Hera
Hera is the goddess of women, marriage and childbirth in ancient Greek religion and myth, one of the Twelve Olympians and the sister-wife of Zeus. She is the daughter of the Titans Rhea. Hera rules over Mount Olympus as queen of the gods. A matronly figure, Hera served as both the patroness and protectress of married women, presiding over weddings and blessing marital unions. One of Hera's defining characteristics is her jealous and vengeful nature against Zeus' numerous lovers and illegitimate offspring, as well as the mortals who cross her. Hera is seen with the animals she considers sacred including the cow and the peacock. Portrayed as majestic and solemn enthroned, crowned with the polos, Hera may hold a pomegranate in her hand, emblem of fertile blood and death and a substitute for the narcotic capsule of the opium poppy. Scholar of Greek mythology Walter Burkert writes in Greek Religion, "Nevertheless, there are memories of an earlier aniconic representation, as a pillar in Argos and as a plank in Samos."Her Roman counterpart is Juno.
The name of Hera has several mutually exclusive etymologies. According to Plutarch, Hera was an anagram of aēr. So begins the section on Hera in Walter Burkert's Greek Religion. In a note, he records other scholars' arguments "for the meaning Mistress as a feminine to Heros, Master." John Chadwick, a decipherer of Linear B, remarks "her name may be connected with hērōs, ἥρως,'hero', but, no help, since it too is etymologically obscure." A. J. van Windekens, offers "young cow, heifer", consonant with Hera's common epithet βοῶπις. R. S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin, her name is attested in Mycenaean Greek written in the Linear B syllabic script as e-ra, appearing on tablets found in Pylos and Thebes. Hera may have been the first deity to whom the Greeks dedicated an enclosed roofed temple sanctuary, at Samos about 800 BCE, it was replaced by the Heraion of Samos, one of the largest of all Greek temples. There were many temples built on this site so evidence is somewhat confusing and archaeological dates are uncertain.
The temple created by the Rhoecus sculptors and architects was destroyed between 570–560 BCE. This was replaced by the Polycratean temple of 540–530 BCE. In one of these temples we see a forest of 155 columns. There is no evidence of tiles on this temple suggesting either the temple was never finished or that the temple was open to the sky. Earlier sanctuaries, whose dedication to Hera is less certain, were of the Mycenaean type called "house sanctuaries". Samos excavations have revealed votive offerings, many of them late 8th and 7th centuries BCE, which show that Hera at Samos was not a local Greek goddess of the Aegean: the museum there contains figures of gods and suppliants and other votive offerings from Armenia, Iran, Egypt, testimony to the reputation which this sanctuary of Hera enjoyed and to the large influx of pilgrims. Compared to this mighty goddess, who possessed the earliest temple at Olympia and two of the great fifth and sixth century temples of Paestum, the termagant of Homer and the myths is an "almost... comic figure", according to Burkert.
Though greatest and earliest free-standing temple to Hera was the Heraion of Samos, in the Greek mainland Hera was worshipped as "Argive Hera" at her sanctuary that stood between the former Mycenaean city-states of Argos and Mycenae, where the festivals in her honor called Heraia were celebrated. "The three cities I love best," the ox-eyed Queen of Heaven declares in the Iliad, book iv, "are Argos and Mycenae of the broad streets." There were temples to Hera in Olympia, Tiryns and the sacred island of Delos. In Magna Graecia, two Doric temples to Hera were constructed at Paestum, about 550 BCE and about 450 BCE. One of them, long called the Temple of Poseidon was identified in the 1950s as a second temple there of Hera. In Euboea, the festival of the Great Daedala, sacred to Hera, was celebrated on a sixty-year cycle. Hera's importance in the early archaic period is attested by the large building projects undertaken in her honor; the temples of Hera in the two main centers of her cult, the Heraion of Samos and the Heraion of Argos in the Argolis, were the earliest monumental Greek temples constructed, in the 8th century BCE.
