SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hello, my name is Melissa Lane. I am the 50th person to be Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, and I also teach at uh Princeton University. I'm delighted to be here with my fellow Gresham professor, Ronald Hutton, to be discussing the question of the gods of Greece.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

I am indeed Ronald, Ronald Hutton, the 34th Gresham Professor of Divinity. For some reason, professors of divinity last a bit longer. And also professor of history at Bristol University. And delighted to be discussing the gods of Greece with you, Melissa. Thank you. Yeah, let's start by asking where deities come from. And the answer is generally from the grassroots, that you start off with tribes and clans who make friends, at least in their own minds, with the local spirits of their area. And then these seem to evolve as societies get more complex into pantheons of deities. And the real fun starts when cultures and kingdoms start pulling themselves together. So when you get these enormous, powerful centralized kingdoms like the pharaohs of Egypt and the rulers of Sumer and Babylon. The fun then is to try and segue together all these local collections of deities, syncretise them, synchronize them, and get them into a big imperial family that can be deities for a kingdom. Usually takes thousands of years, but they manage it. Greece doesn't do that, of course, because it doesn't centralize. It remains a collection of city-states squatting on a country slashed to ribbons and streaming out into the sea. And with their equivalent of America or in the gorgeous West, the Greek colonies, especially in Italy and Sicily. But they do have a unification, it's cultural that makes them feel that they're Greeks and the rest of the world are not, carried out initially by wandering storytellers and then by playwrights and uh poets who publish in literature, which uh is uh pretty successful in that they create this kit of goddesses and gods. But it's never quite complete, is it? Uh at the level of cult, when you see how they're worshipped, different iterations of the same deity can look really different. And even in the myths, uh they tend very often to have different parents and different stories attached. When the Roman Cicero, with the Roman bent for discipline and organization, wrote a book on the Greek and Roman deities, he ended up by concluding there must be at least five different gods called Dionysus because they were so dissimilar from each other. How do you find all this?

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Actually, we see there are two different stories about the birth of Aphrodite in epic poetry. Um for Hesiod, uh, she is born from the genitals of the god Umranus, heaven. But in in Homer, um, she has a much more conventional parentage. Um, she's the offspring of Zeus and the minor sea nymph uh Dione. Right. And even within, you know, if we think about worship within Athens, the Athenians could emphasize different sides of Athena. So they could emphasize Athena as warrior, Athena as protector of the techni of the crafts, and different festivals would correspond to different sides of her.

SPEAKER_02 3:52

Yeah, and and this trucks on. Uh it's basically a feature of uh pre-modern literature storytelling. Uh even in the Christian Middle Ages, when you have quite a cohesive Western Christian civilization. A character like Morgan Le Fay in the Arthurian legend is going to have different personality, different roles, and different personal connections in different stories. And the treacherous pupil of Merlin, the one who imprisons him, not only has about seven or eight different names, but whether she's regarded as deeply sympathetic or a villainess depends on the version. I think it's printing that changes everything. It creates a canon, it fossilizes ideas. And our Greeks are way before that.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Yes, that's right. I think one of one of the striking features about the Greek gods, you mentioned the word treachery, is of course also that we see treachery among them. So there are these generations of gods, and Zeus only comes to power by overturning um and um his father, his own father, Kronos. So the the sense that um there's kind of variability both about each god and also in terms of which gods, which which generation you might choose to emphasize, I think is also a really important theme for the Greeks.

SPEAKER_02 5:19

Absolutely. How do you think the Greeks get on with such badly behaved deities?

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Yeah, I mean, this becomes a huge problem, of course, for especially the philosophers. So one of the most interesting philosophers is Xenophanes of Colophon, who's in the sixth century before the Common Era, um actually quite critical of Homer and the stories about the gods. And it's precisely for this reason that he says, first of all, they're very badly behaved. A true god should actually not be running around in motion, but be still and um having exercising power just through the force of their mind. Um, but he also is very conscious that perhaps the Greeks have just been making up the gods in their own image. Um, so he he says, you know, if the Thracians make gods, they make them look red-haired and blue-eyed, because that's what the Thracians look like. And then he has even a further flight of fancy and says, if cattle and horses were to be able to have hands and make images, they would draw the gods in their own images. So horses would have gods that look like horses. So this sort of question, I think the the Greeks start to become very aware of this question. Well, why should we think of gods as, you know, acting like humans, having families, having quarrels, having love affairs, and so on? You know, perhaps that's all actually sacrilegious.

