HARRIET WADHAM: Greek Mythology

It is with great pleasure that we welcome back one of my favourite bloggo columnists, Harriet Wadham who at the age of ten is often more erudite than some people that I could mention three or four times her age....



First of all, sorry it took so long to get this blog done! Secondly, time to get started on the topic... of Greek Mythology.


The first tale we are going to get started on today is Zeus. Most of the pictures drawn of him represent him as a white-haired, big-bearded man; however, drawings of Zeus pictured as a young, muscled man do occasionally crop up. Actually, forget the occasionally bit. They just crop up, okay???!!! Zeus has a bit of trouble with his love affairs, though, which really angers his wife, Hera (who we’ll get around to sooner or later). So Hera throws a wobbler, and Zeus gets angry at her for messing up their palace (or whatever gods/goddesses do when they’re in a mood), and begins throwing lightning bolts. Ta da!!! There is your average ancient Greek storm. These happen whenever Zeus gets angry (or just really bored).


Now onto the really famous Titan, Prometheus, who’s our favourite because he gave us fire when the god Jupiter (or Zeus; there are a few stories which say it was Zeus, and a few stories which say it was Jupiter, so let’s stick with him) couldn’t care less about us, and thought that if we had fire and tools and everything then we would rise up against them. So Prometheus vowed to help the humans, and brought them fire from the Sun and taught them how to... well, be more civilised really. Jupiter saw this and decided to make the humans’ lives ten times worse, and created pulchritudinous, perfect, prying Pandora, and her mysterious box, got her married to Prometheus’ brother, Epimetheus, and then she got all curious, opened the box, stopped the evil thingy called Foreboding from getting out, and you know the rest. Then, Jupiter dealt with Prometheus.


He bade his strongest servants go forth and capture Prometheus, then had him chained to a rock and have his liver eaten out by an eagle every day. Ouch. Soon enough, Prom’s buddy Hercules came along, broke his chains, killed the birdie, and all was well la la la.


So as I promised, let’s get to Hera, the last main mythical character I’ll focus on today. She was originally, as some stories say, Zeus’ sister and she fell in love with him as soon as she saw him. (How weird). Another variation is that Zeus seduced her, by way of pretending to be a soggy cuckoo bird sheltering from a storm in her lap, or one of his other Zeus-y ways. She is the goddess of love, watching over relationships and weddings to see they go smoothly, or if a couple are on the point of breakup, she uses all her skills to ensure that they fall in love again.


To conclude my blog, I just want to say thank you to some people:

• Jon Downes, for letting me put blogs on his wonderful website


• All the people who take the time to read my blogs and encourage me to write some more


• My family, for helping me use my noggin and think about what I’m going to write next


• My teacher for unsuspectingly giving me sentence openers and good vocabulary to use in my work for the CFZ blog pages


• And last but definitely NOT least, my mum for taking me to the Weird Weekend and inspiring me to write
  this.