According to Walter Burkert, both Hera and Demeter have many characteristic attributes of Pre-Greek Great Goddesses. According to Homeric Hymn III to Delian Apollo, Hera detained Eileithyia to prevent Leto from going into labor with Artemis and Apollo, since the father was Zeus; the other goddesses present at the birthing on Delos sent Iris to bring her. As she stepped upon the island, the divine birth began. In the myth of the birth of Heracles, it is Hera herself who sits at the door, delaying the birth of Heracles until her protégé, had been born first; the Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo makes the monster Typhaon the offspring of archaic Hera in her Minoan form, produced out of herself, like a monstrous version of Hephaestus, whelped in a cave in Cilicia. She gave the creature to Python to raise. In the Temple of Hera, Hera's seated cult figure was older than the warrior figure of Zeus that accompanied it. Homer expressed her relationship with Zeus delicately in the Iliad, in which she declares to Zeus, "I am
Sparta
Sparta was a prominent city-state in ancient Greece. In antiquity the city-state was known as Lacedaemon, while the name Sparta referred to its main settlement on the banks of the Eurotas River in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese. Around 650 BC, it rose to become the dominant military land-power in ancient Greece. Given its military pre-eminence, Sparta was recognized as the leading force of the unified Greek military during the Greco-Persian Wars. Between 431 and 404 BC, Sparta was the principal enemy of Athens during the Peloponnesian War, from which it emerged victorious, though at a great cost of lives lost. Sparta's defeat by Thebes in the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC ended Sparta's prominent role in Greece. However, it maintained its political independence until the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC, it underwent a long period of decline in the Middle Ages, when many Spartans moved to live in Mystras. Modern Sparta is the capital of the Greek regional unit of Laconia and a center for the processing of goods such as citrus and olives.
Sparta was unique in ancient Greece for its social system and constitution, which configured their entire society to maximize military proficiency at all costs, focused on military training and excellence. Its inhabitants were classified as Spartiates, mothakes and helots. Spartiates underwent the rigorous agoge training and education regimen, Spartan phalanges were considered to be among the best in battle. Spartan women enjoyed more rights and equality to men than elsewhere in the classical antiquity. Sparta was the subject of fascination in its own day, as well as in Western culture following the revival of classical learning; this love or admiration of Sparta is known as Laconophilia. At its peak around 500 BC the size of the city would have been some 20,000–35,000 citizens, plus numerous helots and perioikoi; the total of 40,000–50,000 made Sparta one of the largest Greek cities. The French classicist François Ollier in his 1933 book Le mirage spartiate warned that a major scholarly problem regarding Sparta is that all the surviving accounts were written by non-Spartans who presented an excessively idealized image of Sparta.
The earliest attested term referring to Lacedaemon is the Mycenaean Greek, ra-ke-da-mi-ni-jo, "Lacedaimonian", written in Linear B syllabic script, being the equivalent of the written in the Greek alphabet, latter Greek, Λακεδαιμόνιος, Lakedaimonios. The ancient Greeks used one of three words to refer to the home location of the Spartans; the first refers to the main cluster of settlements in the valley of the Eurotas River: Sparta. The second word was Lacedaemon. Herodotus seems to denote by it the Mycenaean Greek citadel at Therapne, in contrast to the lower town of Sparta, it could be used synonymously with Sparta, but it was not. It denoted the terrain. In Homer it is combined with epithets of the countryside: wide, lovely and most hollow and broken; the hollow suggests the Eurotas Valley. Sparta on the other hand is the country of a people epithet; the name of the population was used for the state of Lacedaemon: the Lacedaemonians. This epithet utilized the plural of the adjective Lacedaemonius.
If the ancients wished to refer to the country more directly, instead of Lacedaemon, they could use a back-formation from the adjective: Lacedaemonian country. As most words for "country" were feminine, the adjective was in the feminine: Lacedaemonia; the adjective came to be used alone. "Lacedaemonia" was not in general use during the classical period and before. It does occur in Greek as an equivalent of Laconia and Messenia during the Roman and early Byzantine periods in ethnographers and lexica glossing place names. For example, Hesychius of Alexandria's Lexicon defines Agiadae as a "place in Lacedaemonia" named after Agis; the actual transition may be captured by Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, an etymological dictionary. He relied on Orosius' Historiarum Adversum Paganos and Eusebius of Caesarea's Chronicon as did Orosius; the latter defines Sparta to be Lacedaemonia Civitas but Isidore defines Lacedaemonia as founded by Lacedaemon, son of Semele, relying on Eusebius. There is a rare use the earliest of Lacedaemonia, in Diodorus Siculus, but with Χὠρα suppressed.
