Greek Hero Name Generator

A Greek hero was never just a name. Homer almost always attaches a tag: Achilles is swift-footed, Hector the breaker of horses, Odysseus the man of many wiles, and Agamemnon the lord of men. They filled out the metre, but also told the audience what a hero was for. Alongside the epithet came the patronymic, because lineage was the whole point of heroism: Achilles son of Peleus, Diomedes son of Tydeus, and the stand-alone forms Peleides, Atreides and Laertiades that work as names in their own right.

The names themselves are mostly compounds with a meaning you can still read. Patroclus is "glory of the father", Diomedes "counsel of Zeus", Menelaus "strength of the people", Nicostratus "army of victory". A few heroes carry short, older names like Ajax, Idas and Nestor, which is partly why they sound so archaic next to the compounds.

This list mixes the famous champions of the Iliad and Odyssey with the Argonauts, the Seven against Thebes and their sons, the Amazons, the heroines of tragedy, the athletes who received hero cults after death, and a run of original names built on the same roots. Use the bare names for a Percy Jackson-style cast, and the epithet or patronymic forms when you want a line that sounds like it came out of the poem.