Ancient Greek Religion

Greek religion encompasses the collection of beliefs and rituals practiced in ancient Greece in the form of both popular public religion and cult practices. These different groups varied enough for it to be possible to speak of Greek religions or "cults" in the plural, though most of them shared similarities. Also, the Greek religion extended out of Greece and out to other islands.

Many Greek people recognized the major gods and goddesses: Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, Dionysus, Hephaestus, Athena, Hermes, Demeter, Hestia and Hera though philosophies such as Stoicism and some forms of Platonism used language that seems to posit a transcendent single deity. Different cities often worshipped the same deities, sometimes with epithets that distinguished them and specified their local nature.

The religious practices of the Greeks extended beyond mainland Greece, to the islands and coasts of Ionia in Asia Minor, to Magna Graecia (Sicily and southern Italy), and to scattered Greek colonies in the Western Mediterranean, such as Massalia (Marseille). Greek religion was tempered by Etruscan cult and belief to form much of the later Ancient Roman religion.

Beliefs
While there were few concepts universal to all the Greek peoples, there were common beliefs shared by many.

Theology
Ancient Greek theology was based on polytheism; that is, the assumption that there were many gods and goddesses. There was a hierarchy of deities, with Zeus, the king of the gods, having a level of control over all the others, although he was not omnipotent. Some deities had dominion over certain aspects of nature. For instance, Zeus was the sky-god, sending thunder and lightning, Poseidon ruled over the sea and earthquakes, Hades threw his remarkable power throughout the boundaries of death and the Underworld, and Helios controlled the sun. Other deities ruled over an abstract concept; for instance Aphrodite controlled love. While being immortal, the gods were not all powerful. They had to obey fate, which overrode all. For instance, in mythology, it was Odysseus' fate to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, and the gods could only lengthen his journey and make it harder for him, but they could not stop him.

The gods acted like humans, and had human vices. They would interact with humans, sometimes even spawning children with them. At times certain gods would be opposed to others, and they would try to outdo each other. In the Iliad Zeus, Aphrodite, Ares and Apollo support the Trojan side in the Trojan War, while Hera, Athena and Poseidon support the Greeks.

Some gods were associated to a city. Zeus to Olympia, Hera to Argos, Poseidon to Atlantis, Apollo to Delphi, Athena to Sparta and so on.

Afterlife
The Greeks believed in an underworld where the spirits of the dead went after death. If a funeral was never performed, it was commonly believed that that person's spirit would never reach the underworld and so would haunt the world as a ghost forever. There were various views of the underworld, and the idea changed over time. One of the most widespread areas of the underworld was known as Hades. This was ruled over by a god, a brother of Zeus, who was called Hades (his realm was originally called 'the place of Hades'). Another realm, called Tartarus, was the place where the damned were thought to go, a place of torment. A third realm, Elysium, was a pleasant place where the virtuous dead and initiates in the mystery cults were said to dwell. In the early Mycenean religion all the dead went to Hades, just as in early Judaism all the dead went to Sheol. When Odysseus visits Hades in Odyssey 11, Achilles tells him he would rather be a farmer's servant on the face of the earth than king of Hades. The rise of mystery cults in the Archaic age led to the development of places such as Tartarus and Elysium.

A mosaic depicting the hero Herakles with Cerberus, a three headed dog, who, according to mythology, guarded Hades. A very few, like Achilles, Alcmene, Amphiaraus Ganymede, Ino, Melicertes, Menelaus, Peleus, and a great part of those who fought in the Trojan and Theban wars, were eventually considered to have been physically immortalized and brought to live forever in either Elysium, the Islands of the Blessed, heaven, the ocean or literally right under the ground. Such beliefs evolved during the Archaic period (800-500 B. C. E.) as lower-class people began to play a larger role in Greek society and politics. Without belief in doctrines of the mystery cults, at the moment of death there was no hope of anything but the existence of a disembodied soul.

Some Greeks, such as the philosophers Pythagoras and Plato, also espoused the idea of reincarnation, though this was not accepted by all. Epicurus taught that the soul was simply atoms which dissolved at death, so there was no existence after death.

Greek Mythology
Greek religion had an extensive mythology. It consisted largely of stories of the gods and of how they affected humans on Earth. Myths often revolved around heroes and their actions, such as Heracles and his twelve labors, Odysseus and his voyage home, Jason and the quest for the Golden Fleece and Theseus and the Minotaur.

Many different species existed in Greek mythology. Chief among these were the gods and humans, though the Titans also frequently appeared in Greek myths. They predated the Olympian gods, and were hated by them. Lesser species included the half-man, half-horse centaurs, the nature based nymphs (tree nymphs were dryads, sea nymphs were Nereids) and the half man, half goat satyrs. Some creatures in Greek mythology were monstrous, such as the one-eyed giant Cyclopes, the sea beast Scylla, whirlpool Charybdis, Gorgons, and the half-man, half-bull Minotaur.

Many of the myths revolved around the Trojan war between Greece and Troy. For instance, the epic poem, The Iliad, by Homer, is based on the war. Many other tales are based on the aftermath of the war, such as the murder of King Agamemnon of Argos, and the adventures of Odysseus on his return to Ithaca.

There was no one set Greek cosmogony, or creation myth. Different religious groups believed that the world had been created in different ways. One Greek creation myth was told in Hesiod's Theogony. It stated that at first there was only a primordial deity called Chaos, who gave birth to various other primordial gods, such as Gaia, Tartarus and Phanes, who then gave birth to more gods, the Titans, who then gave birth to the first Olympians.

The mythology largely survived and was added to in order to form the later Roman mythology. The Greeks and Romans had been literate societies, and much mythology was written down in the forms of epic poetry (such as The Iliad, The Odyssey and the Argonautica) and plays (such as Euripides' The Bacchae and Aristophones' The Frogs). The mythology became popular in Christian post-Renaissance Europe, where it was often used as a basis for the works of artists like Botticelli, Michelangelo and Rubens.