Divine and royal origins
Many of the mythical figures of ancient Greece are demigods, the sons of Zeus through his various affairs (such as Heracles and the Dioscuri) or of Poseidon (Theseus). Some are the sons of goddesses who fell in love with mortals (such as Achilles, son of Thetis); others of mortals who fell in love with gods (Aesculapius, son of Apollo).
These heroes carried out the decisive deeds: it was only with the help of Heracles that Zeus and the Olympian gods could overcome the Giants who were the successors of the Titans and thus the last defence of the gods against the primeval powers of the earth and heavens. This age of the divine heroes lay just on the edge of the dawn of history, forming the border between the world inhabited by men and that where gods and men mingled on earth. The Romans tied these Greek stories into their own world, so that, for example, the Julian family (which created the empire) traced their ancestry back to Aeneas of Troy, the son of Aphrodite.Peculiarly, decades of archaeological research have confirmed that the origins of Greek iconography and temples seem to lie in the Early Iron Age, around 800 BCE or so, with buildings such as the possible Heroon at Lefkandi that may have been some kind of tomb monuments for fallen heroes. These may have been places of communal offerings, sacrifices and feasting, as well as celebrations of the community. The basic pattern in Greece seems to have been a temple in antis; and this was derived from the megarons used as the central “throne rooms” of the Mycenaean palaces.1 However, the Iron Age buildings were erected in the ruined palaces or desolate villages. The age of the cities came in the following centuries. Over time, in the Greek cities, the concept of a temenos - an area that is sacred and figuratively “cut off’ from the rest of the city - contributed to the isolation of the divine temples. By the fifth century BCE, the earliest forms of the temples had reached perfection, and the temples were henceforth symbolically separated from the rest of the urban surroundings.