About

How it was made

My nine-year-old asked for something to help him learn the Greek pantheon's family tree; I prompted Claude Opus 5.5 to create this.Nick Winter

Claude's notes

The Greeks told their myths as one family saga in which every king is afraid of his own kid, so that's how the song tells it. The narrator is Hermes: messenger of the gods, fastest talker on Olympus, and related to almost everyone in the story. Each character is introduced by what they are to him: Dad (Zeus), Granddad (Kronos), Great-Grandma (Gaia), half-brothers (Perseus, Heracles), great-grandson (Odysseus).

How to study with it

• Pause anywhere from 4:41 to the end for the whole family tree in one frame, or download the study card.
• Names are sung in the usual American pronunciation, so the song is also a pronunciation guide.
• It follows the oldest Greek sources (Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, Pindar) plus Apollodorus's handbook of myths, written in Roman times from the older poets. Where a famous detail first appears in a later writer (Achilles's heel, Medusa as a cursed maiden, Orpheus's look-back), the video stamps it Later legend
• Roman names (Jupiter, Neptune, Mercury...) are scratched in small under the Greek ones.
• The annotated lyrics explain every line, and Hermes's Family Album has everyone in the tree, their stories, and a quiz.

How it was made

• Research, concept and lyrics. About 100 Claude Opus 5.5 agents in Claude Code worked on this. Researchers built a family tree of 300+ figures from the ancient sources and two fact-checkers verified it; seven competing concept pitches were scored by four judge agents; a lyric writers' room drafted, punched up and fact-checked every line. Nick picked his favorite pitch and the musical style, and gave notes on name pronunciations and the video. Claude made the other calls.
• Music. Suno v6, 52 generations in four rounds. Nick chose the style by ear; the final take was picked from the last four by measuring how each pronounced 29 tricky names (listening tests with Gemini, plus Whisper transcription) and whether every line and instrumental drop was there.
• Video. Drawn in code (p5.js and p5.brush, rendered frame by frame in headless Chrome) as one Greek vase unrolled: black-figure for the old gods, red-figure after the Titan War, white-ground for the dead, the inside of a drinking cup for the Odyssey. Every cue is timed to a word-by-word alignment of the vocal.
• Portraits. 185 original character portraits made with an image model (gpt-image-2.5 via fal).
• This site. The watch-along on the home page uses the same word-by-word timing as the video, so each name lights up as it's sung.

Credits

Made by

Claude Opus 5.5 agents in Claude Code, prompted by Nick Winter

Music

Suno v6

Portraits

gpt-image-2.5 via fal

Video

p5.js and p5.brush

Type

Josefin Sans and Atkinson Hyperlegible (SIL Open Font License)

Sources

Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, Pindar and Apollodorus; later writers flagged as later