SPEAKER_02 6:42

Yeah, I find something quite cute about the primeval Greek deities that really they seem to reflect the habits of Bronze Age Greek aristocrats of royalty, you know, oversexed, belligerent, ambitious, passionate, attached to their own sense of honour, and remorselessly destructive when provoked. I I think there's quite a contrast, although maybe I'm overplaying it, between the Greek concept of divinity and the Near Eastern. It's it kind of shows in the language because when people in Syria, Israel, Judah and Mesopotamia and Egypt address deities, they do so in the terms in which slaves address owners or servants address mistresses and masters. And their myth suggests that the deities are squarely in charge. They've created humanity to serve them. Whereas with the Greeks there seem to be very few, if any, Greek myths which speak of the deities creating humans for their own purposes. Usually they're separate streams that come into being largely by accident alongside each other, and then spend the rest of eternity trying to find a relationship between them. And when Greeks uh address deities in invocation or prayer, it tends to be with a kind of sir and madam rather than Lord God.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

That's such an interesting observation. Um, I think that idea that gods and humans are sort of there alongside each other in the Greek imagination, you know, actually really again carries on into later philosophy. So if we think of the Stoic Commonwealth, for example, it's a commonwealth of gods and humans. Um, and of course, you know, there is the idea, I think, in Greek worship that one wants to, you know, please the gods. Um, and so there is language of service, but I think it's very interesting that you stress that that doesn't go to the stand to all the way to the thought that you're only a creature of the god or your only role is to serve the god. It's more you get on with things, and part of your getting on with things is also ensuring that you stand in the right relationship to the gods.

SPEAKER_02 9:07

Yeah, I'll I'll look at the relationships that I see in a moment, but just now I'll uh recall one very colourful uh Greek creation myth, uh which is that of the Orphic Mysteries, uh, which depends on the idea that um, which is very common in Greek mythology, that there's this pre-human cosmic dust up between gods and titans, two super races struggling for supremacy. And Zeus manages to win with this doomsday weapon, the Thunderbolt, and he incinerates the Titans, but their ashes fall to earth and get rained on and produce this kind of silt, this gook, and then it pulsates and new life forms arise from it because there's still a bit of Titan life in the mud, and they are the human race, and they account for our curious dual nature that uh on the one hand, we're incredibly mortal and vulnerable to all sorts of misfortunes that afflict natural mortal beings. On the other hand, there is this lingering spark of Titan in us, star demon in us, which means we're dissatisfied with the world. We just don't fit in.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

That's so that's a wonderful story to recall. And I mean, we could add to that that of course there is also the Greek idea that some uh a few humans are sort of part divine, you know, so that you have this race of demigods or heroes who might have one divine parent and um, you know, kind of looking after them in some special way. But I think that's another way of conveying the same thought that humans have a spark of divinity, but also have mortal nature. And it's that contrast between being mortal and not being subject to death that I think is is also really fundamental as the Greeks are kind of meditating on what divinity means.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

And absolutely. And something I find very attractive about ancient Greek religion is that, in contrast to other religions of uh the Mediterranean world, uh deities are so much like us that, as you've said, they can actually mate with us. Uh and gods do it all the time. They really like human women. And uh the very occasional goddess, uh above all Aphrodite, will do it. So genetically, we are similar enough to reproduce, which means in natural history terms, our species really are close together. So, in a sense, deities are what we may become ourselves. They they set the benchmark for human evolution, and in that sense, the fact that uh they behave like a bunch of drunken adolescents half the time doesn't matter because it's their ability which is what at stake, their morality is irrelevant.

