Th e 12 Olympian gods were honored as a distinct group
in Greek religion and fi gure prominently in Greek litera-
ture. Th e original children of Kronos and Rhea were Zeus,
Poseidon, and Hades and their sisters Hera, Demeter, and
Hestia. Th e three brothers cast lots to see which part of the
world each would control: Zeus receives the sky, Poseidon
the sea, and Hades the underworld, where he rules over the
dead. Hera takes charge of marriage, Demeter of agricul-
ture, and Hestia of the hearth, the life of individual homes.
Aphrodite, the goddess of love and desire, comes into ex-
istence from the foam generated when Uranus’s castrated
genitals fell into the sea. Th e other Olympians are the off -
spring of Zeus. Zeus fathers the twins Apollo and Artemis
(the sun and the moon) with the Titan Leto. Zeus engenders
a son by Metis (“thought”), who is prophesied to supplant
him just as Zeus did his own father. So Zeus swallows up
the pregnant mother and, in due course, gives birth himself
to the child, miraculously changed in gender: Athena, the
mistress of warfare, who becomes his most powerful and
most loyal ally.
Zeus marries his sister Hera and fathers Hephaestus, the
craft sman of the gods, and Ares, the god of battle. Hermes
is another son of Zeus and his messenger in charge of con-
veying the dead to the underworld and of everything in hu-
man life that concerns mediation (such as speech) as well as
of merchants and thieves (who each transfer goods from one
to another). Finally, Dionysus usually is considered an Olym-
pian (though he exceeds the number 12, he is counted in al-
ternation with Hestia). He is the god of wine and the off spring
of Zeus and the mortal woman Semele. When her body is de-
stroyed on beholding Zeus’s true divine form (jealous Hera
tricks her into asking for this), Zeus carries Dionysus in his
thigh and gives birth to his son.
COSMOLOGY
Th e Homeric poems imagined the earth as a fl at disc like a
warrior’s shield, because if one stands in an open place and
surveys the horizon in all directions, it appears to be a cir-
cle. Delphi, the sacred center of Greece, was thought to be at
the center of this circle. Th e sky appears to be a solid dome
arching over this disc, making it also easy to imagine a corre-
sponding hemisphere under the earth, the underworld. Th is
worldview is inherent in all Greek myth and probably goes
back to the earliest times.
In the sixth century b.c.e. the fi rst philosophers—called
the “pre-Socratics” because they wrote before the great fl ow-
ering of Greek philosophy with Socrates (ca. 470–399 b.c.e)
and his successors—began to question the mythic concep-
tion of the world. Th eir questions led to the new idea that
the nature of the world could be investigated through rea-
son rather than through the creation of myth. Philosophers
did not deny the presence of divinity in the world—they af-
fi rmed it—but it was a divinity deduced from the observation
of the world rather than the traditional anthropomorphic
gods of Homer. Philosophical investigations eventually led
to a geocentric model of the solar system, in which the earth
was at the center and orbited by the sun, moon, and planets.
Some speculations by philosophers, however, anticipated
important discoveries of modern science: Aristarchus (ca.
310–ca. 220 b.c.e.) suggested a heliocentric solar system
(with the sun orbited by the planets, including the earth),
and Democritus (ca. 460–ca. 370 b.c.e.) posited the atomic
nature of matter—although neither idea gained wide accep-
tance in antiquity. Th e achievement of philosophy was to
replace tradition with reason as a way of knowing the truth,
if only for a small elite group.
At the same time, the abstraction of their conceptions
about the heavenly bodies (as opposed to the older anthro-
pomorphic gods) led Greeks to invent the pseudoscience of
astrology (based on older Mesopotamian ideas). Its essential
idea is that the stars and planets infl uence events on earth
and that astronomical calculation can therefore predict peo-
ple’s personalities and future events. Th e view became very
widespread, though it was countered to an extent both by
traditional philosophical ideas about the freedom of the indi-
vidual and by skepticism that such detailed knowledge of the
future was possible.THE LATE CLASSICAL AND HELLENISTIC PERIODS
Alexander the Great of Macedon (356–323 b.c.e.) conquered
fi rst Greece and then the whole of the Persian Empire from
Egypt to India and central Asia. Th is brought Greek culture
into an entirely new world, exposing Greeks to new infl u-
ences as they colonized this vast area. Religion underwent
many changes. One result of this extraordinary achievement
was that Alexander became worshipped as a god in his own
lifetime. Th e spirits of the exceptional men of past ages had
always been worshipped as heroes, but Alexander demanded
and received this worship for himself (a legend circulated that
Alexander was actually the son of Zeus, who had mated with
his mother in the form of a serpent). Th ereaft er, during the
Hellenistic Period (323–31 b.c.e.), his successors in the various
Greek kingdoms carved out of Alexander’s empire were rou-
tinely worshipped as saviors and protectors by their subjects.
Another feature of Hellenistic religion was the re-cre-
ation of native religions as Greek mystery cults. Th e worship
of the goddess Isis in Egypt was only the most prominent of
many foreign religions that were given a Greek interpreta-
tion and exported to cities throughout the Greek and later
the Roman world. Greek philosophers like Pythagoras and
Plato interpreted the belief that the dead were reborn like new
plants from harvested seed to mean that they were reincar-
nated into new life determined by the moral judgments of the
gods. Th ese phenomena helped pave the way for Christianity,
which eventually replaced Greek religion and incorporated
many of its features. Th e Greek world was gradually con-
quered by Rome, and the Roman emperor Constantine an-
nounced toleration of Christianity within the empire in the
Edict of Milan (313 c.e.). Th e emperor Justinian fi nally out-
lawed traditional Greek and Roman religion in 529 c.e.religion and cosmology: Greece 857