1.
Greek mythology
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It was a part of the religion in ancient Greece. Greek mythology is explicitly embodied in a collection of narratives. Greek myth attempts to explain the origins of the world, and details the lives and adventures of a variety of gods, goddesses, heroes, heroines. These accounts initially were disseminated in a tradition, today the Greek myths are known primarily from ancient Greek literature. The oldest known Greek literary sources, Homers epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, focus on the Trojan War, archaeological findings provide a principal source of detail about Greek mythology, with gods and heroes featured prominently in the decoration of many artifacts. Geometric designs on pottery of the eighth century BC depict scenes from the Trojan cycle as well as the adventures of Heracles, in the succeeding Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, Homeric and various other mythological scenes appear, supplementing the existing literary evidence. Greek mythology has had an influence on the culture, arts. Poets and artists from ancient times to the present have derived inspiration from Greek mythology and have discovered contemporary significance and relevance in the themes, Greek mythology is known today primarily from Greek literature and representations on visual media dating from the Geometric period from c. Mythical narration plays an important role in every genre of Greek literature. Nevertheless, the only general mythographical handbook to survive from Greek antiquity was the Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus and this work attempts to reconcile the contradictory tales of the poets and provides a grand summary of traditional Greek mythology and heroic legends. Apollodorus of Athens lived from c, 180–125 BC and wrote on many of these topics. His writings may have formed the basis for the collection, however the Library discusses events that occurred long after his death, among the earliest literary sources are Homers two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Other poets completed the cycle, but these later and lesser poems now are lost almost entirely. Despite their traditional name, the Homeric Hymns have no connection with Homer. They are choral hymns from the part of the so-called Lyric age. Hesiods Works and Days, a poem about farming life, also includes the myths of Prometheus, Pandora. The poet gives advice on the best way to succeed in a dangerous world, lyrical poets often took their subjects from myth, but their treatment became gradually less narrative and more allusive. Greek lyric poets, including Pindar, Bacchylides and Simonides, and bucolic poets such as Theocritus and Bion, additionally, myth was central to classical Athenian drama
2.
Greek language
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Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, during antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire, the language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek roots are used to coin new words for other languages, Greek. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the worlds oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages, the Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods, Proto-Greek, the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards, Ancient Greek, in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire, after the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek, the continuation of Koine Greek in Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Much of the written Greek that was used as the language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine. Modern Greek, Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period and it is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it. In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia, the historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language and it is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English, Greek is spoken by about 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Greek is the language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population
3.
Swamp
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A swamp is a wetland that is forested. Many swamps occur along rivers where they are critically dependent upon natural water level fluctuations. Other swamps occur on the shores of large lakes, some swamps have hammocks, or dry-land protrusions, covered by aquatic vegetation, or vegetation that tolerates periodic inundation. The two main types of swamp are true or swamp forests and transitional or shrub swamps, in the boreal regions of Canada, the word swamp is colloquially used for what is more correctly termed a bog or muskeg. The water of a swamp may be water, brackish water or seawater. Some of the worlds largest swamps are found along rivers such as the Amazon, the Mississippi. Swamps are characterized by slow-moving to stagnant waters and they are usually associated with adjacent rivers or lakes. Swamps are features of areas with very low topographic relief, historically, humans have drained swamps to provide additional land for agriculture and to reduce the threat of diseases borne by swamp insects and similar animals. Many swamps have also undergone intensive logging, requiring the construction of drainage ditches and these ditches and canals contributed to drainage and, along the coast, allowed salt water to intrude, converting swamps to marsh or even to open water. Large areas of swamp were therefore lost or degraded, louisiana provides a classic example of wetland loss from these combined factors. Europe has probably lost nearly half its wetlands, New Zealand lost 90 percent of its wetlands over a period of 150 years. Ecologists recognise that swamps provide valuable ecological services including flood control, fish production, water purification, carbon storage, in many parts of the world authorities protect swamps. In parts of Europe and North America, swamp restoration projects are becoming widespread, often the simplest steps to restoring swamps involve plugging drainage ditches and removing levees. Swamps and other wetlands have traditionally held a very low property value compared to fields, prairies and they have a reputation for being unproductive land that cannot easily be utilized for human activities, other than perhaps hunting and trapping. Farmers, for example, typically drained swamps next to their fields so as to more land usable for planting crops. Many societies now realize that swamps are important to providing fresh water and oxygen to all life. Indeed, floodplain swamps are important in fish production. Government environmental agencies are taking steps to protect and preserve swamps, in Europe, major effort is being invested in the restoration of swamp forests along rivers
4.
