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 chiefgod 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 the Iliad. 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 Odyssey and after Homer, Olympus comes to mean also ‘‘the sky.’’ From this perspective it does not matter whether you call the gods Ouraniones (those of the sky) or Olympioi, and since Mount Olympus in any case ‘‘glints,’’ it is conventionally aigleieis. These gods of the bright element are then to be contrasted with the powers below, who are chthonioi (‘‘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 in Iliad 24.

The Olympians, then, have a home, associated in part with a mountain in northern Greece, but where did they actually come from? There are some clues but few answers. Zeus himself has the same name (allowing for the drifting apart of speech, first into dialects, then into separate languages) as the Germanic *Tiwaz (as in our word Tuesday) or the Sanskrit (Indian) Dyauli, or the Latin (Roman) Jupiter/Jove. So he goes back to before Greeks were Greeks, to an Indo-European god of the sky and of light thousands of years earlier. His son might possibly once have been Dionysus, in a language quite close to Greek (Dios-synos, ‘‘Zeus's son,'' with the s and n transposed?). Semele too, his mother, might just have been ‘‘she of the earth,'' i. e. an earth goddess, in a neighboring language (comparison has been made with zemlya, the Russian for ‘‘earth,'' though its - l - is secondary; but the - l - may be the adjectival ending, as in the Greek word chthamalos, ‘‘of the ground,'' which may be the corresponding word in Greek itself).

Demeter, originally Damater, looks as though she should be the earth or corn ‘‘mother,'' but the Da-is hard to manage. Poseidon, originally Poteidaon, appears to be the ‘‘husband of Da,'' and indeed his worship is associated with that of Demeter in Arcadia. Elsewhere in the Peloponnese, ‘‘Hera'' looks like a title, a feminine equivalent of ‘‘hero,'' perhaps in origin a term like ‘‘Potnia,'' ‘‘Powerful,'' used in historic times to invoke goddesses such as Hera, Aphrodite, Demeter, Athene and so on, but sufficient on its own to name the goddess, as it had been long ago in the Bronze Age Linear B script of the Greek palace society.

Unless Apollo's name comes from the apella, a term used in several states to denote a gathering of the male warrior citizens, we do not know where it comes from, but some of his functions - particularly those of plague and arrows - look like the functions of a Phoenician god Resheph. Some of his other associations, with prophecy, altered consciousness, and purification may belong in the same part of the world (West 1997:55).

Aphrodite, delightfully portrayed by Hesiod as emerging from the ‘‘foam'' (aphros) issuing from the severed sexual organs of Uranus (Sky) as they floated in the sea, may actually be the way Greeks got their mouths round some form of the Phoenician goddess Astarte, and her descent from Uranus explains her cult as Aphrodite Urania, in fact a version of Astarte's cult title ‘‘Queen of Heaven'' (West 1997:56-7). Her epithet ‘‘Kythereia'' may have nothing to do with her cult on the island of Kythera but in fact relate to a god of craftsmen, Kothar in Ugaritic (an early language of Phoenicia), explaining her strange marriage to Hephaestus (Odyssey 8.266-366), though her epithet Kypris (‘‘of Cyprus'') does indeed refer to that island where Phoenician and Greek culture met.

Others are much harder. Athaanaa, as Athene originally was, looks by its structure (a-thaa-naa) non-Greek. Artemis and Hermes it is hard to believe anything about - though it is strange that revered wayside heaps of stones were called hermaia.

Insofar as we can say anything about the origins ofthe gods, what this all reinforces is a sense of how Greek gods were gathered from different sources at different times and underwent periodic renewal in the light of new religious encounters. This produces the remarkably varied and yet unified amalgam displayed by Greeks gods. We will look at two of them here.

