I posted this in ask a historian and got no answers, but I was curious if anyone here had any thoughts. I have read a lot of Greek tragedies, and it got me thinking about their interest in family annihilation and destruction or miasma surrounding a family unit. The Oresteia, The Oedipus Trilogy, Hippolytus, Electra, Heracles, etc.. all seem to have this interest in the destruction of the family unit often by the hands of women. I am curious about what this reflects about Ancient Greek beliefs and culture.

I see many people, especially those from the West and a handful of Westernised Hindus themselves, linking the Hindu pantheon with the Greek pagan pantheon in the internet. While it's is true that Greek paganism and ancient Vaidika religion does have quite some similarities due to their shared origins, this interaction is somewhat overemphasised in the modern context.

A lot of Westerners do get excited when they learn that the Greek Zeus and the Hindu Indra might be one and the same. But after reading Zeus' sexual exploits, I, being a devout Hindu, abhor associating Zeus with Indra. Indra had tricked Ahalya, the wife of his own teacher, Sage Gautama into having sex by impersonating as her husband, for which Gautama cursed Indra with castration and to bear a thousand vaginas all over his body (however, when Indra repented, Gautama restored him his manhood and converted the thousand vaginas into a thousand eyes, which Indra then passed on to the peacock's feathers). But Zeus' sexual debauchery goes unpunished throughout the pagan Greek literature with him facing no repercussions or ever being repentful. And in the Orphic tradition (an esoteric strain of pagan Greek religion similar to Tantra), it gets even worse — here Zeus literally rapes his own mother Rhea, resulting in the birth of Persephone, who is then raped by her own father, resulting in the birth of Dionysious. So here we see Zeus is not only a sex offender, but also indulges in abominable activities like having sex with his own biological mother and daughter. And not to mention the pederastic relationship Zeus has with Ganymede. How can one assume that Hindus worship a perverse character like Zeus under guise of Indra ?

Although Megasthenes had famously conflated Krishna with Hercules based on their similar exploits, but that was a solitary event. Pagan Greeks were an excessively arrogant bunch of people, who viewed Alexander's conquests as a 'civilising mission'. The aforementioned Dionysious was revered among Greeks for his supposed conquest of Hindus. There is an entire epic, called Dionysiaca, compiled by the Roman-era Greek poet Nonnus, codifying the heroic exploits (read war crimes) Dionysious commits against Hindus. Warning — Hindus will not find the Dionysiaca worth reading, as the text is filled with contemporary racist tropes against Hindus. To commemorate Dionysious' anti-Hindu violence, pagan Greeks used to sacrifice cattle to him (something that greatly incenses most Hindus). Hindus in return, equally despised the Yavanas for their m*lecha nature.

In colonial era, the connection between Hindu deities and their pagan Greek counterparts was first proposed by Christian missionaries, under the system of interpretatio graeca, (basically, due to the Eurocentric mindset of the colonizers, they thought all other non-Abrahamic faiths were copycat versions of ancient Greek paganism, so missinary tactics used to undermine pagan Greeks are also applicable to undermine people who are supposedly copying them.), which was further validated when William Jones observed linguistic similarities between Latin and Sanskrit. And given the fact that the perception about Hindus among people growing up in the Eurocentric-Americentric society of the West has never progressed outside of the Victorian-era Christian missionary propaganda, this shameful association of Zeus with Indra remains alive. Many Westerners who have no on-ground experience about how Hinduism is practiced, think that Hindus continue to worship Indra. But reality, there are no Greek (or any foreign) parallel of the deities like Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesha, Durga & Kartikeya that are worshipped by mainstream Hindus in the present. Surya, being an universal deity, has some visual parallels with the Greek Helios, but outside that, Helios doesn't has any trademark symbolism of Surya (like being tbe progenitor of an illustrious dynasty, his association with planets or being the patron deity of astrologers). In Roman times, Helios' identity gets diluted & he becomes one with Apollo (who is an equally lecherous being like his father Zeus), whereas Surya remains unchanged. Neither Helios nor Apollo were ever treated with reverence compared to that Surya receives from Hindus. But all these changes are conspicuously brushed aside under the carpet when comparing pagan Greek pantheon with Hindu figures. Comparing pagan Greek figures with their supposed Hindu counterparts is a type of Hellenocentrism, which is an extended version of Eurocentrism, which makes such comparisons extremely condescending, disgraceful and disrespectful (our holy figures are being constantly compared with that of m*lecchas, and even worse, of a dead pantheon).

