Lamia: From Libyan Queen to Village Bogey
Lamia began as a queen whose children were taken from her. Over the centuries she became a nursery threat, an ogress of Greek folk tales and the shimmering serpent-woman of Keats.
The galleries
Every story on view
Walk the rooms in any order. Each story pairs what the ancient authors wrote with the sculpture, relief or object that kept the myth in sight, and says where the sources part ways.
6 stories on view
Sisyphus of Corinth: The King Before the Stone
We picture Sisyphus on a slope with a rock. The Greeks first knew him as the shrewdest king of Corinth, a man who chained Death and talked his way out of Hades.
Arachne and Athena: Two Artists, One Contest and Ovid at the Loom
Ovid gives Arachne and Athena equal looms and lets us study both tapestries thread by thread. The goddess wins only by tearing up the picture she cannot fault.
The Bull from the Sea: Minos’s Broken Vow and the Minotaur
Theseus takes the glory, but the Minotaur’s story begins earlier, with a king who kept a beautiful bull he had sworn to sacrifice and a queen who paid for his choice.
Echo Before Narcissus: The Nymph Who Became a Voice
Before the boy at the pool there was a talkative mountain nymph. Juno curtailed her speech, Narcissus refused her, and what survived was the one thing marble cannot hold: a voice.
Pandora: The First Woman Was a Work of Art
Hesiod’s Pandora is not born but made: shaped from wet clay, dressed by Athena, hung with gold by the Graces. Read her as an artwork, and the famous jar looks different.