QUESTION ABOUT GODS

by Alex
(Co)

How were the gods and titans created? Why? By who?

How were monsters created?Why?By who?

Are there any Greek or Roman stories about dragons?

Here are some (Very simplistic) answers:
How were the gods and titans created?
The ancient Greeks had many versions about creation, but only some of them survived in the writings of some authors.
In Hesiod's Theogony, in the beginning there was Chaos, which represented a void and infinite space, out of which all gods, all men and all things appeared. Immediately after him/her, Gaia, Tartaros and Eros came into being.
In the Illiad, Oceanus was the first god to appear. In the Orphic poems, Nyx was considered the first deity.
This firs generation of gods was called Protogenoi. Uranus, the Sky, was one of them. From his union with Gaia, the Titans were born.

Why were they created? I couldn't find an answer to that question in Greek mythology. By whom? They just appeared, there was no initial creator. The firs one to introduce the idea of a creator is Plato, who considers the demiurge a kind of craftsman who fashioned and shaped the physycal world taking as a model the Ideas of the eternal world. Even if the demiurge is good, the world he created is not perfect because the material used (a mixture of the four elements, air, fire, water and earth) was imperfect.
As regards the monsters, they were either monstruous animals (Cerberus, Chimera), or born from different parents (the Giants - Aloadae, Antaeus, Cyclopes, Geryon, Argus, Typhon; Scylla - but Ovid says she was a beautiful nymph, turned into a monster by the jealous Circe; the Minotaur, the Sirens) or they were normal beings turned into monsters by gods, as a punishment (Medusa, in one version of her story).
As regards the Dragons, they were giant serpents, sometimes they had sharp teeth and several heads, and they usually guarded a treasure.
Here are some dragons who appear in ancient stories:
- the Colchian Dragon who guarded the golden fleece,
- the Hesperian dragon who had a hundred heads and guarded the garden of the Hesperides with the golden apples (he was killed by Hercules)
- Hydra, a water dragon who could regenerate her heads, each time one head was cut, other two grew instead. Hercules managed to kill her by burnign with fire the necks, after cutting each head
- Python, the dragon who guarded the oracle at Delphi
- the Trojan dragons, who came out of the sea and killed Laocoon and his sons, when he tried to warn his people against the Trojan horse.