#minthe greek mythology

[daughterofzeus-the-novel]

Young Eris (ft Nyx and Echo)

I let go of her sleeve, teeth flashing in what might’ve been a smile.  Us goddesses of the dark were not skilled in such arts, the ones of Aphrodite and the nymphs above.  I was not born to lure gods to my bed.  I was not born to fall in love.

My fingers twitched.  The nymph I saw on the mountain flashed before me, her gaze sparking like flint against stone.  I knew not why I felt so drawn, why my heart beat as it never had before.  Perhaps she knew something.  Perhaps she had the keys to my fate, and was only waiting for me to grasp them.

Morpheus can wait.  I brushed past Mother with a softer, less toothy smirk.  I need to . . . I trailed off.  Wander.

Why I was keeping this secret, I didn’t know.  If it was important to me, surely it would be important to her.  But Mother only waved a hand, pointing to the mountain in the distance.  Hurry.  Gone was her warmth, and even amusement.  Eos is beginning to rouse from her rest.

I hiked up my chiton and made for the rocks, stumbling over them as my eyes scanned for my nymph.  There she was, clustered with her kin, perched on a stone as a river flowed at her feet.  She tossed back her hair, green as the moss dotting the jagged ground.  “Minthe!”  Her voice was high and bright, a lotus in full bloom.  “Have you heard what Ouranos said to Mother Gaia?”

@heleniad @helen-of-sparta

[astroaaron]

Hades: Morning honey. Have you seen Minthe?

Persephone: (Drinking mint tea) Earlier.

[smolartdork]

Some lore Olympus art!

Persephone and Hades (2021)

Demeter (2021)

Random mortal realm nymph (2022)

Persephone Dread Queen (2022)

Aaaaaand some panel edits!

[aloozerontheinternet]

SAVE ME TOXIC YURI

TOXIC YURI SAVE ME

(My redesigns for Minthe and Thetis)

[olgadealexandria]

🪴🪴MINTHE🪴🪴

In Ancient Greek mythology, Minthe is a nymph with a minor role in the story of Persephone and Hades. This is my interpretation of her, inspired by Pre-Raphaelite art 💙💙

Check to see my drawing of Persephone!!

[baalzebubuu]

If Lore Olympus Had a Competent HR pt. 2

[sarafangirlart]

Ypu know I have seen anti hades people say in order for persephone to be fully freed she must be let go of the underworld which misses the point of the myth of marriage and erases persephone historical ties to the underworld. Sure, there are too much woobifying hades and demonizing demeter but I also think they victimize persephone too much they forget her importance in the underworld and again how powerful she became because of it.

The thing is, it’s undeniable that the kidnapping of Persephone was a forced marriage and a rape, however rape back then wasn’t viewed how it is today, if woman is given to a man by her father she’s supposed to accept it, if he rapes her then shes supposed to accept it bc that’s her job as a wife (oversimplification but you get the idea). You know how Briseis was Achilles slave but wanted to be his legal wife for the small protection and rights it would give her? Even tho he killed her family and enslaved her? That’s probably the same idea with Persephone, where she had to accept Hades as her husband bc her options are rather limited. Like there is also a myth where Demeter is the one to turn Minthe into a plant bc Minthe tried to take Hades away from Persephone, not exactly the reaction one would expect from a mother trying to protect her daughter bc why would she want Persephone to stay with her kidnapper?

So while I understand ppl being upset over Hades being woobified, I completely understand why others would want to remove the rape aspect, since after the kidnapping they seem to have a mostly harmonious marriage with Hades treating Persephone as an equal in authority and idk about you but I’d rather not read a story about a woman loving her rapist bc he’s nice and respects her. Kidnapping alone is bad enough and at least kinda forgivable since Hades lets her go. Tho that sort of revisionism could easily be done without demonizing Demeter, bc again, some say she was the one who cursed Minthe.

I probably got some information wrong tho pls kindly correct me if I did.

[aliciavance4228]

Pretending that Hades and Persephone never cheated on each other and erasing Adonis and Minthe is something, but portraying Adonis and Minthe in a negative light and turning them into some generic villains in order to show how pure and superior Hades and Persephone's marriage is makes me go buy a gun.

I can somehow understand that when it comes to Minthe, since we have this fragment where she's turned into the mint plant after boasting about how she's more beautiful than Persephone, and how Hades will soon get rid of her:

„Mintha, men say, was once a maid beneath the earth, a Nymphe of Kokytos, and she lay in the bed of Aidoneus; but when he raped the maid Persephone from the Aitnaian hill, then she complained loudly with overweening words and raved foolishly for jealousy, and Demeter in anger trampled upon her with her feet and destroyed her. For she had said that she was nobler of form and more excellent in beauty than dark-eyed Persephone and she boasted that Aidoneus would return to her and banish the other from his halls …” (Oppian, Halieutica)

However, I will still criticize 99,99% of the fanfictions and retellings where she appears, especially because in many of them a) Demeter is a toxic mother who asked Minthe to sleep with Hades in the hope that in this way her daughter will divorce him, despite the fact that in some versions she was literally the one who punished Minthe in order to protect her daughter's dignity and status as the Queen of the Underworld and b) she's usually the only one who's blamed for sleeping with a married man and Hades is still viewed as this innocent little being, as if it doesn’t take two to tango.