If one were to ask — the how do you explain such levels of similarity between them and us, tje reply is — these are Vishvamitra's creations. (TLDR; Harishchandra's father Trishanku wanted to ascend to Svarga in his lifetime, but after his kulaguru sage Vasistha refused, he approached Vasistha's rival, sage Vishvamitra. Vishvamitra did manage to raise Trishanku physically into Svarga, but Indra hurled him down. Vishvamitra immobilized Trishanku mid-air and created a duplicate version of Svarga for him. The true Svarga is said to be situated in the North, while Vishvamitra's Svarga is situated in the South. Vishvamitra filled up that Svarga with duplicate fake versions of the Vaidika divinities, which greatly shocked the original prototypes, who asked Vishvamitra to resist from creating a duplicate Indra and placate Trishanku by legitimising this duplicate Svarga).

After knowing this, I would like to ask my fellow Hindus not to engage or encourage this ill-informed and ill-intended parallelomania of Westerners.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Hellenistic kingship is that people believed their kings were literally immortal gods.

They didn't. Everyone knew kings could grow old and die.

What made a king "divine" wasn't immortality—it was the ability to do what ordinary humans could not: found cities, end wars, establish peace, and transform entire societies. In a famous hymn to Demetrios Poliorcetes, the traditional gods are described as distant, but the king is here—present and able to help.

Perhaps the real challenge is not understanding ancient religion, but recognizing that the Hellenistic world didn't draw the same sharp line between humanity and divinity that we do today.

How do you interpret ruler cult: political propaganda, genuine religious belief, or both?

I’m trying to get into Greek‑mythology retellings, books like Circe and The Song of Achilles. I want to eventually dive deep into the actual mythology: the gods, major heroes, and specific stories like Orpheus and Eurydice. I also want to work my way up to reading The Iliad and The Odyssey in a good, accessible translation.

Ideally, I’d love a reading path that starts with easier modern retellings, then moves into short stories and finally the ancient texts. I struggle with the originals, so I’m hoping for a chronological or beginner‑friendly order to follow. Any recommendations for retellings, myth guides, or translations would be super helpful.

My dad said that the only evidence that we gave the acropolis marbles was when the turks gave elyin access to inspect the acropolis marbles and they stole it and that my dad will say it till the end of time

Before Alexander the Great’s conquest into the Armenian Highlands and the Caucuses the Armenian Pantheon was completely separate from the Greek pantheon and only had some influence from the Persian gods. When the Greeks came they mapped the Armenian gods to specific Greek gods. This doesn’t seem as a big deal but it changed who the lead deity is and what they where the deity of. Before the Greeks the lead deity of the Armenians was Astghik who was the ***goddess*** of **The Creation of the Universe, Water and Fertility.** She was a pretty big deal and she was so cool 😎. But after the Greeks they mapped her on to Aphrodite which made her the goddess of Fertility and Love which is dumb because we already had a goddess of love Anahit so what is the point of her anymore like why did y’all do that to my girl 😔 and the lead God became a man :( because of his association with Zeus.

Alcibiades

In the spring of 415 BC, an Athenian trireme put in at the port of Thurii, on the southern coast of Italy, carrying a man home to face charges of impiety and, very likely, a death sentence. He got off the boat. He simply did not get back on. By the time anyone in Athens noticed, Alcibiades — the most gifted man of his generation, ward of Pericles, favorite student of Socrates, architect of the war's most ambitious gamble — had vanished into the countryside and would resurface, weeks later, in Sparta, offering his enemies everything he knew about how to beat his own city.

It is the kind of detail historians love and moralists distrust: too clean, too symbolic, too perfectly the hinge on which a life turns. And yet it happened. Thucydides was there, more or less — a contemporary, an exile himself, with every reason to have gotten the story right. Alcibiades really did walk off that boat and into the arms of Sparta, and from there to Persia, and then, astonishingly, back to Athens as its savior, and then out again into the dark. Four defections, more or less, in a life of maybe forty-six years. Nobody else in the ancient world managed anything like it.

A Boy Raised by the City He Would Ruin

He was born around 450 BC, into the kind of family that produced Athens's leaders as a matter of course. His father, Cleinias, died at Coronea when Alcibiades was still a child, and guardianship of the boy passed to his relative Pericles, which meant that Alcibiades grew up not on the margins of Athenian power but inside its living room. He was, by every ancient account, staggeringly beautiful, and he seems to have understood early that beauty was a form of currency he could spend however he liked.

