Greek PantheonMountain
Mount Olympus
The highest mountain in Greece, on the border of Thessaly and Macedonia, which Homer and Hesiod made the home of Zeus and the Olympian gods, a peak above the clouds where the gods feast and hold council.
About Mount Olympus
Peak above the weather
Homer parks the Olympians on a peak above the weather. Clouds stop below the ridge; Zeus sits apart while the others come and go as if the mountain were a house. Cult on the real Olympus in Pieria is later and thinner than the poems. The Iliad is the map. Hesiod's Theogony puts the same court there after the Titan war. Local Zeus cults used other Greek peaks; Olympus is first a literary address, not a measured summit shrine.
On the map
Mount Olympus among other places of the Greek Pantheon.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Homer, Iliad 5
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.
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