CHAPTER TWO
Olympian Gods,
Olympian Pantheon
Ken Dowden
The Nature of Gods
Amongst the many creations of Greek culture, the Olympian gods have a particular
interest. As with anything in the ancient world, we have various types of information
about them. Some comes from archaeology, some from texts, some concerns history,
some concerns thought. But whereas the great sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi was,
and is, real, and we discover aboutthe samesanctuary from our various sources of
information, it is different with the individual gods. The ancient gods are not real – at
least, that is the general supposition – and what our evidence leads us to is pictures
that peoples created in their minds and shared in their imaginations. The gods are in
fact the most powerful work of art created by the Greeks. And they live in different,
but intersecting, dimensions, which combine to create the illusion of a single
personality.
The primary dimension is that of cult (religious practice). Greeks prayed, sacrificed,
poured libations, held festivals, demarcated places which would be precincts, built
altars and temples, gave gifts and built ‘‘treasuries’’ to hold them all. In doing all this
they represented themselves as performing acts to, for, or at least with an audience
of, gods. It is far from unusual to have many gods (‘‘polytheism’’) or to think of
them somehow as persons. But by the standards of other nations, Greek gods were
exceptionally anthropomorphic – they were ‘‘shaped like people.’’ The focus of Greek
worship tended not to be mighty stones or trees (‘‘aniconic,’’ non-representational,
objects of worship), though they admired those too, but stone or wood shaped into
statues of personal gods. Each god was an individual person and each was thought of
as having their particular identity.
Different Greek cities orethne ̄(peoples who were not yet urbanized) worshiped
broadly similar gods to each other. But the system was far from uniform and the Zeus
imagined in one place might be rather different from the Zeus imagined in another.