The Twelve Olympians

by Dr Charles T. Seltman

  All over the world, except in Greece and Italy, these conditions prevailed, and it was because ancient Rome possessed—like Greece—no class or caste of priests that the Græco-Roman civilisation grew into a single and inseparable organisation which, while it lasted, allowed to mankind so extensive a freedom of thought and deed. There were priests; for sacrifices had to be made, festivals kept, prayers uttered, rites observed; and for the goddesses there were priestesses. But all these were just ordinary laymen with normal lives to lead within their communities, with responsibilities and employments like other folk, families to raise and duties to the State. Only upon solemn feast-days and holy-days did they dress them up in robes and wreaths to do their acts. The father of a Greek family, like the paterfamilias in Rome, was chief-priest within his own house; and some prominent magistrate or local ruler was chief-priest of the City and the State. Sometimes the office ran in certain families, sometimes it was elective, generally it involved expenditure on your part instead of income; but it was an honour and a token that your fellows thought well of you. In one respect the Jewish priesthood had a resemblance to those of the Greeks and the Romans, for the Hebrew priests were expected to lead a normal life like ordinary men, to marry and raise a family, to have a profession or a trade; nevertheless, they were all of one caste and clan.

  (2) Humility and obedience were never Greek virtues. If these are ‘virtues’ there must first exist self-assured men who shall exact them; but since no cleavage was known between priests and laymen, and since priests were only laymen engaged part-time on a special job and therefore lacking in authority, they never demanded of their fellow-citizens self-abasement or unquestioning humble submission. “Trust Nurse”, “Mother knows best”, “Father is always right”—such precepts did not enter, even remotely, into the Greeks’ scheme, because in matters affecting his religion the Greek had reached maturity at an early stage. And by humility in this context is meant the kind of abjectness of an enslaved chieftain trodden upon by a Persian King of Kings, or of a spaniel rolling in agonies of self-abasement at its master’s feet. This the Greeks deplored as proskynesis, a ‘prostrating’. There is a different kind of ‘humility’ which is neither demeaning nor degrading, termed aidōs (‘respect’, ‘reverence’, or ‘regard’) by the Greeks, which is the kind of ‘humility’ required by philosopher, scientist, and scholar in search of knowledge, yet this kind is not an accompaniment of blind obedience.

  (3) Greek religion had no dogma. An amateur priesthood like theirs had no cause to claim either unique validity for its own rites and beliefs or a unique reality for its god or its divine family. Such claims would have been at variance with the normal attitude of the Greeks, who were ready to accept foreign gods or goddesses, to worship them after the proper fashion due to them, to honour them as guests, and finally to give them ‘papers of naturalisation’. Religious particularism was not a possibility for civilised Greeks.

  (4) Arising from the last point, there were no missions. Within their own religious framework certain men, being deeply devoted to the cults of specific gods—notably Apollo and Dionysos—endeavoured to increase among other Greeks reverence for the Apolline religion or the Dionysiac worship. But such were personal, not organised, efforts, and there was no thought of excluding nor even of diminishing the cults of the other gods. Certainly it would have seemed wrong to a Greek to “compass sea and land to make one proselyte”,{3} or to propose to foreigners the substitution of Hellenic deities for the local divinities. Rather he would explain to the foreigner that Baal and Yahweh and Amon-Ra and the rest were Zeus, and that Zeus was them each time under another name; for, without any doubt, to have asserted that Hellenes were in possession of the one and only true religion and that their neighbour’s was false would have appeared to a Greek rather ill-mannered.

