Ever feel like you're the unluckiest person on earth? Well, have you ever had your liver
pecked out by a vulture, your hair turned into snakes, or gotten so hungry you started eating
yourself? Keep watching to learn about the cruelest curses in Ancient Greece!
Cassandra started out life as a perfectly normal girl. Things started to change,
however, after she visited the shrine of Thymbraean Apollo,
and found she was able to hear the voices of the divine through the sounds made by nature.
Particularly in the form of bird songs. It's a beautiful story, but it gets ugly real quick.
Years later Cassandra returned to the temple as a grown woman. There, she caught the eye of
Apollo himself, who wanted to do with Cassandra what the Greek gods often wanted to do with
beautiful mortal women. She turned him down, though, and enraged by her rejection, he added
another part to her gift of prophecy: a curse that no one would ever believe what she said.
This happened right before the Trojan War, and Cassandra's gift of prophecy allowed her to see
the whole thing unfolding before it began. Her attempts to stop the war and avert scores upon
scores of deaths ended when her father declared her mad and had her locked away. While she
survived the war, she didn't live to see much past the end. After heading to one of Athena's temples
to ask for protection, she was kidnapped and given to Agamemnon as a slave. She and
Agamemnon both were later killed by Agamemnon's wife, Clytemnestra, upon their return to Greece.
But don't worry, Clytemnestra later got hers at the hand of her and Agamemnon's son, Orestes.
Prometheus was one of a set of twin brothers who switched sides from the Titans to the gods.
After the great war, the two Titans decided to live on the new world's surface,
and regularly visited their divine allies. Zeus eventually told Prometheus to create man,
and his brother to create all the animals. Epimetheus basically gave all the good bits — like
flight — away to the animals and when it came time to give something to man, there was nothing left.
Zeus found that incredibly hilarious, and declared that fire was also off-limits to
these pesky humans in order to keep them in their place. Prometheus, however,
went to visit the smith Hephaestus, stole fire, and gave it to his beloved humans.
It was that act of defiance that led to the part of Prometheus's life that's been immortalized
in countless works of art. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a cliff, and every day,
a vulture would eat his liver — which would regrow, so it could be eaten the following day.
"Wow, that really sucks!"
"No kidding."
Zeus wasn't done yet and delivered a massive curse on mankind for receiving the gift of fire.
He developed the idea of Pandora's box as a bit of divine revenge. Ordering Hephaestus
to create the world's first woman — Pandora — he then gave her to Prometheus's brother,
Epimetheus, to be his wife. Zeus then gifted the couple the infamous Pandora's box,
which released all the evils that plague humankind even today.
As her name suggests, Harmonia was the goddess of harmony within a marriage and on the battlefield,
which is appropriate for the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares. The problem was
that Aphrodite was married to the smith Hephaestus when she hooked up with her
brother to produce Harmonia. But, Hephaestus was not about to allow that to go unpunished.
He got his chance to curse Harmonia when she was quite literally given to the hero and
governor of Thebes, Cadmus. The Greek mythology reference website Theoi says that there are a
few versions of the story. And whether Zeus was behind Cadmus's gifted bride or if it was Ares,
the end result was the same. When all the gods attended the ceremony, it was Hephaestus who
gave her a necklace that cursed not just her, but her entire family line as well.
The Classical Greek playwright,
Euripides wrote of Cadmus lamenting the following to his daughter, Agave.
"I am to reach no respite from this curse;
I may not even cross the downward stream of Acheron to find peace in death."
It ended up being a bit of foreshadowing. Philostratus the Elder wrote that ancient
art depicted the end of Harmonia and Cadmus,
doomed to be turned into dragon-serpents. Even after the gods took pity on them and
allowed them into Elysium, the cursed necklace continued to ruin the lives of anyone who wore it.
Myrrha's only crime was having a father who couldn't keep his mouth shut, and she paid the
ultimate price. Cinyras was the king of Assyria, and Myrrha was his daughter. Like any good father,
he was incredibly proud of her and used to boast about her to anyone who would listen.
He went a little too far, though, and when he started talking about how she was more radiant
than the goddess of love herself, you'd better bet that Aphrodite heard that one.
Aphrodite enlisted the help of her son,
Eros, to curse Myrrha with an insatiable lust for her own father. She started to pursue Cinyras
with a relentless single-mindedness until she successfully tricked him into sleeping with her.
When he realized what they'd done, he turned on the girl and tried to kill her.
She managed to run away and to add to the mess that had been made of what was
a perfectly acceptable family situation before Aphrodite got involved, Myrrha was pregnant.
Seeing no other choice, she went to the gods for help.
And what happened next is proof that when it comes to the Greek gods, people should
really be careful about what they ask for. In order to protect her from her father's wrath,
Myrrha was turned into the myrrh tree. Nine months later, when the tree split open,
there was the little baby Adonis, who Aphrodite immediately fell in love with.
Medusa searches for Perseus.
Medusa is one of the most famous characters in Greek mythology. Even those who don't
know much about it will recognize her as the snake-haired woman who is so horrible that
anyone who looks at her is turned to stone. However, less well-known is her origin story.
And that's a shame because Medusa was only a monster because of a heartbreaking curse.