Apollo

Whether or not Apollo is, as is sometimes romantically said, ‘‘the most Greek of all the gods,’’ he is certainly a remarkable and ambitious construct. Depicted as a youth, with ‘‘uncut hair’’ {Iliad 20.39), he is like Achilles, who is keeping his hair long, ready to cut it, in a passage rite, for the river Spercheius. Apollo is thus a guardian of youth at the moment of transition to full adulthood. Yet he is also the god that kills Achilles, just as Artemis is responsible for the death by sacrifice of Iphigeneia {unless she saves her) and is also in some versions responsible for the death and transformation of Callisto. And just as we can find a figure Artemis Iphigeneia, so we can find Apollo identified with another dead youth as Apollo Hyacinthus {Farnell 1896-1909:4.125). In this environment Apollo seems to have a key role in the definition of society. This role is found even more strongly when his cult, as we have seen, turns out to be the central cult of the assembled Aetolians at Thermon, and the apella from which his name might derive. Similarly, the cult of Apollo Karneios is so fundamental to Dorian Greeks that Thucydides even calls the late summer month Karneios, in which the festival, the Karneia, was held, a ‘‘sacred month of the Dorians’’ {Thucydides 5.54.2; so too Pausanias 3.13.4; cf Nilsson 1906:118-20). Indeed, it was precisely because the Spartans were engaged in the Karneia that they could not come to help the Athenians against the Persians at Marathon {490 BC; Herodotus 6.106), or send Leonidas sufficient forces in time at Thermopylai {480 BC; Herodotus 7.206). The epithet Karneios was said to be derived from kraneia, a ‘‘cornel-tree,’’ but it is usually thought that Apollo has merged with himself an earlier god Karnos.

The gods are constantly depicted as sexual predators. However, in the case of gods sex always leads to children and the purpose of the myth is usually to inscribe an ancestry in myth. Pindar sings how Evadne lived by the river Alpheius:

Reared there, she first touched sweet Aphrodite at the hands of Apollo.

Olympian 6.35

Her mortal father is Aepytus, though really her father was the god Poseidon. He now proceeds to Delphi to ask the oracle {of Apollo!) who is the father of Evadne’s child. Meanwhile Apollo sends Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, and the Fates {Moirai) to ease the birth. Aepytus, returning, announces that the father is indeed Apollo and that the child ‘‘would be the most outstanding seer to human beings.’’ And so it turns out, for the child, Iamus, is the founder of a major clan of prophets, the Iamids, at Olympia. The divine intrudes in this way into the world of men: the mysteries of sex and the survival of birth-pangs reflect divine forces; the oracle provides answers to the problems mortal vision cannot on its own resolve; the god bestows, or originates, the gift of prophecy, a gift which reaches into the present day. Myth accounts for the presence of seers today, but it says something about the nature of prophecy too. Local myth builds on the existing portrait of the god in order to add to it.

Apollo may also be a god of plague, striking men down with his arrows - in Iliad 1 or in the Oedipus the King of Sophocles. This seems to be what he is when he is called on by the priest Chryses as ‘‘Smintheus’’ (mouse-god). If you are suffering from a plague, you need divine assistance and, though others provided oracles - notably Zeus at Dodona, or the hero Trophonius at Lebadeia (Boeotia) - Apollo is normally responsible for oracles and prophets. Apollo Pythios is the god of answers to questions (pyth-, to question), especially at his Delphic cult site with its priestess, the Pythia, and its legend of a snake called Python slain by Apollo. This is the mythical creature from which our word ‘‘python’’ comes, a word first applied to Indian boa constrictors in the 1830s. So you know, when you find a statue of Apollo Pythios at Athens or an altar at Olympia or a temple, regrettably in ruins, in northern Arcadia, that this Delphic Apollo is the Apollo we are talking about (Pausanias 1.19.1, 5.15.4, 8.15.5), and we can see that this variety of Apollo is specially influential. He possesses prophetesses, or causes them to go into a trance, as in the case of Sibyls and the Pythia, who is in effect the Delphic version of a Sibyl. Every Greek state and individual recognized the special power of the oracle at Delphi, though its historical performance was not always very satisfactory - as Croesus king of Lydia discovered to his cost when he was defeated by King Cyrus of Persia (Herodotus 1, esp. 91) and as the Athenians discovered when they sought advice during the invasion of Xerxes (Herodotus 7.142-4). The oracular function is a unique way of crossing the divide between man and god and makes Apollo very special amongst the gods. And so the final silence of his oracle was thought to denote the death of paganism itself, when the last pagan emperor, Julian (AD 361-3) sent his friend Oreibasius to consult it:

Tell the Emperor: the crafted hall has fallen to the ground;

Phoebus no longer has his hut, nor his prophetic laurel,

Nor the chattering spring - the chattering water too is quenched.

