new regime: before them there had been the Titans, and at the beginning there was
either Ocean (as in Homer) or Chaos (‘‘the Gap’’) – both of them probably Near
Eastern imports. You read Hesiod’sTheogonyfor this back story of the gods, for a
sense of where the present order of gods came from. And he may tell you in theWorks
and Daysthat we live in very fallen times, in the Age of Iron, but most Greeks, whilst
admitting, as all traditional societies do, that values were enshrined in their elders and
ancestors, thought mainly about the present, and it was in the present that Zeus and
the Olympians ruled.
Simple books and web pages will list you the Olympians’ functions. Zeus is the king
of the gods and the god of the sky. Hera is the goddess of marriage. Ares is the god of
war. Poseidon is the god of the sea, and earthquakes. Demeter is the goddess of corn
and fertility. Aphrodite is the goddess of sex. Artemis is the goddess of the hunt.
Dionysus is the god of wine and madness. Apollo is the god of law and of order, music
and literature, divination and oracles (but emphatically not god of the sun). Hestia is
the goddess of the hearth. Hermes is the messenger god, and god of travelers and
traders. Hephaestus is the god of smiths and in a sense of fire.
These are tidy roles for our principal gods and provide a way of understanding their
community. Delightful use can be made of such roles by poets, as when theIliad’s
Aphrodite is wounded for being so foolish as to partake in battle (5.428), and its
Ares, because he personifies the evil of war, is loathed by other characters. Apollo can
decline to take part in a battle because he has a superior mentality and is more acutely
conscious of the special status of god relative to man (Iliad21.461–7).
And this is a tradition which continues, especially in lighter vein, to be exploited
throughout antiquity and on into the medieval and modern European tradition.
A particular source for the lighter approach is Ovid’s wickedly ingenious Roman
epic, theMetamorphoses(complete by AD 8), a work which was to become, as is
sometimes said, the ‘‘bible’’ of European painting. Here Jupiter (Zeus) smites the
wicked Lycaon, king of Arcadia, who tried to feed him human flesh, and turns him
into a wolf. Apollo seeks to rape the nymph Daphne, but she can only turn into a
laurel and be appropriated by him as his special tree. Jupiter falls in love with Io, but
regrettably is obliged to transform her into a cow owing to the jealousy of his wife
Juno (Hera). And he fares no better with Callisto, who is converted into a bear by
Diana (Artemis) owing to her pregnancy. And then there are Semele and Danae ̈: Semele
tricked by Juno into making the fatal request that Jupiter should appear to her in his real
form, the lightning; Danae ̈locked in a tower only to be impregnated by Jupiter in the
form of golden rain. These stories from the first few books of Ovid’sMetamorphoses
have entranced us all and form that central core of what mythology means to us. But
they are of course the tip of an iceberg and are themselves culturally transformed from
local stories told for a reason into the rich symphony of classical culture.
From there this view continues strongly as Christianity supersedes the religious
dimension of the pagan gods – thus what remains for the pagan gods is principally the
decorative dimension, myth and its representation. So in European culture, particu-
larly painting and opera, the gods are strongly functional and conventional. As a
result, given that most of us come to Greek religion via Greek mythology, our
perceptions are shaped by this view and almost all the basic books and web pages
peddle this colorful and historically influential, if not very religious, view of ancient
gods.
46 Ken Dowden