It’s said that as early as the 8th century BC, she appeared as the daughter of divine entities
of the sea. While she's sometimes one of a set of three witch-like sisters that share a single eye,
Ovid's story about her is the most widespread. He wrote that she was a
beautiful virgin priestess in the service of Athena. But it was the pesky issue of
celibacy that ultimately got her into trouble. You see, Medusa caught the eye of Poseidon,
and according to some versions, the union resulted in several children,
including the flying horse, Pegasus — which… weird, but okay. Unfortunately, the liaison didn't
go unnoticed. For breaking the vow of celibacy she made to Athena, the goddess cursed her by
turning her hair into snakes, and condemning her to turn anyone who looked upon her to stone.
Now here's the genuinely horrible part; most versions of the story have Medusa being condemned
for being taken advantage of by a god. However, more recent literature written about her has gone
a long way to try to reclaim her not as a monster, but as an ancient example of victim-blaming.
Ekho was a nymph in the service of Hera, and that right there doesn't bode well for her.
As with most Greek myths, there are a few different versions of her story,
but according to the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology,
her endless chatter and talk were what got her into trouble. While Hera's unfaithful husband,
Zeus, was off cavorting with other nymphs, Ekho would distract the goddess with the sort of
one-sided conversation that never seemed to end. When Hera realized this was basically keeping her
busy while Zeus was getting his ramblin' pants on, she cursed Ekho to be able to say nothing,
save repeating the last few words of whatever was said to her.
But, the powers-that-be weren't done with her yet! According to Ptolemy Hephaestion [TOL-uh-mee
hi-FAY-stee-on], she was also the subject of another curse. Aphrodite once went head-to-head
in a beauty contest with one of Zeus's sons. She became so upset when there was determined to be no
clear winner, that Aphrodite cursed one of the judges — Pan — with unrequited love for Ekho.
Ekho, meanwhile, had fallen in love with Narcissus, who had eyes for no one but himself.
When he rebuked her advances, she retreated from the world and went to live in caves
in the wilderness, where her body slowly faded away and left nothing but a voice.
There are a ton of cringe-worthy stories in Greek mythology, and
Pasiphae has the unfortunate honor of being the star of one of the
most cringe-inducing myths out there. Who was she? The wife of King Minos,
and the mother of the Minotaur — but how it all went down was absolutely not her doing.
It was Minos who started the whole thing. When he first took over as the King of Crete,
he met with some major pushback. Thinking that a sign from the gods was just what he
needed to prove his claim, he asked for it — and Poseidon sent a massive bull,
on the condition that Minos would sacrifice it in his name. Minos had other ideas, and instead of
killing the divine bull, he added it to his own cattle and sacrificed something else instead.
Poseidon was predictably unhappy and cursed Minos's wife to lust after the
bull her husband should have sacrificed. She ended up so desperate to do the deed
with the sacred bull that she sought out the inventor Daedalus for help. He would go on to
build her a cow where she could climb inside and, well...let's just say that when she gave
birth to the bull-headed Minotaur, everyone realized exactly what she'd been up to.
"Ew, gross!"
Erysichthon was a king of Thessaly, and it's safe to say that he learned a very
important lesson the hard way. That being, not to destroy places that are sacred to the gods,
because they will make you pay. The goddess in question was Demeter,
and Erysichthon became the target of her wrath when he destroyed a swath of forest that was
dedicated to her. As he did it with ambitions of building himself a feast hall in its place,
it's pretty appropriate that she cursed him with an insatiable hunger.
We're not talking about the sort of hunger that strikes at 2 am and there's really nothing in
the fridge to eat, so it's a choice between a second dinner and holding on until breakfast.
Erysichthon ate and ate and ate some more. In the words of ancient Greek poet Callimachus:
"And all the eatables poured, in vain and thanklessly,
as it were into the depths of the sea."
He had 20 servants cooking for him constantly and another dozen pouring drinks and still,
he starved. He called in debts, requested tributes of hundreds and hundreds of cattle,
and ate so much that there was nothing left in the kingdom for anyone else.
He ate imaginary food as he slept, grinding his teeth down to nothing.
He even sold his daughter for food, and when that was gone, Ovid wrote:
"The ill-starred wretch began to gnaw himself,
and dwindled bite by bite as his own flesh supplied his appetite."
Back in the early days of the gods, mortals were invited to Mount Olympus.
That ended when Tantalus decided to test them to see if they really were all-knowing.
How? He killed his own son, used him as the main ingredient in a stew, and served him at dinner.
"Not a great plan."
Zeus was so mind-numbingly mad that he started by sending Tantalus straight to Hades. Once he was
there, he was cursed with a never-ending thirst and hunger and made to stand in a pool of water
that drained every time he tried to take a drink, and beneath a fruit tree that he couldn't reach.
Then, he cursed Tantalus' entire family line, and it was a curse that would get doubled down on in
just the next generation. The Fates resurrected Pelops, Tantalus' son, from the stew that had been
made from him. They then went on to bribe someone to help him win the right to marry the daughter of
the king of Pisa. The plan worked — killing the king in the process — and when Pelops silenced
the man who had helped him by throwing him off the nearest cliff, a second curse was issued.
That all kicked off the saga of the ill-fated House of Atreus,
which became the subject of a great number of plays in ancient Greece. Famous family
members included Agamemnon and Menelaus, Thyestes and Atreus, who continued the
whole tradition of serving up children for dinner. In other words? In Ancient Greece,
it was probably in the best interests of you and your extended family, not to piss off the gods!