The makers

Ancient Greek and Roman figures

The poets, historians, philosophers, generals and emperors who created, recorded and reshaped classical mythology — from Homer and Hesiod to Virgil, Ovid, Caesar and Marcus Aurelius. Each entry explains what they wrote, why it mattered, and which gods their work brought down to us.

The Greek world

Greece

Homer

Greek

c. 8th century BCE

The name attached to the two oldest surviving works of Western literature — and the most disputed author in the classical world.

Epic poet · Oral tradition →

Hesiod

Greek

c. 700 BCE

The farmer-poet who turned scattered divine stories into a single genealogy, from Chaos to the Olympians.

Didactic poet · Mythographer →

Sappho

Greek

c. 630 – 570 BCE

The most admired lyric poet of antiquity, whose songs of love and loss survive only in fragments.

Lyric poet →

Aeschylus

Greek

c. 525 – 456 BCE

The first of Athens' great tragedians, who made myth a stage for questions of justice, blood-guilt and the gods.

Tragic playwright · Soldier →

Herodotus

Greek

c. 484 – 425 BCE

The travelling inquirer who set out to record why Greeks and Persians went to war — and everything he heard along the way.

Historian · Traveller →

Plato

Greek

c. 427 – 347 BCE

Socrates' pupil who turned philosophy into a system — and used myth as its final argument.

Philosopher · Teacher →

Pindar

Greek

c. 518 – 438 BCE

The most difficult and most quoted of the Greek lyric poets, whose victory songs preserve myths told nowhere else.

Lyric poet · Choral poet →

Sophocles

Greek

c. 496 – 406 BCE

The tragedian who made Oedipus the archetype of fate, and Antigone the archetype of conscience.

Tragic playwright →

Euripides

Greek

c. 480 – 406 BCE

The most unsettling of the tragedians, who put the gods on trial and let the losers of myth speak.

Tragic playwright →

Apollonius of Rhodes

Greek

c. 295 – 215 BCE

The scholar-poet who wrote the only full Hellenistic epic to survive, and gave Medea her first inner life.

Epic poet · Librarian →

Apollodorus

Greek

c. 1st – 2nd century CE

The name on the most useful myth handbook we have — though not the Athenian scholar it was long thought to be.

Mythographer · Compiler →

Diodorus Siculus

Greek

c. 90 – 20 BCE

The Sicilian who tried to write the history of the whole world, and preserved myths no one else bothered to record.

Historian · Compiler →

Pausanias

Greek

c. 110 – 180 CE

The traveller who walked Greece temple by temple and wrote down the myths each place told about itself.

Travel writer · Geographer · Mythographer →

The Roman world

Rome

Virgil

Roman

70 – 19 BCE

The poet who gave Rome a Trojan ancestry and made myth the foundation story of an empire.

Epic poet →

Ovid

Roman

43 BCE – 17 CE

The witty, restless poet whose Metamorphoses became the standard version of Greek myth for all later Europe.

Poet →

Livy

Roman

59 BCE – 17 CE

Rome's great narrative historian, who told the city's story from Aeneas and Romulus to his own day.

Historian →

Cicero

Roman

106 – 43 BCE

The orator who argued Rome's greatest cases and questioned its gods in polished philosophical dialogue.

Orator · Statesman · Philosopher →

Seneca the Younger

Roman

c. 4 BCE – 65 CE

Nero's tutor, a Stoic moralist, and the author of Latin tragedies that fed Renaissance drama.

Stoic philosopher · Tragedian · Statesman →

Hyginus

Roman

c. 1st – 2nd century CE

The Latin counterpart to Apollodorus: unadorned summaries that preserve myths the poets leave out.

Mythographer · Compiler →