SPEAKER_00 12:09

Yes, I think I think that's quite interesting. And again, it marks a real contrast between thinking about Greek religion and the Greek gods um with um monotheism as it evolved um from Judaism onward and in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in particular, because that idea that the gods certainly their function is not to be moral exemplars, I think can seem quite alien to many people today, where that might be the expectation that we have. There's no idea at all that the gods are going to be wholly good, as you say, quite the opposite. And even most of them not all powerful. And of course, even Zeus, who who in some sense is the ruler of the universe and you know has this plenitude of power at the same time in the Trojan War, he's and in other many other moments, he's embattled with his fellow Olympians, you know, trying to kind of um uh benefit his side while the others are scheming to benefit theirs. So, you know, in that sense, again, the expectations that we might have in a post-medieval sense of Christianity, especially that God should be omnipotent and omniscient and um benevolent completely, that just none of that applies to the Greek gods.

SPEAKER_02 13:21

Absolutely so. And even in the ancient world, as we've discussed, there are plenty of pantheons that are much more similar to all-wise, all powerful, all mighty gods than the Greek. So looking now at the way in which humans actually got on with the deities, uh, I think we divide up the labor nicely between us because, unless I'm wrong, uh, you are particularly interested in special humans like philosophers and playwrights and uh uh the the greater poets, and I'm interested in people on the ground uh look looking for help. And it's a curious kind of ad hoc relationship. It's actually, I think, very similar to uh an ordinary peasant or artisan trying to deal with uh a local aristocracy or royal house, in that most of the time you're simply irrelevant to each other, you're in different spheres. But just as one pays dues, pays taxes to uh a ruling family or the local aristocrat, so the deities uh get rather irritable if you don't give them regular honor. But if you give them regular honor, the world ticks over. The the the missing element uh which personally again I find rather refreshing is the lack of commandments, the lack of divine laws, the lack of monitoring, the lack of sin, salvation, and sainthood. Which means that rather comfortably, a lot of the time deities are simply not interested in what humans are up to.

unknown 15:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Can you say a bit more about you know the forms that those um periodic pains of dues um took, sacrifices, um, pilgrimages, and so on?

SPEAKER_02 15:15

Yeah, uh they they really form uh fall into two groups. Uh the first is the ticking over, uh the priming the engine, uh, which is is again it's rather like paying taxes or feudal dues. That there are certain times of the year when you hold festivals in honour of the deities, and there are certain times at which you offer sacrifices to them, particularly uh on behalf of the community, uh blood sacrifices. All that sounds rather creepy to modern ears. Actually, it isn't. And there's something in it for the humans, because everybody likes a festival, we still like a carnival, a parade, a fete at the present day. So it's when everybody gets a chance to celebrate. When Dionysus arrives in Athens, then even women and children are allowed to drink wine. Uh prisoners are released from jail. It's uh a great sigh of relief for the community. And likewise, blood sacrifice really just consists of one of the few times of the year when ordinary people get to share in fresh meat. It's basically having a barbecue but consecrating the animal to the deity before it's slaughtered. And in contrast, the atmosphere in a mid-20th century abattoir, when you have animals being herded in squealing or lowing with fear because they can smell the blood, the general opinion was that if an animal didn't appear comfortable, then the ritual couldn't go ahead. It had to die instantly and painlessly, and had to go to the place of sacrifice without fear, which all adds up to quite a humane recipe for meat eating, remembering that most people in a community are not going to be able to afford meat, especially red meat, uh, most of the time. So offering worship to deities is a great way of getting protein, uh, and you give them the inedible bits. Right. Uh, and then you chow down on the rest yourself as a community. So it works really well.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

Yeah, no, that's a that's a um really interesting analogy. Um just to highlight something that you said earlier, um, as as you were just referring to the festivals, of course, to emphasize many of these were some were purely within a given polis, a given civ city or city-state, but then many were also pan-Greek. And so people would all go to um Olympus or to Delphi, and they would um carry out some of these um ritual activities together. And again, I think that, as you said earlier, that's really central to the formation of a kind of um pan-Greek identity, even with the continuing um differences among each polis.

