Theology

There was a vigorous debate throughout antiquity on the nature and role of the gods (the absence of holy scripture and a priestly caste to regulate religious belief no doubt facilitated such debate). Despite their many differences of purpose and genre, no philosopher or tragedian could avoid theologia (‘‘[giving] an account of the gods’’). As one scholar has observed of the Presocratics, ‘‘Few words occur more frequently in their fragments than the term god’ (Vlastos 1995, 3). Not surprisingly, given their attempts to describe the universe as an ordered and regular system, the Presocratics tended to depersonalize the gods and ascribe their traditional powers to nature, which they took to be both perceptible and rational. Such a view conflicted strongly with tragedy, where the gods of myth are presented as behaving in ways that defy human reason and comprehension.

The very origin of belief in the gods became an issue of debate for both the philosophers and the dramatists. In a fragment of a satyr-play by the Athenian Critias, an older cousin of Plato, a character claims that the gods are fictions, and that a clever man invented fear of the gods in order to curb human lawlessness (fr. 19). This fragment, which many scholars attribute to Euripides rather than Critias (see Pechstein 1999, 553-56), overlaps with Democritus’ idea that the gods are a product of primitive man’s fear of physical phenomena such as thunder, earthquakes, and eclipses (DK A75). The chorus of Euripides’ Electra points to the role of fear in maintaining religious belief when they assert that ‘‘fearful stories benefit mortals by encouraging them to worship the gods’’ (743-44), while Polymestor in Hecuba claims that the gods throw mortals into confusion so that they will worship them ‘‘in ignorance’’ (956-60). A more positive, but equally skeptical, theory of the origins of established religion was propounded by Prodicus, who saw ‘‘a progressive evolution of deification’’ (Henrichs 1975, 112), which transformed ‘‘crops and everything else which is useful for life’’ into recipients of worship and cult (Papyrus Herculanensis 1428 fr. 19.12-19; cf. DK 5). Tiresias alludes to this conception of divinity in Bacchae, when he promotes the benefits of Demeter and Dionysus, givers of grain and wine (274-85).

The philosophers objected in various ways to the anthropomorphic gods of myth. The tragedians were aware of these ideas and incorporated them into their work. Xenophanes criticized Homer and Hesiod for presenting the gods as thieves, adulterers, and deceivers (DK 11; cf. Aeschylus fr. 350), and his ethical objections had a great influence on subsequent Greek thought. Euripides’ Heracles asserts that he does not believe in gods who commit adultery or who bind or rule over each other: ‘‘a god, if he is truly a god, lacks nothing. These are the miserable tales of poets'' (Heracles 1341-46). The hero’s statement is clearly not true within the world of the play (Hera, after all, has destroyed Heracles’ life because of Zeus’ adultery; compare Hecuba’s denial that the Judgment of Paris ever took place, Trojan Women 971-82), yet it has a dramatically explosive effect, as the audience is provoked to ask not only how far divine and human approaches to justice coincide, but also whether such deities deserve human worship at all. The philosophers’ purer conception of divinity (cf. Xenophanes, DK 23-24, 26, A32; Heraclitus, DK 5, 32, 78; Empedocles, DK 134) not only stripped away the anthropomorphic failings of the gods, but also insisted that they be perfect moral exemplars for mankind (cf. Pendrick 2002, 25759). As Ion says to Apollo, ‘‘Since you have power, pursue goodness!’’ (Euripides, Ion 439-40), while a character in one of Euripides’ lost plays puts it most concisely: ‘‘if the gods do anything wicked, they are not gods’’ (Bellerophon fr. 292.7; cf. Iphigenia among the Taurians 380-91, Heracles 1307-8).

Both philosophers and tragedians reflect on the unknowability of the divine (cf. Euripides, Trojan Women 884-88, Helen 711-15). For Heraclitus a god cannot be straightforwardly known: ‘‘The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals but gives a sign’’ (DK93). Human inability to decipher oracles and prophecies generates much dramatic irony, especially in Sophocles (Oedipus the King 94653). According to Xenophanes, no mortal knows the truth about the gods, but has only opinion (DK 34). Protagoras took such doubt to its logical conclusion and declared himself an agnostic about the very existence of the gods: ‘‘There are many obstacles to such knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life’’ (DK 4). The chorus of Euripides’ Helen reacts to the undeserved suffering of the heroine, who is Zeus’ daughter, by declaring, ‘‘I do not know what certain, what true word about the gods I can find among mortals’’ (1148-50). Yet although the chorus fastens on the baffling inscrutability of the gods, the audience is aware of the wider divine frame, the battle between Hera and Aphrodite to preserve their own reputations. Like other figures in tragedy, Helen is the (innocent) victim of a struggle between competing divinities. This notion of clashing divine personalities, basic to archaic and classical Greek thought, ensured that no simple and reassuring scheme of divine justice was possible. Humans might link the gods to the enforcement of universal standards of right and wrong (cf. Euripides, Hecuba 799-805), but Greek religious thought recognized that divine ‘‘justice’’ tolerated the suffering of the innocent and good (see, for example, Solon 13.31-32 West; Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes 602-8).