Acheron
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The Acheron is a river located in the Epirus region of northwest Greece. Its source is near the village Zotiko, in the part of the Ioannina regional unit it flows into the Ionian Sea in Ammoudia. In ancient Greek mythology, Acheron was known as the river of woe, in the Homeric poems the Acheron was described as a river of Hades, into which Cocytus and Phlegethon both flowed. The Roman poet Virgil called it the river of Tartarus, from which the Styx. The newly dead would be ferried across the Acheron by Charon in order to enter the Underworld, the Suda describes the river as a place of healing, not a place of punishment, cleansing and purging the sins of humans. By this myth, Acheron is also the father of Ascalaphus by either Orphne or Gorgyra, the river called Acheron with the nearby ruins of the Necromanteion is found near Parga on the mainland opposite Corfu. Another branch of Acheron was believed to surface at the Acherusian cape and was seen by the Argonauts according to Apollonius of Rhodes, greeks who settled in Italy identified the Acherusian lake into which Acheron flowed with Lake Avernus. Plato in his Phaedo identified Acheron as the second greatest river in the world and he claimed that Acheron flowed in the opposite direction from Oceanus beneath the earth under desert places. The word is occasionally used as a synecdoche for Hades itself. Virgil mentions Acheron with the other rivers in his description of the underworld in Book VI of the Aeneid. In Book VII, line 312 he gives to Juno the famous saying, flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo, If I cannot bend the will of Heaven, I shall move Hell. The same words were used by Sigmund Freud as the motto for his seminal book The Interpretation of Dreams. The Acheron was sometimes referred to as a lake or swamp in Greek literature, as in Aristophanes The Frogs, in Dantes Inferno, the Acheron river forms the border of Hell. Following Greek mythology, Charon ferries souls across this river to Hell and those who were neutral in life sit on the banks. Theoi Project - Potamos Akheron LAchéron, Viol Consort
5.
Greek underworld
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The Greek underworld, in mythology, is an otherworld where souls go after death, and is the original Greek idea of afterlife. At the moment of death the soul is separated from the corpse, taking on the shape of the former person, the Underworld itself is described as being either at the outer bounds of the ocean or beneath the depths or ends of the earth. It is considered the counterpart to the brightness of Mount Olympus. Hades is an invisible to the living, made solely for the dead. There are five rivers that are visible both in the living world and the underworld. Their names were meant to reflect the emotions associated with death, the Styx is generally considered to be one of the most prominent and central rivers of the Underworld and is also the most widely known out of all the rivers. Its known as the river of hatred and is named after the goddess Styx and this river circles the underworld seven times. The Acheron is the river of pain and its the one that Charon, also known as the Ferryman, rows the dead over according to many mythological accounts, though sometimes it is the river Styx or both. The Lethe is the river of forgetfulness and it is associated with the goddess Lethe, the goddess of forgetfulness and oblivion. In later accounts, a poplar branch dripping with water of the Lethe became the symbol of Hypnos, the Phlegethon is the river of fire. According to Plato, this leads to the depths of Tartarus. The Cocytus is the river of wailing, oceanus is the river that encircles the world, and it marks the east edge of the underworld, as Erebos is west of the mortal world. In front of the entrance to the underworld live Grief, Anxiety, Diseases, fear, Hunger, Death, Agony, and Sleep also live in front of the entrance, together with Guilty Joys. On the opposite threshold is War, the Erinyes, and Eris, close to the doors are many beasts, including Centaurs, Gorgons, the Lernaean Hydra, the Chimera, and Harpies. In the midst of all this, an Elm can be seen where false dreams cling under every leaf, the souls that enter the Underworld carry a coin under their tongue to pay Charon to take them across the river. Charon may make exceptions or allowances for those carrying a certain Golden Bough. Charon is appallingly filthy, with eyes like jets of fire, a bush of unkempt beard upon his chin, although Charon embarks now one group now another, some souls he grimly turns away. These are the unburied which cant be taken across from bank to bank until they receive a proper burial, across the river, guarding the gates of the Underworld, is Cerberus
6.
