Disqualified Olympians: the Skeptical Greek View of Divine Judges

chapter 8 Disqualified Olympians: The Skeptical Greek View of Divine Judges Victor Bers* and Adriaan Lanni** 1 Introduction Archaic and Classical Greek literature and legal practice exhibit a reluctance, bordering on refusal, to deem the Olympian gods as fit judges, either of them- selves or of humans. The gods are routinely portrayed as preoccupied with advancing their own interests, and notably petulant over perceived slights. In Aeschylus’ mythical account of the creation of Athens’ first court, Athena, a goddess above all of sagacity, declares herself incapable of judging the defen- dant, a mere mortal, without human jurors to help her. Respectable divine agents of justice are almost always figured as abstractions (“Themis” or the spir- its in Hesiod), named, not portrayed with any specificity, devoid of personality. Perhaps reflecting doubts about the quality of divine judging, Athenian courts were conceived as predominantly mortal affairs. Despite the ubiquity of religious symbols and rituals in Athenian life, Athenian jurors did not, for the most part, seek the assistance of the divine or draw legitimacy from the involvement of the gods in their decisions. This pessimistic view of the gods as judges must reflect in part the Greeks’ profound realization of the inherent difficulty of judgment. But the apparent superiority of mortals over the gods in judging may be in large measure a byproduct of an anthropomorphism that imagined the gods not merely as flawed humans, but as lacking the seriousness mortals acquired precisely as a consequence of their impending death. 2 Literature First, essential prolegomena on some pervasive features of Greek religion, and then pertinent texts—literary, forensic, and philosophical—in the archaic and classical periods, roughly 750 bce until about 330 bce; that is, from the * Professor of Classics, Yale University. ** Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�8�646_008 Disqualified Olympians 129 time of the consolidation of traditional materials constitutive of the Iliad and Odyssey, more or less as we have them, and the composition of Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, down to fifth-century Athenian tragedy, and, bridging the fifth and fourth centuries, the law court speeches attributed to the canonical ten Attic orators, concluding in the fourth century with Plato and Aristotle. Despite a multiplicity of religious practices, many regulated by enduring institutions, such as priesthoods, we cannot speak of interpretive authorities, prepared and expected to explain the world in general terms. A deep chasm divides nearly everything we find in the domain of “imaginative literature,” historiography, and philosophy from cult. One instance: in the Iliad Helen is a woman deeply shamed, even grieved by her adultery, in Euripides’ Orestes a vain and shameless hussy, in his Helen a victim of supernatural sleight of hand; Menelaus is often but a cuckold, dazed by what has happened to him (Aeschylus, Agamemnon) or prepared to threaten the life of an innocent (Euripides, Orestes). Nonetheless, these troubled spouses, or at least entities bearing their names, were honored at the Menelaion, a shrine just south of Sparta.1 Writing in the fifth century bce, Herodotus remarks that Hesiod and Homer (in that order) constructed a theogony for the Greeks and presented their names, honors, skills, and forms (Hist. 2.53.6). But so far from credit- ing the gods with a judicial role, Herodotus quotes, evidently with approval, Solon’s depressing generalization: “The divine is grudging and prone to giving trouble” (Hist. 1.32). To be sure, there were cult centers of immense importance—the oracle at Delphi in particular, which played a crucial role in widespread Greek coloniza- tion as early as the eighth century bce and continued to wield considerable power well into and beyond the fourth century bce. But it is impossible to extract a coherent sense from Delphi of justice in any abstract sense, to say nothing of what might constitute a “divine court.” Heraclitus, the philosopher with the sobriquet “obscure,” was for once clear enough when he wrote that “the god whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign” (Heraclitus fr. 93). Outside the realm of literature, the focus of Greek religion appears to be words, that is, the language of prayer, and actions, par- ticularly sacrifice; in compact Greek, λεγόμενα καὶ δρώμενα. It is telling that for Xenophon’s Socrates a decisive refutation of the prosecution’s charge that he did not honor the gods the city honors, but introduced new divinities, con- sisted of his public participation in the state’s sacrificial rites (Apol. 10–11). The eighteenth book of the Iliad concludes with an elaborate description of the shield that Hephaestus, the divine smith, builds for Achilles to replace 1 Reported by Herodotus in Hist. 6.61, et al., and confirmed by archaeology. .

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