(John Damascene, The Passion of the Great Martyr Artemios 35 = Greek Anthology, appendix, Oracles, 122)

Delphi was a special holy place of Apollo, to which Greeks might turn as something between pilgrims and tourists, as for instance do the Chorus of Euripides’ Ion, another story of a major son of Apollo, the founder of the Ionian Greeks. But Delphi was not the only place specially sacred to Apollo: nothing, after all, was more special than the island of Delos, cult centre of the Ionians, where he and his sister Artemis were born to Leto ‘‘gripping the slender palm tree with her hands’’ (Theognis 6).

Oracles issue a sort of higher regulation, or sense of order or law, for men. The word for law in Greek is nomos, which happens also to be a word referring to melody, and to pasturing. By a strange sort of punning, whether it is historical accident or deeper reality, various quite different functions of Apollo are brought together under his epithet Nomios: god of the oracle and of regulation and good order, god of music and of culture - the companions of the Muses, and in places a god of flocks, as when in mythology he tended the flocks of King Admetus (Farnell 1896-1909:4.123). As we look more deeply into his music we will, however, recognize that his instrument, the lyre (which is not without its resemblance to his bow), represents in itself a demonstration of order. This leads also to the mystic science of the interrelation between music and mathematics, a special study of Pythagoras (ca. 540 BC) and his followers. Pythagoras was closely associated with Apollo - indeed he was his son, some said. But one can also take a deep breath and reach the insight of a Walter Otto:

The chaotic must take shape, the turbulent must be reduced to time and measure, opposites must be wedded in harmony. This music is thus the great educator, the sources and symbol of all order in the world and in the life of mankind. Apollo the musician is identical with the founder of ordinances, identical with him who knows what is right, what is necessary, what is to be. In this accuracy of the god’s aim Hcilderlin could still recognize the archer... (Otto 1954:77)

Artemis

Artemis is the sister of Apollo. This bond in mythic genealogy results from their association in cult. Here we can observe the special role of Delos, where both were born to Leto, as we have seen, and where both had a temple in the same precinct, as did Zeus and Hera at Olympia. This contrasts markedly with Delphi, which is exclusively Apollo’s site (except that Dionysus shares it during the winter months).

In the mythology, Artemis is a huntress, accompanied by the nymphs. Hunting is, however, in reality a man’s pursuit and a dangerous one, pursued in wild and uninhabited places. Myth tells of boar hunts, notably that of Meleager, and warriors in Homer and in the Mycenaean age could wear a boar’s tusk helmet. Odysseus had a wound from a boar hunt in which he had engaged at adolescence whilst under the tutelage of his maternal grandfather, and in historical times no Macedonian noble might become a man until he had slain his first boar. Why then is a virgin goddess hunting in the wilds with nubile (but untouchable) teenage goddesses? And why is it that the nubile maiden Iphigeneia must be sacrificed to her at Aulis, or swapped for a deer, and why is it that Callisto in Arcadia must be turned into a bear? The myths bring together themes of importance for the dynamics of a successful society. It is only through confrontation with the wild, if usually in myth rather than cult, and through a dangerous but protected transition, where their normal roles are inverted, that girls can become tamed in subjection to men through the institution of marriage. A similar logic pervades the mythology of the Amazons, where the transitional independence of young women is marked even more strongly by their impossible characterization as warriors. Artemis, then, is the goddess of the transition, a transition in which men have no part - as is shown by the myth of Actaeon, torn apart by his own hounds as a result of witnessing Artemis and the nymphs, a forbidden mystery. She completes this transition as Artemis Locheia, to whom women may appeal and childbirth and in whose shrine they may gratefully hang up clothing as a thank-offering, their transition to womanhood complete.