Thesprotia
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Thesprotia is one of the regional units of Greece. It is part of the Epirus region and its capital and largest town is Igoumenitsa. Thesprotia is named after the Thesprotians, an ancient Greek tribe that inhabited the region in antiquity, in antiquity, Thesprotia was inhabited by the ancient Greek tribe of Thesprotians and was bordered by the neighboring regions of Molossia to the north and Chaonia to the east. Thesprotia became part of the Epirote League before it was annexed by Rome where it became part of the Roman province of Epirus. After the fragmentation of the Roman Empire into East and West, Thesprotia, along with the rest of the region, became part of the Eastern Roman Empire, until its fall to the Ottomans. The territory of Thesprotia remained under Ottoman rule until 1913, when it was annnexed by the Greek state after the First Balkan War, until 1937, when the separate prefecture of Thesprotia was established, the area was part of the Ioannina Prefecture. Thesprotia borders Albania to the north, the unit of Ioannina to the east. The Ionian Sea lies to the west, much of the regional unit is mountainous. Most farmland is located in the valleys in the central, southern, two of Thesprotias rivers are legendary, the Thyamis and the Acheron of Greek mythology, lined with reedbeds and plane trees. Cold winters of a semi-alpine climate dominate the eastern part and higher elevations, the regional unit Thesprotia is subdivided into 3 municipalities. These are, Filiates Igoumenitsa Souli Thesprotia was established as a prefecture in 1937, as a part of the 2011 Kallikratis government reform, the regional unit Thesprotia was created out of the former prefecture Thesprotia. The prefecture had the territory as the present regional unit. At the same time, the municipalities were reorganised, according to the table below, Province of Thyamida - Igoumenitsa Province of Filiates - Filiates Province of Margariti - Margariti Province of Souli - Paramythia Note, Provinces no longer hold any legal status in Greece. Thesprotia is traditionally one of the poorest and most remote prefectures of Greece, the main economical activities are agriculture and tourism, with agriculture as historically the main economical activity. The main tourist attractions of the region are its numerous beaches, other tourist attractions are the remains of ancient cities such as Gitani. In 1996, construction began on motorway 2, officially called Egnatia Odos, the road, which links the Ionian coast at Igoumenitsa to Thessaloniki, was opened to traffic in 2009. Other important roads in Thesprotia include the Greek National Road 6, in 2009, construction began for a new highway that will connect Igoumenitsa and Saranda, passing by Sagiada and Konispol. The port of Igoumenitsa serves ferry routes to the islands of Corfu and Paxoi, as well as Italy
7.
Argolis
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Argolis or the Argolid is one of the regional units of Greece. It is part of the region of Peloponnese, situated in the part of the Peloponnese peninsula and part of the tripoint area of Argolis. Much of the territory of region is situated in the Argolid Peninsula. Most arable land lies in the part of Argolis. Its primary agricultural resources are oranges and olives, Argolis has a coastline on the Saronic Gulf in the northeast and on the Argolic Gulf in the south and southeast. Notable mountains ranges are the Oligyrtos in the northwest, Lyrkeio and Ktenia in the west, Argolis has land borders with Arcadia to the west and southwest, Corinthia to the north, and the Islands regional unit to the east. Parts of the history of the area can be found in the articles on Argos, Mycenae, Epidaurus, Nafplio, Troezen, Ermioni, Kranidi, from 1833 to 1899, Argolis was part of Argolidocorinthia, which included present Corinthia, Hydra, Spetses and Kythira. It joined Corinthia to form Argolidocorinthia again in 1909, forty years later, in 1949, Argolis was finally separated from Corinthia. The regional unit Argolis is subdivided into 4 municipalities and these are, Argos-Mykines Epidaurus Ermionida Nafplio As a part of the 2011 Kallikratis government reform, the regional unit Argolis was created out of the former prefecture Argolis. The prefecture had the territory as the present regional unit
8.
