Truly Intense Vengeance Stories From Greek Mythology

11. The Divine Vengeance Visited Upon Sisyphus

After he tricked death to let him return to the world of the living, King Sisyphus went on to live to a ripe old age, before he died for a second time. That was when Sisyphus discovered he had been too clever by half, and too smart for his own good. The gods were ticked off at him because he had shown them up and made them look like fools. They also took offense at his self-aggrandizement, deceitfulness, and the hubris that led him to believe that he was smarter than Zeus.

So the Olympians visited terrible vengeance upon Sisyphus so as to make an example of him. The gods thought, with some reason, that few punishments are more terrible than an eternity of futile and hopeless labor. So they condemned Sisyphus to an eternity of pushing a huge boulder up a steep hill. Soon as Sisyphus got his boulder to the top of the hill, it would roll down the other side, and he would have to go back down and collect his boulder to push it up the hill again.

10. Kings Danaus and Aegyptus Took Sibling Rivalry to Extremes

The Danaides were the fifty daughters of King Danaus of Libya, a key figure in the founding myth of Argos, a city-state in the Peloponnesus. Danaus was the twin brother of the mythical King Aegyptus of Egypt, and there was some serious sibling rivalry between the two. Aegyptus had fifty sons, and when he commanded that his twin’s fifty daughters marry his sons, Danaus declined. Instead, he loaded them in a boat, and oared by his daughters, fled across the sea to Argos. The Argives were impressed by the arrival of fifty beauties rowing a boat, and even more so by their father, whom they made their king.

However, Aegyptus did not give up and sent his fifty sons to Argos to claim their brides. To spare the local Argives from the ravages of war, Danaus reluctantly gave his consent for his daughters to wed his twin’s sons. Wedding plans were made, and Danaus arranged a feast for the event. Just before the wedding, Danaus gathered his daughters around him, and passed a dagger to each, with instructions to murder their husbands as soon as they were alone with them.

9. Divine Vengeance Visited Upon Homicidal Brides

To the Ancient Greeks, to disobey one’s parents was to commit a great sin. So all of King Danaus’ daughters, except one who took pity on her new husband after he respected her desire to remain a virgin, obeyed their father’s orders and murdered their spouses on the wedding night. They then cut off their heads and buried them near a lake south of Argos. Danaus hauled the daughter who had disobeyed him before a court, but her husband intervened and murdered Danaus to avenge his 49 brothers. He and his wife then ruled Argos, and began a dynasty that ran that city for centuries.

As to the 49 daughters who had murdered their husbands, they remarried, and chose their new mates from the winners of a footrace. The gods however were peeved at what they had done to their first husbands. By way of divine vengeance, they sent them to Tartarus, the Ancient Greek hell. There, the deadly Danaides were condemned to spend an eternity of ceaseless and hopeless labor, reminiscent of Sisyphus. They had to carry jugs of water to fill a bathtub to wash away their sins, but the bathtub could never be filled because it had a hole in the bottom.

8. Don’t Tick Off the Greek God of Booze

King Lycurgus was a mythical monarch who ruled over the Edoni people in southern Thrace. In Ancient Greek mythology, he had a beef with the god Dionysus, the deity in charge of grapes and wine. According to legend, Lycurgus got drunk on wine one time, and tried to rape his own mother. When he sobered up and realized what he had almost done, he swore off the drink, became a teetotaler, and enacted a Bronze Age version of Prohibition in his kingdom.

Lycurgus banned wine and ordered the destruction of all grape vines throughout the realm. He also banned the religious cult of Dionysus, whom he refused to acknowledge as divine, and prohibited the worship of the grape god in his kingdom. Dionysus, being a god, was not about to heed the dictates of a mortal, not even a mortal king. In hindsight, considering what happened to him and the kind of vengeance that fell upon his head, Lycurgus might have regretted his decision to take on a god.

