Acrisius was the king of Argos and the brother of King Proetus of Tiryns. Acrisius was warned by an oracle that he would be killed in time by a son born to his daughter Danae. So he promptly locked her up in a tower and threw away the key. But the god Zeus got in, disguised as a shower of gold, and became the father of Perseus.

Cousin of Heracles who assigned him his Labors. King of Mycenae and Tiryns only because of Hera's hatred of Heracles, who was the son of her husband Zeus and the mortal Alcmene. Knowing that Alcmene was about to give birth, Zeus had bragged that one of his descendants was about to be born who would rule over two great kingdoms. Hera tricked him into swearing to this, then retarded Alcmene's delivery. Eurystheus, Zeus's great-grandson, was born first.

King of Sparta. One of the Greeks who besieged Troy to retrieve his wife Helen from the Trojan Paris. Helen had been bewitched by the Goddess of Love into eloping with Paris, and in the phrase of the poet Marlowe her face launched a thousand ships. These bore the Greek allies of Menelaus to the siege and ultimate downfall of Troy.

(356 - 323 B.C.)
In an amazing eleven-year journey of conquest, young Alexander of Macedonia conquered all the way from Egypt to India. Behind him came Greek institutions and the Greek language, which became the standard of the ancient world. The intoxication of power caused Alexander to become strange to his friends, and he died unhappy.

King of Tiryns, brother of Perseus's grandfather, King Acrisius of Argos. When his wife falsely accused Bellerophon of making amorous advances, Proetus sent the hero to King Iobates of Lycia with sealed instructions that he be put to death on arrival. Iobates thought to accomplish this by sending him after the Chimaera, but Bellerophon killed the beast instead. On another occasion, the daughters of Proetus were driven mad by Hera and roamed the countryside in a frenzy thinking they were cows.

Sinner condemned in Tartarus to an eternity of rolling a boulder uphill then watching it roll back down again. Sisyphus was founder and king of Corinth, or Ephyra as it was called in those days. He was notorious as the most cunning knave on earth. His greatest triumph came at the end of his life, when the god Hades came to claim him personally for the kingdom of the dead. Hades had brought along a pair of handcuffs, a comparative novelty, and Sisyphus expressed such an interest that Hades was persuaded to demonstrate their use - on himself.

And so it came about that the high lord of the Underworld was kept locked up in a closet at Sisyphus's house for many a day, a circumstance which put the great chain of being seriously out of whack. Nobody could die. A soldier might be chopped to bits in battle and still show up at camp for dinner. Finally Hades was released and Sisyphus was ordered summarily to report to the Underworld for his eternal assignment. But the wily one had another trick up his sleeve.

He simply told his wife not to bury him and then complained to Persephone, Queen of the Dead, that he had not been accorded the proper funeral honors. What's more, as an unburied corpse he had no business on the far side of the river Styx at all - his wife hadn't placed a coin under his tongue to secure passage with Charon the ferryman. Surely her highness could see that Sisyphus must be given leave to journey back topside and put things right.

Kindly Persephone assented, and Sisyphus made his way back to the sunshine, where he promptly forgot all about funerals and such drab affairs and lived on in dissipation for another good stretch of time. But even this paramount trickster could only postpone the inevitable. Eventually he was hauled down to Hades, where his indiscretions caught up with him. For a crime against the gods - the specifics of which are variously reported - he was condemned to an eternity at hard labor. And frustrating labor at that. For his assignment was to roll a great boulder to the top of a hill. Only every time Sisyphus, by the greatest of exertion and toil, attained the summit, the darn thing rolled back down again.

The Aloadae (or Aloadai) were Otus and Ephialtes (or Ephialtis), sons of Iphimedia, queen of Aloeus, by Poseidon, whom she induced to make her pregnant by going to the seashore and disporting herself in the surf or scooping seawater into her bosom. From Aloeus they received their patronymic, the Aloadai. They were strong and aggressive giants, growing by nine fingers every month[3] nine fathoms tall at age nine, and only outshone in beauty by Orion.

The brothers wanted to storm Mt. Olympus and gain Artemis for Otos and Hera for Ephialtes. They would have piled Mt. Ossa atop Olympus, then Mt. Pelion upon Ossa, but were killed by Apollo before their downy beards had even sprouted, and bound to columns in the Underworld.

According to another version of their struggle against the Olympians, alluded to so briefly that it must have been already familiar to the epic's hearers, they managed to kidnap Ares and hold him in a bronze jar, a storage pithos, for thirteen months, a lunar year. "And that would have been the end of Ares and his appetite for war, if the beautiful Eriboea, the young giants' stepmother, had not told Hermes what they had done," Dione related (Iliad 5.385–391). He was only released when Artemis offered herself to Otus. This made Ephialtes envious and the pair fought. Artemis changed herself into a doe and jumped between them. The Aloadae, not wanting her to get away, threw their spears and simultaneously killed each other.

On a more positive front, the Aloadae were bringers of civilization, founding cities and teaching culture to humanity. They were venerated specifically in Naxos and Boeotian Ascra, two cities they founded.

Ephialtes (lit. "he who jumps upon") is also the Greek word for "nightmare," and Ephialtes was sometimes considered the daimon of nightmares.

Brother of Heracles. Although they were twins, only Heracles was an immortal hero. It was understood that Iphicles was the son of Alcmene and her mortal husband, while Heracles was the son of Alcmene and Zeus. Iphicles was the father of Heracles' charioteer, Iolaus, who helped him slay the Hydra.

The Father of Sparta (c. 800 B.C.)
Lycurgus established harmony, simplicity, and strength in Sparta. This warrior society tamed its youth through systematic education aimed at developing leadership, courage, public spirit, and wisdom.

The Reformer of Sparta (reigned 245 - 241 B.C.)
The love of money had virtually destroyed the laws of Lycurgus in Sparta by the time Agis became king. This idealistic young man tried to restore the old way of life that had made Sparta great, but he was defeated by the power of greed.

The Lame King of Sparta (444 - 360 B.C.)
Agesilaus inherited the Spartan throne after Sparta had defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War. At that time, Sparta was the undisputed master of Greece and the Aegean. Because of his stubborn lust for conquest, Agesilaus violated the laws of Lycurgus against imperialistic ventures and fighting too much with the same enemy. By the time Agesilaus died, Sparta had lost most of its prestige and power.