Greek Myth Was Never a Religion

The thing we call "Greek mythology" is a library, and the Greeks did not worship a library. Open Edith Hamilton's Mythology, or the D'Aulaires' picture book, or a Percy Jackson novel, and you find a tidy pantheon with a family tree, a canon of stories in a rough order, and the quiet implication that this is what a Greek "believed." It is not. What the Greeks practised was cult: animals killed at altars, processions on fixed days, oaths sworn by named gods, a hearth kept in every house, a calendar of festivals maintained by each city as carefully as it maintained its walls. There was no scripture, no creed, no church, no priestly caste, no orthodoxy anyone could be excommunicated from. The stories rode on top of that practice, and because they were not doctrine, poets and philosophers could rewrite them at will. Once you see that, the standard question ("did the Greeks really believe in Zeus?") turns out to be badly formed, and Paul Veyne's version, did the Greeks believe their myths?, is the one worth answering.¹

The corpus is a modern object

The single-volume "Greek mythology" most of us met as children is a product of the printing press and the schoolroom. Thomas Bulfinch's Age of Fable (1855) and Hamilton's Mythology (1942) stitched together stories from Homer, Hesiod, the Attic tragedians, Apollodorus, Ovid, and late compilers into a smooth continuous narrative, and in doing so they made a decision the ancients never made: they treated all these sources as witnesses to one underlying "myth," which could be recovered by harmonising them. A Greek of the fifth century BC did not have that object available. He had Homer, whom he had heard sung and probably learned by heart in part; he had Hesiod; he had the local stories attached to his own city's shrines; he had whatever the tragedians had put on that year, which might contradict what they had put on the year before. Euripides could kill Medea's children by her own hand where earlier tradition (as far as we can tell) had the Corinthians do it. Nobody rioted. Nobody could, because there was no authoritative text to riot on behalf of.

Herodotus, writing around the middle of the fifth century, says something that ought to be startling. He tells us — I paraphrase, as I do with every ancient sentence in this essay — that Homer and Hesiod, whom he places about four hundred years before his own time, were the men who composed a theogony for the Greeks, gave the gods their epithets, divided out their honours and skills, and described their forms.² Read that carefully. The most god-fearing historian in the ancient canon is telling you that the personalities of the Olympians were authored, by named poets, within historical memory. He does not think this makes the gods unreal. He thinks it makes the poets important. That combination, gods who are certainly real and stories about them that are certainly made up by somebody, is the thing modern readers keep failing to hold in one hand.

What Greek religion actually was

The scholars who spent the last half-century reconstructing Greek religion (Walter Burkert, Robert Parker, Jan Bremmer, and the late Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, to name the four whose work I keep returning to) agree on the basic anatomy, whatever they disagree on elsewhere.³ The centre of the thing was sacrifice, thusia: a domestic animal led to an altar, sprinkled, killed, its thighbones wrapped in fat and burned for the god, the rest cooked and eaten by the people who had come. Burkert built an entire theory of religion on the killing; you do not have to follow him that far to see that the meal, not the myth, was where a Greek most often met his gods.⁴ Hesiod tells the story of how this arrangement came about, at Mekone, when Prometheus tricked Zeus into choosing the bones. I have written about that story elsewhere, in Prometheus and the price of every tool. What matters here is which way the explanation runs: the practice was already ancient, and the story exists to account for it. Rite first, tale second.

Around sacrifice sat everything else. Festivals, fixed to a calendar that each city kept in its own way and by its own month-names; the Athenians spent the years around 410 to 399 BC having a man named Nikomachos revise and re-inscribe their sacrificial calendar, and Lysias wrote a speech attacking how he did it, which is a fair index of how seriously the schedule was taken.⁵ Local calendars survive on stone: the one from the Attic deme of Erchia lists, month by month, which god gets which animal on which day, at what cost. It reads like a ledger, because it is one. Oaths, sworn by Zeus Horkios and others, holding treaties and law-courts together, with the swearer calling destruction on himself and his line if he lied. The hearth, Hestia, in every house and in the town hall, tended without any story attached at all. Purification after birth, death, bloodshed. Dedications, thousands upon thousands of them, from bronze tripods to terracotta figurines, left in sanctuaries as thanks or as advance payment. Oracles consulted before founding a colony or starting a war. This is the fabric. Myth is embroidery on it.