7. A King Who Forced a God to Flee For His Life

When the Maenads, the wine god’s disciples, threw a festival in his honor atop the sacred mountain of Nyseion in Lycurgus’ kingdom, Dionysus took on human form and attended as the guest of honor. When Lycurgus heard that his command had been defied and that Dionysus was in his kingdom, he flew into a rage. He rushed to Mount Nyseion to break up the festival. Lycurgus used an ax to slay a Maenad who had nursed Dionysus as a child, and chased everybody out with an ox goad.

Dionysus was forced to flee to save himself from the livid Lycurgus and had to leap into the sea to escape the wrath of the angry king. There, Dionysus was rescued by the sea nymph Thetis, who kindly received the wine god and sheltered him in an undersea cave. In the meantime, Lycurgus set out to purge his realm of Dionysus’ followers and Dionysian rites. He carried out persecution in which the Maenads and others who worshiped the god of wine were arrested and imprisoned.

6. Dionysus Made Lycurgus Slay His Own Family, Then Got His Subjects to Slay Him

Unsurprisingly, Dionysus was not too happy with Lycurgus and his disrespectful and impious attitude. So he set out to visit divine vengeance upon the Thracian king, took away his sanity, and reduced him to a raving nut. In his madness, Lycurgus slew his wife and family. In a tragic divinely ordained twist, Dionysus made the king who ordered all grape vines cut down imagine that his own son was a vine. So the crazy king chopped him to death with a sword, and pruned away his ears, nose, fingers and toes.

That was not enough vengeance for Dionysus, however, who was not done yet with the Thracian ruler. The wine god laid a curse upon Lycurgus’ kingdom, and rendered its soil barren and incapable of producing fruit. The desperate Edonians sought advice from an oracle, who told them that fertility would not return to their land until Lycurgus was killed. So the Edonians seized their ruler, tied him up, and flung him to a man-eating horse that tore Lycurgus to pieces.

5. Ixion Was Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

In Ancient Greek mythology, Ixion was a son of the war god Ares and a mortal woman. He became king of the Lapiths tribe in Thessaly, in northern Greece, and from early on, he built up an infamous reputation as somebody who was mad, bad, and dangerous to know. His misdeeds on earth – and up in the heavens as well – led the gods to visit a terrible vengeance upon him. He first offended the Olympians when he promised his father-in-law a valuable present as a bride price – wealth paid by a groom to the bride’s parents. He reneged, however, and did not pay up after the marriage.

The father-in-law seized some of Ixion’s valuable horses as security for the promised bride price. Ixion pretended to shrug it off, invited his father-in-law to a feast, and there, shoved him into a bed of burning coals. That murder was particularly odious in Greek eyes because it violated Xenia – the laws of hospitality governing the relationship between guests and hosts. The breach of Xenia left Ixion defiled, shunned by fellow Greeks and unfit to live amidst men. Nobody was willing to perform the necessary religious rituals that would cleanse him of his guilt and restore him to good standing, so Ixion was forced to live in the wilderness as an outlaw. That was bad, but as seen below, it got way worse for him soon thereafter.

4. Ixion Discovered That it Was Unwise To Hit on the Chief God’s Wife

Although promotion of Xenia was part of the chief Olympian god’s portfolio, Zeus took pity on Ixion. He cleansed him of the defilement and invited him to Mount Olympus to dine at the table of the gods. However, when Ixion was introduced to Zeus’ wife, Hera, he fell passionately in love and lusted after her. Behind Zeus’ back, he hit on and pursued her. That was another big breach of Xenia. To lust after and pursue your host’s wife was a major violation of a guest’s obligations to his host. The Trojan War started when Paris seduced Helen while he was a guest of her husband.

When Zeus heard, he could not believe that Ixion, whom he had rescued and cleansed of his guilt, then honored by hosting him in heaven, could be so ungrateful and brazen. So he made a cloud in the shape of Hera, and sent her Ixion’s way to see what his guest would do. Sure enough, Ixion ravished the fake Hera – a union that ultimately produced the centaurs. The astonished and livid Zeus expelled the ingrate from Olympus and blasted his former guest with a thunderbolt. He then ordered the messenger god, Hermes, to seize Ixion and bind him to a wheel of fire, and by way of eternal vengeance, condemned him to spin forever across the heavens.

