Wrath of Olympus: 10 Bizarre and Horrific Punishments of the Ancient Greek Gods

The Gods Punished a Trickster Too Clever For His Own Good With an Eternity of Ceaseless Toil

In Greek legend, Sisyphus was a king of Corinth, and the founder of the Isthmian Games – one of the Ancient Greeks’ four major games, which included the Olympics. Sisyphus was the wisest of all men, and a cunning trickster who fathered the hero Odysseus, of Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey. Unfortunately, Sisyphus’ cunning was combined with questionable ethics, which got him in trouble with the gods, particularly with Zeus.

Sisyphus violated Xenia, the Ancient Greeks’ sacred laws of hospitality which protected travelers and guests, by murdering some of his guests to demonstrate his ruthlessness. That angered Zeus, whose divine responsibilities included the promotion of Xenia. On another occasion, Zeus kidnapped Aegina, daughter of the river god Asopus. When her father went looking for her, Sisyphus told him where to find his daughter, in exchange for Asopus creating a spring to flow into Sisyphus’ city of Corinth. That snitching made Zeus angrier still.

Zeus sent the god of death to take Sisyphus and chain him into the underworld. Sisyphus however tricked the death god by asking him how the chains worked, and ended up chaining that deity. With Death chained, the mortally ill could no longer find release from earthly suffering, and no sacrifices could be made. The gods threatened Sisyphus with dire punishment if he did not free Death, so he reluctantly did.

However, Sisyphus had one more trick up his sleeve to cheat Death. He instructed his wife not to bury him or perform any of the sacred death rituals when he passed away, and to just throw his corpse out. She obeyed, and when Sisyphus arrived at the underworld, he begged Death to allow him to return to earth to punish his wife for her “impiety”. Death agreed, but once Sisyphus was back on earth, he jumped bail and went on the lam. He continued to live to a ripe old age, before dying 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 for showing them up and making them look like fools, and took offense at his self-aggrandizing deceitfulness, and the hubris of believing himself more cunning than Zeus. So they set out to make an example of him.

The gods thought, for some reason, that few punishments are more terrible than an eternity of futile and hopeless labor. So they condemned Sisyphus to an eternity of rolling 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 roll it up the hill again.

The Wine God Drove a King Mad, and Had Him Slay His Own Family Before He Was Torn to Pieces

Lycurgus of Thrace was a mythical king of the Edoni people in southern Thrace, and he had a beef with Dionysius, the Greek god of grape and wine. According to Greek mythology, Lycurgus got drunk on wine 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 version of Prohibition in his kingdom by banning wine and ordering the destruction of all grapevines throughout the realm. Lycurgus also banned the religious cult of Dionysius, whom he refused to acknowledge as divine, and prohibited the worship of the grape god in his kingdom.

Dionysius, being a god, was not about to heed the dictates of a mortal, not even a mortal king. So when his disciples, the Maenads, threw a festival in honor of the wine god atop the sacred mountain of Nyseion in Lycurgus’ kingdom, Dionysius took on human form and attended as the guest of honor. When Lycurgus heard that his command was being defied and that Dionysius was in his kingdom, he flew into a rage. Arriving at Mount Nyseion, Lycurgus used an ax to slay a Maenad who had nursed Dionysius as a child, and broke up the festival by chasing the remaining attendants out with an ox goad.

To save himself from the livid Lycurgus, Dionysius was forced to flee, and escaped the wrath of the angry king by leaping into the sea. 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 conducted an anti-Dionysian purge throughout his kingdom and carried out a persecution that saw the rounding up, arrest, and imprisonment of the Maenads and other followers of Dionysius.

Understandably, Dionysius was greatly angered by Lycurgus disrespect and impiety, so he set out to visit divine punishment upon the Thracian king by taking away his sanity and reducing him to a raving loon. In his madness, Lycurgus slew his wife and family. Having ordered the cutting down of all grapevines, the crazy king mistook his own son for a vine and chopped him to death with a sword, pruning away his ears, nose, fingers and toes.

