or not the cult at Olympia was where the idea of twelve gods took fixed form, it was
certainly in at the beginning.
This pairing and gathering of the gods, and indeed their ‘‘twelveness’’ (with
Dionysus not Hestia) can be seen at Athens on the east frieze of the Parthenon
(ca. 440/435 BC) and it has a long history at Athens too, one which has in the end
provided our idea of which gods constitute the twelve. Thucydides (6.54.6–7) tells us
that Pisistratus the Younger founded an altar of the twelve gods in the agora as
early as 522/1 BC. And clearly this became an idea of the sort of thing that was done
early in any Greek town – Deucalion, the Greek Noah, was supposed to have
established one in Thessaly (Hellanikos,FGrH4 fr. 6a–b; cf. Long 1987:153). The
Athenian altar was so focal that distances to other places were measured from it. And
by the time of Plato the idea of the twelve gods was so well established that in his last
great work, theLaws(ca. 350 BC), he prescribes that there will be twelve festivals to
the twelve gods, one per month (800b–c). It is interesting that Herodotus had traced
the twelve gods back to a (non-existent) set of twelve Egyptian month-gods (2.4.1,
2.82.1). This sort of orientalizing notion may have contributed to Plato’s view.
We can see, then, how a notion of the twelve gods took final shape in Greek culture
as it assumed its definitive, classical, form. In the same way, in other cultures that had
been influential on the development of Greek civilization in the centuries before the
classical period, the cultures of the Near East and of Asia Minor, poets and priests had
formed ideas of which particular gods were important in their society as a whole and
not just in this or that town, though admittedly without arriving at a set of twelve
(a Hittite example of twelve minor gods – Long 1987:144 – is engaging but
irrelevant). The Greeks certainly did not have a priestly caste, but they made up for
this with their poets, who must in the period ca. 1200–600 BC have constructed a
religion that all Greek audiences anywhere could sign up to at their religious festivals
or other celebrations. This was a market necessity and was probably done as much
instinctively as deliberately.
Herodotus (2.51–3) captures something of this with his story from the oracular
site of Dodona about the Pelasgians, a pre-people whose only function is to be the
raw material that existed in Greece before the Greeks. The Pelasgians, the story goes,
had no names for their gods and in fact learnt them from the Egyptians. Then the
Greeks got these names from the Pelasgians and only later learnt which god had
begotten which other god and what the functions of each god were, thanks to the
poems of Hesiod and Homer. This story is effectively a myth about things that matter
in religion, depicting them as only gradually emerging. However, it recognizes and
highlights the key role of the poets in systematizing the gods, and the influence of
other cultures, longer established than that of the Greeks.
So, by say the seventh century BC, poets had put together genealogies (family
trees) of the gods, which are called ‘‘theogonies’’ (accounts of which god begat
which), and of heroes, who formed that middle ground between god and man. In
this way, mythology is organized, just as in schools today the construction of genea-
logical charts of gods and heroes turns raw data into satisfying order. From the
particularTheogonyof Hesiod we learn how in the beginning there was ‘‘Chaos and
Erebos and black Night’’ (123; cf. Genesis 1) and later (454–7) how Cronus bore the
principal Olympian gods Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Other
poets were doing theogonies too – Homer, for instance, knows of a version, where,
44 Ken Dowden