The Artemis that the Greeks sensed in a vibrantly fertile land, standing also in a dangerous relationship to girls and their transition into matronhood, dominating the wild, and even demanding a selective holocaust of all things living, especially wild things, is the ‘‘same’’ Artemis that Theseus and his son Hippolytus meet in the epilogue of Euripides’ play Hippolytus (lines 1283-1443). Though dramas are very much concerned with the inscrutable and worrying actions of the Olympian gods, the gods themselves are largely banished from the tragic stage: generally they may only appear, as here, at beginning or end, in prologue or epilogue - outside the action of the play. These are moments set in that special register where what happens on the stage stands above or beyond the present plot. In a startling moment, the Chorus has been singing to Aphrodite who is not present, but it is Artemis that appears (1283) and, continuing the lyric momentum by chanting in anapaests, announces herself, then in prose upbraids Theseus for his mortal ignorance and consoles Hippolytus as he is carried in to die. Artemis is almost certainly up high - on the palace roof (the roof of the skene:, the stage building), or even on the meichane:, that stage crane on which the ‘‘god from the machine’’ (deus ex machina) typically appeared (cf. Barrett 1964:395-6). The point is that the Olympian god belongs in his or her own element, the ether, and remains separated from man even in a moment of epiphany like this. It was even worth inventing a stage machine to bring this about. By convention such final moments bring out an explanation of events which is only known to the gods themselves, or to their human equivalents - the tragedians or narrators that manage a plot with the omniscience of its creator.
However unsatisfactory Artemis’ explanation in this particular play - and the ‘‘justice’’ of the gods always surpasses or disappoints human expectation in tragedians, above all Euripides - we must not miss its very special nature. Theseus is immediately overwhelmed by the divine presence and can only react with ‘‘alas!’’ (1313) and ‘‘mistress, I am destroyed!’’ (1325). But Hippolytus, in a particular sort of neardeath experience, senses the divine fragrance (1392) and the presence of the goddess. In what seems a cold moment to modern audiences, perhaps wrongly, her exceptional purity as an Olympian divinity prevents her from witnessing his death (1437), the very same purity which is required in any ritual in order to communicate with these heavenly beings. Humans frequently turn to oracles for advice on such purity - religious dirt, miasma, must be avoided or undergo religious cleaning, katharsis.
Even in the epic, gods are rarely seen for what they are. Athene, who often helps Odysseus, has to reveal herself explicitly to him, only to receive this reaction:
It is hard, goddess, for a mortal who meets you to recognize you, even if he is very knowledgeable: you take on every shape.
(Homer, Odyssey 13.312-13)
And elsewhere in the Odyssey (17.485-7) we hear about gods walking the earth in disguise to check up on the administration of human law and order. What matters for us here is that gods have a culture of disguise and do not appear in their true form, whatever that true form might be - Semele discovered to her cost that the true form of Zeus was the thunderbolt. Thus the divine is less observed than sensed, as for instance Hippolytus does by its fragrance. If Odysseus had been more alert he would have sensed that the arrival of Nausicaa to help him towards the court of Alcinous was the result of Athene’s intervention, by disguising herself as a companion of Nausi-caa’s. He would also have realized that his prayer to Athene (6.324-7), at a shrine of hers that conveniently appears, was promptly answered by a strange mist protecting him and the appearance of a young maiden carrying a pitcher to give him directions. This is how the Olympians actually work.
So when tragedians and others speculate about the actions of particular gods, or of ‘‘the god’’ - which often means Zeus - they are not doing something mysteriously philosophical or different from the popular religion. The mythology, the ‘‘philosophy,’’ and the religion all form part of the same picture. At a temple the Greek sacrificer does not pray facing the cult-statue; rather, he turns his back on the mythic, anthropomorphic, god at this moment. Formal public prayer to the major gods was typically conducted at an altar, looking upwards, hands raised to the sky. What did they imagine was there? Perhaps a sort of notional Mount Olympus, that earth of the gods, perhaps something of the Aeschylean god, some sense of the forces that dominated the world they lived in and that were somehow above it but watching.
