Bronze Age
Mycenaean palaces flourish across Greece, and Linear B tablets record offerings to gods including Poseidon and Zeus. Around 1200 BCE the palaces fall amid a wider Mediterranean collapse; writing is lost in Greece.
- c. 1600 BCE — Mycenaean civilisation rises in mainland Greece
- c. 1450 BCE — Linear B tablets at Knossos name Greek gods
- c. 1200 BCE — the Pylos archive is written; palaces fall and the Greek Dark Age begins
- c. 1180 BCE — the traditional date for the fall of Troy
Archaic and Classical Greece
Writing returns and the epics are set down. City-states build temples and festivals; tragedy and history are invented; Athens becomes a cultural and imperial power.
- c. 750 BCE — Homer's Iliad and Odyssey take written form
- c. 700 BCE — Hesiod's Theogony organises the gods
- c. 776 BCE — traditional date of the first Olympic Games
- c. 582 BCE — the Pythian Games at Delphi are founded
- c. 472–406 BCE — Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides stage tragedy
- 431–404 BCE — the Peloponnesian War, chronicled by Thucydides
Hellenistic and Roman
Alexander's conquests spread Greek language and gods across the eastern Mediterranean. Rome fights, then absorbs the Greek world, and Latin poets reshape the myths for an empire.
- c. 496 BCE — Rome vows a temple to Ceres, Liber and Libera
- 336–323 BCE — Alexander the Great spreads Greek culture eastward
- c. 250 BCE — Apollonius of Rhodes writes the Argonautica
- c. 146 BCE — Rome conquers Greece; Greek learning floods Italy
- c. 55 BCE — Lucretius' De Rerum Natura attacks mythic religion
- 29–19 BCE — Virgil writes the Aeneid
- c. 8 CE — Ovid completes the Metamorphoses
- 14 CE — Augustus dies; the imperial cult is established
- c. 98–117 CE — Tacitus and Pliny the Younger document the empire
Late Antiquity
Christianity becomes the empire's favoured religion, temples close and festivals lapse. Yet the myths are copied, allegorised and preserved precisely because they are now cultural literature.
- c. 180 CE — Pausanias tours the sanctuaries of Greece
- 313 CE — the Edict of Milan legalises Christianity
- 391 CE — Theodosius restricts pagan cult
- c. 400s CE — mythographers and scribes begin the copying chain to the Middle Ages