The Myths Behind Percy Jackson: The Titan's Curse

Artemis, daughter of Zeus and Leto and twin of Apollo, is the huntress of the mountains and protector of young women and wild animals. The Homeric Hymn to Artemis shows her hunting and then leading the dance at Delphi. Her companions are nymphs: Ovid tells of Callisto, expelled from the band after Zeus seduced her, and of Actaeon, who saw the goddess bathing with her nymphs. An order of immortal Hunters recruiting modern girls is Riordan's invention.

Apollo is the god of music, prophecy, healing and archery. The sun that crosses the sky in a chariot belongs, in Homer and Hesiod, to a different god, Helios. Classical and later writers increasingly identified Apollo with the sun, and Riordan uses that later, merged figure.

Hesiod's Atlas is a son of Iapetus and brother of Prometheus whom Zeus set at the western edge of the world, before the Hesperides, to hold up the sky. Apollodorus tells how Heracles took the sky onto his own shoulders while Atlas fetched the golden apples, then tricked him into taking it back: the scene Riordan echoes. Hesiod gives Atlas no command in the war.

The Hesperides tend the golden apples in a garden beyond the ocean. Hesiod calls them daughters of Night; later writers make them daughters of Atlas. Apollodorus names four (Aegle, Erythia, Hesperia and Arethusa), and in Apollonius of Rhodes they mourn the serpent Heracles killed. No ancient Hesperid is called Zoë or helps Heracles. Her transformation into a constellation follows an ancient pattern, like Callisto becoming the Great Bear in Ovid.

Hesiod has Hera rear the lion and set it on the hills of Nemea. Killing it was Heracles' first labour: his arrows glanced off, so he trapped it in its two-mouthed cave and strangled it, and wore its skin ever after.

Hesiod mentions an unnamed serpent guarding the golden apples at the ends of the earth. Apollodorus gives it a hundred heads and many voices; Apollonius of Rhodes names it Ladon and shows it lying dead, killed by Heracles, the day before the Argonauts arrive.

The creature comes from a short passage in Ovid's Fasti about a monster that was a bull in front and a serpent behind, and a prophecy that whoever burned its entrails would overcome the gods. That passage is essentially its only ancient witness, so Riordan's premise is Ovid's, nearly unchanged. It has no entry in the atlas because there is almost nothing more to say.

Othrys is a real mountain range in central Greece, facing Olympus across the Thessalian plain. Hesiod names it as the Titans' side in their ten-year war with the gods; a palace on its summit belongs to later retellings. The garden lies at the western edge of the known world. Moving both to California is Riordan's invention, in keeping with his premise that the gods follow Western civilization.

Cronus, youngest of the Titans, overthrew his father Uranus, swallowed his own children to escape the same fate, and was overthrown by Zeus. He is not a god of time; that is Chronos, Time personified, a different figure. The names were confused in antiquity (Plutarch notes that the Greeks allegorized Cronus as time), and Riordan builds on that confusion.