Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The Public Sphere 199
1. There are many gods.
2. Any community is necessarily eclectic in its choice of which gods
to worship.
3. There will always be genuine gods who are left out of the community’s
pantheon.
Very few Greeks were what we would call atheists. A rare exception
is Diagoras of Melos, a lyric poet who flourished in Athens in
the final decades of the fifth century b.c.e. and who was accused
of mocking the Eleusinian Mysteries. He was condemned to death
but fled. A more common position was agnosticism, as manifested
by the Sophist Protagoras of Abdera, who wrote: “Concerning the
gods, whether they exist or whether they do not, I am unable to
comment. The subject is inherently obscure and life is too fleeting.”
Incidentally, The tradition that Protagoras was condemned for
impiety and fled from Athens is probably untrue.
Polytheism did not have to wage war against would-be intruders,
unless the would-be intruder happened to come in the form of
an exclusive monotheistic religion that challenged its fundamental
belief in the plurality of the divine.
Getting the Gods’ Attention
The gods presided over all aspects of daily life, including health
and sickness, economic prosperity, the fertility of crops, livestock,
and humans, childbirth, warfare, and seafaring (judged always
to be a dangerous undertaking). However, they were only fitfully
interested in human affairs. Their generally somewhat dismissive
attitude toward the human race is indicated by the following words
that Apollo addresses to Hephaistos when they are about to engage
in battle outside Troy:
Earthshaker, you would think I was out of my mind if I were to fight with
you for the sake of wretched mortals, who are like leaves, now flourishing
and growing warm with life . . . but then fading away and dying. So let
us give up this quarrel at once and let mortals fight their own battles. (The
Iliad 21.462–67)
The gods, in short, had better things to do than concern themselves
with the plight of humans, and it follows from this that it
was often something of an uphill battle to enlist their support. Their
attention had to be attracted first by a prayer in which the petitioner