Percy Jackson's Greek Gods

The home of the Olympian gods, Mount Olympus is one of the main settings of many tales throughout Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods. The interplay of the gods who live there thematically symbolizes What Makes a Society. The real Mount Olympus is a massif (a single body within a mountain range) located on the border between Thessaly and Macedonia in Greece, and its tallest peak (Mytikas—meaning “nose”) is more than 9,000 feet high. In myth, Mount Olympus’s central location made it an ideal place for the gods to watch the events taking place in Greece, and while the origin of the mountain’s name is unknown, some suggest that Olympus derives from a combination of words meaning “pure foot,” which would have allowed the people of Greece to identify it as a footstool for the gods to exist above them. As the tallest mountain in Greece, Mount Olympus has mythological significance, representing the effect of the gods on the land. Before the Olympians’ rise to power, Kronos lived atop Mount Othrys, then the tallest mountain, which the Olympian gods sheered in half at the culmination of the 10-year war between the Titans and gods. In doing so, the Olympians established themselves as the world’s most powerful force, and in the