Yes — the ancient Greeks absolutely did create elaborate, visual family-tree charts (stemmas) of their gods, and some of them survive from antiquity itself.

Here are the real ancient examples we still have (not medieval or Renaissance copies):
  1. The “Tabula Iliaca” (1st century BCE – 1st century CE)
    • 22 small marble relief tablets that have been found (the most famous is the Tabula Iliaca Capitolina in Rome).
    • In the center is a pictorial family tree of the gods going back to Chaos → Gaia → Ouranos → the Titans → Zeus and his siblings → the younger Olympians.
    • Lines connect parents to children, with tiny labels in Greek. It is literally a visual stemma of the divine genealogy exactly as described in Hesiod’s Theogony.
  2. Papyrus fragments with drawn stemmas (2nd–3rd century CE)
    • Several mythological handbooks on papyrus (e.g., P.Oxy. 4098) include hand-drawn branching diagrams showing Zeus → his many children by different goddesses, or the descendants of Inachus, etc.
  3. The “Cronius Table” and other Hellenistic pinakes
    • Hellenistic and Roman-era schoolrooms and libraries loved pinakes (wooden or ivory tablets) with painted or incised family trees of the gods.
    • Pausanias (2nd century CE) describes seeing such tablets in gyms and temples where students memorized mythology.
  4. Wall paintings and mosaics
    • House of the Vettii in Pompeii (1st century CE) has a large fresco that is essentially a family tree of the Olympians with connecting lines.
    • Late Roman villa mosaics (Antioch, Piazza Armerina) sometimes include genealogical diagrams of gods alongside the Labors of Hercules.
  5. Literary references to physical charts
    • Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro (4th century BCE) casually refers to people carrying around “written-out genealogies of the gods” that they argued over.
    • Lucian (2nd century CE) mocks pedants who unroll huge scrolls with branching diagrams of divine marriages.
Most famous ancient “family tree” text that was constantly turned into chartsHesiod’s Theogony (c. 700 BCE) is basically one long family tree (Chaos → Gaia → Ouranos → Kronos → Zeus → the rest). In antiquity it was treated the way we treat an org-chart: copied onto walls, tablets, and scrolls in diagram form.So, to answer directly:
Yes – the Greeks in antiquity regularly made and displayed elaborate, visual family-tree charts of their gods, and we still possess actual physical examples from the Hellenistic and Roman periods (and literary proof they go back centuries earlier). They were used for education, temple decoration, and showing off how much mythology you knew.

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