Greek God Names

Greek gods vs Roman gods

Jupiter is not Zeus, and this site keeps the two apart on purpose. The Romans read the Greek gods through their own, the move the sources call interpretatio romana: same throne, different register, different receipts. Jupiter comes from the same Indo-European sky-word as Zeus, which makes the two cousins, not copies, and the Roman register carries gods with no Greek counterpart at all, Janus first among them. The deity rows live on this page; the Roman names live on Roman god names. Two pages, two registers, both showing their receipts.

How the pantheon works

The Greek pantheon is a family tree with a violent inheritance. Hesiod’s Theogony, the spine of the record, opens with the primordials: the gap, the earth, the dark. Gaia’s Titan children rule next, until Cronus’s son Zeus overthrows him and lots out the world: sky to Zeus, sea to Poseidon, the under-earth to Hades. Below the Olympians run the working gods, the chthonic powers, the personified abstractions, the Muses, and the local wilds. Every stratum in the table is one branch of that tree.

The sources are named because the family tree itself is an argument: Homer knows a different order than Hesiod, the Orphic traditions add their own casts, and the local cults kept gods the national poets never mentioned. The flags on the rows are the page keeping score honestly.

The chthonic register

The under-world kept its own gods, and Greek honesty about death is in the rows.Hades rules below, but he is not an Olympian in the sources: he stays under, and the row flags that his name’s "unseen" parse is the ancient gloss, still debated. Persephone splits her year between the seeds and the dead. Thanatos and Hypnos, death and sleep, are the twin words themselves. The three Erinyes hunt oath-breakers. Melinoë and Zagreus come from the Orphic tablets only, and their rows say so: a narrow source, flagged, is still a real receipt.

The planets borrowed the names

Five rows above are the original names of five planets, and the Greeks knew them as gods first. The wandering stars carried their patrons: Hermes’s gleaming Stilbon is the planet Mercury, Ares’s fiery Pyroeis is Mars, Zeus’s blazing Phaethon is Jupiter, Cronus’s shining Phainon is Saturn, and the dawn-bringer and the evening star, two names for one goddess’s planet, are Venus. The planet register borrowed the divine strings, and that lane is tabled on planet names. This page rows the gods themselves, Ouranos included, whose name the seventh planet took in 1781.