Europa and the Pirate Twins Trivia Quiz

Answer: Apollo and Artemis

Greek mythology offers a number of variants on the stories of Apollo and Artemis, but there is general agreement that they were twins, born on the island of Delos when Hera (understandably angered by Zeus's continual infidelities) decreed that their mother Leto could not give birth to her children on solid land.

Some versions state that Delos was a floating island, therefore technically not terra firma, and was later fastened in place by Zeus; other versions state that the island was prepared to disobey Hera.

In any case, the goddess of the hunt, wild animals, wilderness, childbirth, virginity (an interesting combination, especially the last two!) and the god of music, poetry, the sun, healing and plague (again, some rather contradictory fields) are definitely twins, not pirates, and none of the moons in our solar system are named after them, although it was the Apollo space program that took men to the moon in the 20th century.

Answer: Europa and Io

Jupiter has (at least) 67 moons, but the most familiar are the four so-called Galilean moons, the ones that Galileo and Simon Marius both independently observed in 1610 - Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa. Galileo called them Cosimo's stars, but the names suggested by Marius, which were those of lovers of Zeus (the Greek god whose Roman counterpart was Jupiter), became accepted. The convention of using the names of lovers of Zeus and/or Jupiter was followed for the naming of subsequent moons, although as the number grew, it became necessary to also use offspring for names.

Europa was the mother of Minos, the first king of Crete and the one who kept the Minotaur confined in the centre of a maze built by Daedalus until Theseus managed to defeat it.

Io was a priestess of Hera, who became one of Zeus's lovers. There are several versions of their story, the best-known of which has Zeus turning Io into a heifer to conceal her from an outraged Hera. Hera saw through the deception, and set the hundred-eyed Argus Panoptices to guard Io and keep Zeus away. Zeus had Argus killed, which made Hera angrier than before (not surprisingly). She sent a gadfly to sting Io, who was driven to wander far and wide in an attempt to escape the harassment. Io was finally restored to human form in Egypt, and gave birth to both a son and a daughter to Zeus.

No twins are found in either woman's immediate family, nor any evidence of piracy, but they definitely had moons named after them.

Answer: Freyja and Freyr

Both Freyja and Freyr are described in the 'Prose Edda' (a study of Norse myth written in the 13th century) and the 'Poetic Edda', a collection of traditional verse collected in the 13th century. Their names mean Lady and Lord, and it is possible that these were originally titles that have come to replace their actual personal names. Freyr is associated with virility, prosperity, peace and fair weather, and is especially linked to Sweden. Freyja is also associated with fertility, (and love, sex, beauty, etc.), but also with war and death rather than peace and happiness.

Although we often associate the Norse with Viking raiders, these two were not pirates in any sense, nor are any of the moons in our solar system named for them.

Answer: Zheng Zhilong and Zheng Jin

Zheng Zhilong (1604-1661) was a Chinese merchant who started his career as a pirate at the instigation of the Dutch, who gave him ships and arms, and encouraged him to harass Japanese shipping. He eventually ran a fleet of nearly 1000 boats, and was semi-officially employed by the Ming rulers to defend the coastal waters against the Japanese and (ironically) the Dutch. After the 1633 Battle of Liaoluo Bay, he used his wealth to acquire over half of the province of Fujian, from which he came.

Zheng Jin, who was the grandson of Zheng Zhilong, became King of Tungning (on Taiwan) in 1663. From there, he ran his pirate fleet both for personal gain and to maintain security in Taiwan, as well as planning for an invasion of the Philippines, a dream of his father's which never eventuated. He did, however, organise an invasion of Fujian in 1676, attempting to free it from Manchu control. The failure of this attempt led him to retire into a life of self-indulgence for the few years that remained before his death in 1681.

Definitely pirates, both of them, but clearly not twins; they have no moons named after them or any other members of the family.

Answer: Titan and Janus

In 1847, John Herschel suggested that the moons of Saturn should be named after the Titans and Giants associated with the Roman figure of Saturn (the Greek equivalent being Cronus). At the time there were seven known moons, and this worked well. As more moons were discovered (the number is now over 60), they ran out of Titans, so moved on to other mythological figures, both Greco-Roman ones and giants from other mythologies.

Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons, is larger than the planet Mercury, and the second-largest moon in the solar system, second only to Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. It has a nitrogen-rich atmosphere not unlike that of the Earth, and lakes composed of liquid hydrocarbons. Janus was discovered in 1966, and is notable for sharing its orbit with another moon, Epithemus. This is the only known example of two moons sharing a single orbit in the solar system. That makes these two moons almost like twins, but not. And they are not involved in celestial piracy, either.