SPEAKER_02 18:09

Yeah, rather as uh early modern and indeed Victorian villagers would visit each other's um harvest homes, still do, uh, and village fetes and feasts and ails. So Greeks would visit each other's festivals, a way of tying the Greek well together. And you mentioned pilgrimage earlier, which I think is is really important, uh, combining the pleasures of a summer holiday with those of worship. And and and temples and shrines are impressive places, and it's it's where you get to see the highlights of the Greek artistic world. Yeah. Uh and rather like a medieval cathedral to people who are normally living in cramped, smelly, dingy accommodation. Uh, it's a a foretaste of heaven with the incense, the magnificent buildings. These places are houses for the deities and worthy of them.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

Yeah, I mean, and it is interesting to cut to think about what the statues looked like that were inside those temples, for example, and the sort of cult objects, um, because I think in in more archaic Greek times, often they might, it might just be a piece of wood, you know, um, a kind of olive wood or something like that that you could think of as representing the god. But then especially in the classical period, we see this again real anthropomorphizing where the gods become these um monumentally sized um but human-shaped um and beautifully decorated um entities and statues. So um Phidias's statue of Athena um on the Parthenon, for example. Um, and again, I think sometimes we have lost our sense of how magnificent that was because we don't remember that those statues and many elements of the temples were actually painted. Um, and so that is something that we've we can't we sort of think of them as you know, pure white, but in fact they were they were multicolored, um, and that was that was part as well as bejeweled, and that was part of their magnificence.

SPEAKER_02 20:12

Absolutely so. Uh you know, I I'm right with you on this wonderful transition from the archaic to the classical. Uh, you know, the most rampantly feminine of Greek deities, Aphrodite, starts off as a triangular hunk of rock uh which was never shaped into human form, possibly because at least is one point of origin. Aphrodite began as a goddess of the copper bearing rocks of Cyprus representing the land, so to have a hunk of potential ore as your uh icon is very sensible. And I I I still love that fourth century moment when uh Aphrodite becomes definitively womanlike, and B, she disrobes. Uh the incredible impact made by Praxitoles Aphrodite of Cnidas, uh, who who seems to have been larger than life, as deities are actually supposed to be, stepping outside Greece just for a moment, uh, the Roman poet Ovid, uh portraying the goddess Artemis to him, Diana, surprised by the hunter Actian. It's a Greek myth, uh, able to stare over the heads of her nymphs because she's about two or three feet taller doing it. So seeing these whacking great statues, that they are literally life size for immortals. And the number of Greek epigrams on that particular statue of Aphrodite, of Aphrodite herself saying, Where the heck did Praxitales ever see me getting out of the bath? How could it happen?

SPEAKER_00 21:55

That's wonderful. Yeah, that makes me think also again of the um the large. Athena within the Parthenon, to whom the women of Athens would every year on the Pan Athenae bear a cloak. So they would weave a special peplas cloak that would then be presented to the goddess. Now, again, they don't really think the goddess needs a cloak, probably. If she wanted a cloak, she could have one, you know, herself. She doesn't need, but it's that sort of sense of this periodic ritual service, which again, as you said, doesn't amount to sort of constant enslavement, but amounts to kind of um periodic recognition or acknowledgement. Um, and that actually puts me in mind of um uh, you know, the Paul Cartledge's thought that one way we might talk about the relationship of the Greeks and the gods is that they have to nomidzane the gods, um, to acknowledge the gods, which is different from having to believe in the gods or having to serve the gods as masters. It's rather this question of giving them due acknowledgement, due recognition.

SPEAKER_02 22:57

Yeah, there is this uh question then to which I must now turn of what happens if you're an ordinary Greek and you actually do want to attract the attention of a goddess or god uh yourself. And the answer is you have to catch their attention. Uh that you're not gonna get it naturally. It's exactly like dealing with a local Aristo. Now, it helps to have a contact in the aristocrat's palace or household, which is where uh subborning um getting hold of uh the right ear of a priestess or priest helps. But if you're gonna go it alone to head for a prominent shrine where they hang out, they being the deity hang out and lost the time, uh, and actually offering them a bribe uh with an ex voto offering, uh if you cure my toothache, uh if I can conceive a child with my husband, uh, if I can go on this perilous, lengthy voyage and come safe home, I shall give you an altar, a statue, uh a golden hairnet, uh a beautiful lyre, uh the instrument, uh whatever. And an awful lot of our uh evidence for religion is the payment of the debt, the the handing it over of uh what is essentially uh a deal, a contract, a payment for services rendered.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I think a kind of related phenomenon is the practice of asking questions of the god through oracles. Um the most famous oracle, of course, is that of Apollo at Delphi, but there's also, for example, the oracle at Dodono, which is um thought to give the answer of the god, which will then be sort of um interpreted um by a human, but the answer of the god comes through the rustling of the tree. Um, and so people going to sort of ask their questions and in return um offer perhaps some service of the kind that you were describing.

