Did the greeks really believe in their myths?
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Did the greeks really believe in their myths?
Did the greeks really believe in their myths?
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
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Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
The Greeks as a whole? No, there are plenty of examples of rejection of this or that set of myths, or skepticism that led some to think they were made up by Homer and Hesiod, but there did seem to be more or less broad acceptance of them as being literally true. Upper classes tend to be split between treating the myths as literally true, or reading them as allegories.
no. plato in the laws says the last time society was sincerely religious was in the period immediately after the last great flood, when the only survivors were simple mountain shepherds. this is obviously a myth in itself, but shows you that he didn't consider contemporary greek society to be real believers, but people who hedge their bets by going through with ritual but not really treating it very seriously etc etc. sincere religiosity is already, for plato, a thing of the mythical past
>the last great flood
>a myth
This sounds like a different claim about the degree to which people are pious, and not strictly whether they believe this or that myth. Unless you have a specific passage in mind, I'm not seeing anything in the flood passages about myths not being believed in. I would also point to the Euthyphro re: Euthyphro's beliefs about Zeus and Chronos, and the Phaedrus, where naturalistic interpretations of the myths are associated with the sophists.
Ahem.
>this is obviously a myth in itself
>he doesnt know
No
>To think that Hesiodic genealogies or Homeric accounts were accepted at face value by the Hellenes, even by the initiates and the educated minority, would be to indulge oneself in rationalistic naivete instead of trying to explore the metaphysical exegesis and symbolism of the sacred.
Uzdavinys relies too much on later Hellenic and Roman allegorical readings, and conflates them with what people in general believed. Thucydides' accounts of the plague, the piety of the Spartans, the piety of Melos, Nicias' piety, and the widespread disturbance over the mutilation of the Herms and blaspheming of the Mysteries before the Sicilian expedition, all say otherwise, even as Thucydides is himself more evidently skeptical of the character of those beliefs.
Thucydides also pretty much outright accepted the historical aspects of the trojan war, although he doubted the supernatural elements.
A myth was a story and every group of people had their own story, source: Robert Graves.
Believe means to follow only a formula and the myths had different versions.
They thought they were educative rather than historical, hence why Plato in The Republic supported changing/censoring Homer to more closely fit with his vision of goodness, because the good must automatically be true in Platonism.
They definitely thought their gods/creatures were conscious beings, but the beliefs about them were formed through popular devotion rather than organized theology.
That's true, however the later Plato was very apologetic as to the possibility of getting anything wrong about the gods and said that anything said about them or the highest things must be at the level of the strictest and most pious and most thorough evaluation of everything and then, even then, it still might be blasphemous, despite asking the gods for pity.
>bearded men with six packs discussing philosophy? must be fictional, some kind of allegory or metaphor
It is reality metaphysified so in a sense, yeah. Literally...eeeehhh, yes and no.
Probably not but I like to think they did.
With the occasional human sacrifice it'd be quite funny if they didn't.
Be real, it is probably like it is today. I know a number of people that would kill in Jesus' name if you asked them.
>"It'd have to be one of the gays. They all deserve death."
Still, a number of the population had to look at it like simple stories. I actually like greek mythology as a form of entertainment.
Yes, this. I'm seeing a lot of full on "no"s as if it were the most obvious thing, but I'm looking at the Greek rhetors, and, whether those rhetoricians believed what they wrote themselves, they certainly appeal with regularity to traditional face-value understandings of the myths for their cases.
They had the story about the gods going door to door in disguise asking for hospitality and the only ones who invited them in were the old couple who fed them their only goose. Which implies nobody really paid the gods much mind
No, that’s not what that means. Ya frickin idjit
Don't tell him about the Dionysus play Euripides wrote. He'll go off on a completely wrong tangent.
ok explain it
It was about people lacking hospitality in general not about people disrespecting the gods.
Nice explanation moron. Most surface level one possible. How does that preclude mine?
You used characters from a fictional story as basis for a claim about how real people act.
Also on top of that the gods were disguised so there was no way people would know who they were. This type of story is really common in folklore where the rich man goes undercover as a vagrant to test men on morals or hospitality. The 1001 Arabian nights freqneutly depict the shah and jafar doing this.
Yeah, the moral is literally they respect the gods and only gods while disrespecting the poor showing they aren't truly kind people.
Yes that's the point of a myth
So it's demonstrating real problems with people's behavior
Well yes but my point is the story here
is about hospitality in Greece and not about divinity or how they handled it. The gods are going undercover to test their hospitality not to test how devout they are.
