Greek Mythology
By Ken Jennings and Mike Lowery
4.5/5
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About this ebook
With this Junior Genius Guide to Greek mythology, you’ll become an expert and wow your friends and teachers with all the best ancient stories: how Prometheus outsmarted the gods, how Achilles’s heel led to his death, and how we mere mortals always seem to get mixed up in so many misadventures. With great illustrations, cool trivia, and fun quizzes to test your knowledge, this guide will have you on your way to whiz-kid status in no time!
Ken Jennings
Ken Jennings is the New York Times bestselling author of Brainiac, Maphead, Because I Said So!, and Planet Funny. In 2020, he won the “Greatest of All Time” title on the quiz show Jeopardy! and in 2022, he succeeded Alex Trebek as a host of the show. He is living in Seattle during his mortal sojourn, but his posthumous whereabouts are still to be determined.
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Reviews for Greek Mythology
12 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I really enjoyed reading your book. I read enthusiastically and understood the story. If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel star, just submit your story to [email protected] or [email protected]
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Provides facts on the classic myths of the Greeks and Romans, from how Prometheus outsmarted the gods to how Achilles's heel led to his death.
Book preview
Greek Mythology - Ken Jennings
Good morning, Junior Geniuses! Please take your assigned seats and settle down. Troublemakers in the front row! You know who you are.
My name is Ken Jennings, but you can call me Professor Jennings
or Sir
or Your Grand Sagaciousness.
Our subject today is a fascinating one: the classic myths of the Greeks and Romans. That’s why I’m wearing this simple white robe, or toga,
even though frankly it’s a little chilly, especially when I stand over here by the ventilation panel. Today we will travel back more than three thousand years to the Bronze Age, when these myths were born, in pursuit of one of the only things that really matters in life: knowledge. Lots of knowledge about cool stuff.
The great thing about knowing stuff is that anyone can do it. To be a Junior Genius, all you need to do is pay attention every day to the weird facts in the world around you—and the world is certainly overstuffed with weird facts nowadays. That’s why our secret Latin motto is Semper quaerens. In English, that just means Always curious.
Everyone: Stand up, put your right index finger to your temple, and face this drawing of Albert Einstein. We will now say the Junior Genius Pledge.
With all my fellow Junior Geniuses, I solemnly pledge to quest after questions, to angle for answers, to seek out, and to soak up. I will hunger and thirst for knowledge my whole life through, and I dedicate my discoveries to all humankind, with trivia not for just us but for all.
Let’s begin!
Greece Is the Word
Every day we forget stories. I saw a funny video about a cat on the Internet this morning, but when I tried to tell a friend about it, I suddenly had no idea how it ended. A list of best-selling books from ten years ago would have authors on it that I don’t even remember. The thing you have to realize about Greek myths is that these are stories so good that we’ve managed to remember them for more than three thousand years.
Three thousand years! When these stories were first told around a banquet table or a campfire, paper hadn’t even been invented yet to write them down on. The entire world probably had only forty million people in it—roughly the population of the state of California today. Two of those people were your great-great-great-great- . . . great-grandparents.
Today kids still love Greek myths, but they aren’t just fairy tales for children—they’ve become woven into our everyday life. Have you ever heard anyone say that someone has the Midas touch
or an Achilles’ heel
? If references like that are all Greek to you, don’t worry. It just means that today you’re going to hear some great stories for the very first time.
Best of the West
Greek mythology is still important today because so much of Western civilization was born in ancient Greece. Here’s a list of some of the things we still use today that the Greeks invented. (Note that some of these inventions cropped up elsewhere—India, China, the Middle East—around the same time.)
• DEMOCRACY
• AN ALPHABET with both consonants and vowels (our word alphabet
even comes from the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta)
• LOGIC
• COMEDY AND DRAMA
• GEOMETRY
• WIND POWER
Not too shabby for a handful of small city-states founded by sheepherders! The Greeks even invented pizza . . . sort of. One of their favorite snacks was an ancestor of pizza called plakous: a delicious flatbread sprinkled with herbs, onion, and garlic. (Canadian bacon and pineapple hadn’t been invented yet.)
Hero Worship
The greatest Greek inventor was Hero of Alexandria, sometimes called Heron. Around AD 40 he invented the world’s first steam engine—but, not realizing the machine’s potential, only used it as a toy. For Greek temples, Hero invented the world’s first automatically opening doors and even a vending machine! (By inserting a coin into a slot, temple visitors could buy a specific amount of holy water.)
Ancient Greek buildings sometimes had showers and even central heating. Around 600 BC, the Greeks dug a two-thirds-mile tunnel on the island of Samos to supply the capital with water. And the Greek explorer Pytheas sailed as far north as Scandinavia!
Around 1960, scientists discovered that this ancient Greek device found in a ship-wreck was actually an early computer! Astronomers designed it to calculate positions of the sun, moon, and planets.
Greek scientists were not perfect, of course. Even bright guys like Aristotle thought that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that the heart was the center of human intelligence. (The brain, he said, was just a big cooling organ.) The great Greek mathematician Pythagoras refused to eat (or even touch) beans: He and his followers were sure that beans had souls!
But in general, the Greeks reached heights of scientific knowledge that wouldn’t be surpassed in Europe for almost two thousand years.
Myth Information
But apart from their scientific thinking, the Greeks also had a rich tradition of storytelling about gods and goddesses, brave heroes, and hideous monsters.
What we think of as ancient Greek civilization was actually a big clash of cultures: a series of migrations from the north into the prehistoric civilizations of the Greek isles. Each of these tribes brought their own oral traditions with them, and Greek mythology was what they created from this mishmash of different stories.
The Greeks were polytheists (pah-lee-THEE-ists
), meaning they believed in many gods. They worshipped these gods by making offerings at stone altars. At home their courtyard would have an altar to a household god. Their village or city would have temples with larger altars and statues of different gods. Before a family meal, you might sacrifice to Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, with an offering of burned meat. Before beginning a journey, you might travel to a temple of Hermes, the god of travelers, to pray and leave a votive offering (an object like a coin or a small statue) in his sacred grove.