The Diversity and Origins of the Gods
The different functions of the gods, though suggestively combined, are largely the
product of historical accident, and so are the gods themselves, as emerges when we
consider the principal god of the various Greek cities. Why is Zeus not worshiped as
the chief god in all Greek cities? It is Athene that is the principal god for the Athenians,
Zeus for the city-less inhabitants of southern Arcadia, and Apollo for the rather tribal
Aetolians at their central religious site of Thermon. Hera is met as the city goddess in
some parts of the Peloponnese and its colonies (e.g. Samos) but not elsewhere: the
goddess looks as though she is geographically restricted – did she originally belong to
the previous settlers of the Peloponnese, or to the particular Greek tribes that settled
in the Peloponnese? Artemis is the principal divinity of Ephesus (she is Diana in Latin)
but the multiple breasts with which she is depicted and the fierce devotion she attracts
point to her continuing an earlier tradition of the region.
So, Greek religion as we see it in the classical and later ages is an inherited and
updated amalgam of all sorts of valued practices and beliefs. Pagans are great hoarders
of traditions, theirs and the traditions of others that they encounter and think
authoritative or powerful – particularly if it is necessary for confidence in their control
of a new environment. And the application of a ‘‘Greek’’ god-name is always an
approximate business, as we can see from the cult of Aphrodite at Locri as the goddess
of death.
Gods move as populations move. Zeus Olympios is Zeus from Mount Olympus,
king of the Olympian gods in their Olympian home. Olympus is the name of several
mountains in Greece, but also of one in particular, on the borders of Thessaly and
Macedonia, one of the early homelands of mythologizing Greeks, who like the
founders of cities in the USA brought familiar place names with them. From its
shape, the word Olympus does not, however, look like a word the Greeks brought
with them to Thessaly in the first place. Indeed, they seem uncertain at times whether
it is the name of that mountain or in fact a word for the sky. Homer does his best to
keep them separate in theIliad. At 15.192, in the division of sky, sea, and ‘‘misty
gloom’’ between Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, it is said that ‘‘the earth and long
Olympus are common’’ to all three. This is evidently the mountain range, the
particular earth that is special to the gods. And at 5.748–56 the Horai (Seasons)
are the gatekeepers that open the gates for Hera to enter Olympus from the sky and
park her horses there in order to talk to Zeus, who is sitting comfortably on the
highest, but revealingly most distant, peak. Elsewhere, in the Odysseyand after
Homer, Olympus comes to mean also ‘‘the sky.’’ From this perspective it does not
matter whether you call the gods Ouranio ̄nes (those of the sky) or Olympioi, and
since Mount Olympus in any case ‘‘glints,’’ it is conventionallyaigle ̄eis. These gods of
the bright element are then to be contrasted with the powers below, who arechthonioi
(‘‘chthonic’’), meaning that their power resides in the earth and concerns the dead
buried beneath it and the negotiation of the boundaries of death and life. This is not a
cut-and-dried distinction: the Olympian Hades is king of the underworld, and
Hermes communicates with the world of the dead and may be invoked in ‘‘black’’
magic – no surprise that Priam encounters him, traveling by night across the river to
the deathly camp of Achilles inIliad24.
Olympian Gods, Olympian Pantheon 47