In an act of revenge by Aphrodite, Phaedra, wife of Theseus, falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus, with tragic consequences.
Heroides
After Achilles slaughtered the rest of her family, Briseis becomes his enslaved concubine. While he’s angry, she remains devoted to him until his death.
When Edward Burne-Jones was invited to remove his painting from exhibition, it wasn’t so much the male genitals in the centre, but the scandal surrounding its model.
Odysseus had been away from his home, wife Penelope and son Telemachus for over 20 years. What would she have written to him?
A tragedy with a happy outcome, painted by Waterhouse, Kauffman, Paulus Bor, Delacroix, Maurice Denis and Lovis Corinth.
Byron, no stranger to forbidden love, swam across the Dardanelles in 1810, retracing the strokes of the legendary Leander who died trying to reach his lover Hero.
Final two stories, of a brother and sister caught in an incestuous relationship, and one of the many widowed Greeks from the Trojan war. Very different paintings hidden away.
Ovid’s fictional letter made it clear how the legend of Phaon was absurd. Yet it has been painted repeatedly ever since.
Was she abducted, seduced, or seducer? Victim or whore? Ovid’s pair of letters between Helen and Paris raises questions which many artists have tried to tackle.
Boy meets girl but has to swim a mile in treacherous waters to keep meeting her. When she tells him how she burns with passion, he pushes his luck in the sea.
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