3 RELIGION AND SOCIAL LIFE
Religion
The Olympians
The origin of Greek mythology and beliefs about the gods must go way back in time
but, from the point of view of a fifth-century Greek like Herodotus, Homer and Hesiod
were effectively the founding fathers of the literary record. As Herodotus puts it in his
Histories:
But it was only – if I may so put it – yesterday that the Greeks came to know of the
origin and form of the various gods, and whether or not all of them had always
existed; for Homer and Hesiod, the poets who composed our theogonies and
described the gods for us, giving them all their appropriate titles, offices, and
powers, lived, I believe, not more than four hundred years ago.
(2, 53)The polytheism apparent in the Homeric poems lasted throughout Greece essentially
until well into the Christian era. Despite any tendency on the part of philosophers and
thinkers like Plato and Aristotle to move to monotheism, the old gods continued
to rule.
The principal deities that dominated the Greek pantheon are twelve in number,
with Zeus, at their head; the rest are made up of his siblings and his children. They
are: Aphrodite, Apollo, Ares, Artemis, Athena, Demeter, Dionysus, Hephaestos, Hera,
Hermes, Poseidon and Zeus himself. Of these, only Dionysus is not prominent in
Homer. Later Greeks believed that his cult had been imported from the east; there
are stories that he was born on Mt. Nysa in Asia Minor and rode in a chariot drawn
by tigers, which certainly makes him one of the most exotic of the Olympians. His
worship by Maenads and the ecstatic rites associated with his cult are the subject of