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7
The “Plantheon” of Greek Mythology
Thus far, we have seen that it was an agricultural innovation in Mesopotamia— the
artificial pollination of female date palms— that provided the first demonstration that at
least one kind of tree required pollen for fruit production, although there is no evidence
that this finding was ever generalized to other plants. Rather, in the Near East, the produc-
tivity of date palms became a metaphor for human and agricultural fertility, as portrayed
in religious iconography as well as in myths and poetry invoking the goddess Inanna. In
Egypt, the goddesses Hathor, Nut, and Isis were strongly identified with fruit trees and were
often depicted providing nourishment to the deceased in the afterlife. In the Aegean, sacred
trees, poppies, saffron crocuses, and other plants often associated with goddesses acquired
symbolic significance in rituals preceded over by priestesses. As mentioned earlier, there
are intriguing parallels between the planting cycle of the saffron crocus and the Demeter/
Kore myth of Greece. Such examples indicate that, prior to the emergence of a competing
scientific paradigm, agricultural knowledge was transformed into myth and integrated into
a religious worldview that associated agricultural abundance with women and goddesses.
We now turn to the Greeks, the first people of antiquity to develop cosmologies based
on principles of causation to explain the substance and behavior of the material universe.
However, the transition from myth- based to logic- based belief systems was never complete,
nor did it occur linearly. Contingency played an important role. The sudden collapse of the
Mycenaean palace societies at the end of the Bronze Age allowed previously marginalized,
smaller, and more egalitarian societies to proliferate, and the subsequent “Dark Age” that
engulfed Greece after the twelfth century bce can be thought of as a latency period during
which the Greeks were reinventing themselves.
The primary form of government during this period was rule by chieftains called basileis
(si n g u l a r, basileus)— the real life models for the Homeric “kings” described in the Iliad and