Press Release Summary = In the context of the Greek traditions, there was no theology in the sense of a rationalized exposition of the normative understanding of the gods. If one takes the term to refer to any explicit account of the gods in general, or of particular gods, then the Greek tradition abounded in theologies.
Press Release Body = In the works of the poet Hesiod, whose Theogony provides a creation myth focusing on deified abstractions like Night and Time, one can find an attempt to establish a more or less comprehensive account of how the gods originated, how they acquired their honors--but the long digression in honor of the goddess Hecate, who was by no means a major figure in the Greek religious imagination, shows that the poem could not have been meant to be authoritative in our sense.
The decision as to which deities were considered major enough to number among the Twelve Olympians who were the chief gods of the pantheon was no doubt a political decision, at least in part. Because most of the gods were originally local, and inconsistent stories were told of them from one locality to another, the tradition of the ancient Greeks resisted systematization, at least at first.
Socrates and other philosophers were accused of atheism by the populists of Athens when they pointed out the difficulties in accepting the received ideas about the gods as a whole. Yet Socrates\' view of the gods was ultimately to triumph; as time went on, the traditional piety of the sacrificial rites tended to be dismissed as a sort of folklore, while those who were philosophically minded tended to believe in abstract, remote, and genteel gods who vaguely acted to uphold social norms and public virtues.
During the archaic and classical periods, Greek peoples had rather strict procedures for introducing new gods into the traditions of worship, but after the death of Alexander the Great, who had spread the Greek language, and Greek social and political forms throughout the Mediterranean world, the breakdown in the autonomy of Greek cities, and the dissociation of all indigenous cults from local political realities, made it possible for syncretism, the \"mixture\" of traditions, to flourish.
In the Hellenistic world, aspects of Persian, Anatolian, Egyptian (and eventually Etruscan-Roman) religious traditions gained different types of recognition beyond the confines of the peoples with whom they had originated, with Isis being particularly popular, as is indicated by the fact that a name like Isidore (\"gift of Isis\") established itself even in the Christian world.
Very late in the history of classical religion, the Neo-Platonists, including the Roman emperor Julian, attempted to organize classical paganism into a systematic belief system, to which they gave the name of Hellênismos: the belief system of the Greeks. Julian also attempted to organize Greek and Hellenistic cults into a hierarchy resembling that which Christianity already possessed. Neither of these efforts succeeded in the limited time available; Greek religion had always been local, variable, and inconsistent.
Julian\'s vision of a synthesis of Platonism and Hellenism was taken up in the 14th century by George Gemistos Plethon, a forerunner of the Renaissance.
Web Site = http://myth.spiritualideas.com/greek_mythology.htm
2025
