Every Monster In Greek Mythology Explained In 13 Minutes

Medusa, the most famous monster Greece ever produced and the only one of three sisters who could be brought down. A woman's face in a crown of live snakes, wings on her back, and a stare that turns a body to stone. And her two sisters could not die. Around her lair, stone figures stand where they were caught looking. Perseus never looks. He tracks her in the polish of his shield, walks in backwards while she sleeps, and takes the head in one swing. The head keeps working after she is gone, and something climbs out of her, a full-grown winged horse. Pegasus was inside her the whole time. You have met her in Percy Jackson and in Clash of the Titans only ever through a mirror. And she is the normal one. Minotaur. A man's body with a bull's head locked in the dark under a palace on Crete. A bull's head on a man's shoulders and human hands. The son of the Cretan queen and a bull the king should have given up. So the king built something to keep him in. Every nine years, Athens sends fourteen young people across and none of them come back out. Theseus goes in with a ball of thread, ends it with his bare hands, and follows the thread out. Nobody uses it, but the Minotaur has a name. It is Astarion, the starry one. And everybody still calls him the bull from the maze. He waits at the end of a maze in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. And World of Warcraft made him a whole playable race. Hydra cut off one head and two grow back in its place. Nobody could finish it by cutting. One heavy body, nine long green necks, every one ending in a head that bites on its own. It lives in the swamp at Lerna and its breath alone is poison. Heracles' second labor. He starts cutting. Every stump puts two new heads into the air. So his nephew follows him in with a torch and sears each neck the moment the blade is clear. Cut, burn, next. It works. One head cannot die, so he buries it under a rock, alive. Then he dips his arrows in the venom. Decades later, one ends him. Disney's Hercules gave it a song, God of War the opening boss, and Marvel named its whole evil empire after it. Same motto, cut off one head, two more take its place. Cerberus, the three-headed dog at the door of the underworld. He is not there to keep the living out. Three heads on one black body, snakes down the neck, and a live serpent for a tail. And he belongs to the God of the Dead. The dead walk in freely. Nothing walks out. Three people got past him, none of them fought. Orpheus played him to sleep. A priestess brought drugged cakes. Heracles carried him up the stairs. The most feared animal down there never stopped anyone with snacks. And the oldest description of him does not say three, it says fifty. And he is only the doorman. The one the gods ran from is last. Fluffy in Harry Potter is him and sleeps to music exactly like this. Both Hades games put him in your way. Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant who ate his way through Odysseus' crew. A cyclops and a son of the sea god. One round eye in the middle of the forehead, nothing where the others go. He keeps sheep alone on an island behind a stone door. Odysseus and twelve men walk in, uninvited. He comes home, rolls the stone across, eats two of them. Nobody else can shift that stone, so they blind him instead. And when he roars that nobody did it, the neighbors go back to bed. Then there is the poem. Three centuries later, a Greek poet gave him a love song. The man-eater on the beach, singing at a nymph who will not have him. He is in Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. Chimera. Three animals in one body and it is on fire. Nothing else is built like this. A lion in front, a goat out of the back, a snake for a tail. From Lycia, on the south coast of modern Turkey, where it burns the farmland flat. A king sends a young man called Bellerophon, expecting him to die. He takes the winged horse out of Medusa's neck, comes in over the flames, and puts a lead-tipped spear in the mouth. Its own fire melts the lead, and the mountain still burns. Flames come out of the bare rock and have for thousands of years. Sailors used to steer by them. You have fought it in Fullmetal Alchemist and it has been in Final Fantasy since the first game. Sphinx. A lion with wings and a woman's face and a question. Answer wrong and you do not walk on. A lion body, folded eagle wings, a woman's head on top. She sits on a rock outside Thebes, sent there as a punishment on the city. She stops every traveler with one riddle. What walks on four legs, then two, then three, nobody gets it. The road stays shut and the city starves. Then Oedipus says, a human being, and she goes off the rock. They did not even invent the shape. The one at Giza is 2,000 years older. That one lies still and says nothing. This one blocks the road. She is in Assassin's Creed Odyssey where the fight is riddles. And one stops Harry Potter in a hedge maze. Centaur. A man from the waist up, a horse from the waist down. One creature, two sets of rules. A human