April : the fourth month, named from an abbreviation for Aphrodite

Cassandra : a daughter of Priam endowed with the gift of prophecy but fated never to be believed

Clio : the Greek Muse of history

Cynthia : an epithet of Artemis, so called for her birth on Mount Cynthus

Daphne : a nymph in Greek mythology who was transformed into a laurel tree to escape the pursuing Apollo

Diana : the Roman goddess of the moon and hunting, the protectress of women

Elissa : the Phoenician name of Dido, a mythological queen of Carthage who killed herself when abandoned by Aeneas

Hector : a bullish Trojan champion slain by Achilles

Helen : the beautiful daughter of Zeus and Leda and wife of Menelaus whose kidnapping by Paris was the cause of the Trojan War

Irene : the personification of peace in classical mythology

Iris : a messenger of the gods, regarded as the goddess of the rainbow

Leda : the mother of Castor and Clytemnestra by her husband Tyndareus, and of Pollux and Helen by Zeus, who was wearing the form of a swan

May : the Roman goddess of growth and increase and the mother of Hermes

Melissa : the sister of Amalthea who nourished the infant Zeus with honey in Greek mythology

Niobe : she provoked Apollo and Artemis to vengeance for taunting their mother, Leto, with the number and beauty of her own children; her children were slain and she was turned into stone by Zeus, in which form she continued to weep over her loss

Penelope : in classical mythology, the wife of Odysseus who remained faithful to him throughout his absence at Troy, despite having many suitors

Phoebe : a Titanesse, daughter of Uranus and Gaea and mother of Leto, later identified with the goddess Artemis

Rhea : the mother of Zeus

Selena : the goddess of the moon who loved Endymion

Sibyl : the prophetess at Apollo's oracle on Delphi

An Etymological Dictionary of Classical Mythology by Elizabeth W. Kraemer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Last updated 1/13/14