Apollo

Apollo was normally shown as a very strong, extremely handsome young man. He was well liked among the gods and humans alike. The town of Delphi became the center of Apollo’s worship. The temple at Delphi contained a prophet who predict the future.

Apollo was famous for his musical abilities. He was credited with inventing the lyre (while other stories have Hermes creating it and trading it with Apollo), and would often entertained the gods on Mount Olympus with it. Apollo was sometimes depicted as the sun god racing across the sky. Other myths connected the sun to the god Helios.

Apollo was the son of Zeus, but was not always on good terms with his father. Hera once tried to conspire against Zeus. Apollo and the other Olympians went along with the conspiracy. Zeus prevailed and punished both Apollo and Poseidon by forcing them to slave as mortals on Troy’s walls for a year. Another time, Apollo was forced to be a herdsman when he killed the Cyclopes in retaliation for Zeus killing his son Aselepius.

Athena

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Next after Zeus himself in Olympian precedence comes Athena, the Grey-Eyed, the Ægis-bearer. She is, in very special fashion, the daughter of Zeus; she is a motherless child, she sprang full-grown, full-armed, from the brain of her Father. This fact is never stated either in the Iliad or the Odyssey, though the relations between Zeus and Athena are always specially close, but the miraculous birth is the subject of one of the Homeric Hymns, a hymn of such splendour and, moreover, so instructive that it must be quoted in full:

“Pallas Athene, glorious goddess, now will I sing.
Sea-grey eyes, ready mind, heart to remember a thing,
Worshipful maid, Ward of the City, valiant in war;
Tritogeneia, daughter of Zeus the Counsellor,
Born from his sacred head, in battle-array ready dight,
Golden, all glistering. Fear took hold of them all at the sight–
Them, the Immortals; but she, before Zeus of the Ægis-shield,
Burst and flashed and leaped in birth from the deathless head,
Shaking a sharp-edged spear. And high Olympus reeled p. 15
At the wrath in the sea-grey eyes, and Earth on every side
Rang with a terrible cry, and the deep was disquieted
With the tumult of purple waves and outpouring of the tide.
Suddenly, and in heaven, Hyperion’s bright son stayed
His galloping steeds for a space–long, long it seemed, till the maid
Took from immortal shoulders the godlike armour they had,
Pallas, our Lady of Athens. And the counsellor Zeus was glad.
Then hail thou thus, to whom, with the Father, the shield belongs;
But I will make mention of thee yet again in my holy songs.”

Pausanias tells us that the goddess, as token of her power, produced the olive-tree at the time of her contest with Poseidon, and, he adds, “there is a story that when the Persians set fire to the city of the Athenians the tree was burnt to the ground, and that after it had been burnt down, it sprang up, and in one day grew up as much as two cubits.”

And, last, Athena had her owl, that little owl whom, if to-day you climb the Acropolis by moonlight, you may still hear hooting in the ruined Parthenon. The goddess herself bore the title Glaukopis, Owl-Eyed, and on her coins, current through the whole of civilized Greece, was stamped the image of her owl. When Athena rose to be the goddess of Light and Reason, the little old owl stopped hunting mice in the Parthenon, and mounted with Athena to be her Bird of Wisdom.

Hera

We pass to Hera, wife of Zeus. At first Hera seems all wife, the great typical bride, and the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera seems the prototype of human wedlock. So Homer, no doubt, intended us to think, but, if this is really the case what means the ceaseless, turbulent, hostility between Zeus and Hera, the unending, unseemly strife between the Father of gods and men and the woman whom he cannot even beat into submission? Is this tyrannous mistress really made by the Greek housewife even of the Homeric days in her own image? Moreover, at Olympia, where, in historic days, Zeus ruled supreme, Hera had her ancient separate sanctuary, the Heraion, the building of which long predated that of Zeus. At Argos, too, there was an ancient Heraion sacred to the ox-eyed goddess. In Thessaly, in the ancient Argonautic legend, Hera is queen and patron of the hero Jason. Of Zeus we hear nothing. What does it all mean? The answer is clear enough: Hera has been forcibly married, she is an ancient Pelasgian divinity, and when Zeus, the god of the immigrant Achaians, conquers her land, he marries the native princess. But she is never really subject to him. She leaves a wife’s submission to the shadowy double of Zeus, Dione. In a word, the unseemly squabblings between Zeus and Hera are the outcome, not of conjugal jealousy, but of racial rivalry. Hera remains always the turbulent, native princess, coerced, but never really subdued by the alien conqueror.

