Accounts preserve two regional strands (Arcadian and Boeotian) and variant parentages in oral and literary traditions. In the common outline, Atalanta is exposed as an infant on Mount Parthenion and left to die; a she-bear suckles and fosters her, marking her as a wild-raised child devoted to Artemis. Different authors give differing details of her parentage and upbringing, but the exposure-and-fosterage motif explains her exceptional prowess and liminal status between human society and the divine huntress sphere.
Sources emphasize a functional huntress persona rather than ornate description: Atalanta models herself after Artemis, wearing a simple sleeveless tunic reaching her knees and living in the wilderness. She is repeatedly described as swift-footed and beautiful; one account notes she agreed to race in full armour. Specific facial or color details are not provided in the supplied summaries.
Atalanta's primary attributes are exceptional speed, expert archery, and hunting skill. She drew first blood on the Calydonian boar and is credited with slaying the centaurs Rhoecus and Hylaeus in accounts summarized by modern sources. Some traditions place her among the Argonauts (with variant attestations). She exercises agency in social affairs (refusing marriage based on an oracle, setting a lethal footrace condition) and her fate is shaped by interactions with gods—Artemis as patron, Aphrodite aiding Hippomenes with golden apples, and later divine metamorphosis (accounts vary as to whether Artemis, Cybele, or Zeus effects the change into lions).
Weaknesses
- conditionmortality
- conditionvulnerability to divine judgement or metamorphosis (attested: transformed into a lion by a deity after sacrilege)
Wards
None recorded.
Artemis
Artemis is an ancient Greek goddess of hunting, the wilderness and wild animals, transitions (especially childbirth and puberty), vegetation, and chastity. Twin sister of Apollo and daughter of Zeus and Leto, she functions as a protector of young children and maidens while also capable of inflicting disease or punishment for transgressions against her sacred laws.
Aphrodite
Aphrodite is a major ancient Greek goddess associated with love, lust, beauty, pleasure, passion, procreation, and related social and cosmic forces. She is counted among the principal Olympian deities with major cult-centers (Cythera, Cyprus, Corinth, Athens), celebrated annually at the Aphrodisia, and syncretized with the Roman Venus.
Centaur
A mythic hybrid from ancient Greek tradition with the upper body of a human and the lower body and legs of a horse. Centaurs appear as a tribal population associated with mountainous and wooded regions of Greece and embody tensions between human social order and untamed nature.
*Péh₂usōn (reconstructed)
Péh₂usōn is a hypothetical Proto‑Indo‑European pastoral guardian reconstructed by comparative scholars from parallels in Greek and Vedic traditions. Proposed as a Graeco‑Aryan ancestor‑figure, the reconstruction describes a protector of flocks, roads, and travellers rather than an attested historical cultic personality.
Aba (disambiguation / name-form)
Aba is a polyvalent name-form attested across many unrelated contexts (place names, personal names, animal names, and brief mythological listings). The provided sources do not support a single, coherent supernatural entity called "Aba" and offer no descriptive or ritual material for such a being.
Abarbarea
Abarbarea is a name attested in classical Greek and Roman sources for freshwater nymphs (naiads). The name appears for at least two individual mythic figures — a naiad wife of Bucolion and a naiad counted among ancestors of the Tyrians — and Hesychius records plural forms that may indicate the name was also used as a class-name (Abarbareai / Abarbalaiai).
Abas
Abas (Ancient Greek: Ἄβας, gen.: Ἄβαντος) is not a single mythic being but a recurring personal name borne by multiple mortals and minor mythic figures in Greek epic and genealogical traditions — kings, founders, seers, warriors, attendants, a centaur, and a youth transformed by a goddess. The name is glossed in the sources as 'guileless' or 'good-hearted' and appears across Argive, Theban, Trojan, Euboean, and other local cycles.
Abderus
Abderus (Ancient Greek: Ἄβδηρος, romanized Ábdēros) is a mortal heroic figure in Greek myth closely associated with Heracles, remembered as the youth left in charge of the Mares of Diomedes who was killed by them. He functions as an eponymous local/divine-hero ancestor for the city of Abdera and received funerary commemoration and athletic agones at his tomb.
Abomination of Desolation
An apocalyptic prophetic phrase originating in the Book of Daniel designating a profaning thing or act that renders the Jerusalem Temple cult desolate; later reused in the Synoptic Gospels as an eschatological sign prompting urgent flight. The term denotes ritual/cultic impurity (Hebrew shiqquts) and is variously interpreted as pagan offerings or altar, a foreign cult statue, or (in some New Testament readings) an acting agent.
Absyrtus
Absyrtus (Ancient Greek: Ἄψυρτος) is a Colchian prince in the Greek Argonautic cycle, son of King Aeëtes and brother or half-brother of Medea. He appears in variant traditions either as a companion taken by Medea during her flight with Jason and murdered/dismembered to delay pursuit, or as a pursuer sent by Aeëtes who is overtaken and slain by Jason; his death functions as a key narrative device in the escape from Colchis.
Acacallis
Acacallis (Ancient Greek: Ἀκακαλλίς; also Acalle) is a mythological princess of Crete in Greek tradition, daughter of King Minos and Pasiphae. She functions primarily as a dynastic and etiological figure: in varying accounts she is mother, by gods such as Hermes (Mercury) or Apollo, of eponymous or founder-figures like Cydon (founder of Cydonia), Miletus, or Lydon/ Lydus.
Acacus
Acacus (Ancient Greek: Ἄκακος) is, in Arcadian Greek tradition, a mortal eponymous founder-king of Acacesium and is remembered as the foster-father who reared the infant Hermes (Mercury) in that local tradition. He is presented in genealogies as a son of Lycaon and functions as a local ancestral/onomastic figure rather than a supernatural spirit.
Academus
Academus (Greek: Akádemos / Hekádemos) is an Attic hero-eponym tied to a sacred grove (Akademeia) on the Cephissus near Athens. In myth he revealed where Helen was hidden to the Dioskouroi, an act said to have saved the city, and the place bearing his name became a long-lived sacred precinct, later the site of Plato's Academy.
Acamas
Acamas (Ancient Greek: Ἀκάμας) is a personal name recurrent in ancient Greek narrative traditions applied to multiple human characters (warriors, princes, suitors), once to a Cyclops, and once as a hound's name. Rather than a single supernatural entity, bearers of the name appear episodically across the Trojan War, Theseid, and Theban cycles as mortal actors whose deeds intersect with gods and fate.
Acantha
Acantha (Ancient Greek: Ἀκάνθα, 'thorn') is a late or secondary mythological figure known from modern retellings as a nymph transformed into the acanthus plant. The tale that she scratched Apollo and was changed into a spiny-leaved plant is not attested in surviving classical corpora and appears to be a modern compilation or invention rather than a firmly documented ancient myth.
Community Record
- [1]Atalanta — Wikipedia. Wikipedia contributors, 'Atalanta,' Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopediawiki
- [2]Atalanta — Wikidata. Wikidata item Q381411other
- [3]РИК 'Россия 24' : RUSSIA24 : July 18, 2024. Archive.org recording listed in research notesother