Heraclea Pontica
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Heraclea Pontica was an ancient city on the coast of Bithynia in Asia Minor, at the mouth of the river Lycus. The site is now the location of the modern city Karadeniz Ereğli, the colonists soon subjugated the native Mariandynians but agreed to terms that none of the latter, now helot-like serfs, be sold into slavery outside their homeland. The prosperity of the city, rudely shaken by the Galatians and it was the birthplace of the philosopher Heraclides Ponticus. The Greek historical author Memnon of Heraclea wrote a history of Heraclea Pontica in at least sixteen books. The work has perished, but Photiuss Bibliotheca preserves an account of books 9–16. At present, it is the Turkish city of Karadeniz Ereğli, outpost of Hellenism, The Emergence of Heraclea on the Black Sea, Stanley Mayer Burstein, University of California Publications, Classical Studies,14. Coin minted in Heraclea Pontica 3rd–2nd century BC, Photiuss Bibliotheca 224, Memnon of Heraclea, History of Heraclea
9.
Cumae
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Cumae was an ancient city of Magna Graecia on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Founded by settlers from Euboea in the 8th century BC, Cumae was the first Greek colony on the mainland of Italy, the ruins of the city lie near the modern village of Cuma, a frazione of the comune Bacoli in the Province of Naples, Campania, Italy. Cumae is perhaps most famous as the seat of the Cumaean Sibyl and her sanctuary is now open to the public. In Roman mythology, there is an entrance to the underworld located at Avernus, a lake near Cumae. They were already established at Pithecusae, they were led by the paired oecists Megasthenes of Chalcis and its name refers to the peninsula of Cyme in Euboea. It spread its influence throughout the area over the 7th and 6th centuries BC, gaining sway over Puteoli and Misenum and, thereafter, all these facts were recalled long afterwards, Cumaes first brief contemporary mention in written history is in Thucydides. The growing power of the Cumaean Greeks led many indigenous tribes of the region to organize against them, notably the Dauni, contact between the Romans and the Cumaeans is recorded during the reign of Aristodemus. Livy states that prior to the war between Rome and Clusium, the Roman senate sent agents to Cumae to purchase grain in anticipation of a siege of Rome. Also Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the last legendary King of Rome, lived his life in exile with Aristodemus at Cumae after the Battle of Lake Regillus, also during the reign of Aristodemus, the Cumaean army assisted the Latin city of Aricia to defeat the Etruscan forces of Clusium. The combined fleets of Cumae and Syracuse defeated the Etruscans at the Battle of Cumae in 474 BC, the Greek period at Cumae came to an end in 421 BC, when the Oscans broke down the walls and took the city, ravaging the countryside. Cumae came under Roman rule with Capua and in 338 was granted partial citizenship, in the Second Punic War, in spite of temptations to revolt from Roman authority, Cumae withstood Hannibals siege, under the leadership of Tib. At the end of the 4th century, the temple of Zeus at Cumae was transformed into a Christian basilica, the first historically documented bishop of Cumae was Adeodatus, a member of a synod convoked by Pope Hilarius in Rome in 465. Misenus was excommunicated on his return but was rehabilitated and took part as bishop of Cumae in two synods of Pope Symmachus. Pope Gregory the Great entrusted the administration of the diocese of Cumae to the bishop of Misenum, later, both Misenum and Cumae ceased to be residential sees and the territory of Cumae became part of the diocese of Aversa after the destruction of Cumae in 1207. Accordingly, Cumae is today listed by the Catholic Church as a titular see, in 1207, forces from Naples, acting for the boy-King of Sicily, destroyed the city and its walls, as the stronghold of a nest of bandits. The seaward side of the rise on which Cumae was built was used as a bunker. Not to be confused with the namesake Cuma in Asia Minor A bishopric was established around 450 AD, in 700 it gained territory from the suppressed Diocese of Miseno. In 1207 it was suppressed itself, its territory being divided and merged into the Roman Catholic Diocese of Aversa, saint Massenzio Rainaldo Giovanni Gregorio Leone In 1970, the diocese was nominally restored as a Latin titular see
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Smith, William, ed. (1870). "Acherusia". Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology.
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