The immediate area around the town of Sparta, the plateau east of the Taygetos mountains, was referred as Laconice. This term was sometimes used to refer to all the regions under direct Spartan control, including Messenia. Lakedaimona was until 2006 the name of a province in the modern Greek prefecture of Laconia. Sparta is located in the south-eastern Peloponnese. Ancient Sparta was built on the banks of the Eurotas River, the main river of Laconia, which provided it with a source of fresh water; the valley of the Eurotas is a natural fo
Alexander the Great
Alexander III of Macedon known as Alexander the Great, was a king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon and a member of the Argead dynasty. He was born in Pella in 356 BC and succeeded his father Philip II to the throne at the age of 20, he spent most of his ruling years on an unprecedented military campaign through Asia and northeast Africa, by the age of thirty he had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world, stretching from Greece to northwestern India. He was undefeated in battle and is considered one of history's most successful military commanders. During his youth, Alexander was tutored by Aristotle until age 16. After Philip's assassination in 336 BC, he succeeded his father to the throne and inherited a strong kingdom and an experienced army. Alexander was awarded the generalship of Greece and used this authority to launch his father's pan-Hellenic project to lead the Greeks in the conquest of Persia. In 334 BC, he began a series of campaigns that lasted 10 years. Following the conquest of Anatolia, Alexander broke the power of Persia in a series of decisive battles, most notably the battles of Issus and Gaugamela.
He subsequently overthrew Persian King Darius III and conquered the Achaemenid Empire in its entirety. At that point, his empire stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River, he endeavored to reach the "ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea" and invaded India in 326 BC, winning an important victory over the Pauravas at the Battle of the Hydaspes. He turned back at the demand of his homesick troops. Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BC, the city that he planned to establish as his capital, without executing a series of planned campaigns that would have begun with an invasion of Arabia. In the years following his death, a series of civil wars tore his empire apart, resulting in the establishment of several states ruled by the Diadochi, Alexander's surviving generals and heirs. Alexander's legacy includes the cultural diffusion and syncretism which his conquests engendered, such as Greco-Buddhism, he founded some twenty cities. Alexander's settlement of Greek colonists and the resulting spread of Greek culture in the east resulted in a new Hellenistic civilization, aspects of which were still evident in the traditions of the Byzantine Empire in the mid-15th century AD and the presence of Greek speakers in central and far eastern Anatolia until the 1920s.
Alexander became legendary as a classical hero in the mold of Achilles, he features prominently in the history and mythic traditions of both Greek and non-Greek cultures. He became the measure against which military leaders compared themselves, military academies throughout the world still teach his tactics, he is ranked among the most influential people in history. Alexander was born on the sixth day of the ancient Greek month of Hekatombaion, which corresponds to 20 July 356 BC, although the exact date is disputed, in Pella, the capital of the Kingdom of Macedon, he was the son of the king of Macedon, Philip II, his fourth wife, the daughter of Neoptolemus I, king of Epirus. Although Philip had seven or eight wives, Olympias was his principal wife for some time because she gave birth to Alexander. Several legends surround Alexander's childhood. According to the ancient Greek biographer Plutarch, on the eve of the consummation of her marriage to Philip, Olympias dreamed that her womb was struck by a thunder bolt that caused a flame to spread "far and wide" before dying away.
Sometime after the wedding, Philip is said to have seen himself, in a dream, securing his wife's womb with a seal engraved with a lion's image. Plutarch offered a variety of interpretations of these dreams: that Olympias was pregnant before her marriage, indicated by the sealing of her womb. Ancient commentators were divided about whether the ambitious Olympias promulgated the story of Alexander's divine parentage, variously claiming that she had told Alexander, or that she dismissed the suggestion as impious. On the day Alexander was born, Philip was preparing a siege on the city of Potidea on the peninsula of Chalcidice; that same day, Philip received news that his general Parmenion had defeated the combined Illyrian and Paeonian armies, that his horses had won at the Olympic Games. It was said that on this day, the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, burnt down; this led Hegesias of Magnesia to say that it had burnt down because Artemis was away, attending the birth of Alexander.
