human in spite of their supernatural foundation.
That is, these gods were usually men or women
whose behaviors were governed by very humanlike
passions. There were twelve Olympian gods, of
which Aphrodite was one. There were many lesser
gods as well, and many cities also had their own
gods who served as their protectors. The Greek
gods governed many aspects of daily life. For
instance the goddess Persephone is associated
with a myth that explains the divisions of grow-
ing seasons and the creation of winter, while
Aphrodite governed love and marriage.
Many of these gods appeared in the poetry and
drama of the period. In Sappho’s ‘‘Fragment 2,’’ the
poet calls to Aphrodite to come to her and be an
honored guest at her celebration. In addition to
Sappho’s use of Aphrodite, Homer used many
of the Greek gods in his two major epic poems,
theIliadand theOdyssey. Although Homer’s
works had circulated orally for a long period of
time, after they were written down in the late
sixth centuryBCE, they became the authoritative
accounts of early Greek life, recalling the great-
ness that had been Greece and offering the
promise of a golden age to come. Homer’s
works also emphasized the role of the gods in
Greek life and history, and thus they continued
to reinforce the worship of these gods.COMPARE
&
CONTRAST 6th centuryBCE:The archaic Greek world is
still mostly an oral society, not a written one.
Thus the principal means of communication,
especially for the transmission of history, is oral
stories, most often sung, as was the case with
Homer, who sang his long narrative epics two
hundred years earlier.
Today:Modern communication in Greece
takes many different forms, from newspapers
and books to mobile phones and the Internet.
While singing remains popular, its value as
entertainment has changed since Sappho’s
period, when it was the traditional form of
disseminating history to the people as well as
providing entertainment as part of religious
observance.
6th centuryBCE:Some Greeks move away
from traditional mythology and begin to
explore cosmology, construing a belief sys-
tem in which there are no divine beings, no
Greek gods. These early Greeks begin to
study the universe as a set of mathematical
truths that can be discovered through care-
ful observations. Some of these observations
are tied to the movements of the planets and
a desire to understand the universe in a way
not explained by belief in mythical gods.This early study of the universe is sometimes
described as metaphysical, which refers to
the study of ideas that are not part of man-
kind’s usual physical reality.
Today:The study of the origin and evolution
of the universe continues to fascinate man-
kind. In the world today, this study has moved
away from the sort of metaphysical study of
the ancient Greeks and instead focuses on
strictly scientific explanations. The explora-
tion of space becomes a central tenet of efforts
to understand the universe.
6th centuryBCE:Greek citizenship is available
to free adult males but not to women, slaves, or
foreigners.Freemenwhodonotownlandare
also not offered full citizenship. Greek democ-
racies are run by landowning free males and so
are not true democracies, since other groups
are not represented in government.
Today:Greek citizenship is open to both gen-
ders, while new immigrants must meet certain
requirements in order to attain citizenship. If
an immigrant can prove Greek ancestry, he or
she can become a Greek citizen. Immigrants
without Greek ancestry must live in Greece for
ten years before they can apply for citizenship.Fragment 2