In other ways, people thought of Zeus as representing the

Father in psychological terms. People who had real problems with their own fathers might think of Zeus as a sort of ideal father, for instance. In the story of Phaethon , we see Zeus playing the part of the wise father.

Bronze statue of Zeus(?) from Artemisium (ca. 470

BC )good things happen to you and sometimes bad things: if good things happened, they would say, that was because you had done something that pleased Zeus, and if bad things happened you had done something wrong, and you needed to try to make Zeus happy now. The story of Prometheus explains how this works.

Although Zeus was not really related to any Egyptian gods , Greek people who traveled to Egypt thought that

Zeus was like the Egyptian god of the air and wind , whose name was Amon .


Artemis

Apollo had a twin sister named Artemis, who was also the daughter of Zeus and the nymph

Leto. Artemis never marries or has any children ; she is a wild goddess who spends most of her time hunting .

The Greeks thought Artemis was the same thing as the moon - the moon was Artemis, and

Artemis was the moon . But at other times the Greeks painted pictures of Artemis looking like a girl.

People were already worshipping Artemis in Greece during the Late Bronze Age . Probably

Artemis came to Greece with the Indo-European invaders in the end of the Early Bronze Age about 2000 BC , but the way people thought about Artemis also had a lot in common with a

West Asian goddess, the Mistress of Beasts. Probably the Greeks mixed their ideas about

Artemis with some West Asian ideas they also heard about.

Artemis as the Mistress of Beasts

(from the black-figure Fran � ois vase, about 570 BC)

Some stories about Artemis are Phaedra , the story of Niobe , and the story of Actaeon .


Hephaestus

Hephaistos (heh-FAIS-toss) is the blacksmith god, the god of volcanoes and hot fires and smelting metal ore to make iron . People said he lived inside volcanoes , and when they erupted it was because Hephaistos was moving around.

Hephaistos was Hera 's son, and was not thought of as having had any father. People said that

Zeus had thrown him off Mount Olympus down to earth, and he had injured his legs in his fall and couldn't walk well.

This story shows his connection to the earth in several ways: Hera, Gaia 's daughter, is an earth goddess, and her son is also earthy. He is thrown from Mount Olympus down to the earth, and he crawls on the earth instead of walking with his head high like a sky god. Of course the god of volcanoes would have to be an earth god and not a sky god, because volcanoes are inside the earth.

In some stories, Hephaistos is married to Aphrodite , but they never seem to get along very well.

She likes Ares better.


Poseidon

The Greeks thought of Poseidon as a god of violent, unpredictable movement. He is most often the god of the ocean, which is of course the biggest, most unpredictable, and most dangerous thing around. Many Greeks spent a lot of time sailing on the ocean, and they paid a lot of attention to

Poseidon.

But Poseidon is also the god of earthquakes , and earthquakes are also very common in Greece. He stamps his foot, or he hits the earth with his trident

(like a pitchfork) to make an earthquake.

And, maybe for the same reason, Poseidon is the Horse-God. Horses , I suppose, are also big and unpredictable and dangerous, though not on the same scale as earthquakes and oceans. If he came with the Indo-Europeans to Greece, then he might have originally been a horse-god, who only later came to be associated with the ocean and earthquakes

Poseidon, in Greek mythology, is the brother of Zeus and Hades , and so also the brother of Demeter and Hera . Like them, he is the child of Earth and

Time, Gaia and Kronos .

There are not very many stories involving Poseidon. One is the story of

Phaedra , which shows Poseidon more or less as a blind, uncaring force, rather like the oceans and earthquakes he controls. Another is the Odyssey .

You might think of Poseidon as representing physis , nature, in the Greek mind, and that when people sacrifice to Poseidon they are trying to control nature , to reduce chaos to rationality, to establish nomos, or law. For people who sailed on the ocean in tiny wooden ships, the idea of being able to control the ocean might seem very interesting!


HESTIA was the virgin goddess of the hearth (both private and municipal) and the home. As the goddess of the family hearth she also presided over the cooking of bread and the preparation of the family meal. Hestia was also the goddess of the sacrificial flame and received a share of every sacrifice to the gods. The cooking of the communal feast of sacrificial meat was naturally a part of her domain.

Hestia

In myth Hestia was the first born child of Kronos and

Rhea who was swallowed by her father at birth. Zeus later forced the old Titan to disgorge Hestia and her siblings. As the first to be swallowed she was also the last to be disgorged, and so was named as both the eldest and youngest of the six Kronides. When the gods Apollon and Poseidon sought for her hand in marriage, Hestia refused and asked Zeus to let her remain an eternal virgin. He agreed and she took her place at his royal hearth.

Hestia was depicted in Athenian vase painting as a modestly veiled woman sometimes holding a flowered branch (of a chaste tree ?). In classical sculpture she was also veiled, with a kettle as her attribute.


Ares

ARES was the great Olympian god of war, battlelust, civil order and manly courage. In Greek art he was depicted as either a mature, bearded warrior dressed in battle arms, or a nude beardless youth with helm and spear. Because of his lack of distinctive attributes he is often difficult to identify in classical art.

Some of the more famous myths featuring the god include:--

His adulterous affair with

Aphrodite in which the pair were trapped in a net laid by her husband Hephaistos;

The slaying of Adonis , his rival for the love of Aphrodite, in the guise of a boar;

The transformation of Kadmos of Thebes and his wife Harmonia into serpents;

The murder of Hallirhothios to avenge his daughter's rape and his subsequent trial in the court of the Areiopagos;

The arrest of Sisyphos , an impious man who kidnapped the god Death;

The battle of Herakles and

Kyknos in which the god intervened in support of his son;

His support of the Amazones , warrior daughters of the god;

His capture by the Aloadai giants who imprisoned him in a bronze jar;

The Trojan War in which he was wounded by Diomedes in battle with the help of Athene.

Zeus - Cloudfront.net

Greek Gods/Goddesses Graphic Organizer

Hades

Dionysos

HERA

Demeter

ATHENA

Apollo

Aphrodite

Hermes

Artemis

Hephaestus

Poseidon

Hestia

Ares

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