Such legends may have emerged when Alexander was king, at his own instigation, to show that he was superhuman and destined for greatness from conception. In his early years, Alexander was raised by a nurse, sister of Alexander's future general Cleitus the Black. In his childhood, Alexander was tutored by the strict Leonidas, a relative of his mother, by Lysimachus of Acarnania. Alexander was raised in the manner of noble Macedonian youths, learning to read, play the lyre, ride and hunt; when Alexander was ten years old, a trader from Thessaly brought Philip a horse, which he offered to sell for thirteen talents. The horse refused to be mounted, Philip ordered it away. Alexander however, detecting the horse's fear of its own shadow, asked to tame the horse, which he managed. Plutarch stated that Philip, overjoyed at this display of courage and ambition, kissed his son tearfully, declaring: "My boy, you must find a kingdom big enough for your ambitions. Macedon is too small for you", an
Darius III
Darius III named Artashata and called Codomannus by the Greeks, was the last king of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, from 336 BC to 330 BC. Artashata adopted Darius as a dynastic name, his empire was unstable, with large portions governed by jealous and unreliable satraps and inhabited by disaffected and rebellious subjects. In 334 BC, Alexander the Great began his invasion of the Persian Empire and subsequently defeated the Persians in a number of battles before looting and destroying their capital, Persepolis, by fire in 330 BC. With the Persian Empire now under Alexander's control, Alexander decided to pursue Darius. Before Alexander reached him, Darius was killed by his cousin Satrap Bessus. Artashata was the son of son of Ostanes, he had distinguished himself in a combat of champions in a war against the Cadusii and was serving at the time as a royal courier. However, prior to being appointed as a royal courier, he had served as a satrap of Armenia, he may have been promoted from his satrapy to the postal service after the ascension of Arses, for he is referred to as one of the king's "friends" at court after that occasion.
In 336 BC, he took the throne at the age of 43 after the death of Artaxerxes Arses. According to Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily, Artashata was installed by the vizier Bagoas, after the latter had poisoned the king Artaxerxes III and subsequently his sons, including Arses, who had succeeded him on the throne. Artashata took the regnal name Darius III, demonstrated his independence from his possible assassin benefactor. Bagoas tried to poison Darius as well, when he learned that Darius couldn't be controlled, but Darius was warned and forced Bagoas to drink the poison himself; the new king found himself in control of an unstable empire, large portions of which were governed by jealous and unreliable satraps and inhabited by disaffected and rebellious subjects, such as Khabash in Egypt. Compared to his ancestors and his fellow heirs who had since perished, Darius had a distinct lack of experience ruling an empire, a lack of any previous ambition to do so. Darius was a ruler of average stamp, without the striking talents and qualities which the administration of a vast empire required during that period of crisis.
In 336 BC Philip II of Macedon was authorized by the League of Corinth as its Hegemon to initiate a sacred war of vengeance against the Persians for desecrating and burning the Athenian temples during the Second Persian War, over a century before. He sent an advance force into Asia Minor under the command of his generals Parmenion and Attalus to liberate the Greeks living under Persian control. After they took the Greek cities of Asia from Troy to the Maiandros river, Philip was assassinated and his campaign was suspended while his heir consolidated his control of Macedonia and the rest of Greece. In the spring of 334 BC, Philip's heir, who had himself been confirmed as Hegemon by the League of Corinth, invaded Asia Minor at the head of an army of Macedonian and other Greek soldiers; this invasion, which marked the beginning of the Wars of Alexander the Great, was followed immediately by the victory of Alexander over the Persians at Battle of the Granicus. Darius never showed up for the battle, because there was no reason for him to suppose that Alexander intended to conquer the whole of Asia, Darius may well have supposed that the satraps of the ‘lower’ satrapies could deal with the crisis, so he instead decided to remain at home in Persepolis and let his satraps handle it.
In the previous invasion of Asia Minor by the Spartan king Agesilaus II, the Persians had pinned him in Asia Minor while fomenting rebellion in Greece. Darius attempted to employ the same strategy, with the Spartans rebelling against the Macedonians, but the Spartans were defeated at Megalopolis. Darius did not take the field against Alexander’s army until a year and a half after Granicus, at the Battle of Issus in 333 BC, his forces outnumbered Alexander's soldiers by at least a 2 to 1 ratio, but Darius was still outflanked and forced to flee. It is told by Arrian that at the Battle of Issus the moment the Persian left went to pieces under Alexander’s attack and Darius, in his war-chariot, saw that it was cut off, he incontinently fled – indeed, he led the race for safety. On the way, he left behind his chariot, his bow, his royal mantle, all of which were picked up by Alexander. Greek sources such as Diodorus Siculus' Library of History and Justin's Epitoma Historiarum Philippicarum recount that Darius fled out of fear at the Battle of Issus and again two years at the Battle of Gaugamela despite commanding a larger force in a defensive position each time.