Dionysius was not done with him yet, however. The wine god laid a curse upon Lycurgus’ kingdom, rendering its soil barren and incapable of producing fruit. The desperate Edonian sought advice from an oracle, who informed them that fertility would not return to their land until Lycurgus was killed. So the Edonians seized their king, tied him up, and flung him to a man-eating horse, which tore Lycurgus to pieces.

49 Murderous Brides Were Condemned to an Eternity of Hopeless Labor

In Greek legend, the Danaides were the fifty daughters of Danaus, king of Libya, and a main figure in the founding myth of the city state of Argos, in the Peloponnese. Danaus was the twin brother of the mythical king Aegyptus of Egypt, and the twins had some serious sibling rivalry going on. Aegyptus had fifty sons, and when he commanded that his twin’s fifty daughters be married to 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.

Aegyptus did not give up, however, and sent his fifty sons to Argos to claim their brides. To spare the local Argives from the ravages of war, Danaus reluctantly consented to wed his daughters to his twin sons. Wedding plans were made, and Danaus arranged a feast for the event. However, 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.

Disobeying one’s parents was a great sin in Ancient Greece, so all the daughters, except one who took pity on her new husband after he respected her desire to remain a virgin, 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 in revenge for the deaths of his 49 brothers. He and his wife then ruled Argos, inaugurating a dynasty that ran that city for centuries.

As to the 49 daughters who had murdered their husbands, they remarried, choosing new mates from the winners of a footrace. The gods however punished them by sending them to Tartarus, the Ancient Greek version of hell – an abyss where the wicked are subjected to suffering and torment. There, the 49 daughters were condemned to spend an eternity of ceaseless and hopeless labor, reminiscent of Sisyphus. They were 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.

Hitting on Zeus’ Wife Gets a Man Condemned to Everlasting Torture

Ixion, in Greek mythology, was a son of the war god Ares and a mortal woman. He became a 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. Because of his misdeeds on earth – and up in the heavens as well – the gods condemned him to eternal torment.

Ixion’s first major trespass that offended the gods was against his father-in-law. He had promised his father-in-law a valuable present as a bride price – wealth paid by the groom to the parents of his bride – but reneged and failed to pay up after the marriage. So 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, murdered him by shoving 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.

Zeus however took pity on Ixion, and although promotion of Xenia was part of the chief Olympian god’s portfolio, 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. So behind Zeus’ back, he started hitting on and pursuing Hera.

That was another big breach of Xenia: lusting after and pursuing your host’s wife was a major violation of a guest’s obligations to his host – that was how the Trojan War started, when Paris seduced Helen while a guest of her husband. When Zeus heard, he couldn’t 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, condemned to spin forever across the heavens.

Hera Punished Her Husband’s Former Mistress by Prolonging Her Childbirth Labor for Years

Being Zeus’ mistress was tough. The chief Olympian god’s relentless pursuit, persistence, rough wooing, and refusal to take “no” for an answer was bad enough. Making it worse for those who gave in to Zeus, or were raped by him, was having to deal with his insanely jealous wife, Hera, and her crazy punishments – not of her philandering husband, but of his victims.

Leto was Zeus’ first mistress, and became the first to fall victim both to the chief god, who slaked his lust and abandoned her when she got pregnant, and then to the cray wrath of his wife. To exacerbate the unfairness of it all, Leto had been Zeus’ mistress before he married Hera, so the chief god had not even been cheating on his wife at the time.

In Greek myth, Leto was a Titan goddess whose beauty captivated Zeus, and she became his first and favorite lover. However, after Zeus impregnated Leto with twins, he abandoned her in order to marry his sister, Hera. Although the affair and pregnancy had occurred before Hera’s marriage to Zeus, the Queen of Heaven was still jealous of Leto, and set out to turn her life into a living hell.

