Mermaids, fairies, nymphs, sprites, sirens, kelpies, selkies and xanas are children's entertainment nowadays, right down to the new phenomenon of "mermaiding." This wasn't always the case. In 1917, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was fooled by the Cottingley Fairies, photos taken by two young girls

“What we caught, we threw away, what we didn't catch, we kept.”  This is Homer's Riddle and I didn't figure it out, but neither did Homer. In the story, Homer is on the Greek island of Ios, and he is sitting on a rock

The Museo Pio-Clementino is one of the sculpture museums in the enormous Vatican Museum, and it showcases works of Greek and Roman sculpture.  This statue of Penelope is a Roman copy of Greek original. According to one expert, "the copyist has exchanged the stool of the original for a

Why do so many English paintings of Circe in the mid-to-late 19th Century feature lions and wolves, not pigs, which is what Odysseus' crew were turned into? They seem more like tragic figures rather than femmes fatale. Wright Barker mostly painted rural and sporting scenes - dogs, hunting, horses,

This is Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus (1891). It's hard to see at bottom right, but there is at least one of Odysseus' men who has been turned into a pig. Odysseus himself is visible in the mirror. Waterhouse revisited Circe the next year in Circe

This song by Cream was released in 1967 as the B side to Strange Brew and on their Disraeli Gears album, and it is marvelously evocative. Told, one assumes, by a modern-day English Odysseus in the Greek islands, the object of his desires is identified with Aphrodite. Australian pop artist

To get home more quickly, could Odysseus have received guidance from the Oracle at Delphi, rather than Tiresias? The Oracle does not put in much of an appearance in the Odyssey. This implies that Homer may have been largely unaware of it and that most divination there came in the

Odysseus himself is a prototype of the Christ figure for the way he suffers the whims of the gods. Ecce Homo means "behold the man," the Latin words used ironically by Pontius Pilate when he presents Jesus to a hostile crowd shortly before the crucifixion.  Ecce Homo was

Eudora Welty's writing recalls for me the Odyssey in its dreamscapes and its interesting women on the move. Circe herself appears in the short story The Bride of the Innisfallen, written in 1951. Welty rarely makes her mythological references as obvious as this, yet Greek mythology seems to

* 1819 Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci * 1833 Tennyson’s first version of The Lady of Shalott * 1891 John William Waterhouse Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses * 1922 James Joyce’s Ulysses published * 1930 Lawrence of Arabia (T.E. Lawrence) translation of the Odyssey * 1938 Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Odyssey: A

The tale of Jason, Medea and the Golden Fleece is as old the Odyssey. It is also much bloodier and it's hard to think of two less likeable characters in the ancient Greek legends. It all starts out so well: Later, Circe pops up as Medea's

Mercury and Calypso by sculptor and draughtsman John Flaxman around 1805 (shown here in a subsequent French edition of 1835). Calypso is ordered to give up Odysseus... Flaxman was one of the main sculptors and illustrators of the Neoclassical movement and very successful in his day. Below: Odysseus and Circe.

Borges was interested in the idea that transmigration was a respectable concept in ancient Greek thought and it is still an under-appreciated thought in the West today. He cites Pythagoras who recognized the shield he fought with in the Trojan War. And then there was Plato: "In the tenth

Was Circe one of the models for Keats when he wrote this celebrated poem of 1819? Circe, like her sisters the wild fertility goddesses and faeries of myth and poetry – like Lilith in the Bible and Morgan le Fay in the Arthurian legends – seduces men and wreaks havoc by whispering

The best remakes of the Odyssey are from Japan. Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki has written: “I have been fascinated by (Nausicaa) ever since I first read about her in Bernard Evslin’s Japanese translation of a small dictionary of Greek mythology. Later, when I actually read the Odyssey, I was disappointed

The real question is: What is Odysseus doing with his hand in the painting below? Why would he leave Calypso? And who are all those other people? I had always thought of Calypso as living alone. Flemish Baroque painters apparently disagree: I suppose magic only went so far and someone

There are thousands of images of Odysseus in sculptures and statues, paintings, tapestries, pottery, coins. I have selected a few of my favorites here. The red-figured pottery below (stamnos) shows Odysseus passing the Sirens. Below is a detail of a Roman marble statue of Odysseus (Ulysses) from the 2nd century

Penelope has come down through the centuries as the very image of faithfulness, but conflicting versions do exist in classical Greek writing. In one version it was well known that Penelope was unfaithful and when Odysseus returned home, he threw her out of the house and she returned to her

Athena is clearly the most interesting and popular of the classical Greek gods and goddesses - something the Greeks figured out since most major cities, notably Athens, considered her their patron and protector. That may have been because she actually got things done. Among her most interesting attributes: her gleaming

The drawing above is Honoré Daumier's satirical take on Penelope and Odysseus reunited in the matrimonial bed (1842), from the series Histoire ancienne. It reminds me of this version from Milos circa 450 BC, which Daumier had probably seen. This (cropped) drawing below is just as honest about

Pieter Lastman's Odysseus and Nausicaa (1619) is not quite how I imagined her. This is by French caricaturist and painter Jean Veber: Ulysses and Nausicaa (1888). Valentin Serov's version (1910) reminds me of a Fellini movie... Finally, this is French painter Lucien Simon's Nausicaa

From the Second Vatican Council declaration: "True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is

The Gospel of Judas is an account of conversations between Jesus and Judas in the last days before Jesus was crucified and it suggests they were best friends, contrary to received wisdom, and that Judas turned him in because Jesus asked him to. The idea that Jesus could have been

Many islands have been candidates: Malta, Favignana, Stromboli, Isole Li Galli, Corsica, Jerba, and, of course, various Ionian islands on the west coast of Greece. Ogygia Calypso’s Ogygia has proved hard to find. All that is known about it is that it was an island near the edge of