Percy Jackson's Greek Gods

Percy recaps Zeus’s tendencies to chase women and incinerate anyone who angers him, even kings. One such king is Salmoneus, who disguises himself as Zeus in an attempt to make his followers worship him. When Zeus finds out, he destroys Salmoneus’s kingdom. At another point, Zeus decides that all humans are terrible and must be purged from Earth. With Poseidon’s help, he sends a massive flood to drown them. A few survive and make sacrifices to Zeus, so he lets them live. They repopulate Earth by throwing rocks that are the bones of Gaia, which turn into humans, and Zeus is similarly okay with these new humans because “without them he wouldn’t have had any pretty mortal girls to chase after” (209).

The only time Zeus doesn’t get what he wants is in a confrontation with a storm giant named Typhoeus. One day, Typhoeus decides to destroy the world. Zeus leads the charge to stop him, but the other gods are terrified and run away. Zeus is no match for Typhoeus, and the giant rips out Zeus’s sinew and steals his lightning bolts. With help from Hermes and a satyr god, the three defeat the giant by playing mesmerizing music to calm him. Typhoeus is so impressed with the music that he offers to make the satyr god his court musician, but the satyr god says he would need a harp made from godly sinew to play songs about such a great being. Typhoeus gives the god Zeus’s sinew. The Satyr god plays a song to put the giant to sleep while Hermes puts Zeus back together. Zeus blasts Typhoeus into the sea and slams Mount Etna on top of him, trapping the giant and creating a volcano.

When Athena’s Titan mother is pregnant with her, Zeus hears a prophesy that the Titan’s daughter will be greater than him, so he swallows his wife, who gives birth to Athena in his stomach. As the daughter of a thought Titan, Athena can transform into pure thought and move to Zeus’s head, where she makes a racket until Zeus develops a terrible headache. Unable to take the pain, Zeus orders Hephaestus to cut his head open, and Athena emerges, proclaiming herself the goddess of warfare and wisdom.

Athena is sometimes known as Pallas Athena because of the time she spends with the warlike nymphs of Africa. While there, she develops a friendship with a nymph named Pallas, the only fighter as good as Athena. One day while the two are sparring, Zeus looks down and believes Athena is about to be killed. He appears behind her with Medusa’s severed head. Since Pallas is a nymph, the head doesn’t turn her to stone, but it slows her down enough that Athena lands a killing blow. To honor her fallen friend, Athena builds a statue and places it in a shrine in Troy so that women can seek protection from Pallas and Athena. Since the statue looks so much like Athena, people get confused and start referring to the goddess as Pallas Athena, but Athena is fine with this because “by taking her friend’s name, the goddess was keeping Pallas’s memory alive” (234).

Despite this kindness, Athena has a dark side. When a talented weaver named Arachne is told she must have learned from the goddess herself, Arachne takes offense and challenges Athena to a weaving contest. Athena agrees and weaves a tapestry depicting the gods in all their glory, complete with images of mortals whom the gods punished for daring to challenge them. Arachne’s tapestry depicts the terrible things the gods did to the mortals, and when the two are finished, Athena is forced to concede a tie. Enraged that Arachne insulted her, Athena beats her bloody while the crowd cheers. Given her injuries, Arachne knows she’ll never weave again. She tries to die, but Athena, feeling guilty, turns Arachne into a spider so that she and all her descendants can weave forever.

Athena swears off men, but this doesn’t keep Hephaestus from developing feelings for her. One day, Hephaestus throws himself at her, sobbing and begging for her to be with him. Athena kicks him away, wipes off his snot with a handkerchief, and tosses the cloth down Mount Olympus, where it becomes a mortal baby. Athena claims the child and puts him in a box with a snake to enhance his godlike nature, leaving the box with the princesses at one of her temples. The princesses hear baby noises from the box and get concerned, but when they open it, they go mad and jump off a cliff. Athena punishes their father by killing him and installing her son as king.