head, arms, and chest joined at the waist to a horse from the mountains of Thessaly and they live wild. No houses, no farms, nothing built. A Thessalian king invites them to his wedding. They get into the wine, the hall goes over, and it becomes a war. The Greeks carved that brawl onto the Parthenon. One is the opposite. Chiron taught nearly every hero Greece had and he could not die until a poisoned arrow left him in endless pain so he gave the immortality away and let go. Narnia rides them into battle and the nastiest thing in all of Zelda is one with a lion's head. Harpy. A bird the size of a woman with a woman's face. And she is not after you. She is after your dinner. A bird's body in brown and gold, hooked talons, wide wings, and a woman's head out of the feathered shoulders. And the name just means the Snatchers. A blind king called Phineas sits down to eat. They drop out of the sky. They take what they can and spoil the rest. He starves at a full table, then two Argonauts who can fly chase them off the map. They are not scavengers. They are on the payroll. When somebody vanished and was never found, the Greeks said the Harpies had taken them. You have fought whole packs of them in the Witcher. Nemean Lion. A lion whose hide nothing could cut. Not a sword. Not an arrow. Not a rock. A lion the size of a cart with a coat that turns any edge. It lives above Nemea in a cave with two mouths. This is his first labor. The Hydra, which he could not stop cutting, is his second. His arrows come straight off it. His club breaks on it. So he blocks one mouth, walks in the other, and does it in the dark with his hands. Then he cannot get the skin off. The only thing sharp enough to open the lion was the lion. He wears it ever after. That is why Heracles wears a lion's head. He is wearing it all through Disney's Hercules and Dwayne Johnson wears it on the poster. Ladon. A hundred-headed dragon wrapped around a tree and it never slept. Not once. One long green body wrapped around a tree that grows golden apples in a garden at the western edge of the world. It belongs to Hera and it is no pet. It does not hunt. It holds. A hundred heads, all awake, all facing out, each in its own voice. Heracles is sent for the apples and never fights it. He offers to hold the sky for the giant next door and sends him in. Three heroes walked past Cerberus. Ladon guarded fruit and nobody got by. When it finally went, it went upward. That is Draco. Three nymphs already tended that garden for her. But the nymphs had been helping themselves to the fruit. So Hera added the dragon, Talos, a bronze giant, and he came with the island. Crete had a guard that was not alive. A bronze man the height of a ship's mast, no skin, no hair, made in a god's forge and given to Crete. Nothing behind the face ever changes. He walks the whole coast three times a day. A strange ship comes in and he throws rocks the size of houses. Anything that gets ashore, he heats himself red hot and holds. One vein runs from his neck to his ankle, closed at the heel with a single pin. The witch on the Argo finds it. The pin comes out and he empties. It does not pour out of him fast. It runs like melted lead. And every machine with one weak point wired in is this again. Echidna. A woman to the waist, a huge speckled snake below it. She is not the fighter. She is the source. Long black hair, dark eyes, green and gold serpent below the hips. She lives underground in a cave, alone. And she does not get old. The Hydra, Cerberus, the Chimera, the Sphinx, the Nemean Lion, Ladon, the old lists give them all one mother. Nearly this whole video came out of one cave. She is taken in her sleep by a giant covered in eyes. And there is a spiny animal in Australia that lays eggs and feeds milk. Nobody could decide reptile or mammal. So they named it after her. She is in Percy Jackson's first season on an arch with the Chimera. Their father is still coming, Typhon. The one the gods ran from. Everything else here is a hero's problem. This one went for the sky. His head brushed the stars. His arms reached across the world, below the waist, coiling serpents, a hundred fire-breathing heads out of the shoulders. The last child of the earth, made for one job. He goes at Olympus and the gods do not hold. They run to Egypt and hide as animals. Zeus stays. Typhon pulls the sinews out of his hands and feet and leaves him on a cave floor. Two gods steal them back. Zeus drops a mountain. The mountain is Etna. He is still under it. Every eruption, every shudder in the ground, the Greeks said that was him, still trying to get out. He is the final boss of Hades II. And in God of War, he is a mountain you climb. So which one of them wins? Medusa turns anything that looks at her to stone and still goes down asleep. The Hydra needs fire before it stops. Ladon never lost and never slept, but every one of them was a problem one hero could solve. Typhon took the whole sky and holding him cost a mountain that still shakes. Greece did not really have many monsters. It had one family. Which one do you think you would get past?