Ever tried reading the Greek myths and epic poems and become confused with all of the names and family links? You are not alone. All those dalliances have resulted in a complex web of family ties and lineages, and that’s not even taking into account the Gods who would intermingle with the early mortals, taking various forms to feed their lust or to exact revenge.
This visualisation aims to convey all of these links. Now you can stop getting your Thalia’s and Scylla’s mixed up (always embarrassing when that happens). You can tell people that we descended from Deucalion and Pyrrha and see the horrors that emerged from Pandora’s jar (and what was left inside).
The visual is arranged by the Olympians and the ages of man. The Olympians are the twelve major deities of the Greek pantheon, therefore most connections involve them at some point. The ages of man help convey some sort of timeline for the origin of the gods (an accurate timeline is almost impossible). The ages are according to the poem Works and Days by Hesiod, which describes the various stages of human existence on Earth. Other people of interest are also highlighted to help you navigate the visual. These are people you’ve probably heard of before but now you can see who they are connected to.
You can hover over a person to see their connections. This highlights 3-degrees of separation, the early gods were a close-knit bunch and the usual 6-degrees of separation would highlight the entire graph! You can also interrogate the graph further by setting one of the modes below. Clicking on a node in information mode will display a window showing further details about that person. In shortest path mode clicking on two nodes will highlight the shortest path between them.
All credit should go to the wonderful Stephen Fry whose fantastic book gave me the idea. Only he could regale the classics with such wit and wisdom, it is a highly recommended read. Even more credit should go to Nadieh Bremer whose stunning Royal Constellations visualisation gave me the inspiration and knowledge to be able to create it. She is a genius in her field and I highly recommend you check out her work. You can read about the creation of the visualisation on my portfolio site.
The data gleaned from the book was augmented with information from the excellent resource site theoi.com which is well worth a visit if you want to further your knowledge on Greek mythology. Images have been extracted from the equivalent Wikipedia articles, which are all in the public domain. The Hellenic style font used for the headings is Diogenes. Icons are courtesy of Font Awesome.