First, Hera kicked the pregnant Leto out of Mount Olympus, forcing her to wander the world amongst mortals. Then, when it was time to give birth, the Queen of Heaven saw to it that the childbirth was as miserable as could be, by prolonging Leto’s labor. Hera banned her from giving birth on “terra firma” – the mainland or any island under the sun. She then sent emissaries to all cities and settlements, forbidding them to offer Leto shelter, food, or water. Leto was thus forced to keep wandering the earth, without a chance to settle down anywhere to give birth.

After crisscrossing the world for years while in labor, unable to find a resting place, Leto came across a barren island not connected to the ocean floor, so it did not count as a real “island” by Hera’s definition. The island’s barrenness also meant it had nothing to lose, and thus nothing to fear from Hera’s wrath by defying her will. There, Leto finally gave birth to the gods Artemis and Apollo.

Hera, now even more jealous of Leto after she gave birth to Zeus’ children, sent a dragon to chase her and her newborns around. In their flight, they sought refuge in Lycia, whose peasants, on Hera’s instructions, sought to prevent Leto and her infants from drinking water. So Leto turned them into frogs before the infant Apollo eventually slew the dragon.

Hera also sent the gigantic Titan Tityos to rape Leto, but she was once again saved by her children, Apollo and Artemis, who killed their mother’s would-be rapist. Hera eventually came to terms with the situation, accepted things as they were, and let Leto and her children be. Leto then went on to become a goddess of motherhood, with a divine portfolio that also included protection of the young.

Unlucky Man Sees Naked Goddess, Gets Torn Apart by Dogs

The Ancient Greeks’ worldview differed greatly from the orderly worldview of the major monotheistic religions, in which the universe is ruled by an omniscient, omnipotent, and infallible God. The Ancient Greeks sometimes saw their gods as arbitrary and capricious, and few myths depict that conception of the Olympians’ arbitrariness and capriciousness as does the myth of Actaeon.

Most entries in this article are about mortal or immortal beings who did something to invite the wrath of the gods, or at least found themselves in a situation in which the wrath of a good was understandable, even if unjustified. The unfortunate Actaeon on the other hand, endured a divine punishment despite not having done anything of his own volition that could have justified his fate.

In Greek mythology, Actaeon was a famous Theban hero, who loved to hunt in the outback of his native region of Boeotia. Like the hero Achilles, of Iliad fame, Actaeon had been taught hunting by the centaur Chiron. Chiron – a mythical being with the lower body of a horse, and the torso and upper body of a human – was notable in Greek legend for his youth-nurturing nature. He instilled in Actaeon a passion for hunting that would prove the Theban hero’s undoing.

One day, while out hunting with his dogs in Boeotia, Actaeon unwittingly stumbled upon the chaste goddess Artemis – Diana to the Romans – while she was naked, bathing in spring with some wood nymphs. Although the extent of Actaeon’s sin, if it could even be called that, was to simply have had the misfortune of bumping into a naked goddess, Artemis was livid that a mortal saw her naked. So she turned him into a stag. The terrified Actaeon bounded into the woods, but his own dogs detected the scent of a stag, and failing to recognize their master in his new body, chased him down and tore him to pieces.

Zeus Punished the Champion of Mankind With an Eternity of Having His Guts Torn Out

In Greek legend, Prometheus was a Titan – a race of divine beings who preceded the Olympian gods. His name, which means “foresight”, emphasizes his intellect, for he was known as a cunning trickster. He is credited with creating humans from clay, and for being a champion of mankind in the halls of the heavens. That championing of mankind got him in trouble with the gods, who devised a horrific punishment for him in consequence.

Prometheus had been one of the leaders of the Titans went they waged war for mastery of the heavens against the Olympian gods, when the latter rose up to replace the Titans. 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.