But demonizing Adonis? The guy who was groomed by almost every deity who found him handsome, including Persephone aka the one who raised him and was supposed to be only a mother figure to him? The character who's perceived as an object of desire rather than an actual human being and yet so many people fail to see the abusive undertones behind his relationships and still make Adonis x Aphrodite content? I've even seen fanfictions where the authors kept the part where he was raised by Persephone, but twist the sexual nature of their relationship and write Adonis as a jerk who finds himself worthy of sleeping with a goddess like Persephone, and Persephone as this loyal wife who would never cheat on her husband. Are you guys really willing to go that far to the point of giving Adonis an Oedipus Complex?!

Yes, this myth is already very disturbing, yet there's no need to ignore Adonis' abuse by pretending that he enjoyed it, or that he was the abuser all this time.

[imcastingspellz]

Minthe and Persephone turnarounds!

[iloveallmyocs]

oh god i hate lore olympus

[0lympian-c0uncil]

Minthe, *bad at flirting*: You have a wonderful name.

Persephone,*equally bad at flirting*: Thanks! I got it for my birthday!

[sephsbat]

not my girl minthe's wikipedia pic being a photo of a mint plant.

[namedafterflowerstournament]

Botanic Tournament : Aromatic Herbs and Spices Bracket !

Round 2 Part 2 Poll 1

Mint :

Nepeta/Catnip :

[cookie-nom-nom]

“the goddess Demeter vented her anger on this minty whore by grinding her with a mortar and pestle”

-line from actual peer-reviewed article I'm reading rn

[mask131]

Asking because I’m researching for my own story.

Did Hades ever cheat on Persephone? I’ve seen two different versions of a myth that he fell in love with two people.

One is that he did love these two but Demeter or Persephone turned one into a mint and Hades turned another into a tree (I think?)

But another version where he was pursued by these two and he didn’t actually love them?

Not sure about the second version, feels like someone babied Hades a bit.

Ah yes, the famous Leuce and Minthe everybody talks about... Well, while I am no expert on the matter, I'll give you the trick that make you seem like an expert: just look at the sources for these stories. As in who wrote about them, when did they write about them, and which culture did they belong to?

Let us begin with Minte, the lover turned to mint. For example, when it came to the sources of the Minthe's legend, one of them is Ovid - so alarm bells - but said mention is just one quick throw-away line, not a full story ; unless the other sources which go into more details about it, and these other sources are Greek. So already the alarm bell can be put down: the Greeks seemed to know more about this than the Romans. However who are the Greeks in question that wrote about this legend? Strabo and Oppian - people who lived in the post-roman age of Greece, in (or around) the first centuries after Christ (Oppian even more obviously since he is in the third century CE). So we are into the latest part of Greek mythology document, the most "recent", and thus it has to be considered carefully. Because while in these late era we did find people digging up and preserving old myth we had no other record of (see how Apollodorus ended up actually preserving an old Medusa story, the one of Medusa being cursed for her vanity, when everybody believed him for a long time to have just collected an alternate tale of Ovid), but on the other we also have LOTS of inventions and stuff that clearly did not exist in very ancient, and not even in Classical Greece (see Nonnos' Dionysiaca which is... a quite special thing.)

It should especially be considered that the two late Greek versions contradict each other, and come from works with very different purposes. Strabo collected the legend as part of his geographical work, and mentions it because there is a mountain near an area sacred to Hades called Minthe, and according to the legend Strabo heard and that he wrote down, Minthe was a lover of Hades that Kore/Persephone "trampled" to death (probably out of jealousy) and turned into a mint. Note that this is the same version Ovid briefly mentions in his Metamorphosis. So by the town the Romans came around, we can be pretty sure this story was the most common one... And yet a few centuries later, Oppian collected a different story in his Halieutica, and Oppian was not a geographer but a poet, and the Halieutica is a ... didactic epic about fishing. I know it sounds weird, but I swear it makes sense. Anyway, in the story Oppian gives us, the tale goes differently: Minthe was still Hades' lover, but the story explicitely says she was BEFORE Hades ravished/captured Persephone to be his bride, and as a result Minthe was actually pushed away/abandoned. (Note that in the Ovid/Strabo stories Minte seems to be a human woman, while in Oppian's tale, she is a "nymph of the Cocytus", aka one of the nymphs of the rivers of the underworld). And in Oppian's tale it is not Persephone that was jealous, but Minthe, who kept complaining, and saying bad things about Hades' new bride, and who kept boasting about her own beauty supposedly greater than Persephone's, and she kept repeating that Hades would end up being tired of Persephone and divorce her and take Minte back... And the goddess that got angry with Minthe wasn't Persephone, but it was Demeter, who became very angry at Minthe slandering her daughter, and trampled her until she was turned into a mint-plant.