Now notice what is missing from that inventory. There is no book. There is no statement of what a Greek must hold to be true about the gods, no catechism, no confession recited at the altar. There is no clergy in the sense of a trained, separate, lifelong class of specialists licensed to interpret. Priests existed, but a priesthood was typically an office: attached to one god at one shrine, often held for a year, sometimes allotted, sometimes hereditary in a family (the priestess of Athena Polias came from the Eteoboutadai; the Eumolpidai and Kerykes ran Eleusis), and in the Hellenistic cities of Asia Minor sometimes simply sold to the highest bidder.⁶ None of these people preached. A priest knew the correct procedure for his altar. Nobody knew, or needed to know, the correct opinion about Zeus.

A priest knew the correct procedure for his altar. Nobody knew, or needed to know, the correct opinion about Zeus.

Sourvinou-Inwood gave this arrangement its most influential modern label, polis religion. Her argument, as I would restate it, was that the city-state was the frame inside which every Greek religious act was organised and made sense: the city anchored and authorised the activity, stood between worshipper and god, set the calendar, funded the sacrifices, appointed the priests, and policed the edges.⁷ The model has been criticised, most pointedly by Julia Kindt, for making the city too total: it struggles with mystery cults you joined as an individual, with magic and curse tablets, with Panhellenic sanctuaries like Delphi and Olympia that belonged to no one city, and with anything that looks like private conviction.⁸ I think Kindt is right that the model leaves things out, and I also think its central insight survives her critique: the unit of Greek religion was a community performing, not a person assenting. Even the mystery cults promised a better afterlife for what you did at Eleusis, not for what you thought.

Why the poets were free

Here is the consequence that most surprises people who come to Greece from the Abrahamic religions. Because myth was not doctrine, myth could be attacked, mocked, and rewritten in public without that being an attack on religion.

Xenophanes of Colophon, in the sixth century BC, complained that Homer and Hesiod had pinned on the gods everything humans think shameful: theft, adultery, deceiving one another. He observed that Ethiopians make their gods dark and snub-nosed while Thracians make theirs red-haired and blue-eyed, and that if oxen and horses could draw, they would draw gods shaped like oxen and horses. Against all that he set, in my paraphrase of the fragments, a single god, greatest among gods and among men, resembling mortals in neither shape nor mind.⁹ This is about as direct a demolition of the Homeric pantheon as it is possible to write, and Xenophanes was not tried, exiled, or silenced for it. He seems to have wandered the Greek world for decades reciting it.

Plato, two centuries later, went further and did it in prose. In the Republic he has Socrates propose that the guardians of the ideal city must not be told Hesiod's story of Kronos castrating Ouranos and swallowing his children. Even supposing it true, Socrates says (again my paraphrase), it should not be repeated to the young; and if it must be told at all, then to as few listeners as possible, under secrecy, and only after a sacrifice expensive enough to keep the audience small.¹⁰ Homer's gods laughing, lying, lusting, weeping over the dead: out. The whole passage treats the poets as sources of false and harmful stories about beings who are nonetheless real, and it treats their falsity as a matter of civic education, not heresy. In the Euthyphro, Socrates admits, on my reading of the passage, that he finds the tales of gods making war on gods hard to swallow, and wonders aloud whether that is why he is on trial; Euthyphro, the self-appointed expert on piety, is the one who takes the stories literally, and he is the fool of the dialogue.¹⁰

Which brings up the objection: Socrates was tried and executed, in 399 BC, on a religious charge. Doesn't that prove there was an orthodoxy after all? Look at the wording. He was accused of not nomizein the gods the city nomizei, and of introducing new divinities.¹¹ The verb is the difficulty. Nomizein is built on nomos, custom or usage; it can carry the sense of believing in something, but its native force is closer to practising, observing, treating as customary. The charge is not that Socrates held a wrong theology. It is that he failed to acknowledge, in the customary way, the gods the city acknowledged, and that he brought in unlicensed ones. It is a charge about participation and about civic boundaries, brought in a city that had just lived through the mutilation of the herms and the parody of the Mysteries in 415 and the collapse that followed.¹¹ Whether Athens ever formally criminalised opinions about the gods is genuinely disputed: the decree of Diopeithes, said to have targeted Anaxagoras for teaching that the sun was a hot stone, is reported only by Plutarch centuries later, and Kenneth Dover argued long ago that the whole tradition of intellectual persecution in fifth-century Athens rests on late and shaky evidence.¹¹ Even on the most generous reading, what Athens occasionally punished was impiety toward the city's cults, never a wrong reading of Hesiod.