  (5) Since there were neither dogmas nor missions, there were no martyrs. Of course, this meant no persecutors either, since you cannot just be a martyr in space. “But”, someone may interject, “was not Socrates a martyr?” “Did not the Græco-Romans persecute the Christians?” And the answer must be that both Socrates and the Christians were put on trial and punished for political, but not for religious offences.{4} Rome was very ready to adopt any reasonable faith of Oriental origin such as Christianity into the great ‘family’ of empire-religions, and one emperor, Severus Alexander, wishing to venerate Christ, had a statue of Jesus put in the palace chapel upon the Palatine Hill in Rome. It was quite impossible for any sincere Christian to reciprocate with a like polite gesture without committing the sin of a ‘lapse’, and it seems that the sect aroused the hostility of normal citizens by its breaches of accepted Custom and Conduct, and not by the nature of its Values and Virtues. Transferred into modern metaphor, what the others objected to was simply that when the band played God Save the Queen or The Star-spangled Banner a Christian put on his hat and sat down! From this breach of Custom much martyrdom came to pass, and, as a sequel, a theoretical admiration for martyrs. Yet some historians have questioned whether it is good for anybody of people to begin a cult of martyrs and martyrdom, for this can produce its own opposite—a cult of persecutors and persecution. Later generations may derive a certain pleasure from a record of the supposed sufferings of forebears; and thus suffering itself becomes a virtue which confers a lurid glamour alike on the tortured and the torturer, who may even become popular figures in the cinema. The girl beaten-up in the film is only the modern substitute for the virgin-martyr, over whose sufferings the hagiographer once delighted to linger.

  (6) There was no Sacred Book. Someone in search of an epigram once called Homer “the Bible of the Greeks”—a most misleading remark. A fifth-century Greek, because he respected tradition, was apt occasionally to seek authority for his beliefs and actions in the Homeric poems. But these writings never had for him that enormous authority which was attached to a ‘Book’ that was inspired, like the Old Testament, the Bible, and the Koran. The religion of the Greeks was nourished on local legends, ancient tradition, bits of ritual half-remembered for interpretation, hymns of praise, epigrams, old-wives’ tales, explanatory anecdotes—all of these so desperately contradictory of one another as to give cause for nothing but quiet speculation or gentle amusement to the Greeks themselves. There was no holy, indisputable, God-dictated Book to which you could refer back to obtain a final ruling. One remarkable result of this lack was that to the end Greek religion remained utterly without controversies, since there were no heresies, for the simple reason that all opinions about the gods were equally tenable. In fact, no Book, no Heretics!

  (7) There was very little preoccupation with sin, and, of course, no doctrine of the Fall of Man from innocency into sin, coupled with the later view that mankind starts from infancy in a state of wickedness. The Greek word hamartia, often translated as ‘sin’, really meant ‘failure’, ‘fault’, or ‘error of judgment and distinction would be made between: (a) such error or folly—your own affair; (b) the failure of duty to men—a tort; (c) offence against the State—crime; and (d) offence against a god—sin. In all Greek mythology there were only five sinners condemned to eternal torment: Ixion, who assaulted Hera—“an infringement”, this has been called, “of Zeus’ prerogative”;{5} Tityos, who assaulted Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis; Tantalos, who made himself immortal by stealing the Food of the Gods; Sisyphos, who gave away the secret of one of Zeus’ private intrigues. The fifth sinner was Prometheus, who tried to pass on to mortals powers which should be reserved for gods; but he was ultimately pardoned. Clearly the only sin was to commit a personal offence against a divinity. As for guilt, like the guilt of Œdipus or of Orestes, that was altogether a different matter; it had been put upon you by a Fate beyond the gods, and there was nothing for it but to be purified by a god. It was dire misfortune, but no fault of yours.