Answer: Castor and Pollux

These brothers, known as the Dioscuri in Greek and Gemini in Latin, were both sons of Leda, but their paternity (and mortality/immortality) is not consistent in different accounts. Most often Zeus is said to have fathered Pollux when he seduced (or raped, depending on how you choose to consider the event) their mother after assuming the guise of a swan. Some have him also siring Castor at the same time, others describe Castor as the mortal son of Leda's husband, the Spartan king Tyndareus. Helen of Troy is said to have been produced as the daughter of Leda and Zeus at the same time, possibly as a triplet, possibly in a separate egg. One story has Clytemnestra (later to be the wife of Agamemnon) and Castor hatching from an egg that came from the union with Tyndareus, while Helen and Pollux hatched from the Zeus-sired egg. Life and love certainly got complicated!

Castor and Pollux are definitely twins, and not pirates or moons, although Greek myth says that Zeus transformed them into two of the stars in the constellation we now call Gemini. Gemini has nearly 100 stars that can be seen with the naked eye; the brightest is Pollux and the second-brightest is Castor. One of the moons of Jupiter is named after their mother, Leda.

Answer: Titania and Oberon

There are at least 27 moons orbiting the planet Uranus, the first two of which to be discovered in 1787 by William Herschel were Titania and Oberon. They, and the other named moons of Uranus, were allocated the names of characters from the plays of William Shakespeare and the poems of Alexander Pope.

Titania, Uranus's largest moon and the eighth largest moon in the solar system, was named after the queen of the fairies in Shakespeare's comedy 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'; Oberon was her consort and the king of the fairies. The next two moons discovered (in 1851) were named Ariel (after a sky spirit who appeared in both Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' and Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock') and Umbriel (after a gnome who appears in 'The Rape of the Lock'). The fifth moon which is large enough to be almost planetary were they to be orbiting the sun instead of a planet is Miranda, discovered in 1948 and named after the principal female character from 'The Tempest'.

Unlike a number of classical mythological figures who are both siblings and partners in marriage, there is no suggestion that Titania and Oberon share familial descent, let alone that they could be twins. Although they do get pleasure from messing around with the humans who cross their paths, this is a far cry from piracy in any way, shape or form.

Answer: Abdul Hassan and Abduwali Muse

The Horn of Africa, and Somalia in particular, became notorious for its active pirates during the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st. Abdul Hassan, who was born in 1969, acquired the nickname of 'the one who never sleeps' as he led a group called the Central Regional Coast Guard in capturing ships for ransom, in a career of piracy that really took off around 2005. Abduwali Muse started his piratical activity at a much younger age (somewhere between 14 and 18), and was active in the years 2008 and 2009, before being arrested. He was the only one of the four pirates who hijacked MV Maersk Alabama in April of 2009 to survive the incident, and he was subsequently sentenced (in February of 2011) to 33 years imprisonment in a US Federal prison, the first person to have been tried in the United States for piracy since the early nineteenth century. The trial made international news due to the uncertainty of the age of the defendant at the time of the hijacking, and argument about the appropriateness of trying him as an adult. Eventually, the piracy charges (which carry a life sentence) were dropped, and he pleaded guilty to the lesser charges of hijacking and kidnapping.

These two share pirate activity, but neither is a twin, and neither is likely to ever be honoured by having a moon named after him.

Answer: Romulus and Remus

These brothers are thought to have had their characters and story developed as a way of establishing the foundation myth for the city of Rome - indeed, it has been suggested that Romulus was named by back-formation from the contemporary name of the city when the stories were being fleshed out. There are, as usual, a number of variants on the story, but the general thrust of them all has their mother, Rhea Silvia, forced to abandon the twins at birth. They were saved by a sequence of miraculous events, including being suckled by a wolf and fed by a woodpecker before a shepherd found them and cared for them until they were adults. When they discovered their lineage (they were princes of Alba Longa, the city founded by Aeneas when he arrived in Italy after the Trojan War) they restored their grandfather to the throne as one of their first adult acts, then decided to go set up a new city for themselves. After a quarrel about which hill would be the best spot for their city, Romulus killed Remus, and went on to found Rome. Romulus was still ruling his city as it expanded to cover the seven hills traditionally associated with the city, and during the war with the Sabines that resulted from Roman men forcibly abducting Sabine women and marrying them. The subsequent truce allowed continued expansion of the city.

Although the actions of Romulus's men in seizing the Sabine women may seem somewhat piratical, the brothers are not generally considered to have been pirates, and do not have moons named after them in our current astronomical nomenclature.

Answer: Phobos and Deimos

Mars only has two moons, although it is suspected that there could be more, with diameters on the order of 100 metres, in the dust ring between these two. They are named after the twin sons of Ares (Greek equivalent of the Roman god of war, Mars), whose names mean Fear (hence the suffix -phobia to indicate an overwhelming and often irrational fear) and dread.

The namesakes were twins (our first example of a pair which fits into more than one of our three categories), but the two moons are quite different in size and orbit, with Deimos nearly three times as far away from Mars as is Phobos, and Phobos being nearly five times as large as Deimos.