Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 2

The race was very close. Then the yellow-haired one spurted ahead and won the race.

Maybe he isn’t even your father. People like to say they’re descended from the gods, of course.

He was so stung by the words of his friend, and the boasting and lying he had been forced to do, that he traveled night and day, not stopping for food or rest, guiding himself by the morning star and the evening star, heading always east.

He raised his eyes shyly and saw a tall figure sitting on the throne. Taller than any man, and appallingly beautiful to the boy—with his golden hair and stormy blue eyes and strong laughing face.

And I would have flung him over the cliff and myself after him if I had not resolved to make my lies come true.

Well, you’re my son, all right. Proud, rash, accepting no affront, refusing no
adventure. I know the breed.

A poor charred cinder floating in space—well, that is what the oracle predicted for the earth—but I did not know it would be so soon...so soon.

Up high on Olympus, the gods in their cool garden heard a clamor of grief from below.

She lived in an obscure little village, and her father was a humble dyer of wool.

Therefore when she heard them murmur, she would stop her work and turn round indignantly to say, “With my own ten fingers I gained this skill, and by hard practice from early morning till night...."

Before the group that was gathered there she would not give in; so pressing her pale lips together in obstinacy and pride, she led the goddess to one of the great looms and set herself before the other.

The central figure was the goddess herself competing with Poseidon for possession of the city of Athens; but in the four corners were mortals who had tried to strive with gods and pictures of the awful fate that had overtaken them.

Myth stories about creation are different. In a prophetic voice, they relate events that seem outside of time and even beyond time itself.

Again Mbombo‘s stomach convulsed, this time sending forth a wonderful and various stream of life: the tall sky, the sharp-forked lightning, deep-rooted trees, animals in all their lithe power and the first man and woman.

Long ago when the world was young, the earth and all living creatures were shrouded in the darkness of an eternal night, for neither the sun nor the moon shone in the sky.