A pantheon (‘‘all-gods’’) is the set of gods that any individual culture possesses, and because they are personal gods they will tend to form a family. In modern treatments these tend to be formalized as the twelve Olympian gods: Zeus and Hera, Poseidon and Demeter, Apollo and Artemis, Ares and Aphrodite, Hermes and Athene, Hephaestus and Hestia. Which unfortunately leaves out Dionysus - so sometimes Hestia is relegated. Unfortunately again, this does not take account of Heracles, who becomes an Olympian god (Herodotus 2.44), joining his new wife Hebe (‘‘Youthfulness’’) on Olympus - so she was an Olympian too. It also leaves out deities such as the Muses and Graces who are assuredly Olympian goddesses:
Mousai Olympiades, kourai Dios aigiochoio ‘‘Olympian Muses, daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus’’
Hesiod Theogony 52
It is therefore not a straightforward matter of fact that there were twelve Olympian gods. The Greek gods of cult and of mythology were quite numerous and various. Nonetheless, the attempt to create a twelve-strong pantheon began as early as the sixth century BC at both Olympia and Athens.
First, Olympia. The ‘‘Homeric’’ Hymn to Hermes (500 BC, plus or minus) sets Hermes on the banks of the river Alpheius, evidently at Olympia, where he divides a sacrifice into twelve portions for the gods (line 128; cf. Cassola 1975:174). And in an ode to be sung at Olympia Pindar recalls Heracles sacrificing by the Alpheius to the ‘‘Twelve Lord Gods’’ (Olympian 10.49) as he founded the cult site of Olympia. Herodorus of Heracleia, an author of around 400 BC, gave more detail:
When he [Heracles] came to Elis, he founded the shrine at Olympia of Zeus Olympios and named the place Olympia after the god. He sacrificed to him there and to the other gods, setting up altars, six in number, shared by the twelve gods: first the altar of Zeus Olympios, whom he had share with Poseidon; second of Hera and Athene; third of Hermes and Apollo; fourth of the Graces and Dionysus; fifth of Artemis and Alpheius; sixth of Cronus and Rhea. (Herodorus of Heracleia, FGrH 31 F34a)
This is an influential story, as can be seen from its (brief) incorporation into Apollo-dorus’ Library of Mythology (2.7.2). Archaeology has not revealed these altars, but there is no reason not to believe in them. This gives us yet another selection of twelve, including a couple of gods from the earlier generation (Cronus and Rhea). Whether 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, the Laws (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 genealogical charts of gods and heroes turns raw data into satisfying order. From the particular Theogony of 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,
Very close to Akkadian mythology, ‘‘Ocean and mother Tethys’’ are the ‘‘begetting of the gods’’ (Iliad 14.201).
This way the poets establish an agreed sense of who matters amongst the gods and where they fit in the notional history and family tree of heaven. This can be seen from Homer, who deals with a particular range of Olympians, as is shown in table 2.1, giving the number of mentions of each. Some of the priorities are of course occasioned by the story or other accidents, but the picture painted is not so far from a recognizable pantheon of twelve. And when the gods come out to fight each other (Iliad 20.67-74), they are of course drawn up in pairs: Poseidon and Apollo, Enyalios (Ares) and Athene, Hera and Artemis, Leto and Hermes, Hephaestus and the river Xanthos. This makes a total of ten, again not so far from a regular later pantheon (though Xanthos is inventive and Leto surprising). And sculptors for their part are only poets in stone, when they depict Olympians in a group, as for instance on the east frieze of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi with its neatly ordered and subtly varied enthroned gods (before 525 BC). This may not be twelve gods two by two, but it is not far from it.
So, by the time we reach the classical age there is a sense of a pantheon of twelve, even if details might vary. And some order has been brought to the chaos that is Greek religion, at least for the purposes of drama, narrative, and the world of ideas.
World History