Morality tales aren't indicative of the actual state of the populace, just what they value. By your logic Psalms indicate that only a few hangers on in the country still cared about the infant sacrifices in the Temple, when we know that wasn't true because the Book of Daniel is entirely about Israel's top brass throwing a fit over the Greeks ending said sacrifices.
You are incredibly stupid and your parents should feel deep shame for spawning you. Who brought you into this world and why? Surely, they must feel deep regret.
Quit seething about and skip to the part where you throw a temper tantrum while posting soijacks already, he directly refuted you and everyone can see it.
No, he didn’t at all. Read this
fifty fricking times. I wasn’t the guy saying it’s just a story. I am the guy saying he didn’t get the moral of the story. Just read that guy’s post again and again.
“It’s demonstrating problems with people’s behavior”
It’s demonstrating problems with HOSPITALITY and with turning away guests. It is NOT about religion or piety or devotion.
You really don't think there's any sort of intended metaphor there about the people turning the gods away and only the old timers keeping the faith?
So it was taken from a time when exactly this was happening - the faith was all but dead.
>So it was taken from a time when exactly this was happening - the faith was all but dead.
That goes a bit far, since Ovid is someone very familar with the intellectual trends of his day.
I don't think you're quite right on your observation about his story, either; the focus is on guest friendship, not belief in the gods per se, nor what kind of belief. If it were you'd expect the old couple to recognize the gods as gods in disguise, but they don't. Hence, the moral pertains more narrowly to guest friendship, claiming rather that many people are unkind, rather than unbelievers in the existence or myths of the gods.
>That goes a bit far, since Ovid is someone very familar with the intellectual trends of his day.
The faith was on its last legs during this time.
>I don't think you're quite right on your observation about his story, either; the focus is on guest friendship, not belief in the gods per se, nor what kind of belief. If it were you'd expect the old couple to recognize the gods as gods in disguise, but they don't. Hence, the moral pertains more narrowly to guest friendship, claiming rather that many people are unkind, rather than unbelievers in the existence or myths of the gods.
Did you actually read the story yet or just the wikipedia summary?
This is how it begins
>With admiration, and admiring, fear
>The Pow'rs of Heav'n; except Ixion's Son,
>Who laugh'd at all the Gods, believ'd in none:
>He shook his impious head, and thus replies.
>These legends are no more than pious lies:
>You attribute too much to heav'nly sway,
>To think they give us forms, and take away.
>Did you actually read the story yet or just the wikipedia summary?
>This is how it begins
All due respect, this doesn't make the point re: people within the story itself believing the myths. Besides, a carefuller translation:
>With these words the river was silent. The story of the miracle had moved the hearts of all. But one mocked at their credulity, a scoffer at the gods, one reckless in spirit, Ixion’s son, Pirithoüs. “These are but fairy-tales you tell, Acheloüs,” he said, “and you concede too much power to the gods, if they give and take away the forms of things.” All the rest were shocked and disapproved such words, and especially Lelex, ripe both in mind and years, who replied... [story begins]
So, first, I contest making the point through an older translation that's taking liberties. Second, we have to distinguish that the passage is a frame story that the story of the old couple takes place within, where the frame story itself != Ovid. And third, to remind, the point that everyone's arguing over, starting at
, is that 1) *this story itself* was a regular belief of the Greeks, whereas it's unattested anywhere prior to Ovid, and 2) that anon was framing the story as *everyone else knowing the gods go around in disguises and not paying them mind*, whereas the story itself has even the people who invite Zeus and Hermes in not knowing they're gods. *This was what everyone was arguing about above.* This makes this story a poor case for proving or generalizing about anything.
Absolutely.
Okay, read and reread this post
fifty times in succession until it clicks in your minuscule brain.
If the gods go in disguise then people who dont let them in clearly wouldnt be rejecting them because they think theyre gods
There were people at the time criticizing the personification and humanization of the gods.
So no, they were regarded as forces with parables to teach about them. As the religion degraded they may have actually just thought that their predecessors thought of them as fact and were completely ignorant of any parable or metaphoric qualities. Causing them to regard the religion as silly.
What happens to most religions over time.
I didn't explain that well
"Hello sonny, there are forces/gods. Here are some stories to teach you about them. You go contemplate them"
"Haha old man you actually think there are men and women on the clouds, you idiot! There is no wisdom in this religion and I shall convert to some other belief"
>they were regarded as forces
Eh there were some exceptions in regards to gods worshipped who began as regular humans and ascended to godhood. Sparta in particular worshipped Helen of Troy as a goddess who began in myths as a human. It's why a lot of her character gets weird stories to cope with the fact Sparta worshipped a hussy as a goddess.
Various Greeks believed their cities were founded by literal children of the gods, and that their basic laws were a product of said demi-gods. The Athenians were going to prosecute Anaxagoras for saying the sun and moon were stones. These things were believed widely, and were rationalized and allegorized at a relatively late date. Xenophanes' criticism of the anthropomorphic accounts of the gods implies in fact that the beliefs in gods with literal human shapes were common enough to need refuting from him.
Some of them did, some of them didn't. Generally intellectuals interpreted them allegorically or discarded them altogether from at least the period of Classical Athens.
If you read enough Greek myth it eventually becomes predominantly a history of various lineages saying who was father of who and married who. The kind of thing you don't really question as real just mundane.
did the average greek even know their own myths and stories or was all that just written down by homer and hesiod and the rich made a big deal of it but for everyone else they could live and die without noticing
They likely knew the stories of Homer and Hesiod, since their poems were recited at competitions and festivals throughout Greece, but beyond that, there's not too much certainty, since most of the surviving writings are from an educated class selected for preservation by later educated classes. There's some variations in what remains, suggesting that a core story might be held to be true (so something like the story of Thebes and Oedipus), but those stories could be told with differences depending on the city or presentation (so playwrights could usually get away with changing a bunch of elements and applauded for it, or shat on for it if you were Euripides).
>did the average greek even know their own myths and stories
Yeah, there was a huge class of traveling poets who kept people informed about this stuff like in every Indo-European society. Once mass urbanization became a thing theater was added to this. This was on top of the large priestly class and the huge mass of all sorts of local folk cults and ancestral lineages. The Church Fathers whined about this because up until the Ottoman conquest the Greeks were far better educated in Hellenic lore than in israeli mythology.
From everything we know about these people they were, if anything, overly religious by our standards. Medical authors, like Galen, complain about the Greeks and Romans being so pious that they couldn't get their hands on corpses to examine unless they went to the frontlines of some war or another, as the Greeks and Romans would be quick to cremate the bodies and perform funerary rites.
Anyone got a source for this story everyone's arguing over?
Nvm, found it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baucis_and_Philemon
Not sure this is a great example of normative beliefs regarding myths, though it does have an evident moral purpose. But it's Ovid, so Roman era, and it's apparently not attested in anything older we have, and the story itself makes clear that the old couple didn't realize that Zeus and Hermes were gods in disguise until they noticed their pitcher remaining miraculously full. There are firmer examples elsewhere of beliefs regarding how myths were taken.
take the chimera; it will originally have been a calendar symbol: each component represented a season of the sacred year.
This is much more simply refuted up and down in Greek writings broadly. Aristotle dismisses believers of myths in the Metaphysics, implying it's common and unsophisticated, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon detail numerous stories of people beliving in myths literally (while they themselves cast doubts), Xenophanes claims that mortals in general believe ridiculous beliefs about the gods being literally like people with more powers, and claiming such beliefs are common beyond the Greeks to Ethiopians and Thracians, the Attic rhetors appeal to myths and their literal reality to make case arguments, Plato pointing to literal interpretations of myths (Euthyphro's belief that Zeus overthrew Chronos, the new tendency of the sophists to explain myths via naturalistic accounts in the Phaedrus, the Athenians gearing up to prosecute Anaxagoras for claiming the sun and moon were rocks in the Apology, the story in the Timaeus about Solon being mocked by the Egyptians because the Greeks literally believe their myths). Now, I'm not denying there were Greeks who understood the myths allegorically; Hellenistic period grammarians and authors allude to allegorical readings popping up around the start of the Peloponnesian War--but the authors we have from antiquity are by and large not representatives of their time, which was why they were preserved, as standouts among the rest, and who themselves make a point in their writings of doubting literal beliefs in the myths, *because literal belief was already frequent and pervasive and these authors for the most part thought it was damaging to political life*.
The author you're citing seems to take for granted that very few people would believe that poem about WJB literally, *because he takes for granted all of the rationalism and technology of his day that would make it evidently ridiculous to believe*, which wasn't the case 2500 years ago. (Even then, we have people motivated enough today to insist on a flat earth according to how they understand the Bible.)