Greek & Roman Mythology Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

What hollow object, built by the Greeks on the advice of Odysseus and left outside the walls of Troy as a pretended offering to Athena, concealed a party of soldiers who climbed out at night to open the gates to the returning army?

Question 2

What were the names of the twin brothers who personified sleep and death, sons of Night, who lived together in the underworld and were shown as young winged men, one gently closing the eyes of mortals and the other carrying the dead away?

Question 3

Which god, the only ugly and physically disabled Olympian, worked as the divine blacksmith, forging the thunderbolts, the palaces of the gods and the finest armour, with automatons of gold to assist him at the anvil?

Question 4

What is the name of the deep abyss below the underworld itself, as far beneath the land of the dead as the earth is beneath the sky, where the worst sinners are punished and the defeated Titans are imprisoned behind bronze gates?

Question 5

Which goddess of the harvest, grain and the fruitful earth caused all crops to wither and famine to spread across the world while she searched for her abducted daughter, relenting only when a deal was struck for the girl's partial return?

Question 6

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?

Question 7

Which cunning king cheated death twice, once by chaining up the god sent to fetch him and once by tricking the queen of the underworld into letting him go back to the living, and for his insolence was condemned to an eternity of pointless labour?

Question 8

What fire-breathing monster of Lycia was a mismatched combination of a lion at the front, a goat rising from its back, and a snake for a tail?

Question 9

Which king, honoured with a seat at the gods' table, betrayed their trust, in the worst version by killing his own son and serving him up to test whether they would notice, and was punished with unending hunger and thirst in the underworld?

Question 10

What monster with the body of a man and the head and tail of a bull was kept at the centre of a vast maze beneath the palace at Knossos, and fed on youths and maidens sent as tribute from Athens until a hero killed it?

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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.