These are the main sources for the Minthe tale, but there are other secondary records about it. For example saint Photios of the Orthodox Church wrote in the ninth century a "Lexicon", a work meant to explain words and vocabulary of Antique authors that had gone obscure - and he had a mention of Minthe, where he merely described her as Hades's mistress/extra-marital lover, and yet a "nymph of Cocytus" (so we have a mix of the previous versions above). We also have a preserved scholia of a Greek poet of the second century (Nicander) that mentions another story of Minthe being killed by Persephone for having slept with Hades - but in this scholia, Persephone rather "ripped to pieces" Minthe, and it was Hades himself that turned her into a mint.

So conclusion: the story did exist... But apparently only was recorded in very, very late Greek mythology, meaning it might be one of the very latest developments of Hades' love life. THAT BEING SAID... there is an element that might hint at the source of this sudden legend. John M. Edmonds published in 1957 "The Fragments of Attic Comedy" in which he mentions the writings of the second century CE scholar Julius Polux, who mentions that Minthe was evoked and described in an old Greek play we now have lost: "Nomoi", the "Laws", written by Cratinus, an Athenian playwright of the 6-5th century BCE... So given all the elements we have, we might be to imagine that Minthe started her life as a theatrical invention, that became more and more popular until it became a widespread legend.

We also have to consider the cultural elements surrounding the mint-plant in Ancient Greece - because whenever someone turns into a plant, it is very revealing. The myth of Minthe seems to be a poetic transliteration of the various roles the mint had in Ancient Greece. After all, it was a plant used for funerary rites and rituals - explaining why it would be associated with Hades and the underworld. It was also one of the ingredients of the sacred brew used in the Eleusian Mysteries, again linking it to the Underworld, but with the additional links to Demeter and Kore. (Even though some rather saw Minte as being an opposite of Persephone/Demeter, for example Marcel Detienne in "The Garden of Adonis" (a studies of spices in Ancient Greece), points out that the mint was seen as a plant of sterility, or a sterile symbol, and that thus Minthe being destroyed by Demeter represents the victory of a goddess of fertility against the plant of sterility. We also have records of the mint being considered an aphrodisiac by Ancient Greeks - which again would explain Minthe's role as a lover of Hades... So Minthe might have been an allegorical character to depict the role of the mint in relation to the funerary rites and/or Eleusinian rites, that gained a life of its own... Maybe. We can never be sure.

But one thing we are sure of is that Minthe did not belong to the oldest versions of Greek mythology - she is not from the Homeric or Hesiodic traditions, in both of which Hades is very much faithful to Persephone.

As for Leuce, she is... very very much less interesting than Minthe. Because the story of Leuce/Leuke only comes from one source: Servius. Who was not from Greece, but from Italy, and who lived between the fifth and sixth century, aka at a time where a lost of the old myths had been lost or very, very warped - and he is to this day the only source we have for this story so... he might have either invented it, or recorded someone else's invention or deformation. Mind you, people will come saying "But... Leuke was turned into a poplar tree, and the poplar tree was HUGE in Underworld symbolism and Greek mythology!". And I do not deny that... But when the only source we have for a character is a non-Greek person that is the only one speaking of said character and came long after Ancient Greece and even after the glory days of the Roman Empire... Yeah I am doubting Leuke ever really belonged to Greek mythology.

If you want to write something about Hades having another lover, at least go with Minthe, she has more roots in Greek mythology (no pun intended). But you are not even forced to include Minthe because she is part of the very late stages of Greek mythology, she is not a constant, so you can add her if you want, or go with older traditions where she did not exist.

[thatsauceysauce]

I understand the age gap in lore olympus is weird but when you think about it real greek mythology age gaps aren’t that different, not to mention how most greek gods and goddesses are related anyways. the comic was a romance story and wasn’t going to be exactly persephone and hades story, i feel like once the comic was over a lot of fans switched up on it, which isn’t totally reasonable but when you do bring up the fact they made persephone so helpless and hades so powerful it is weird in a way, but again— greek mythology also had moments like that. i do wanna say tho, they both were overcoming issues and problems which i think drew them together.

another thing i wanna bring up was persephone being sa’d/raped (i believe) the actual greek god is nothing like what the comic made him out to be which sets a bad standard for what people expect him to be. another thing is that i hate how people bash the art style of the creator, if the style isn’t what you like then simply don’t read the comic, don’t bash the artist. but i do agree the characters share so many similarities it is hard to keep up with who is who. i do wanna also bring up that i do see how weird it is for the author to made persephone so childish looking, but then again she had stopped aging, not only that but the height difference is not a 19 year olds, more like a child’s.. but there was no reason to make her stay that young.

also why is minthe so hated on??! she got cheated on and had to find out through news paper articles, not to mention how she had to be with hades knowing that his family hated her was in my opinion not okay, and so many people bash her. she was a complex character and was bashed for it.. going into the topic of the art style once more minthe and persephone also share many similarities, so many of the comic strips involving them with hades look alike, another thing is minthe was slut shamed for wearing a black dress but when persephone wore it she was totally praised, which in my opinion is quite odd..

(reread a bit and minthe and hades were not exclusive)

they also made persephones mother out to be such a bad mom when in the actual story her and her mothers reunion was them sharing hugs and their love.

i do wanna add that this is just my opinion and no hate!