Today's task is to spend a little time with the gods, based in part on Durant's chapter 8 The Gods of Greece.

There were five unifying elements among the scattered Greek city-states:

1. common language
2. common intellectual life (major works of the well known philosophers and dramatists)
3. common passion for athletics
4. love of beauty
5. fairly common religous rituals and beliefs.

Originally, the tribal and political separation led to a form of polytheism. In the early days each family had its own god. Similarly, each city had its special local god. (e.g Athens worshipped Athena), in the centre and summit of which there was a shrine with a perpetual fire.

"Polytheism is as natural as polygamy, and survives as long, suiting well all the contradictory currents of the world." (p. 176)

"... there is a birth rate as well as a death rate of the gods; deity is like energy, and its quantity remains, through all vicissitudes of form, approximately unchanged from generation to generation." (p. 177)

Here is a very brief genealogy of the early gods:

Ouranus (the sky) and Gaia (the earth) mated and had 6 brothers and 6 sisters. These 12 gods were called the Titans. Kronos and Rhea in turn had 3 brothers [Hades, Poseidon and Zeus] and 3 sisters [Hestia, Demeter and Hera]. The Titans were eventually killed by their children and Zeus then became the head of the new order. Athena was born out of the head of Zeus. There was a lot of co-mingling among the gods with all of the normal tendencies toward anger and jealousy.

Greek religion "was in origin a system of magic rather than of ethics, and remained so, in large measure, to the end (p. 200). ... But Protagorus doubted, Socrates ignored, Democritus denied, Euripides ridiculed the gods; and in the end Greek philosophy, hardly willing it, destroyed the religion that had molded the moral life of Greece. (p. 202)"