Born from the sea, Aphrodite is the most beautiful woman in the world. When she arrives on Olympus, the male gods fall all over her, and the women get enraged because the men are being ridiculous. Hera stops the fighting by betrothing Aphrodite to Hephaestus. The women smugly agree while the men grudgingly acquiesce, realizing that if Aphrodite is married to Hephaestus, it “opened up all sorts of possibilities for becoming her secret Boyfriend” (255). Aphrodite joins the pantheon as the goddess of love and promptly enters an affair with Ares. In addition, she huffs around Mount Olympus, gets mad when anyone but her gets attention, and generally makes everyone’s lives miserable.

The gods take advantage of Aphrodite’s powers, using love to their advantage. Zeus is still angry that Prometheus gave humans fire, so he tricks Prometheus’s brother into unleashing misery on the world so that everyone will blame Prometheus, and Zeus can have his revenge. However, nothing works until Aphrodite suggests giving Prometheus’s brother a wife. The gods create the perfect woman, name her Pandora, and drop her off with Prometheus’s brother. The two immediately marry, and Aphrodite gives them a pithos (jug) as a present, warning them to never open it. Pandora’s curiosity gets the better of her, and she opens the pithos, releasing a hundred evil spirits into the world to torment humanity. However, Zeus also put the spirit of hope in the jar, which gives humans the power to believe that things can get better.

At one point, Zeus decides that all his affairs with women are Aphrodite’s fault, and he makes her fall in love with a human to teach her a lesson. When the love spell wears off, Aphrodite is embarrassed and leaves, promising that the mortal’s son will grow up to be a prince and making him swear never to reveal the boy’s true mother. Years later, the mortal tells the secret, and Zeus incinerates him. In another case, a princess refuses to worship Aphrodite, so Aphrodite curses the woman with a vile pregnancy that makes her father chase her off at sword point. To save her, the gods turn her into a tree that still gives birth to a baby boy. Feeling guilty, Aphrodite takes in the child (naming him Adonis) and gives him to Persephone to babysit.

Adonis grows up to be the most handsome man in the world. Both Persephone and Aphrodite realize how attractive Adonis is and fight over who will take him as a boyfriend. Adonis doesn’t like either option, so the goddesses ask Zeus, who proposes a timeshare. Adonis will spend a third of the year with Persephone, a third with Aphrodite, and a third alone. Aphrodite persuades Adonis to spend his extra third of the year with her, which goes well until a wild boar kills him. Aphrodite buries Adonis in a field of lettuce, and he turns into flowers that remind her of his scent.

Ares literally came out of the womb swinging, and Percy sums him up by saying that “if bullies, gangsters and thugs prayed to a god, they’d pray to Ares” (275). Ares’s main worshippers are the people of Sparta and Thrace, as well as the Amazons, and he has two sacred groves guarded by dragons where people can pray if they survive their encounter with the dragons. A man named Cadmus kills one of these dragons after it eats half his men, and Athena offers Cadmus protection so that he can build the city of Thebes. Years later, to avenge the dragon’s killing, Ares turns Cadmus and his wife (also Ares’s daughter) into snakes.

Despite being the god of war, Ares can’t always get away with killing people. When a son of Poseidon falls in love with a daughter of Ares, Ares kills him for attacking his daughter, though allegedly out of love. Poseidon demands that Ares stand trial for murder. Ares claims that he acted in self-defense and is found innocent of murder, though the gods still punish him. The hill where he’s tried is later known as the Aeropagus and becomes a place where Athenians are tried.

Percy’s last tale of Ares involves two giants who want to overthrow the gods. Ares tries to fight the giants off when they attack Olympus, but they capture him, chain him up, and shove him in a jar, which makes him weak and sickly. The giants threaten to destroy Ares if the Olympians don’t rescue him, but since the Olympians don’t really like Ares, they ignore the giants. Eventually, Hermes rescues Ares, and when the other gods see how weak and pathetic Ares is after his imprisonment, they destroy the giants for daring to treat a god so badly.