Hera, then, was Queen in Greece long before the coming of the Achaian Zeus. In those early Pelasgian days, who and what was she? Her name tells us. Hera is Yār-a, the year. Hera is the spirit of the year, the daimon who brings the fruits of the year in their season. As such she has a threefold seasonal aspect. As Stymphalos, in remote Arcadia, Pausanias tells us, Hera had three sanctuaries and three surnames. While yet a girl she was called Child or Maiden, when married she was called Fullgrown, and, separated from her husband, she was called Chera, the desolate one, the Widow. She reflects, then, the three stages of a woman’s life, but she reflects also the three seasons, for in antiquity the seasons were three, not four: spring, summer, winter; summer and autumn being regarded together as one season of fruit bearing. In the spring she is Child or Maiden, in summer and autumn she is Fullgrown, and in winter she is a Widow. Her winter desolation reminds us of the mourning of Demeter. This three-seasoned year is dependent on the earlier moon calendar, with its waxing, full, and waning moon.

Of all this nature-aspect of Hera as goddess of the seasons there is in Homer little trace, she has become wholly a human queen. Once only, and that in very beautiful fashion, does the old nature-aspect break through. Zeus the Cloud-gatherer is seated on the topmost peak of Mount Ida, and Hera, clad in all her splendour and girt with the cestus of Aphrodite, approaches him. “And as he saw her, love come over his deep heart.” He cast about her a great golden cloud and clasped her as his bride within his arms. “And beneath them the divine earth sent forth fresh, new grass, and dewy lotus and crocus and hyacinth, thick and soft that raised them aloft from the ground. Therein they lay, and were clad on with a fair golden cloud, whence fell drops of glittering dew.” Here manifestly we have the sacred marriage which wakens anew the blossoming earth in a magical spring. Hebe, it may here be noted, the cup-bearer of Olympus, and the daughter of Hera, is but her younger aspect as maiden.

Zeus : God of Skies

As to the primary origin and significance of Zeus there is happily no doubt. He is the Indo-European sky-god in its two aspects; he is the god of the Bright Sky and the shining ether, and also of the Dark Sky, the god of thunder and rain. When the gods drew lots for shares in the universe Poseidon, Homer tells us, drew the sea, Hades the murky darkness, and Zeus “the wide heaven.” The most primitive figures in Greek theology, long before Homer, were Ouranos and Gaia, Heaven and Earth; and of Ouranos Zeus had preserved many characteristics. Accordingly, in Homer’s pantheon, Zeus, before all things, is the Loud-Thunderer, the Cloud-Gatherer; “he lighteneth, fashioning either a rain unspeakable or hail or snow, when the flakes sprinkle the ploughed lands.” He has for his messenger Iris the Rainbow.

These traits, appropriate to the elemental sky-god, are a little difficult to fit in with the moral characteristics of the model father, husband, and ruler, and assuredly the human Zeus of Homer cannot command our admiration. He is apt, as we have seen, to behave like the uncontrolled thunderstorm he once was. He explodes automatically at the smallest opposition. Moreover, he is shamelessly licentious, he bullies and maltreats his wife. Yet there are beginnings of better things. He has his kindly aspect as god of strangers, beggars, and suppliants generally.