SPEAKER_02 25:01

Absolutely. I think we're going to go in in different directions now because uh I'd like to look a bit at personal devotion to deities. Uh, but I'd also uh before going there, like to ask you to enlarge more on the kind of thing which you really know so much more about than I, which is the way in which increasingly Greek philosophy and high-level Greek religion responded to the challenge of knowing the divine.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

Yes, thank you. So, as I mentioned before, I think a lot of this questioning does go back to Xenophanes in the sixth century, asking, you know, sort of casting doubt on the traditional stories and epic, especially that we're ascribing all this quarrelsome, um, desirous nature to the various deities. Um, and what we see from that point is both in literary and philosophical circles, we see sort of real questions about how can one interpret the gods. So, on the one hand, there is the view: well, if they're anthropomorphic, then it's sort of discreditable to describe them as behaving badly. So we should clean up poetry. And that's of course the view that Plato takes in the Republic is to say we need to censor the poets and not allow them to tell stories about the gods that would say, make them anything but good, because that will only encourage uh misbehavior among humans if we don't censor them in that way. And then the alternative tack is to, especially among literary critics, um, from Theogenes of Regium onward, as um Barbara Graziosi has pointed out, is to interpret them allegorically or metaphorically and say, oh, you know, people talk all about the gods, but really they just mean, you know, each god is just symbolizing a certain um material element or symbolizing a certain emotion. And again, that can go in the line of thinking, well, humans have made up the gods for their own purposes. So I think those tensions, on the one hand, this question about can God be anything but good? And so we see um already a phenomenon that scholars have described as pagan monotheism, as the philosophers start to say, well, if God, if the gods have to all be good, then isn't there a sense in which there's only really one God? So we can talk about the god being good, and we can sort of um sublate all the Olympians and all the other divine beings into just one. And then on the other hand, to say, well, perhaps the gods are not really gods at all, they're just allegorical ways of talking that the poets have developed. So both of those strands would go on um from classical Greece um right into Rome and far beyond.

SPEAKER_02 27:53

Yeah, they're they're the classic means by which our greatest Greek philosophers could be rescued for the Christian era. Uh I retain um a lurking and slightly une uneasy affection for the Greek philosophers who didn't go down that route, the the Neoplatonists who tried to do the opposite, and because they were coming way after the appearance of Christianity, and some of them in the very uncomfortable situation of the triumph of Christianity all round these devoted pagans. I'm thinking of people like Porphyry, Amblicus, Proclus, who tried very hard to construct a pagan theology which could be set up against the Christian, in other words, to turn something that is chaotic, shambolic, regionalized and incoherent into all the opposites for those. And uh it's n it's not a philosophy to which I I tend myself because I happen to like the chaos, the incoherence, the decentralization. But to try and fit a multiplicity of goddesses and gods into this kind of waterfall of divinity, uh, this cascade, this current springing out from one source, but turning quite legitimately into all these separate beings. Uh, very much like a human family tree.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

Yeah, yeah. No, that is very interesting that um, right, the sort of more ascetic take of Plato himself of trying to reduce it all to one is allowed by the Neoplatonists to flower into this, as you say, waterfall. They have this idea of emanation, but it's very regulated and controlled and ordered. So the multiplicity can survive, but it has to be properly ordered.

SPEAKER_02 29:50

Yes. And the idea coming in that uh the other way of contacting the deities, uh preferable a higher, a nobler way than offering a bribe or a payment, is to work a ritual.

