Greek & Roman Mythology Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which Titan was condemned, for his part in the war against the Olympians, to stand at the western edge of the world for ever holding up the sky on his shoulders?

Question 2

Which master craftsman and inventor built the maze that held the Minotaur, then, imprisoned by the king to keep its secret, made wings of feathers and wax to escape by air with his son?

Question 3

Which woman, a daughter of the king of the gods and the most beautiful in the world, was married to the king of Sparta but left with, or was carried off by, a Trojan prince, giving the Greek kings their pretext to launch a thousand ships against Troy?

Question 4

What is the collective name for the twelve elder deities, children of the sky and the earth, who ruled the cosmos in the age before the Olympian gods and were led by the one who overthrew his own father?

Question 5

Which grim ferryman rowed the souls of the properly buried dead across the rivers that ringed the underworld, for a fare of one small coin, leaving the unburied to wander the near bank for a hundred years?

Question 6

Which hero, sent to fetch the head of a monster whose gaze turned onlookers to stone, approached her by looking only at her reflection in his polished shield, cut off her head, and carried it away in a bag as a weapon?

Question 7

What three underworld goddesses, with snakes in their hair and blood dripping from their eyes, hounded and drove mad anyone guilty of a grave crime against family, especially the murder of a parent?

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About Greek & Roman Mythology

Greek mythology is the deepest and best-recorded body of myth in the Western tradition, and Roman myth mostly reuses it under Latin names, so the two are taken together here. This quiz runs to eighty questions. Each describes a figure, a monster, a place, an object or a story, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains who they were, how the tale goes, the Greek and Roman names, and the word or phrase we still get from it.

The first pack is the core pantheon and the biggest names: the twelve Olympians one by one, from Zeus and Hera to Hephaestus and Dionysus, each with their sphere, their symbols, their Roman name and a signature myth; the Titans they overthrew, led by Cronus who ate his own children; Gaia the primordial Earth and Prometheus who stole fire; and the four heroes everyone half-remembers, Heracles of the twelve labours, Perseus who beheaded Medusa, Achilles of the fatal heel and Odysseus of the long way home.

The second pack widens out to the rest of the heroic world. More heroes and their quests, Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason and the fleece, Orpheus in the underworld, Bellerophon on Pegasus. The doomed and the punished, Oedipus, Sisyphus, Tantalus, Midas, Narcissus, Icarus, Pandora. The cast of the Trojan War, Helen, Paris, Agamemnon, Hector and Cassandra. The famous monsters, Medusa, the Hydra, Cerberus, the Chimera, the Sphinx, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis. The groups of lesser powers, the Fates, the Furies, the Muses. And the smaller gods and enchantresses, Eros, Pan, Persephone, Charon, Hestia, Circe, along with Daedalus, Ariadne and Virgil's Roman epic the Aeneid.

The third pack is the geography and furniture of the myths, plus the distinctively Roman material: Mount Olympus and the rivers and regions of the underworld, Styx, Tartarus, Elysium; the Labyrinth, the Golden Fleece, the Trojan Horse, the Apple of Discord, the aegis, ambrosia and the cornucopia; the war of gods and Titans and the primordial Chaos before it; the Oracle of Delphi; and the two-faced Janus, Aeneas, Romulus and Remus, Atlas, Hypnos and Thanatos, and Nemesis. Because a captioned painting usually gives the answer away, images are used only where the picture does not, and everything has been checked against the standard ancient sources.

Throughout, the quiz keeps the Greek and Roman names paired so you can see where 'Jupiter' is 'Zeus', 'Venus' is 'Aphrodite', 'Ulysses' is 'Odysseus' and 'Hercules' is 'Heracles', and it flags the places where Roman myth genuinely differs, most of all in treating Mars as a dignified father of the state rather than the bully the Greeks made of Ares. It also points out the everyday debts we owe these stories: a titanic scale, a herculean task, a promethean gift, a narcissist, an odyssey, a nemesis, panic, chaos, a museum, the word 'cereal' from Ceres and 'January' from Janus.