Zeus, The Ultimate Player

Ok, so everyone knows that the Greek gods were a bit of a wild bunch, a little bit crazy, and I find all of the Greek myths and stories really interesting, they have a tale about everything, but I didn’t realise how crazy and mixed up the Mount Olympus family tree was until I really started to research it.

So Chaos is the beginning of it all, (from chaos comes order) and then came Tartarus, Gaia (earth), Eros, Nyx (night) and Erebus. Gaia then had 3 children; Uranus (sky), Mountains and Pontus (the sea). Now it gets a bit weird, but kind of understandable, Gaia marries Uranus (the earth and the sky) and produced 12 children including Cronus and Rhea (seen as the mother and father of the Gods) they then had 6 children including Zeus who, after he overthrew his father became the king of the Greek Gods.

If you look at the Olympus family tree you will see the entire cross lovin’ thing. Now I know it is not a family tree in the typical sense, being Gods I suspect it’s whole different ball game and if you are a god on Mount Olympus the pool of people to get with is quite small, especially if you’re a bit of a player like Zeus, that’s probably why there are so many stories of Greek gods coming to earth and having sex with mortals. Those stories are also weird. Because they are Gods they couldn’t come down to earth as themselves, but you would have thought that they would have disguised themselves as a person and not, as in some of the stories, and an animal or inanimate things like a sheet, a bull, a cloud, a swan and have sex with the mortals, usually impregnating them. But it was a good excuse for women if they have been sleeping around, “A swan impregnated me. It must have been Zeus!”

Now I know this isn’t the entire MountOlympus family tree, just the main part (the whole thing would be far too convoluted, massive and confusing). But in this one Zeus married Hera, the most famous of his relationships and then cheated on her, a lot! This tree only shows 9 of his relationships, 2 being his sisters, one is his aunt and 1 is his cousin. This only shows 12 children and 9 muses, but he apparently had a lot more (into the hundreds in fact). In the most promenant stories you can find of Zeus he had, in total, 25 children plus 6 fates and 12 muses by divine mothers (16 of them) and 38 children plus 3 graces by mortal women (28 of them) That’s a lot of children (84 kids!) The most famous of his children being Heracles (Hercules to us Disney watchers), Perseus, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, Orion, Aphrodite, Persephone, Helen of Troy and the muses and fates.

There are many conflicting genealogies to be totally accurate and have every god/goddess/titan/monster in a family tree. Also lots of stories could have been lost.

I bet you didn’t know that Zeus was such a playa!