SPEAKER_00 30:05

Well, please say a bit more about that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:07

Yeah, uh copied directly from uh Grico-Egyptian magic, the idea that um you can work with the deities if you know the right way of inviting them. You know, sending out the verbal equivalent with lots of incredibly elaborate uh material props like the blood of a black ibbis to write on the skull of a baboon and that kind of thing, uh, that it's the equivalent of sending out embossed invitation cards to at homes, uh, and then they arrive in your magic circle and help out. And uh the Neoplatonists basically uh taking that idea and enobling it as a means of getting in. If if there's a kind of punchline, a postscript to the pagan ancient world that catches my heart, it's the story of the goddess Athena when she's evicted from the Parthenon, uh knocking on the door of uh the philosopher Proclus and asking if she can shack up at his place.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Oh, that's a wonderful story. Yeah. But do say a bit more about the sort of practice of cult um and you know what it meant for ordinary people, um, perhaps the mystery religions, among other dimensions.

SPEAKER_02 31:22

Yes, there's a whole uh area which I I've left out so far, and it's the enormous question of what happens if you're pious and an ordinary person. Uh I've long ago became convinced that religion is kind of an inbred talent in certain people, uh, rather like being a musician or being a mathematician or being a speaker. Uh some people just feel the divine there. Now, maybe it is there, and that's why they feel it. Uh and maybe it's in control, or maybe this is uh random incidents and the production of brain chemicals. I've I've no idea. But I do respect the sheer power of a religious instinct in people.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

This is what William James would later call the varieties of religious experience.

SPEAKER_02 32:14

That's exactly so. So the question I pose myself is what happens to those who aren't satisfied with not contacting the deities unless they have a toothache or a fertility problem. And the answer, of course, is that mystery religions are designed for these people. That is specific cults within a wider Greek paganism, which offer people in an intense personal relationship, uh virtually one-to-one with favourite deities, specific deities who are unusually interested in human beings. They differ, of course, widely. I mean, some of them, like the Orphic Mysteries, uh are a bit like Hare Krishna temples in the modern West, you know, different dress, uh different appearance, a different lifestyle. And then there are things like the Eleusinian mysteries, uh, which are for anybody who wants to turn up, uh, unless they're a murderer, you know, slaves, women equally welcome. We we have a sense uh in outline of what happens at Eleusis in that people purify themselves with water and they get purified with air and fire, presumably uh by being fanned or having to go round a fire or pass between fires. And then they have an ear of corn towards the end revealed to them as a a key symbol, and the big deal is a manifestation of the goddess Demeter or Persephone or both. So that that's a way of putting thousands and thousands of people through a similar experience. But I I'm particularly interested in the sign-up mystery religions, the initiatory mystery religions, uh which are uh a mixture of um of lured and freemasonry. In that if you sign up to one of these, you can usually find a shrine of your religion in each major city. And if you swap cities, then uh you can then join that and uh become part of it. Uh, cults like Isis and Serapis and Dionysus.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

And these also involve women as well as men, um, very often, is that right?

SPEAKER_02 34:36

Absolutely so. And some of the women only, which is Dionysus. Yeah. Uh the term uh Bacante was coined for women followers of Dionysus. Yeah. Uh and it could uh apparently be an incredibly liberating experience because signing up to this god allegedly meant that whereas women are much more restricted in Greek society than in most traditional societies, uh, if they become Bacantes, they get to band together, head out of town, up into the woods, and well, and we don't know. Uh clearly conduct religious rites, uh clearly have some kind of party, uh, but basically be free. Yeah, hugely salutary. Uh there's a favourite inscription of mine from a Greek city among the the scores in in Asia Minor, uh recording of how a priestess arrives from Athens uh with this license given by the town council to establish uh three cults of Dionysus, three mysteries in the city. And two of them are women only and one is mixed sex.

