Common Literary Allusions from Greek Mythology
Cassandra
- Greek Myth Origins
- Apollo, god of sun, prophecy, and poetry, falls in love with a beautiful woman named Cassandra and gifts her and her descendants with the power to hear the future. When she rebuffs his advances, he curses her ( and her descendants) so that no one will ever believe the prophecies they tell
The 12 Labors of Hercules
Symbol and Representation
- Greek Myth Origins
- Zeus, king of ancient Greek gods, fathers a child, Hercules, with a mortal woman. Hera, Zeus' jealous wife, later curses Hercules out of anger at her husband, causing him to go mad and kill his sons and wife. To atone for his sins, Hercules completes 12 tasks impossible for normal men and devised by Hera and her lover, King Eurytheus
- The slaying of the Nemean Lion
- The slaying of the Lernaean Hydra
- The capture of the Cerynaein Hind
- The capture of the Erymanthian Boar
- Defeat of the Stymphalian Birds
- The seizure of the Mares of Diomedes
- The capture of the Cretan Bull
- Seizure of the Girdle of Hippolyta
- Seizure of Geryon's Cattle
- Theft of the Apples of Hesperides
- The capture of Cerebus
- Cassandra now plays a role in literature as a symbol of unheeded warning, and of insight turned to insanity
- She is a staple figure of tragedy
- Professor Trelawney, a discredited seer in JK Rowling's Harry Potter Series, is the grand daughter of Cassandra Trelawney, making her a descendant of Cassandra, and cursed herself
Symbol and Representation
- Hercules tasks all represent valiant and impossible feats, accomplished not for the desire of personal goals, but for penance and redemption
- Parallels between the labors of Hercules emphasize the grandeur and importance of an event
- In Andrew Hussie's Homestuck, a character associated with cats is strangled to death after being beaten with clubs and shot with arrows, much like the slaying of the Nemean Lion
Symbol and Representation
Oedipus and Electra
- Orpheus and Eurydice serve as another symbol of tragedy and the ironies and futility of lost love, as well as a warning to trust and uphold bargains and against the hubris of one's own convictions
- Orpheus, as a master musician and poet, is often allusioned simply to invoke the ideas of masterful and beautiful music
- In Cornelia Funke's Inkheart trilogy, a character who thinks highly of his own melodious talents is given the name of Orpheus. Throughout the second novel, he attempts, unsuccessfully, to bring another character back from the dead with the talents of his voice
Orpheus and Eurydice
- Greek Myth origins
- Oedipus
- A staple tragic hero who's struggle against the fates ends in fulfillment of the prophecy of killing his father and marrying his mother
- Electra
- Electra kills her mother Clytemnestra in revenge for Clytemnestra's murder of Electra's father, King Agamemnon
- Greek Myth Origins
- Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus, dies on their wedding day. The distraught Orpheus plays a song so beautiful that the nymphs show him an entrance to the underworld to retrieve his deceased wife . His song convinces Hades to let him take Eurydice back to the surface, on the condition that he lead her there and not look back until they reach their destination. Orpheus began to doubt Hades, and turned back to look just as he was about to cross the thresh hold to the upper world, and Eurydice vanished. Their souls were later reunited upon Orpheus' death.
Symbol and Representation
- Though Oeidipus is also a common symbol of the futility of fighting fate, he and Electra are commonly referenced in the psychoanalytic complexes named after them
- Both Electra and Oedipus complexes, assigned to females and males respectively, are a point of Freudian (and therefore factually debatable) psychology in which a child's sexual maturation is manifested through subconcious desire of sexual possession of the opposite sex parent and competition with the same sex parent. Most children mature beyond this point, but those left with complexes never move past it
- The names are derived from the murders of one parent to possess, either in marriage or revenge, the other
- Sylvia Plath remains the poster child for the Electra complex, as her poem Daddy, about a woman with an unresolved complex, mirrors her own autobiographical feelings regarding her father and late husband before her own suicide