  The Greeks are now discovered to have had a religious system which was deficient in a number of things: no priestly caste, no unquestioning obedience, neither dogma nor m
issions, no martyrs, no Sacred Book, and very little concern about sin. Yet all or most of these are found to be present in religions of authority which have commanded the adherence of mankind; and the elements of gentleness, humour, regardfulness, as well as the love of knowledge, a free spirit of enquiry, and natural toleration, which all distinguished the Greek way, would put it at a disadvantage in the face of any well-organised and forceful faith. But far more significant for mankind than anything as yet mentioned is the difference between Greek and most subsequent religious thought and practice concerned with the attitude to sex. Here we may place together Hebrew, Greek, and Roman attitudes as of one group, and the mediæval—Eastern and Western—attitude as of the other. Mediæval religion, by respecting in theory priest and monk and nun above other mortals, partly because they professed celibacy and chastity, brought sex right into the forefront of mental and spiritual stress, instead of regarding it as but a normal function in its proper place. Men may at times feel that they strengthen some weakness of will by certain vows of abstinence, like the sons of Jonadab, son of Rechab, who refused strong drink; or the Jews or Hindus, who abstain from the flesh of pig or cow. But a Greek like Herodotus would have viewed with surprise any stranger who deprived himself of such a god-given function as speech by a vow of silence, and with astonishment any barbarian who abstained totally from what is, albeit spasmodically, the strongest of all emotions and urges—hunger alone excepted—in order to suffer as a vicarious sacrifice for the sinfulness of mankind. A Greek philosopher would have observed that so intemperate a practice might change for the worse not only the lives of individual men and women, but the trend of history. We, in our day, looking back, can see that this concentration for over a millennium upon sex as so great a concern of religion is responsible for the modern world’s preoccupation with the subject. By contrast, Greek thought, religion, art, and custom treated sex merely as an incidental function of humanity, as something unembarrassing and healthy in moderation.

  The almost casual attitude of the Greeks to sex requires stressing, because we are apt to misinterpret the nudity of gods, heroes, and mortals in art as an interest in things sexual. I venture to quote what, in another context, I wrote a number of years ago on this topic. We can be—

  misled by our own heritage of prudery, which the Greeks lacked. Just as we can look at a naked dog or horse without instantly thinking of the kennels or stud, so the normal Greek could see the naked human figure without sex-obsession. His emotion could be stirred by the fineness of a fine form for its own sake, whether animal or human, and his art was no less competent to make a bronze horse than a bronze athlete.{6}

  The Greeks were not, as their opponents pretended, a nation of whole-time debauchees, but a lot of hard-working, friendly, human beings with much the same kind of follies and virtues as are ours today.

  Greek goddesses and gods are, in reality, still relevant now, for some of them came through the Dark and Middle Ages as Planets; and although a renegade Athenian mystic named Clement—later of Alexandria—did his best to smear the older faith, his achievement fell short of his hopes because he had a mind over-fond of pornography. When the temples of the gods were closed and their altars and statues broken, men still continued to venerate them. Instead of being driven—as they should have been—into the Bottomless Pit,

  Knocking Mammon the meagre o’er pursy Belphegor,

  And Lucifer into Beelzebub’s lap,

  they rose into the firmament to become the darlings of astrologers and magicians. Mediæval and many later men have believed their destinies to be ruled by the god-planets, Venus and Jupiter, Mars and Mercury, Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn. The very days of our week are in most European languages named after Helios, Selene, Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, and Kronos under their Latin or Nordic titles. Then poets and painters of the Renaissance brought them all back to earth again; and if, here too, we know them rather better by their Latin than by their Greek names, that is but a minor detail. It is pleasant to reflect that as Concepts, Beings, Symbols—both of God made man and of manmade God—they have not yet left us; nor we them.

  II—HERA

  LONG before the Hellenes—that is, the real Greeks—came down from the North to occupy and give its name to Hellas, and to spread into the islands and many coasts of the sea, quite different people inhabited those regions. They were people to whom we now give the names of Minoans and early Helladics, and they were men of the Mediterranean race; while the Hellenes—or Greeks—were of Indo-European stock, speaking a language totally different from that of their predecessors. The Greeks subjugated these people, but did not exterminate them, exactly as the Angles and Saxons did not kill off the Britons. Moreover, in many cases the chieftains and princes of the Greeks married the young concubines or daughters of the local warriors whom they had slain in battle.