3. Prometheus Created Mankind, and Angered the Gods by His Staunch Support of Humans

Prometheus was a Titan – the race of divine beings who had dominated the world before the arrival of the Olympian gods. Prometheus’ name, which means “foresight”, emphasizes his intellect, for he was known as a clever trickster. Ancient Greek mythology credited him with having created humans from clay, and then advocated for and championed mankind in the halls of heavens. That fondness for humans got the Titan in serious trouble with the gods, who visited horrific vengeance upon him as a result.

The Titans, twelve children of the primordial parents Uranus (“Sky”) and his mother Gaia (“Earth”) had preceded the Olympians as gods. When the Olympians led by Zeus rose up to challenge for mastery of the world, Prometheus was one of the Titans’ leaders. However, when his fellow Titans refused to heed his advice and resort to trickery, Prometheus switched sides and joined the Olympians. That ensured the gods’ victory and doomed the Titans to defeat. That did not stop the Olympians from turning on Prometheus when he got on their wrong side.

2. Helping Humanity Got Prometheus in Hot Water With Zeus

Although he had helped the Olympian gods secure victory against the Titans, Prometheus eroded his store of goodwill with them when he took the side of humanity against that of the new deities. He ticked off Zeus and got on his wrong side when he tricked him to accept the bones and fat of sacrificial animals instead of their meat. That set a precedent that allowed humans to sacrifice animals to the gods by burning their bones and fat but got to keep the meat for themselves.

In response, a peeved Zeus took fire away from mankind and wiped its secret from human minds, so they would have to eat meat raw and shiver from the cold in the dark of night. To make his pettiness stick, the chief god prohibited anybody from letting humanity in on the secret of fire. Prometheus however defied Zeus and stole fire from Mount Olympus, then smuggled it down to earth to share with mankind and help them survive life’s struggles. That was the final straw for the chief Olympian.

1. Zeus Sentenced Prometheus to an Eternity of Dreadful Torment

Zeus was livid when he looked down from the heavens and saw the dark of night dispelled by the flicker of fires. To vent his anger at mankind, the chief god sent Pandora down to earth with a box full of calamities. When the lid of Pandora’s box was eventually removed, all the evils that plague humanity were unleashed upon the world. From then on, mankind was afflicted with diseases, plagues, war, death, and the constant need for backbreaking labor to eke sustenance out of the earth. Only hope was left inside the box, to keep life bearable despite all its miseries.

As to Prometheus, Zeus devised a horrific punishment for him. He had the Titan taken to the Caucasus Mountains, where he was chained to a rock. There, Zeus’ vengeance took the form of a giant eagle that flew in every day to rip open Prometheus’ guts and feast upon his liver. The liver re-grew each night, and the eagle returned each day to repeat the process. That way, Prometheus was subjected to an eternity of torment by day, and nights full of dread of what the morrow would bring.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

History Collection – Bizarre and Horrific Punishments of the Ancient Greek Gods

Ancient History Encyclopedia – Prometheus

Bulfinch, Thomas – Bulfinch’s Mythology (2010)

Dalby, Andrew – The Story of Bacchus (2005)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Cronus

Encyclopedia Britannica – Tantalus

Fry, Stephen – Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined (2018)

Fry, Stephen – Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece (2017)

Gantz, Timothy – Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (1996)

Genealogical Guide to Greek Mythology – Actaeon

Greeka – The Danaides

Greek Mythology – Io

History Collection – Pythagoras Cup and Other Weird Ancient History Facts

Keefer, Professor Julia, New York University – The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

Nilsson, Martin P. – Greek Folk Religion (1972)

Peabody, Josephine Preston, Tales Beyond Belief – The Myth of Niobe

Ranker – The Most Satisfying Revenge Stories in Greek Mythology

Theoi Greek Mythology – The Titaness Leto

Wikipedia – Ixion

Wikipedia – Lycurgus of Thrace