Despite having helped the gods secure victory, Prometheus eroded his store of goodwill with them by siding with humanity against the Olympians. He got on Zeus’ wrong side when he tricked him into accepting the bones and fat of sacrificial animals instead of their meat. That set a precedent that allowed humans henceforth to sacrifice animals to the god by burning their bones and fat, but keeping the meat for themselves.

A peeved Zeus responded by taking fire away from mankind, and wiping its secret from human minds, so they would have to eat meat row, 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 by stealing fire from Mount Olympus and smuggling it down to earth to share with mankind and help them survive life’s struggles.

When Zeus looked down from the heavens and saw the dark of night dispelled by the flicker of fires, he grew livid. To vent his anger at mankind, Zeus sent Pandora down to earth with a box whose lid, when it was eventually removed, unleashed upon the world all the evils that plague humanity, such as 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 its sufferings.

As to Prometheus, Zeus punished him by having him taken to the Caucasus Mountains, where he was chained to a rock. There, a giant eagle would fly in every day to rip open his guts and feast upon his liver. The liver re-grew each night, and the eagle returned each day to repeat the process, subjecting Prometheus to perpetuity of torment by day, and nights full of dread of what the morrow would bring.

A King’s Divine Punishment Gave Rise to a Word That Survives to This Day in English

In Greek legend, Tantalus was a king of Sypilus in Lydia, in western Anatolia. He was the father of Pelops, after whom the Peloponnesus is named. Tantalus was also the great grandfather of Menelaus, the Spartan king and cuckolded husband of Helen of Troy, and his brother Agamemnon, who commanded the Greeks in the Trojan War. Another of Tantalus’ children was Niobe, who got her own dose of divine punishment and earned an entry on this list – see below.

Tantalus was a son of Zeus and a nymph – minor female nature deities, typically depicted as uninhibited nubile maidens who love to sing and dance. As a son of Zeus, Tantalus was on intimate terms with the gods, and was often invited to dine with them at their table in the heavens. However, he ended up abusing that divine favor, committed a variety of offenses that angered the Olympians, and brought divine punishment upon himself.

One of Tantalus’ sins was stealing ambrosia and nectar, the food of the gods, and giving it to mortals. He also liked to blab, and revealed to mortals secrets he had learned at the table of the gods in heaven. However, what offended the divine pantheon the most was when Tantalus killed his own son, Pelops, and served him to the gods at a banquet as a means of testing their powers of observation.

The only deity to touch the food was the goddess Demeter, who was distracted by the death of her daughter, Persephone, and absent-mindedly ate part of Pelops’ shoulder. Zeus gathered the rest of the boy’s body parts, got the god Hephaestus to make him a bronze shoulder, put them all together and restored the kid to life. Zeus then turned on Tantalus, and subjected him to the wrath of the gods.

Zeus destroyed Tantalus, then personally took his soul to Hades, the underworld of Greek mythology. There, the chief god devised a punishment that became a proverbial term for temptation. Tantalus was placed in a pool of water, beneath a fruit tree with low branches. Whenever he reached for the fruit, the wind wafted the branches away, and whenever he reached for water to take a drink it flowed away from him. Thus he was tormented by everlasting hunger and thirst, despite food and water being so near. It is from Tantalus’ punishment, of desperately wanting something that seems so close but that is just beyond reach, that we get the English word “tantalize”.

While Tantalus’ divine punishment and other supernatural aspects of his story are mythical, there might have been a historical king Tantalus in real life, who ruled an Anatolian city named Tantalis. The geographer Strabo, citing earlier sources, described the wealth of Tantalus as driving from mines in Mount Sypilus. In the second century, AD, the geographer Pausanias reported seeing a sepulcher of Tantalus, and visiting a port bearing his name. Archaeological evidence also attests to the existence of a king Tantalus in ancient times.

