Greek mythology

Myths are a way of expressing and seeking answers to tantalising questions, such as how the world came to be and what powers govern it, how man and other beings were created. Before coming to the explanation of natural phenomena by logic, man used mythical thinking to give answers to the problems that concerned him. Thus, myth is a basic attitude of human consciousness which creates myths out of unintelligent forces, out of the awe of the unknown and the inevitable, out of the desire to fulfil in imagination what cannot be fulfilled in nature, out of the desire to see death overcome by immortal beings. In other words, human consciousness creates myths aspiring to make possible in an imaginary world what is logically impossible. Therefore, the primary source of myth is the responses of consciousness to the unknown, which it seeks to comprehend and in which it wants to act, since only in this way can its existence be fulfilled. Thus, human consciousness constructs a world of its own by composing rational and irrational elements. Even when a knowledge of the laws of nature was born, human consciousness still sought to extend beyond science.
Myth is common to all the peoples of the Earth. But ancient Greek mythology transcended all geographical and temporal boundaries. The gods of Greek mythology, such as Zeus, Athena or Aphrodite, the heroic figures, such as Achilles or Odysseus, are known not only in Greece where they were born, or in Europe that was spiritually based on Greek civilisation, but also in the far reaches of the world. A first reason that explains this high prominence of Greek mythology is the fact that, through the intervention of the Romans, it initially became known in Europe as early as the Middle Ages, and its high quality set aside the Western national medieval myths.
The Greek myth was cultivated, at least for fourteen centuries, in the lands where it was born by a number of epic, lyric and dramatic poets, who made it a carrier of the ideals of the Greek world. [...]