A Herm From Siphnos, of the later sixth century B.C. Herms are stone pillars, topped with the head of the god Hermes and
commonly with an erect phallus carved on the front. On the block-shoulders wreaths or clothes could hang. They were set
up by roads, at street corners and in other prominent public places to solicit worship from, and offer protection to passers-
by. The type of mount is later used for other deities (Heracles, Dionysus, Pan) and in the Roman period for portrait busts.
It is hard to summarize Greek attitudes to their gods. Much depends on the kind of evidence that one selects. The high
literary genres tend to offer a pessimistic view. They often stress the unbridgeable gulf between blessed gods and puny,
doomed, suffering man. The gods' concern for mortals, creatures of a day, is necessarily limited, and they rule the universe
for their own convenience, not for ours. Sufferings come even to the strongest, wisest, and most pious of men; one scarcely
knows why, but 'nothing of this is not Zeus'. Poets who wrote so were not trying to do down the gods but to describe what,
at the limits, human life is like. The gods can appear comfortless beings because life itself is brutal, and there was for the
Greeks no power distinct from the gods, no devil, to be blamed for the wrongness of things. But since not everyone cared to
look into life's worst possibilities so closely there was always room for a more optimistic view. According to Zeus in the
Odyssey, men are responsible for their own misfortunes; far from hurting them the gods do what they can to save them
from themselves.
This comfortable doctrine was taken up by the Athenian statesman-poet Solon and became a keynote of Athenian civic
religion. Whatever he might hear in the tragic theatre, the Athenian in daily life did not normally doubt that the gods were