Explore the pantheons

High king of the Greek expedition, who sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia for a sailing wind. He took Troy after ten years and came home to be murdered in his bath by his wife Clytemnestra, the curse of the house of Atreus closing over him.

The brother for whose sake Rama was exiled, who wanted none of it. Refusing the stolen throne, he ruled fourteen years as regent from a village outside the capital, with Rama's sandals on the throne.

King of Ayodhya, bound by two old boons to his wife Kaikeyi that exiled his beloved Rama. He died of grief within days, fulfilling an old curse that he, who had once killed a hermit boy by accident, would die bereft of a son.

The blind king of Hastinapura whose inability to check his son Duryodhana, seeing every wrong and preventing none, makes him the epic's study in culpable weakness. He hears the entire war through Sanjaya's divine sight.

King of Panchala, humiliated in a feud with his boyhood friend Drona. From his vengeance sacrifice rose Dhrishtadyumna, destined to kill Drona, and Draupadi, destined to change everything.

Eldest of the hundred Kaurava brothers, whose refusal to yield the Pandavas so much as five villages made the war inevitable. Even his enemies granted him courage and generosity, to everyone but his cousins.

The king who gave up his kingdom, sold his wife and son, and worked as a cremation-ground keeper rather than break his word, tested to the point of demanding a fee to cremate his own child. The gods restored everything; his name became the byword for truthfulness.

King of Mithila who found the infant Sita in a furrow while ploughing, and raised her as his own. Celebrated in the Upanishads as the model of the king who rules while inwardly renounced.

Emperor of Magadha, twice-born from two half-bodies joined by a demoness, and killable only by tearing him apart again. He besieged Mathura seventeen times; Bhima finally split him in a fourteen-day wrestling match at Krishna's prompting.

King of Sindhu who held the gap that trapped Abhimanyu to his death. Arjuna vowed to kill him by the next sunset or burn himself alive, and Krishna briefly hid the sun to make it happen.

The tyrant of Mathura, warned that his sister's eighth child would kill him. He imprisoned her, murdered her infants, and sent demon after demon against the escaped child, who returned at sixteen and threw him from his own throne.

The first man and lawgiver of this age, warned by Vishnu's fish avatar of the coming deluge. His ship, moored to the fish's horn, carried the seeds of all life over the flood, humanity are his descendants, the manavas.

King of Sparta and Helen's husband, for whose sake the hundred kings sailed. He survived the war, wandered seven years, took Helen home, and, as Zeus's son-in-law, was promised the Isles of the Blessed instead of death.

The Phrygian king granted his exact wish: that all he touched turn to gold. His food turned metal in his mouth, his daughter, in later telling, to a statue in his arms, until he begged to be rid of the gift and washed it into the river Pactolus.

King of Crete, son of Zeus and Europa, master of the Aegean, who commissioned the Labyrinth to hide his queen's monstrous child and exacted Athens' tribute of youths to feed it. After death, he judges the dead in the underworld.

The king of Nishadha, peerless charioteer and cook, possessed by the spirit of the fallen age into gambling away his kingdom. Disfigured and in exile, he was won back to himself by Damayanti's stratagem, the epics' great romance of loss and reunion.

King of Thebes who solved the Sphinx's riddle and doggedly investigated a plague's cause, only to find it was himself: the man who had unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. He put out his own eyes with her brooches.

Father-in-name of the Pandavas, cursed to die if he ever embraced a woman, which is why his sons were fathered by gods. He died as the curse foretold.

Last king of Troy, father of fifty sons, most of whom the war devoured. His night journey alone through the enemy camp, to kiss the hands of Achilles, killer of his son, and beg Hector's body back, is the Iliad's final mercy.

King of Hastinapura who married the goddess Ganga on the promise never to question her, and lost her when he did. His later desire for Satyavati extracted the vow that made his son Bhishma.

The king born with three eyes and four arms, fated to die by Krishna's hand. Krishna promised his mother he would pardon a hundred insults, and at the hundred-and-first, hurled his discus in open court.

The craftiest of men, who twice cheated death itself, once chaining Death, once talking his way back from the underworld. His sentence fit the crime: to roll a boulder uphill forever, watching it roll back each time from the summit.

The king who dined with the gods and abused it, stealing their nectar, testing their omniscience by serving them his own butchered son. He stands forever in receding water beneath fruit that lifts from his reach: to tantalize.

Eldest Pandava, son of the god Dharma, so devoted to truth that his chariot rode above the ground, until one equivocal half-lie brought it down. His dice-game weakness cost his family everything; his righteousness won it back.