Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
A typical Greek hero origin story was being born to a mortal woman and an Olympic god (usually, though not exclusively, Zeus the Philanderer). See Herakles, Perseus, Bellerophon, etc...
Were there any heroes in Classical Greek Myth (a single example will suffice) that were the reverse, i.e. born to an Olympic goddess from a mortal human father? I couldn't find any in my Googling, and my Mythology textbooks are long gone.
There are very few examples, one of which is Aeneas:
a Trojan hero, the son of the prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite.
The Wikipedia article on demigods gives a good cultural explanation as to why there were not many:
The fact that male deities of Greek myth had far more notable children with mortals than the female goddesses can be attributable to the Greek male-dominated society being reflected in their religion. Zeus, primarily, and also Poseidon, both had a multitude of affairs with mortal women, with Zeus having to shield them from his wife Hera after she was alerted to the infidelity. The females were expected to remain loyal to their husbands, while the males were almost expected to take multiple lovers, meaning that far more of the demigods in Greek myths were born on earth to human mothers than on Olympus to divine mothers.
Demi-gods and heros were often "city gods" -- the rulers of a given city-state would claim descent from the gods by way of a specific hero. Heroes born to Olympian mothers would be raised in Olympus, and not available to rule Greek city-states. Only mortal mothers are useful to establishing the "divine right of kings."