Socrates loved him, the word is not too strong, and Plato does not shy from it in the Symposium, where Alcibiades arrives late to a drinking party, drunk, and delivers a confession instead of a speech: that he has tried everything to seduce the philosopher, that nothing worked, that Socrates is somehow immune to the one weapon Alcibiades has never known to fail. It is a strange, moving passage, because you can feel Alcibiades circling something, he cannot quite name — the sense that Socrates saw a version of him worth saving, and that he could never quite become that version. At Potidaea, when Alcibiades went down wounded, it was Socrates who stood over him and kept the enemy off until help came. The debt went one way. Alcibiades never really paid it back.

The Sicilian Gamble

By 415 the question in front of the Athenian assembly was whether to invade Sicily — to open, in the middle of an already exhausting war with Sparta, an entirely new front three hundred miles across open water, against the wealthiest Greek city outside the mainland. Nicias, cautious and pious and almost certainly right, argued against it. Alcibiades argued for it, and Alcibiades was more fun to listen to. He did not merely want Athens to conquer Sicily; he wanted to be the one who did it, and he was frank enough, or vain enough, to say so. The assembly voted for the largest fleet a Greek city had ever launched.

Then, on the night before departure, someone went through the city defacing the herms — the stone pillars, phallic and protective, that stood at crossroads and doorways all over Athens. It is still not clear who did it or why. What is clear is that Athens, already anxious, already primed to see conspiracy everywhere, decided the mutilation was connected to a wider plot against the democracy, and that Alcibiades — arrogant, aristocratic, rumored to have parodied the sacred Eleusinian Mysteries for laughs at private dinners — made an excellent suspect.

He asked to be tried immediately, while the fleet still sat in the harbor and his soldiers still loved him. His enemies were patient. They let him sail. They waited until he was three hundred miles from any friend, and only then did they send the ship to bring him back.

What He Gave Sparta

He did not go home. He went to Sparta instead, and what he offered them was not just his allegiance but his knowledge — a full accounting, from the inside, of exactly how to hurt Athens. Send a general to Syracuse, he told them; a man named Gylippus went, and Gylippus is the reason the Sicilian expedition ended not in glory but in the total destruction of an Athenian army. Fortify Decelea, he told them, a fortress inside Attica itself, permanent, year-round — and the Spartans did, and the occupation strangled the Athenian countryside for the rest of the war, cut the city off from the silver mines at Laurium, and let twenty thousand slaves walk free into Spartan lines.

He adapted to Sparta the way he adapted to everything: completely, and without apparent effort. Cold baths, black broth, the famous austerity — Alcibiades wore it as easily as he had worn Athenian luxury, and the Spartans, suspicious of foreigners on principle, seem to have half-fallen for him anyway. Then it was rumored that he had fathered a child with Timaea, wife of King Agis II, and the goodwill ran out fast. Alcibiades, sensing the shift before it fully arrived, did not stay to find out how it would end.

The Third Side

Persia was the only power left, and Alcibiades went to the satrap Tissaphernes with a theory dressed up as advice: that Persia's real interest was in neither Greek side winning outright, that Sparta and Athens should be allowed to bleed each other for as long as possible while Persia funded just enough to keep the bleeding going. Tissaphernes listened. Spartan subsidies slowed. And Alcibiades, who had now betrayed two cities, made himself indispensable to a third by convincing it that indispensability meant doing almost nothing at all.

It was from this unlikely position — exile, double traitor, guest of the enemy empire — that he found his way back into the war on his own terms. The Athenian fleet at Samos, desperate after the Sicilian catastrophe and the oligarchic coup of 411, decided that a man who could deliver Persian gold was worth more than a man's loyalty. They elected him general. Of everything Alcibiades did, this may be the strangest: that after everything, the people with the most reason to distrust him were the ones who called him back.

Cyzicus, and a Kind of Redemption

What followed was the best two years of his life. As commander of the Athenian fleet he won battle after battle through the Aegean and the Hellespont, and at Cyzicus in 410 he destroyed the Spartan navy so completely that Sparta, humiliated, is said to have sued for peace. Athens got its grain routes back. The war, which had looked unwinnable a year earlier, looked winnable again.

In 407 he sailed home. He had not set foot in Athens in eight years. The city that had condemned him to death in absentia met him at the harbor and gave him everything: the charges dropped, his property returned, supreme command of the entire war effort placed in his hands. For a season it must have felt like the story was going to end the right way — that the most talented man Athens had ever produced would finally get to be its hero instead of its problem.

Notium, and the Last Exile

It did not last a year. In 406, while Alcibiades was away from the fleet on other business, his deputy Antiochus disobeyed a direct order not to engage the Spartan navy, and lost. The defeat at Notium was not really Alcibiades's fault. It did not matter. Athens had spent his entire life alternating between worshipping him and fearing him, and the old fear — that he was too big for the city, too unpredictable, too much his own government — came back all at once. He did not wait to find out what the assembly would decide. He sailed to fortresses he privately held in the Thracian Chersonese and did not come back.