At the Battle of Issus, Darius III caught Alexander by surprise and failed to defeat Alexander's forces. Darius fled so far so fast that Alexander was able to capture Darius’s headquarters and take Darius’s family as prisoners in the process. Darius petitioned to Alexander through letters several times to get his family back, but Alexander refused to do so unless Darius would acknowledge him as the new emperor of Persia. Circumstances were more in Darius’s favor at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC, he had a good number of troops, organized on the battlefield properly, he had the support of the armies of several of his satraps, the ground on the battlefield was perfectly so as not to impede movement of his scythed chariots. Despite all these beneficial factors, he still fled the battle before any victor had been decided and deserted his experienced commanders as well as one of the largest armies assembled. Another source accounts that when Darius perceived the fierce attack
Seven Against Thebes
Seven Against Thebes is the third play in an Oedipus-themed trilogy produced by Aeschylus in 467 BC. The trilogy is sometimes referred to as the Oedipodea, it concerns the battle between an Argive army led by Polynices and the army of Thebes led by Eteocles and his supporters. The trilogy won the first prize at the City Dionysia; the trilogy's first two plays and Oedipus, as well as the satyr play Sphinx, are no longer extant. When Oedipus, King of Thebes, realized he had married his own mother and had two sons and two daughters with her, he blinded himself and cursed his sons to divide their inheritance by the sword; the two sons and Polynices, in order to avoid bloodshed, agreed to rule Thebes in alternate years. After the first year, Eteocles refused to step down, leading Polynices to raise an army of Argives to take Thebes by force; this is. Seven Against Thebes features little action. Dialogues show aspects of Eteocles' character. There is a lengthy description of each of the seven captains that lead the Argive army against the seven gates of the city of Thebes as well as the devices on their respective shields.
Eteocles, in turn, announces. The commander of the troops before the seventh gate is revealed to be Polynices, the brother of the king. Eteocles remembers and refers to the curse of their father Oedipus. Eteocles resolves to fight his brother in person before the seventh gate and exits. Following a choral ode, a messenger enters, announcing that the attackers have been repelled but that Eteocles and Polynices have killed each other in battle, their bodies are brought on stage, the chorus mourns them. Due to the popularity of Sophocles' play Antigone, the ending of Seven against Thebes was rewritten about fifty years after Aeschylus' death. While Aeschylus wrote his play to end with somber mourning for the dead brothers, it now contains an ending that serves as a lead-in of sorts to Sophocles' play: a messenger appears, announcing a prohibition against burying Polynices; the seven attackers and defenders in the play are: The mytheme of the "outlandish" and "savage" Seven who threatened the city has traditionally seemed to be based on Bronze Age history in the generation before the Trojan War, when in the Iliad's Catalogue of Ships only the remnant Hypothebai subsists on the ruins of Thebes.
Yet archaeologists have been hard put to locate seven gates in "seven-gated Thebes": In 1891 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff declared that the seven gates existed only for symmetry with the seven assailants, whose names vary: some have their own identity, like Amphiaraus the seer, "who had his sanctuary and his cult afterwards... Others appear as stock figures to fill out the list," Burkert remarks. "To call one of them Eteoklos, vis-à-vis Eteokles the brother of Polyneikes, appears to be the desperate invention of a faltering poet" Burkert follows a suggestion made by Ernest Howald in 1939 that the Seven are pure myth led by Adrastos on his magic horse, seven demons of the Underworld. The city is saved when the brothers run each other through. Burkert adduces a ninth-century relief from Tell Halaf which would illustrate a text from II Samuel 2: "But each seized his opponent by the forelock and thrust his sword into his side so that all fell together"; the mythic theme passed into Etruscan culture: a fifth-century bronze mirrorback is inscribed with Fulnice and Evtucle running at one another with drawn swords.
