Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

198 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
know about the practice of Greek religion comes to us from highly
unrepresentative authors, including the poets Homer, Hesiod,
Aeschylus, Sophokles, and Euripides, the historian Herodotos,
and the philosophers Plato and Aristotle.
Because most Greeks took the existence of their gods for granted,
they had no need for any creed or dogma, which is why they
have not bequeathed to us any sacred literature comparable to
the Bible or the Koran. The very Greek word orthodoxy, meaning
“correct opinion,” has no ancient equivalent, at least not of a religious
nature. Ideas about the nature of the gods were as a result
always fluid. As A. D. Nock (Conversion , 10) observed, “The place
of faith was taken by myth and ritual (which) implied an attitude
rather than a conviction.” It follows that the focus of devotion
was not upon belief but upon action. What mattered to the
Greeks principally was securing the goodwill of their gods, and
what mattered in turn to the gods were the respect and gifts
that they received from mortals. Piety (eusebeia) thus consisted
in the performing of traditional rites and in giving the gods what
they wanted.
Although the Christian notion of sin had no Greek equivalent,
certain forms of behavior did offend the gods and had fateful,
even fatal, consequences, including atasthaliê and hubris, both of
which translate approximately as overweening pride and presumptuousness.
However, even though the gods preserved a
healthy distance between themselves and mere mortals, the nemesis,
or retribution, that presumptuousness engendered seems to
have been regarded primarily as self-inflicted. At the very beginning
of The Odyssey, Zeus complains that mortals blame the gods
for their undoing when in fact it is their overweening pride that
is the cause. Broadly speaking, however, Greek religion offered
little guidance in conduct and no explanation for the ordering of
the universe. For the answers to those and related questions, the
Greeks turned to philosophy.
The main objective behind Greek religion was to secure advancement
in this life. To come to terms with this priority, we have to step
outside the assumptions of a monotheistic worldview and conceive
of a universe not ruled by a single beneficent deity but by a host of
warring deities whose interests frequently conflicted and who were
only marginally concerned with the good of mankind. Greek religion
was an inclusive and, by and large, essentially tolerant system,
which operated from the following basic principles: