What Do We Mean
When We Say Ancient Greek Religion?
Ancient
Greek religion is something entirely different to the prominently Christian
conventions within the UK today. The religion of ancient Greece was a
polytheistic religion and put importance on aspects of society by creating
importance not on one God who was omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, but
multiple gods who each had a role in controlling and protecting that aspect of
civilisation. When looking at different gods from Hellenic polytheism, we can
see how Athena was the goddess of wisdom, skill and crafts; as expressed above,
Poseidon was controller of the seas yet also of horses; Artemis was concerned
with crucial aspects of life including the coming of age of women but also male
dominated aspects including war and hunting.[1]
Today,
religion is more its own specialised area of culture, where we may choose to
acknowledge it if we choose to. Atheism is acceptable and we may believe in
what we wish to. Christianised religion today is not particularly embedded
within society. This is different to Hellenic religion in that society and
religion were entwined with each other. We know of this religion that matters
were more public as opposed to individual akin to modern Christianity. A
communal identity manifested itself around a deity or shared deities. The
Greeks would create an identity for themselves based around particular deities
to clarify who they were and what they stood for and this would differ from
other regions of ancient Greece, who again, would represent themselves as
worshipping their own particular deity or deities. The idea of patronage is one
that we can certainly no longer relate to today. We have to study it with an
open-mindedness or struggle to grasp the idea due to the perceptions we have of
most modern religions that operate under the idea of a single God.
We
have particular creation narratives for each deity, how they came to be and how
they were to reflect whatever aspect of society they reached. These creation
stories and successive myths of particular deities were communicated as an
authoritative tradition and while we have written works from the ancient Greeks
such as the Homeric hymns, and also the works of Hesiod to clarify what we know
of the religion, the power of ancient Greek religion stems from the traditions
of the polis which defined its culture and what it stood for, as opposed to
today, where we put our power in scripture in the form of the Bible. Of course,
myth is a study for which is vital in explaining how ancient Greek religion
worked. ‘Real progress has been made in the last two decades or so in
appreciating how myths gave a sense of identity to human groups, rooted them in
a landscape, placed them in history, mapped out their interrelationships with
other such groups.’[2]
This summary by Robert Parker tells us how the belief in the myth helped
explain to the ancient Greeks the meaning of certain elements of life and
provided the societies with which they lived in a purpose and sense of communal
identity.
The
fascination with ancient Greek religion is that the elements that it is founded
on, these of tradition, communal identity and the ideals portrayed in the
literature we have are all unfamiliar to what we perceive religion to be in
modern times. Current day religion is primarily based on the importance of scripture as portrayed not only in the Bible but also of particular
importance in other religions such as Islam.
[1]Hornblower S & Spawforth A (eds.), (2004) The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilisation. Oxford University Press. P.590
[2]Parker R. (2011) ‘On Greek Religion’. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and
London. P.25
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