A gruesome detail from the battle, in which Tydeus gnawed on the living brain of Melanippos in the course of the siege appears, in a sculpted terracotta relief from a temple at Pyrgi, ca. 470–460 BC. The Seven Against Thebes were Adrastus Amphiaraus Capaneus Hippomedon Parthenopeus Polynices TydeusAllies: Eteoclus and Mecisteus; some sources, state that Eteoclus and Mecisteus were in fact two of the seven, that Tydeus and Polynices were allies. This is because both Polynices were foreigners. However, Polynices was the cause of the entire conflict, Tydeus performed acts of valour far surpassing Eteoclus and Mecisteus. Either way, all nine men were present in the battle; the defenders of Thebes included Melanippus Polyphontes Megareus Hyperbius Actor Lasthenes EteoclesSee Epigoni, the mythic theme of the Second War of Thebes Of the other two plays that made up the trilogy that included Seven Against Thebes and Oedipus, of its satyr play The Sphinx, few fragments have survived. The only fragment definitively assigned to Oedipus is a line translated by Herbert Weir Smyth as "We were coming on our journey to the place from which three highways part in the branching roads, where we crossed the junction of the triple roads at Potniae."
The only two fragments definitively assigned to The Sphinx were translated by Smyth as "For the stranger a garland, an ancient crown, the best of bonds, as Prometheus said," and "The Sphinx, the Watch-dog that presideth over evil days." Translators David Grene and Richmond Lattimore wrote that "the rise of German Romanticism, the consequent resurgence of enthusiasm for Aesc
Harmonia
In Greek mythology, Harmonia is the immortal goddess of harmony and concord. Her Roman counterpart is Concordia, her Greek opposite is Eris. There was a nymph called Harmonia. According to Apollonius of Rhodes, she was a naiad of the Akmonian Wood, a lover of Ares and mother of the Amazons. According to one account, she is the daughter of Aphrodite. By another account, Harmonia was from Samothrace and was the daughter of Zeus and Electra, her brother Iasion being the founder of the mystic rites celebrated on the island. Always, Harmonia is the wife of Cadmus. With Cadmus, she was the mother of Ino, Autonoë, Semele, their youngest son was Illyrius. Those who described Harmonia as a Samothracian related that Cadmus, on his voyage to Samothrace, after being initiated in the mysteries, perceived Harmonia and carried her off with the assistance of Athena; when Cadmus was obliged to quit Thebes, Harmonia accompanied him. When they came to the Enchelii, they assisted them in their war against the Illyrians, conquered the enemy.
Cadmus became king of the Illyrians, but afterwards he was turned into a serpent. Harmonia, in her grief stripped herself begged Cadmus to come to her; as she was embraced by the serpent Cadmus in a pool of wine, the gods turned her into a serpent, unable to stand watching her in her dazed state. Harmonia is renowned in ancient story chiefly on account of the fatal necklace she received on her wedding day; when the government of Thebes was bestowed upon Cadmus by Athena, Zeus gave him Harmonia. All the gods honored the wedding with their presence. Cadmus presented the bride with a robe and necklace, which he had received either from Hephaestus or from Europa; this necklace referred to as the Necklace of Harmonia, brought misfortune to all who possessed it. Other traditions stated that Harmonia received this necklace from some of the gods, either from Aphrodite or Hera. Polynices, who inherited the necklace, gave it to Eriphyle, that she might persuade her husband, Amphiaraus, to undertake the expedition against Thebes.
Through Alcmaeon, the son of Eriphyle, the necklace came into the hands of Arsinoe, next into those of the sons of Phegeus and Agenor, lastly into those of the sons of Alcmaeon and Acarnan, who dedicated it in the temple of Athena Pronoea at Delphi. The necklace had wrought mischief to all, in possession of it, it continued to do so after it was dedicated at Delphi. Phayllus, the tyrant, stole it from the temple to gratify the wife of Ariston, she wore it for a time, but at last her youngest son was seized with madness, set fire to the house, in which she perished with all her treasures. Hyginus gives another version. According to him, the thing which brought ill fate to the descendents of Harmonia is not a necklace, but a robe "dipped in crime", given to Harmonia by Hephestus and Hera; the necklace gave peace and held Harmonia's powers in it, what made it cursed. Apollonius of Rhodes, in the Argonautica, mention a nymph of the Akmonian Wood, near Themiscyra, named Harmonia, loved by the god Ares and bore him girls who fell in love with fighting, the Amazons.
Aneris Cadmus et Hermione Concordia Eris Homonoia goddess of concord and oneness of mind Chisholm, Hugh, ed.. "Harmonia". Encyclopædia Britannica. Cambridge University Press; this article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Leonhard Schmitz. "Harmonia". In Smith, William. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. 2. P. 350