SPEAKER_00 35:49

No, that's wonderful. Well, that also perhaps opens the door to thinking more about the role of these kinds of mystery religions and other religious practices in city life. Um, because, for example, the Eleocinan mysteries, which as you mentioned, were open to anyone. They weren't only for Athenians, for example. But at the same time in Athens they're viewed as very important that one might participate in them. And the Athenians at a crucial point of the Peloponnesian War become very preoccupied with the thought that someone has um polluted and profaned the Eleusinian mysteries, as well as also desecrating the statues of the Herms within the city. And this is thought to be, you know, a very bad omen and very dangerous for the city's military and political fortunes to have um profaned religious symbols in this way.

SPEAKER_02 36:41

Yeah, with all with all the uh the raciness and the smuttiness of Greek myth and the ad hoc nature of a lot of individual religion, uh there never diminishes this overpowering sense that if you upset even one deity, you're toast.

SPEAKER_00 36:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:59

And yeah, deities are very good at revenge.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:02

They're infinitely patient, they're incredibly inventive. Uh really, you you do not want to upset these people.

SPEAKER_00 37:11

I mean, this is a very interesting thing because it goes back, you know, I was talking about how philosophical and literary, we might say, skepticism or sort of criticality about the gods developed. But at the same time, also politically, again, Barbara Graziosi has made the interesting suggestion that as the Athenians developed much more participatory, democratic political structures from the late sixth century onward, then suddenly, for example, if you're doing a court case, the question is, well, what's the place of the gods in a court case? You know, because if we really think the gods are quite powerful, then you might think, well, you could say, the god made me do it. I'm not responsible. And that is a kind of thought that you might have an epic, but in a in a uh a setting of a jury of your peers as a as an Athenian male citizen, that's not going to get you very far. So this kind of collision between civic norms of argument and um religious, you know, sort of the the inherited um and continuing sort of um stories of epic poetry beg became a kind of political tension and and and perhaps gave rise to some of these philosophical questions as well.

SPEAKER_02 38:22

Agreed. I I remain interested in the actual experience of the mysteries. I mean, partly this is a kind of north face mentality because it's the very aspect about which we know least. We know far more about the admission fees and the menus uh for the dinners than we know about uh the actual rites. But there are hints here and there. Plutarch, who uh loved these things, uh, wrote that the basic structure of an initiation ritual and the mysteries was actually very similar to an initiation ritual into most things, uh Freemasonry uh fraternities, in that there's this structure of introduction and then challenge, and then something scary or or deeply unpleasant, and then a release into bliss. And and Plutarch talks about all these things. And there are some great ideas and the hints. Um, a biography of Pythagoras, the philosopher, speaks of his initiations, the mysteries of the Cretan Zeus, of how he was uh made to uh lie uh comfortably on uh a rug of black sheep's wool or lamb's wool, listening to the running of a river all day, and getting into the flow literally in his mind, and then lying all night beside the sea and listening to the rhythm of the waves, and having kind of been relaxed and blissed out by this, going into this huge cave, which is still there on Mount Eda, and having a revelation of Zeus and his use, the the deity appearing, manifesting, does seem to be the bottom line of uh the mysteries.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

That's very interesting. Can you say something about the role of um blindness and being blindfolded, especially in the Eleusinian mysteries? This is a part that interests me because Plato sort of um draws on it and rethinks it in his dialogue, the symposium.

SPEAKER_02 40:23

So yes, uh and it's a key feature of initiation to the Roman Mithraic, the mysteries of the god Mithras, uh, which are uh Greek as well as Roman, though not as not to the same extent. Uh, and of course, uh without having the least idea of what went on at Eleusis or uh uh with Mithras, uh Freemasons uh had the same thing of uh binding and blindfolding the initiate on being brought in, and they they they still do. Uh it's it's a very clever way of discomposing somebody. You see, if you're having to put an element of ordeal, then then there's really a bit of brink personship here, because if you have too much ordeal, they're going to be too traumatized to enjoy anything after that. And they might even make a run for it. Uh whereas if you blindfold somebody, that's an immediate disempowerment. So it's scary enough in itself. Yeah. Uh it's a big step towards getting the ordeal in place. Uh, but of course, um spiritually, symbolically, it's forcing people in on themselves so that uh they're relying on their wits, uh their bedrock of personhood. So it's very powerful, especially as if uh, as in some of the mystery writes, it's combined with uh having your hands tied. So the release into bliss is a very literal one.