Zeus

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As to the primary origin and significance of Zeus there is happily no doubt. He is the Indo-European sky-god in its two aspects; he is the god of the Bright Sky and the shining ether, and also of the Dark Sky, the god of thunder and rain. When the gods drew lots for shares in the universe Poseidon, Homer tells us, drew the sea, Hades the murky darkness, and Zeus “the wide heaven.” The most primitive figures in Greek theology, long before Homer, were Ouranos and Gaia, Heaven and Earth; and of Ouranos Zeus had preserved many characteristics. Accordingly, in Homer’s pantheon, Zeus, before all things, is the Loud-Thunderer, the Cloud-Gatherer; “he lighteneth, fashioning either a rain unspeakable or hail or snow, when the flakes sprinkle the ploughed lands.” He has for his messenger Iris the Rainbow.

These traits, appropriate to the elemental sky-god, are a little difficult to fit in with the moral characteristics of the model father, husband, and ruler, and assuredly the human Zeus of Homer cannot command our admiration. He is apt, as we have seen, to behave like the uncontrolled thunderstorm he once was. He explodes automatically at the smallest opposition. Moreover, he is shamelessly licentious, he bullies and maltreats his wife. Yet there are beginnings of better things. He has his kindly aspect as god of strangers, beggars, and suppliants generally.

For his complete moralization the figure of Zeus had to await the genius of Æschylus. To Æschylus Zeus was at once the mysterious power that moves the universe and the moral solution of all-world problems. He cries: “Zeus, our Unknown, whom, since so to be called is his pleasure, I so address. When I ponder upon all things I can conjecture naught but Zeus to fit the need, if the burden of vanity is in very truth to be cast from the soul.” And again: “Never, never shall mortal counsels overpass the harmony of Zeus.” This is, indeed, a far cry from the elemental thunderstorm.

It is not, however, only the genius of Æschylus that has enlarged, softened, and beautified the conception of Zeus, till his elemental form is almost wholly lost. Pheidias, in the great chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia, embodied the ideas of the time of Æschylus, and Quintilian, in discussing this image, makes this notable statement: “Its beauty seems to have added something to revealed religion.”

The God’s Of Homer’s Olympus

The Olympians dwell on Olympus, a mountain on Thessaly, from which they take their name. They are Northerners. The Hellenes, who worshipped them, were an immigrant people, who came down from the valley of the Danube and conquered the indigenous Pelasgians. Homer‘s Achaians are but one offshoot of those tribes of northern warriors who later, as Dorians and as Gauls, again and again invaded the south, conquered and blended with the smaller, darker, indigenous peoples, and, by blending with them, saved them from being submerged in the great ocean of the East. Homer’s Achaians closely resemble the large-statured, fair-haired, blue-eyed population of the north, whose blood is in our own veins. The indigenous “Pelasgians,” Herodotus tells us, “had never emigrated, but the Hellenes ‘had often changed their seat.’” Their first settlement in Greece was in Thessaly. “Hellen and his sons,” says Thucydides, “grew strong in Pthiotis.” It was these Northerners, these Hellenes, these Achaians, who led the expedition against Troy. The Trojan War was the first collective enterprise, according to Thucydides, that gave unity to Greece.

Once awake to this northern element in Homer we are no longer surprised to find his Olympus a certain forecast, as it were, of the atmosphere of the Eddas. The gods of Homer, it has often been noted, are magnified men; but why are they so very big and so very boisterous? Simply because they are, in part, Northerners. Vastness, formlessness, fantastic excess are not “Greek” in the classical sense. Very northern are the almost Berserker rages of Zeus himself and the roughness of his divine vengeance. To wave his ambrosial locks and shake Olympus by the nodding of his brows, may be both Greek and godlike, but how about such manners as “pushing the other gods from their seats,” “tossing them about the hall”; hurling his son by the foot over the battlements of Olympus; beating his wife and hanging her up with anvils to her feet, suggesting that she “would like to eat Priam raw”? There is such magic in the words of Homer that we are apt to forget that these are not the ways of Greek gods, however primitive, but the rude pranks of irresponsible giants. The old theoi have been, indeed, considerably “tossed about” and are none the better for the process.

This northern element comes out in striking fashion in the figure of Poseidon. When the Earth-Shaker goes down to battle he shouts mightily “loud as nine thousand or ten thousand men cry in battle,” and his shout “puts great strength into the hearts of the Achaians.” We remember how Tacitus noted with amazement “the harsh note and confused roar” of the battle-cry of the Germans with which they used to rouse their courage. “It was not,” he says, “so much an articulate sound as a general cry of valour.” Poseidon takes but three strides to pass from Samothrace to Ægæ; surely the gait of a northern giant rather than of a Greek god.

It has often been noted that in their human aspect, Homer does not take his gods very seriously. “There is no god so good,” Mr. Gladstone observes, “as the swineherd Eumæus.” Zeus, on his atmospheric side, is as magnificent as his own thunder; as husband and father he is lower than the mortals over whom he rules. The nearer the gods are to the Nature gods which they in part were, the more reverent they remain. Poseidon, who is half sea and half river, “moves in a kind of rolling splendour.” Hephaistos, as the divine smith, is lame, and, therefore, to the blunt taste of the Olympians, ridiculous; but as the fire-god, who fights with the river-god Zanthus, he is a blazing glory. This lack of seriousness is, in part, accounted for, if we suppose that the gods are a blend of indigenous and immigrant elements. Homer is singing of divinities, who are, in part at least, “other men’s gods.”

So far, then, we have found in Homer’s Olympus two elements; first and earliest, the primitive Pelasgian element; next, in marked contrast, the immigrant Northern element. A third element, which we shall call Minoan, must later be added, but the consideration of this is best carried over till we come to Poseidon. In the figures of Zeus and Hera, his wife, we shall see clearly mirrored the fusion of North and South, of Hellene and Pelasgian.

Examining Greek Mythology

Before we proceed to examine Greek mythology, it is essential that we should be quite clear on two points: (1) What exactly we mean by mythology; (2) what is the relation of mythology to religion?

Religion, everywhere and always, is compounded of two factors; of ritual–that is, what a man does; of mythology, what a man thinks and imagines. These two elements are both informed and vitalized by a third, by what a man feels, desires, wishes. To quote Professor Leuba, the unit of conscious life is neither thought nor will nor action in separation, but “all three in movement towards an action.” Now, religion is only one particular form of conscious life, and, again to quote Professor Leuba, “conscious life is always orientated towards something to be secured or avoided immediately or ultimately.” The religious impulse is directed to one end and one only, to the conversation and promotion of life.

While a man is doing a religious act, performing some ritual, he is also necessarily busy thinking, imagining; some imago, however vague, of whatever he is doing or feeling rises up in his mind. Why and how? Here we must turn for help to psychology.

Man is, it would seem, the only animal who is the maker of clear images; it is his human prerogative. In most animals, which act from what we call instinct, action follows immediately and, as it were, mechanically on conception, follows with an almost chemical certainty and swiftness. But in the human animal, because of the greater complication of the nervous system, perception is not transformed instantly into action; there is an interval, longer or shorter, for choice. It is in this interval that our ideas, our images arise. We do not instantly get what we want, so we figure to ourselves our need, and out of these images so created, which are, as it were, the empty shadows of desire, our whole mental life is built up. If reaction were instantaneous, we should have no image, no representation, practically no mental life. Religion might have had ritual, but it would have been barren of mythology.

All men, in virtue of their humanity, are image-makers, but in some the image is clear and vivid, in others dull, lifeless, wavering. The Greeks were the supreme ikonists, the greatest image-makers the world has ever seen, and, therefore, their mythology lives on to-day. The genius of Rome was not for ikonism; their mythology, save when they borrow from the Greeks, is negligible. They worshipped not gods, not dei, but powers, numina. These numina were only dim images of activities; they never attained to personality, they had no attributes, no life histories; in a word, no mythology.

We must always remember that mythology, the making of images, is only one and, perhaps, not the greatest factor in religion. Because the Romans were not ikonists, it does not follow that they were a people less religious than the Greeks. The contrary is probably true. A vague something is more awe-inspiring than a known someone. So Lucan felt in writing of the imageless worship of the Gauls:

“Not to have known
The gods they fear, adds terror.”