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Olympians: the Gods and Goddesses of Classical Greece

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Olympians: the Gods and Goddesses of Classical Greece PREFACE This volume grew out of several separate projects which I have undertaken over the last several years, including a set of encyclopedia articles on Greek gods and goddesses, and a series of lectures which I delivered in 1996 at the Centre Universitaire de Luxembourg to an extraordinarily receptive and encouraging audience. My goal in expanding the articles and lectures into the current book has been to express in a single volume of manageable size what I have come to regard as the most useful and illuminating modern and not-so-modern commentary on the divinities of the Classical world, supplemented by my own remarks and evaluations. In order to render the book as readable and useful as possible, I have not encumbered the text with footnote numbers; references to primary and secondary sources may be checked in the General Bibliography and Chapter Bibliographies. I am grateful to many people for their assistance and encouragement. My good friend and colleague Charles Marie Ternes of the Centre Universitaire de Luxembourg first suggested that I transform my lectures and articles into a book; he then encouraged me to submit it for publication in Luxembourg. Mark T. Riley of California State University at Sacramento read a preliminary draft of this book, making detailed and helpful suggestions for the production of the current text; faults and failings which remain are more than likely a result of my having ignored his good advice. I owe a particularly large debt of gratitude to my friend and colleague, Prof. Charles Marie Ternes of the Centre Alexandre- Wiltheim, Luxembourg, and the Centre Universitaire de Luxembourg. Dr. Ternes encouraged me to write this book and offered many helpful suggestions during its composition; he wrote the admirable French and German chapter summaries and he guided the completed manuscript through the publication process. Errors and omissions are, of course, solely my responsibility. My students at Clark University in a series of courses on Classical mythology and ancient religion over nearly 25 years have been a constant source of inspiration and renewed enthusiasm; their eminently sensible questions in and out of class have kept me thinking about the issues which I hope this book clarifies in some small way. Finally, Sarah K. Burke proofread the final typescript with meticulous attention, catching many errors and stylistic infelicities. INTRODUCTION: THE TWELVE GODS A brief comment on the Twelve Olympians and the twelve chapters of this book is in order. The Greeks assembled their gods into a company of twelve and I have chosen to supply twelve chapters on each of the members of one of various alternative lists of the Twelve. The number twelve is fixed in the various ancient lists which have come down to us; some names vary, Dionysus being frequently substituted for Hestia. Other lists of twelve differ quite drastically from that upon which this volume is based. I have followed here the selection of Twelve made for the central group of the Parthenon Frieze, leaving Hestia out and including Dionysus: Aphrodite, Apollo, Ares, Artemis, Athena, Demeter, Dionysus, Hephaestus, Hera, Hermes, Poseidon, and Zeus. Burkert regards these Twelve “quite simply as the gods of the Greeks;” without going quite this far, I would defend my choice of twelve divinities as being those gods who are not only enshrined in the Parthenon, the archetypal symbol of Classical Greek culture, but also those who are likely to be of most interest to modern readers. Hestia, then, is not accorded a full chapter here. As the hearth, she is the physical manifestation of the center of the home, of the sacrificial fire of the temple (that is, the hearth of the gods), and of fire itself as one of the core prerequisites of civilized life. Plutarch (Life of Aristides, 20.4) refers to the ever-burning sacrificial fire at Delphi as being “the public hearth”; Hestia tends the shrine of Apollo at Delphi according to one of the two Homeric Hymn to Hestia (HH 24). Without Hestia, “mortals hold no banquet” (HH 29.5-6). As the hearth of the gods Hestia is, of course, a major divinity but she may by definition never leave home, nor can she have lovers, family, interesting adventures, and so on. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, perhaps the least Hestia-like of the Twelve Gods, amplifies this point: Nor yet does the pure maiden Hestia love Aphrodite’s works. She was the first-born child of wily Kronos and youngest too, by will of Zeus who holds the aegis , a queenly maid whom both Poseidon and Apollo sought to wed. But she was wholly unwilling, nay, stubbornly refused; and touching the head of father Zeus who holds the aegis, she, that fair goddess, swore a great oath which has in truth been fulfilled, that she would be a maiden all her days. So Zeus the Father gave her a high honor instead of marriage, and she has her place in the midst of the house and has the riches portion. In all the temples of the gods she has a share of honor, and among all mortal men she is chief of the goddesses. (Loeb translation) Hestia is, then, a major divinity, both oldest and youngest of the children of Kronos in that she was the first to be born and swallowed, and the last to be regurgitated (cf. Hesiod, Theogony 454). Beyond this, however, she is somewhat uninteresting. In discussing the Twelve Gods (ofl d≈deka yeo€ or simply ofl d≈deka), Guthrie points out in The Greeks and their Gods that they can be shown to have been conceived in Classical times as a kind of corporate body; this is shown in several ways, for example in the erection of the single Athenian altar to them which we shall discuss below, and in the common oath “By the Twelve!” (cf. Aristophanes’ Knights, 235). Thucydides (6.54) and Herodotus (6.108; 2.7) both mention the altar to the Twelve at Athens, which according to Thucydides was set up in the agora by Peisistratus the Younger (grandson of the tyrant) and later enlarged. Six altars, each dedicated to a pair of gods, existed at Olympia, where Pindar (Olympian 10.50ff.) says that their cult was founded by Heracles. O. Weinreich (“Zwölfgötter,” in W.H. Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie, Hildesheim, 1936) suggests that the twelve gods to whom the Athenian altar was dedicated in 522-521 BC were the canonical twelve of the time of the archon Peisistratus the Younger: Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hermes, Athena, Hephaestus, and Hestia. On the east frieze of the Parthenon (dedicated in 438), a slightly different set of twelve is depicted; Dionysus has replaced Hestia. Though a “late intruder and hardly of Olympian status,” as Guthrie characterizes him, Dionysus could hardly be refused a place so close to his own theater. Hestia is displaced here and elsewhere with little surviving comment by ancient writers other than Plato’s description of a procession of the gods; Hestia remains at home and the canonical number of twelve is made up without her presence (Phaedrus, 246e; R. Hackforth trans.): And behold, there in the heaven Zeus, mighty leader, drives his winged team. First of the host of gods and daimons he proceeds, ordering all things and caring therefor, and the host follows after him, marshaled in eleven companies. For Hestia abides alone in the gods’ dwelling place, but for the rest, all such as are ranked in the number of the twelve as ruler gods lead their several companies, each according to his rank. We shall see that other variations from the Peisistratean Twelve are attested. At Olympia, the Titans Kronos and Rhea, plus the river-god Alpheus, take their place among the twelve gods, probably sometime between 470 and 400 BC, replacing Hephaestus, Demeter and Hestia. The change may have been made to pay particular honor to the parents of Zeus, the god to whom the site was primarily sacred, as well as to the god of the local river. In Laws (828), Plato suggests linking the twelve gods with the months of the year; he would set the twelfth month apart from the others by devoting it to Pluto so that this portion of the year could be sacred to chthonic powers, as opposed to the celestial gods honored by the remainder of Plato’s annual round of observances. Weinreich collects an enormous amount of literary and archaeological data on altars and inscriptions dedicated to the Twelve Gods, from all parts of the Greek-speaking world: mainland Greece, Crete, Asia Minor, Sicily and Italy, including even some references to India. He follows U. Von Wilamowitz- Moellendorf (Glaube der Hellenen, Berlin, 1931) in concluding that the cult of the Twelve originated in Ionia. In fact, the earliest cults of the Twelve Gods which can be dated with certainty are indicated by the 6th-century altars at Olympia and Athens mentioned above. Weinreich suggests that the Twelve served as guardian spirits of the twelve months and of the signs of the zodiac; as we shall see below, this association is late and based on the purely coincidental similarity between the Olympian Twelve and the twelve Egyptian gods of the months and of the zodiac. Weinreich maintains, probably correctly, that the Twelve were Olympian gods from the very beginning; A.E. Raubitschek challenges this conclusion, maintaining that the Twelve were originally local heroes or daimones (“Die Attische Zwölfgötter,” in Opus Nobile: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Ulf Jantzen, Wiesbaden, 1969). Charlotte R. Long, in The Twelve Gods of Greece and Rome (New York, 1987), follows Weinreich to the extent of agreeing that the Attic Twelve “seem to have been major, named Greek gods from the start.” She engages in a long-needed, comprehensive reassessment of the literary and epigraphical evidence for the Olympian Twelve.
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