Greek Mythology
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This Greek gods trivia quiz runs through the whole of Greek mythology in 177 free questions with answers: the twelve Olympians and what each one ruled, the Titans they overthrew, the heroes (Heracles, Perseus, Odysseus, Jason) and the monsters they faced, plus the stories behind Pandora, Persephone, the Trojan War and the founding of Athens. Openers like which god carries a trident sit alongside harder ones about Hesiod, the Furies and the lesser-known children of Zeus. If you came looking for Greek mythology trivia hard enough to stump a classics student, the newest 177 questions are for you. They dig into Hesiod's Theogony and Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Gigantomachy, epithets like Argeiphontes, minor figures such as Melampus, Erysichthon and the Aloadae, and cult sites like Brauron and the oracle of Trophonius. Nothing in that stretch can be answered from Percy Jackson alone. It works as a classroom warm-up for a mythology unit, a round for pub quiz night, or a solo test of how much you actually remember. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia or a primary text, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered. Play the full set for a shareable score, then try the wider Mythology quiz for the Norse and Egyptian gods.
30 of 177 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which god of dreams, a son of Sleep, visits sleepers in human form?
Morpheus
Morpheus; pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner named morphine after him because the drug brings on sleep.
Q 02Which bird, sacred to the goddess of wisdom, was stamped on the silver coins of ancient Athens?
Owl
The owl; the coins were so identified with it that Athenians simply called their silver tetradrachms glaukes, 'little owls'.
Q 03Which hero beheaded Medusa?
Perseus
Perseus looked only at her reflection in a polished shield, then used her severed head, which could still turn onlookers to stone, as a weapon.
Q 04Who was the Greek god who ruled over the Underworld and the dead?
Hades
Hades drew the underworld when he and his two brothers cast lots for the world; later Greeks called him Plouton, 'the wealthy one', for the riches underground.
Q 05What type of creature was the Minotaur, famously confined in the Labyrinth?
Half-man, half-bull
Half-man, half-bull: its name means 'bull of Minos', and Athens had to send seven youths and seven maidens to Crete to feed it.
Q 06Which mountain, home of the Muses, rises above Apollo's oracle at Delphi?
Mount Parnassus
Mount Parnassus; the Montparnasse district is named after it, a nickname from 17th-century students who went there to recite poetry.
Q 07Which goddess was associated with love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation?
Aphrodite
Aphrodite, whose name Hesiod traced to aphros, 'sea foam', because she rose from the waves; modern scholars call that a folk etymology.
Q 08Who was the Greek god of the sea, earthquakes, and horses?
Poseidon
Poseidon; long before Homer, Bronze Age clay tablets from Pylos show he was that city's chief god.
Q 09Arrows bounced off which beast's golden fur, so Heracles strangled it and wore its pelt?
Nemean Lion
The Nemean Lion; Heracles could only skin it using one of the lion's own claws, then wore the pelt as armour.
Q 10What did Prometheus famously steal from the gods to give to humanity?
Fire
Fire, which he smuggled to humans hidden in a hollow fennel stalk; his punishment was an eagle eating his ever-regrowing liver.
Q 11Which Greek god was known as the divine blacksmith?
Hephaestus
Hephaestus, in one telling, was cast off Olympus at birth by his own mother because he was lame.
Q 12Which goddess presided over agriculture, grain, and the harvest?
Demeter
Demeter; while she grieved for her abducted daughter nothing would grow, a story often read as the origin of the seasons.
Q 13Which two sons of the Greek war god gave their names to the moons of Mars?
Phobos and Deimos
Phobos and Deimos, Fear and Dread; Eton science master Henry Madan suggested the names after Asaph Hall found the two moons.
Q 21Which blind prophet of Thebes spent seven years living as a woman?
Tiresias
Tiresias; even among the dead he kept his prophetic powers, and Odysseus sails to the edge of the underworld to consult him.
Q 22Which snake-haired sisters could turn anyone who looked at them to stone?
Gorgons
Gorgons: only Medusa of the three was mortal, and after she was beheaded, her sisters chased her killer but couldn't see him under his cap of invisibility.
Q 23Who was the Greek god of wine, revelry, and ecstasy?
Dionysus
Dionysus was born twice: when his mortal mother Semele died while pregnant, Zeus sewed the unborn baby into his thigh until he was ready.
Q 14Which aged king slipped into the Greek camp to beg Achilles for his dead son's body?
Priam
Priam; he kissed the hands of the man who had killed his son, and Achilles, moved to tears, gave back the body.
Q 15Which herald's staff, twined with two snakes, is often misused as a symbol of medicine?
Caduceus
The caduceus; its adoption as the US Army Medical Corps insignia popularised the mix-up with the one-snake Rod of Asclepius.
Q 16What kind of container held the world's evils in Hesiod, before translators turned it into a 'box'?
Pithos
A pithos, a large storage jar; the 'box' is usually attributed to Erasmus, whose 16th-century Latin turned it into a pyxis.
Q 17In Greek myth, which ferryman rows the dead across the Styx, and only those buried with a coin to pay him?
Charon
Charon's fare is real archaeology: low-value coins known as Charon's obols have been found in or on the mouths of the dead in some burials.
Q 18Which Trojan hero carried his father Anchises out of the burning city?
Aeneas
Aeneas; he escaped to Italy, and Virgil's Aeneid made him the ancestor of the Roman people.
Q 19What was the name of the many-headed hound that guarded the gates of the Underworld?
Cerberus
Cerberus, usually shown with three heads; for his last labour Heracles had to overpower him without weapons and carry him out of the underworld.
Q 20Which Athenian hero ventured into the Labyrinth to defeat the Minotaur?
Theseus
Theseus, with the help of Ariadne and her thread, navigated the Labyrinth and slew the beast, freeing Athens from the tribute of youths sent to Crete.
Q 24Which beautiful youth, beloved of a goddess, was killed by a wild boar while hunting?
Adonis
Adonis; Greek women mourned him every year at the Adonia, and anemones were said to spring up where his blood fell.
Q 25Which Titan was known for bearing the sky on his shoulders as punishment?
Atlas
He was made to stand at the western edge of the earth after the Titans lost their war with the Olympians, which is why the Atlantic Ocean and the Atlas Mountains carry his name.
Q 26Which monster of Greek myth was part lion, part goat and part serpent?
Chimera
The Chimera's name now labels any creature made of mixed parts, and in biology an organism built from the cells of two embryos.
Q 27Who was the goddess of the rainbow and a messenger of the gods?
Iris
Iris; her name is simply the Greek word for rainbow, the same word later used for the coloured part of the eye and for the flower.
Q 28What was the name of the winged horse that sprang from Medusa's blood?
Pegasus
Pegasus; wherever his hoof struck the ground a spring burst out, including the Muses' Hippocrene, the 'horse spring', on Mount Helicon.
Q 29Who was the primordial deity representing the personification of the Earth?
Gaea
Gaea, or Gaia; when Uranus hid their children away inside her, she made the sickle that one of her sons used to castrate him.
Q 30Which hero led the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece?
Jason
Jason's ship, the Argo, gave his crew their name; Medea later murdered their children after he abandoned her for a Corinthian princess.