SPEAKER_00 41:59

That's that's a very interesting. Um, just your mention of Mithras um made me remember seeing uh Mithraic um sort of small temple in Ostia in one of the towns just outside Rome. Of course, they're everywhere, but but it also sort of brings me back to one of the things we were talking about earlier about really the fluidity of the way that different deities and different cults could be adopted by various cities at different times. So again, Plato's Republic begins by describing a festival that has um is taking place in honor of the recently imported goddess Bendis, who is a Thracian goddess whom the Athenians have decided to incorporate into their sort of civic pantheon. Um, but one of the very important things that's a contrast there for me, thinking about the philosophers, is that that was a civic decision. And when Socrates would be tried, one of the charges against him was that he himself had introduced new gods into the city, and the implied contrast is as opposed to it being properly done by the city itself.

SPEAKER_02 43:09

Yeah, I I feel that I'm starting to approach the end of my uh exchange with you. And of course, uh for us all uh the visible end is death. Uh, but of course, it may not be the end. Uh we we haven't tackled the problem of the afterlife yet, or the question over it. And it's it's a surprisingly difficult subject in Greek culture, because when you start off in the archaic period, uh everybody says, and everybody may be right, that the the view is a very depressing one. It's it screams out of Homer uh that you're left with this kind of shadow play, uh uh a literal ghost existence of what life had been on Earth. So you know, however rotten your life is on earth, enjoy it while while you can, which which uh is a bit melancholic. But clearly by the classical and later periods, there is this sense of uh at least better options. Uh and a large part of the mystery religions was to make such a firm relationship with a patroness or patron deity that when you go to the afterlife, basically uh you you get the executive suite in the next world, uh often visualized as uh a flowering meadow. And I I'm particularly touched by some of the inscriptions in children's tombs associated with parents in the mystery religions, that they they clearly uh have a vision of their little boy, you know, sitting in a sunlit field uh with a picnic hamper.

SPEAKER_00 44:58

Yeah, that is very, very moving. Um and of course, child mortality was so much more prevalent in the ancient world, so one can imagine people were experiencing those losses, you know, much more regularly. Um yes, I mean one sort of sign of the preoccupation, but also the terror and or fear and concern about the afterlife is that Hades wasn't really an Olympian god, precisely because he's not able to reside on Mount Olympus. He's down below the river Styx. Um, and so you know that that sort of um sense that there's a whole other realm of the gods or divine realm that isn't the realm, the sunlit realm of Olympus, but but but really something else I think is very important.

SPEAKER_02 45:44

Absolutely. Uh Hades' realm seems enormous, which is after all the underside of the earth, therefore technically as big. And if it's where the sun goes at night, then it's it's a sunlit world, although Homer does seem to regard it as kind of dark and shadowy and gloomy, but maybe that's uh if if you like the uh the first level of a multi-story. And uh w clearly from what we hear later things are more cheerful bits of it. That's interesting, yeah. There's no point in being in the Elysian fields, you know, the uh the the A-lister area of the underworld. If you're groping around in the dark and the cold, it's got to be better than that. And I love the gold leaves that um seem not so much to be initiation certificates of mystery religions as calling cards by which you can introduce yourself to the underworld deities. Uh there are some wonderful, wonderful uh brief inscriptions on them, uh for I am a child of the starry heaven and of the green earth, and there is no part of me that is not part of the gods. And uh an even more plexus thudding one-liner uh uh from from Magna Graca, Great Greece, Italy, again, the Italian, the American world of uh of Greece. I have dived into the lap of the dark queen, and so I am safe.

SPEAKER_00 47:18

How beautiful. Well, perhaps that's a beautiful note on which to end. Um, it's really been a pleasure to have this conversation.

SPEAKER_02 47:24

It was so incredibly easy, wasn't it? You know, there were we at the beginning, wondering how to do it, what to say, wondering if we should have questions posed to us and so on. No, it just flowed. Absolutely. A bit like Pythagoras's river.

SPEAKER_00 47:39

Exactly. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_02 47:41

Thank you, Melissa.