From there, in 405, he is supposed to have ridden out to warn the Athenian commanders that they had anchored the fleet somewhere indefensible, at Aegospotami, and that the Spartans would catch them exposed. They told him to leave. Days later the fleet was destroyed at anchor, almost without a fight, and with it went Athens's last chance of winning the war.

Alcibiades outlived the defeat by less than a year. He was in Phrygia by then, under Persian protection, when the men who now ran a beaten Athens — Spartans and their local allies — decided he was still too dangerous to leave alive. According to the story that came down through Plutarch, the house where he was staying was set on fire in the night. He came out anyway, sword in hand, and was killed by arrows from men who would not come close enough to fight him honestly. It is possibly the only encounter in his whole life where nobody tried to talk him into anything.

A Family He Never Met

Read enough of the historians and you start to notice that Alcibiades is not really an anomaly. He is a type the Greeks kept producing and kept failing to hold onto — the citizen too brilliant to trust, cast out, and driven, usually against his own preference, into the arms of the enemy.

Themistocles got there first. The man who talked Athens into building the fleet that beat Persia at Salamis — who is, on any fair accounting, the reason Greece stayed Greek — was ostracized within a decade of his greatest victory, hunted by his own countrymen on manufactured treason charges, and ended up exactly where you would least expect the savior of Salamis to end up: at the court of the Persian king, on a Persian salary, governor of a Persian province, dead at Magnesia, an old man in the service of the empire he had broken. Thucydides tells this one almost without comment, as though the irony were too obvious to underline.

Pausanias is the darker version, and the Spartan one. He won at Plataea, freed Greece from the Persian army as surely as Themistocles had freed it at sea, and then — whether from genuine ambition or genuine paranoia on Sparta's part, the sources disagree — was accused of secretly courting the Persians himself. He fled into a temple of Athena for sanctuary. The Spartans did not drag him out, because that would have been sacrilege. They walled up the door instead and waited for him to starve, which is either more merciful or more horrifying than an execution, depending on how you look at it.

Demaratus, a deposed Spartan king, went to Persia earlier and more willingly, and ended up riding with Xerxes on the invasion of Greece — and Herodotus gives him one of the strangest scenes in the whole Histories, a Greek explaining to the Persian king, patiently, almost tenderly, exactly why the Spartans will die rather than retreat, knowing that his own former countrymen are the ones who will do the dying. And Hippias, oldest of them all, the tyrant Athens expelled decades before any of this — Hippias was there at Marathon in 490, an old man leading a foreign army toward the city that had thrown him out, hoping to be installed as its puppet ruler. He did not live to see how badly that went.

Plutarch, writing centuries later and looking for a Roman life to set beside Alcibiades's in his Parallel Lives, picked Coriolanus without much hesitation — another brilliant, prickly, indispensable man exiled by his own city, who led an enemy army to its gates and turned back only when his mother came out to beg him not to burn it down. Plutarch's instinct was right. These are not really separate stories. They are one story the Greeks kept telling because it kept being true: what happens to a community when it produces someone too gifted to control.

Even Homer knew the shape of it. Achilles sulks in his tent while the Achaeans die outside it, because his pride has been wounded and he would rather watch his own side lose than swallow the insult — and Sophocles' Philoctetes is a variation in a minor key, a wounded archer abandoned on an island by the very allies who will later crawl back and beg him to return, because it turns out they cannot win the war without him. The indispensable man, cast out, then needed. Homer had the plot before anyone had the history to hang it on.

What Athens Never Learned

It would be easy to file Alcibiades away as simply a traitor — a man loyal to nothing but his own advancement, willing to sell any city to any other for the right price. Thucydides, who watched most of this happen, resists that reading, and I think he is right to. His Alcibiades is not a man without loyalty so much as a man his city never figured out how to keep. Every time Athens grew afraid of him — and it grew afraid of him constantly, because his talent and his appetite for glory were genuinely frightening things to hand to one person — it chose exile over trust, and every single time, exile handed him straight to an enemy who knew exactly what to do with him.

Maybe that is the real subject of the story: not one unreliable man, but a democracy that could produce someone like Alcibiades and never worked out what to do with what it had made. He was, in the end, not so different from Athens itself in those years — dazzling and reckless in almost equal measure, capable of Cyzicus and capable of Sicily, sometimes within a few years of each other. Twenty-five centuries on, historians still cannot decide whether to call him the war's great traitor or its great tragedy. Probably he was both, and probably that was always the only shape a life like his was going to take.