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I'm looking for dates in Greek Mythology. Are there any original sources (like Hesiod or Ovid) that give us any clues as to when events happened?

For instance, when did Cronos swallow his children? When was the Titanomachy (when the Gods struck out against the ruling Titans) and when was the Giantomachy (when the Giants struck back against the Gods)? Did all this take place in 10 million BC or was it 10,000 BC?

Plato tells us that Atlantis sunk around 9600BC, but when did everything else happen? If you have any other landmark dates

Please note that I'm looking for mythological dates (i.e. concerning greek gods), not historical dates (i.e. concerning greek men and women).

Thanks for your insights!

2007-08-12 06:37:02 · 5 answers · asked by Sarah 2 in Society & Culture Mythology & Folklore

5 answers

Check this site.
Mythical Chronology:
http://www.maicar.com/GML/MythicalChronology.html

2007-08-12 06:49:57 · answer #1 · answered by Arcsol 3 · 1 0

Historical Greek royal and noble families traced their family trees back to kings and heroes of myth. So there was an inexact chronology.

The dates are rather fuzzy, depending how many years the ancients assigned to each generation. The Trojan War was perhaps usually set around 1000 B.C. or so. The rest of the myths occur before.

Heracles, the Argonauts, etc. lived one generation before the heroes of the Trojan War.
The great-x7 grandfather of the Trojan War heroes Deucalion, was the only man to survive the Great Deluge.

His grandparents were Prometheus, Epimetheus and Pandora, whose story is set just after the fall of the Titans.

So you can measure it all in generations at least. Male lines are usually 30 years per generation, female lines are 15, which were the ages that men and women traditinally married and started having children. But the eldest son might also marry at 15. Often in mythology you find uncles marrying their nieces (the eldest brother's eldest daughter).

2007-08-13 07:21:05 · answer #2 · answered by Thalia 7 · 1 0

Sorry, but I think you question is unanswerable.

All myths, by their very nature, are out of our time frames.
They happen, like their descendants, the fairytales, "once upon a time".

Greek myths are not even supposed to be a coherent belief system, as the Abrahamic religions, although Pythagoras and his followers had a good go at making them so. Successive "Hellenic" tribes brought their different versions, and we don't know any but the ones that were current in the educated elite.
Although people from Theodorus Siculus to J.J. Bachofen and J. Frazer speculated about the hidden myths, we can't know what most people really believed in.

2007-08-12 16:59:15 · answer #3 · answered by haggesitze 7 · 1 0

That was a primeval time before time. Greek mythology in its whole signifies the creation of the material universe, the formation of the galaxies and planetary systems and illustrates the forces at work.

2007-08-12 14:21:12 · answer #4 · answered by MARY B 4 · 0 1

You are confusing two separate incidents and making them one... Chronics and the children took place at the dawn of Greek history.... The battle at Thermopylae came much later in Greek history... And that was a battle that will forever remain a standard in all the worlds history books............................................................................................

2007-08-12 18:33:44 · answer #5 · answered by kilroymaster 7 · 0 1

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