But they watch with eyes that are not ours. So free are they from the worries and concerns of humanity that they may seem irresponsible or immoral. In a famous Homeric cliche, generations of men are like leaves (Iliad 6.146, 21.464; Simonides fr. 8.2 West; Aristophanes, Birds 685), whereas the gods are routinely described as ‘‘gods who exist always’’ (e. g., Iliad 1.290; Odyssey 5.7) and feast energetically on Olympus (Iliad 1.533-604). Achilles throws up before Priam an image of two pots on Zeus’s threshold, from which he dispenses a mixture of good and evil to man, or evil alone, but never apparently unalloyed good (Iliad 24.527-33). Another image is of the laughter of the gods, as Hera’s scolding of Zeus and Hephaestus’ intervention collapse into insignificance (Iliad 1.599), or as Zeus enjoys the spectacle of the gods going to war with each other (Iliad 21.389-90). Then there are the scales: unaccountably these same all-powerful beings do have the self-imposed job of managing us. So Zeus holds up the scales to balance out whether a hero should die now (Iliad e. g. 22.209), or debates with himself whether the fighting should go on a bit longer (Iliad 16.652). If anything, this Zeus is more frightening than the vague power imagined by the chorus in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (367-84): there the Trojans ‘‘have the stroke of Zeus to talk about,’’ and he hates overbearing, over-rich houses, a description that applies as much to the doomed Agamemnon as to dead Priam. Zeus came to power in a violent revolution, and somehow from that elderly Chorus folk can derive a proverbial lesson about learning through suffering (160-80).
The character of his rule is most intensely explored in epic and drama. Here we learn of the sheer distance between man and the gods, something which leads in the fourth century BC to Plato’s view (Symposium 203a) that ‘‘god with man does not mix,’’ and to Aristotle’s view (Magna Moralia 1208b30-1) that it would be ‘‘bizarre to say that you loved Zeus.’’ The problem therefore posed by Greek religion was how you bridged this gap between man and the Olympian gods. Intermediary beings - demons - became one answer, special rites or mystery religions another; and philosophy became the doctrine of self-help: man must ascend by his own efforts.
The Olympian gods are in the last resort a model for approaching the divine. It helps in thinking about divine planning to suppose that there is a Zeus acting as he does for what we would recognize as motives, and influenced by likes, dislikes, and prayer - otherwise, why would we bother? This leads to wonderful manifestations of Greek culture - the mythology and its incarnation in the objects of worship and the decor of cult, and in Greek art and architecture at large. It also helps ordinary traditional people to channel their genuine piety and find social fulfillment, and at times release, through vehicles such as prayer, sacrifice, oracles, and even a sort of pilgrimage to oracles and other notable sites. But the anthropomorphism of the Olympian gods comes with a health warning that the gods are not like us, are distant from us, and live elsewhere. We may pray to the skies and talk about Olympus. We may pray to Zeus, or to our local city god, or to the god whose function it is to protect us in our present role or circumstances. Each of the gods combines a sense of power and personality. It is the personality that gives us a handle on them, allows us to pray to them at all. But it is in the end a cloak for their power.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
The most authoritative book on Greek religion, including the gods, is Burkert 1985; briefer but remarkably powerful is Bremmer 1994. Susan Deacy is general editor of a new series, Greek Gods and Heroes, which covers not only the ancient information about the god but also their tradition into modern times: already available is Dowden 2005 on Zeus, and to appear are F. Graf on Apollo, S. Deacy on Athena, R. Seaford on Dionysus, and E. Stafford on Heracles. The facts of mythology are available in Apollodorus’ Library of Greek Mythology, translated by Hard (Hard 1997), and in a wide variety of dictionaries of mythology, e. g. March 1998, Grimal 1987 (important to use the full, Blackwell, edition) and Graves 1962 (provided you do not believe his poetic fantasies about trees and triple goddesses). For the ways in which mythology works, see Dowden 1992 and Graf 1993b. On the evidence for the origins of the pantheon of twelve, see Long 1987. For the synthesis of myth and religion, the most visionary account is that of Otto 1954, and more specifically 1965. For detailed information on the cults of particular gods, it is still worth going back to Farnell 1896-1909.
World History
