Clay Lane

The gods had given Heracles every grace of body and mind, but there was one thing he must do for himself: choose how to use them.

Heracles, a child of Zeus, is endowed with astonishing physical strength and skill, but does he also have strength of character to match?

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Artemis, goddess of the hunt, pursued a bitter and relentless vengeance upon a king who carelessly slighted her.

Calydon was an ancient city in Aetolia, on the west coast of mainland Greece near modern Missolonghi. The tale tells how Artemis, goddess of the hunt, took spiteful revenge on a king who slighted her.

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When he caught his wife with her lover, the ugly blacksmith of the gods showed that he was not without his pride.

While Odysseus is in the court of King Alcinous, a court musician entertains them with the story of Hephaestus. He was the lame and ugly blacksmith to the gods, whom Zeus instructed Aphrodite to marry so that the other gods would stop fighting over her — a solution which did not solve anything at all.

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Smarting for his outraged ‘rights’, Cain lost his reason — but not God’s pity and love.

Abel and his brother Cain were the sons of Adam and Eve. Theirs is a universal tale of what long-nursed envy and a sense of outraged ‘rights’ can lead us to do; but it is also an allegory of the deteriorating relationship between Judah and the ten tribes of northern Israel in the 8th century BC.

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The King who condemned him to the den of lions felt far worse about it than Daniel did.

Nebuchadnezzar II was King of Babylon (near to modern Baghdad) in the 6th century BC. Many Jews lived there, after Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonians 587 BC.

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Prince Belshazzar’s disrespectful behaviour left him facing the original ‘writing on the wall’.

Belshazzar was a prince in Babylon (near what is now Baghdad, Iraq) in the 6th century BC. While his father King Nabonidus was away, Belshazzar had the government of the Empire in his father’s stead.

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