arth herself was called the All-Mother, but she was not really a
divinity. She was never separated from the actual earth and personified. The Goddess of
the Corn, Demeter (CERES), a daughter of Cronus
and Rhea, and the God of the Vine, Dionysus,
also called Bacchus, were the supreme deities of the earth and of great importance in
Greek mythology.
Pan was the chief. He was the son of Hermes; a noisy merry god, and part animal too, with a goat's horns, and goat's hoofs instead of feet. He was the goatherds' god, and the shepherd' god, and also the merry companion of the woodland Nymphs when they danced. All wild places were his home, thickets and forests and mountains, but best of all he loved Arcady, where he was born. He was a wonderful musician. Upon his pipes of reed he played melodies as sweet as the nightingale's song. He was always in love with one nymph or another, but always rejected because of his ugliness. Sounds heard in a wilderness at night by the trembling traveller were supposed to be made by him, so that it is easy to see how the expression "panic" fear arose.
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Silenus was sometimes said to be Pan's son; sometimes his brother, a son of Hermes. He was a jovial fat old man who usually rode an ass because he was too drunk to walk. He is associated with Dionysus as well as with Pan; he taught him when the wine-god was young, and, as is shown by his perpetual drunkenness, after being his tutor he became his devoted follower. |
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Besides these gods of the earth there was a very famous and very popular pair of brothers, Castor and Pollux (Polydeuces), who in most of the accounts were said to live half of their time on earth and half in heaven. Castor and Pollux were the sons of Leda, and are usually represented as being gods, the special protectors of sailors, and were also powerful to save in battle, the accounts of them are very contradictory. Sometimes Pollux alone is held to be divine, and Castor a mortal who won a kind of half-and-half immortality merely because of his brother's love.
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Leda was the wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta, and the usual story is that she bore two mortal children to him, Castor and Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife; and to Zeus, who visited her in the form of a swan, two others, Pollux and Helen, the heroine of Troy. Nevertheless, both brothers Castor and Pollux were often called the sons of Zeus; indeed, the Greek name that they are both known by, the Dioscouri means "the striplings of Zeus". On the other hand, they were also known as "the Tyndaridae" or the "sons of Tyndareus" |
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Aeolus, King of the winds, also lived on the earth. An island, Aeolia, was his home. Accurately he was only regent of the Winds, viceroy of the gods. The four chief winds were Boreas, the North Wind; Zephyr, the West Wind; Notus the South Wind; and the East Wind, Eurus.
There were also some other beings who lived on the earth, neither human, nor divine. Prominent among them were:
The Centaurs Beings that were half man and half horse The Gorgons Three dragon like beings with wings, two immortal and one immortal The Graiae Three gray sisters of the Gorgons, who shared a single eye The Sirens Beings with enchanting voices who lured sailors to their deaths on the rocks of their island The Fates Who gave to men at birth, the good and evil that they have