Contrast this with the world I described in the essay on Akhenaten, where a pharaoh could try to close the temples and erase a god's name from the monuments, and where his successors could in turn erase him. That is what religious authority with a centre looks like. Greece had no centre. There was no Greek Akhenaten because there was no throne from which the gods could be edited; and there was no Greek inquisition because there was no text against which a heresy could be measured. What Greece had instead was a thousand altars, a shared poetic vocabulary, and a shrug about the details.

Two poets, no scripture

It is worth pausing on the fact that Homer and Hesiod, whom Herodotus credited with giving Greece its gods, do not even agree with each other. Homer's Olympians are a squabbling aristocratic household seen from a hall in which they are entertainment; Hesiod's are the terms of a cosmic succession that ends with Zeus imposing order, and his Works and Days is a farmer's moral almanac in which Zeus punishes crooked judgements. The two poets look at the same names and see different things, and I have argued in Hesiod vs. Homer that they were speaking for two Greeces. Any religion with a scripture would have had to reconcile them, or pick one, or produce a commentary tradition explaining the discrepancy away. Greece did none of these. It kept both, sang both, and let the tragedians add a third and fourth voice.

Marcel Detienne and, more recently, Bruce Lincoln have shown that even the word muthos did not start out meaning "a false or sacred story"; in Homer, on their account, it is simply an authoritative speech-act, what a chief or a hero says in assembly, and it only drifted toward "fable" under pressure from the philosophers' logos.¹² The category "myth," in other words, was invented partly by the very people who were discrediting it. That should make us wary of retrojecting a settled category of "sacred narrative" onto Greeks who had a stock of famous stories, told by poets, about beings they also sacrificed to.

What "believing" meant

So: did the Greeks believe their myths? Veyne's answer, in his short and slippery book of 1983, is that belief is not one thing. People hold truths inside different frameworks, each with its own rules for what counts as true, and can move between them without feeling a contradiction: a Greek could accept that Theseus was a real king of Athens, doubt that he fought a bull-headed man, and treat the whole tale as an authoritative fact when it was useful in a lawsuit or a boundary dispute.¹ Pausanias, touring Greece in the second century AD, records dozens of local legends with a mixture of piety and raised eyebrow, and it is often impossible to say where his credulity ends. Veyne's point is that this is not confusion; it is how belief normally works when nobody has forced it into a creed.

I accept that, and I want to sharpen it, because I think Veyne's question hides two different verbs. There is believing that, assent to a proposition, and there is believing in, trust in a person or a power. Modern discussion of Greek "belief" has swung between two poles. Simon Price and others in the tradition that produced polis religion argued that belief was essentially a Christian category and that Greek religion was a matter of practice, not of faith; Henk Versnel, in a large and cranky book, replied that this had gone too far, that Greeks plainly did hold gods to exist and to act, and that "belief" in that sense is perfectly Greek.¹ Both sides are right about different verbs. A Greek almost universally believed in the gods: that they existed, that they were near, that they could be angered and appeased, that an oath sworn by them bound you. Every act in the inventory above (the sacrifice, the votive, the oath, the purification) presupposes that trust and makes no sense without it. What a Greek was not required to believe that was any particular story. Whether Zeus really swallowed Metis, whether Athena really sprang from his head, whether the sun was a god or a hot stone: those were open, and the openness was not a crisis.

A Greek almost universally believed in the gods. What he was not required to believe was any particular story about them.

Put crudely: the Greeks believed in their gods and used their myths. Myth was the shared language in which the gods could be talked about, praised, argued with, dramatised, and, when a poet was in the mood, ridiculed. It supplied names, genealogies, and precedents. It was authoritative the way a nation's founding stories are authoritative, invoked at the right moments and picked apart at others, and it was fluid because no institution had a stake in fixing it. When Athenians voted to bring the cult of Asklepios into the city in 420 BC, or of Bendis, a Thracian goddess, around the same decade, they were not amending a theology; they were adding a festival to the calendar and an altar to the landscape.⁵ Religion was something you did, on schedule, with your neighbours, and the stories were how you talked while doing it.

That last point explains why the modern corpus feels so complete and so lifeless at once. Hamilton could assemble her book because the stories had already been cut loose from cult for two thousand years; what she was cataloguing was the embroidery with the fabric gone. There is nothing wrong with reading it that way, and I read it that way as a boy like everyone else. But when we call it "Greek religion" we make a category error with consequences: we imagine a people who "believed" absurd things and pity or admire them for it, when what they actually did was keep the hearth lit, kill the ox on the appointed day, swear by Zeus and mean it, and let their poets say what they liked. The gods were the fixed point. The stories were the moving parts. If you want to know what a Greek held sacred, do not read the myths. Read the calendar.