  That older race had customs and codes of conduct very different from those of the incoming Greek stock; for while the older was based on matriarchy and polyandry, the younger was patriarchal and monogamous, even as we claim to be in our own day. Among the Mediterraneans, as a general rule, society was built round the woman, even on the highest levels, where descent was in the female line. A man became king or chieftain only by a formal ‘marriage’, and his daughter—not his son—succeeded; so that the next king or chieftain was the youth who married his daughter. It is improbable that any woman was restricted as to the number of lovers she might choose, and marital jealousy can scarcely have existed. For this reason these people imagined a similar, though glorified, state of affairs for their gods.

  The Great Goddess was always supreme, and the many names by which she was called were but a variety of titles given to her in diverse places. She had no regular ‘husband’, but her mate—her young lover—died, or was killed, every autumn, and was glorified in resurrection every spring, coming back to the goddess; even as a new gallant may have been taken into favour every year to mate with an earthly queen. The lover of the goddess was a lover-god who was known by a variety of names or titles—even as she was. Sometimes imagination pictured the miraculous appearance of the divine progenitor as visiting her in bird form. When they hailed her as Europē they said her lover appeared as an eagle; when they saluted her as Leda, they declared that her mate was disguised as a swan; when they gave their goddess the name Theleia or Lamia or Io, they averred that her lover arrived as a vulture or hoopoe or woodpecker; when they glorified her by the simple title of ‘Lady’—or Hera in Greek—they alleged that her admirer came as a cuckoo. Indeed, bird-epiphanies have always been popular in Mediterranean lands.

  Until the Northerners arrived, religion and custom were dominated by the female principle, and men were but the servers of women in the chase and the fields, in love and war. Therefore only the Goddess was supreme, though under many names.

  At this point it has become apparent that the Northerners—the Greeks—coming down between about 2000 and 1300 B.C.{7} in a series of invading waves, came into contact with a group of customs and conduct-codes which must have startled them to a much greater degree than any contemplation of Greek paganism can possibly startle us now! It was all so wildly different from their simpler ‘sky’ religion; and, although in the early stages the details of this are not easy to put together, it seems that they in their turn imagined a divine family in the heavens which reflected the pattern of their own domestic life, exactly as the Mediterranean beliefs about the great ‘Goddess of many Titles’ reflected the pattern of the Minoan and kindred social orders.

  The patriarchal incoming Greeks had their supreme God—Zeus—who was the Sky and the All-Father, and who had a family. This meant a wife, a daughter, and a sister of his—a kind of old maid who lived with the family. If there were others they got lost or went astray on the way south; but we shall encounter some of the family later; yet, because they were not strong divine personalities, they tended to get absorbed into other divine concepts—all except the Old Maid. On the other hand, Zeus, god of sky an
d weather, wielder of the thunder, flasher of lightning, was in the true sense terrific; and he remained the dominant God Almighty and Eternal for as long as Greek religion endured.

  For all their assurance about the rightness of their worship of the divine family, the Greeks, who came down from the North and were frequently united to women of the Mediterranean race, were already very tolerant people. The last thing that they would have contemplated would have been the suppression of an older faith, almost shocking though it may have appeared with its goddess-centred cults. Toleration generally calls for some sort of compromise. “We”, said the Greek chieftains—so I imagine it—“we act thus and thus; and having left our first wives behind, we marry the young women of the land, the dainty, olive-skinned, dark-haired daughters of the South, who enchant us. Zeus, the Almighty, surely acts likewise and weds the Great Goddess whom our new wives adore.”

  And thus it came to pass, ‘according to the gospel’, that Zeus did marry her. The region in which a first encounter occurred was the country of Argos in the north-eastern part of Peloponnesus, and at a great holy place, later called ‘the Heraion’, which is Greek for ‘Sanctuary of Our Lady Perhaps the Greeks never learnt the secret name of her, and perhaps the folk of the older stock would not tell; and that is why she became known as Hera—’Lady’ in Greek—feminine of Hero, ‘Lord’. What occurred was the domestication of a once-free polyandrous and independent goddess, and it is a fair assumption that this corresponded to what was going on among Greek princes with wives of the earlier race.