The Gods Devised a Horrific Punishment for an Overly Proud Mother

Niobe, in Greek myth, was a daughter of Tantalus, who got his own dose of terrible divine punishment from the gods – see previous entry. She was a queen of Thebes, and was blessed with great fortune. However, she committed the sin of hubris – a mixture of extreme pride, dangerous overconfidence, and overweening arrogance. For that, the gods subjected her to a terrible punishment.

In addition to her noble birth and descent from a king, Niobe was a stunning beauty. She took great pride in both her birth and her looks, but what she took the greatest pride in was her large brood of fourteen children – seven sons, and seven daughters. One day, the people of Thebes went out to celebrate the feast of Latona – a religious festival in honor of Leto, the mother of the gods’ Apollo and Artemis – and as described in Bulfinch’s Mythology:

“It was on occasion of the annual celebration in honor of Latona and her offspring, Apollo and Diana [i.e Artemis] when the people of Thebes were assembled, their brows crowned with laurel, bearing frankincense to the altars and paying their vows, that Niobe appeared among the crowd. Her attire was splendid with gold and gems, and her face as beautiful as the face of an angry woman can be. She stood and surveyed the people with haughty looks. “What folly,” said she, “is this! to prefer beings whom you never saw to those who stand before your eyes! Why should Latona be honored with worship rather than I? My father was Tantalus, who was received as a guest at the table of the gods; my mother was a goddess. My husband built and rules this city, Thebes; and Phrygia is my paternal inheritance. Wherever I turn my eyes I survey the elements of my power; nor is my form and presence unworthy of a goddess. To all this let me add, I have seven sons and seven daughters, and look for sons-in-law and daughters-in-law of pretensions worthy of my alliance. Have I not cause for pride? Will you prefer to me this Latona, the Titan’s daughter, with her two children? I have seven times as many. Fortunate indeed am I, and fortunate I shall remain! Will any one deny this?”

That impiety shocked the Thebans, and they returned to their daily pursuits in awestruck silence and trepidation. They had good reason for trepidation because taunting Leto turned out to be a bad idea. Niobe’s hubris provoked Leto’s children, the gods’ Apollo and Artemis, to seek vengeance for the insult to their mom, who had suffered greatly on their behalf – see earlier entry about Leto, above.

In a flash, Apollo and Artemis, whose nicknames included “The Immortal Archers”, showed up at the citadel of Thebes. From its towers, they watched the Theban youths engaged in sports below, while the Latona festival in honor of their mother was ignored. So Apollo strung his golden bow, and shot down all seven of Niobe’s sons, one after the other. Not to be outdone, Artemis strung her bow, and slew all seven of Niobe’s daughters.

Niobe was left transfixed with grief and surrounded by the corpses of her offspring. Her children lay unburied for nine days, because the gods turned the Thebans into stone, until the tenth day, when they allowed the burials to proceed. Even then, the gods were not yet done with Niobe. As if her punishment was not already horrible enough, Zeus piled on and capped it off by turning Niobe into a pillar of stone, in which state she would continue to weep throughout eternity for her loss.

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Sources & Further Reading

Mythology Source – Zeus and Io

Ranker – All The Ways Hera Got Revenge On Zeus For Cheating On Her

Meaww – ‘Blood Of Zeus’: Zeus As Cheating Husband, Scorned Wife Hera Bring War To Olympus As Heron Flies To The Rescue

Medium – The Myth of Sisyphus

ThoughtCo – Thetis: Not Just a Greek Nymph

Ancient History Encyclopedia – Prometheus

Bulfinch, Thomas – Bulfinch’s Mythology (2010)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Tantalus

Encyclopedia Mythica – Lycurgus

Genealogical Guide to Greek Mythology – Actaeon

Greek Myth Index – Danaides

Greek Mythology – Io

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

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

Nilsson, Martin P. – Mycenean Origin of Greek Mythology (2017)

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

Theoi Greek Mythology – The Titaness Leto

History Collection – Truly Intense Vengeance Stories From Greek Mythology