Artemis is accordingly the goddess at Brauron, a moist, marshy place at the coastal fringes of Attica where Athenian girls’ rites are practiced. The place itself has a ‘‘marginal’’ feel, an almost eerie combination of fertility and remoteness. At Patrae too, the priestess of the major cult of Artemis Triclaria was a girl, who retained that priesthood until she married (Pausanias 7.19). Here there were grim tales that the most attractive boy and girl had been sacrificed to Artemis annually, owing to an adolescent pair, Melanippus and Comaetho, prematurely having had sex in the shrine. At Halae in Attica the cult of Artemis Tauropolos saw a mock-human sacrifice every year, associated with how - at least in Euripides’ Iphigeneia amongst the Tauri - Orestes had almost been sacrificed by Artemis’ priestess, his sister Iphigeneia. Everywhere we see the goddess angered, often in the wild or in connection with an animal (a deer or a bear), and often demanding human sacrifices that somehow never seem actually to have happened at any point where there is historical evidence. What matters is the image and the ideology, in which the god consists, winding in and out of Greek mythology and crossing cult sites, some active (Brauron), some lost in the mists of time (Aulis).

Related to these phenomena are the cults we find at the mouth of the Alpheius, a river whose plan to take her virginity had been foiled by a girls’ ritual in which Artemis and the nymphs all smeared their faces with mud during an all-night festival. Here the river flows grandly on from Olympia and reaches the final stages of its path to the sea:

At its mouth, around 80 stades [12.5 km] from Olympia, is the grove of Artemis Alpheionia or Alpheiousa [i. e., Artemis of the Alpheius] - it is said both ways. There is a grand festival [panlgyris] to this goddess at Olympia annually, just as there is to Elaphia [Artemis of Deer] and Daphnia [Artemis of Laurel]. The whole land is full of Artemisia [i. e., Artemisions, shrines of Artemis], Aphrodisia, and Nymphaia - amidst groves that are for the most part full of flowers due to the abundance of water. And there are many Hermaia on the roads and Poseidia on the headlands. And in the shrine of [Artemis] Alpheionia there are paintings by Cleanthes and Aregon - by the former a Capture of Troy and a Birth of Athene, by the latter an Artemis Borne Aloft on a Griffin. (Strabo C343)

I have quoted this passage, remarkably lyrical for the geographer Strabo (64 BC-ca. AD 25), at some length for the wonderful sense that it gives of the place of the gods in the imagination, lives, and environment of the Greeks, a place that cannot be conjured up by statements that Artemis is goddess of the hunt.

Less lyrical, however, is the cult of Artemis Laphria (perhaps, the ‘‘Devouring’’) at Patrae. There we find a stupendous procession culminating in the arrival of a maiden priestess riding in a float drawn by deer! The altar, of tinder-dry wood, has already been prepared. And the next day:

They throw, living, onto the altar edible birds and likewise all the victims, and in addition wild boars and deer and gazelles. Some even bring the cubs of wolves and of bears, others full-grown beasts. And they place upon the altar the fruit of cultivated trees. Then they light the wood. At this point I have even seen, say, a bear or some other animal, either forced outwards by the first onrush of the fire, or even escaping through brute strength. Those who threw them on bring them back again to the fire. And they recount that no one has ever been injured by the animals. (Pausanias 7.18.12-13)

Out beyond this, Artemis may turn into a major goddess of the city, as in effect she is in Patrae and in Aetolian Calydon, the scene of Meleager’s boar hunt and the origin of the cult of Artemis Laphria. Her domination of a city is, however, more frequent in Asia Minor, and this is what is represented by the cult at Ephesus (above). This, then, is an area phenomenon.