Tackling and Understanding Ancient Greek Religion

We can describe ancient Greek religion in many ways and make a cornucopia of themes that are majorly involved within it such as; faith, conflict, conversion, tradition, way of living, morals, influence, power, magic, storytelling, dependency, superstition and rules. All these things and many more contribute to what is not only just ancient Greek religion but religion as a whole. R. Garland depicts a list of attributes which ancient Greek religion is not in his book ‘Religion and the Greeks’ (1992). It is easy to tell that our modern day conception of religion is vastly different to what the ancient Greeks religious festivities were; therefore we need to set aside what our preconception is of religion to actually understand ancient Greek religion, as L. B. Zaidman and P.S. Pantel depict in their book ‘Religion in the Ancient Greek City’ (1992: p3) that ‘Greek society was fundamentally different from our own, and the concepts that we employ to describe contemporary religious phenomena are necessarily ill adapted to the analysis of what the Greeks regarded as a divine sphere’. Throughout the entirety of the world, relating to different countries and different time eras there has been numerous religions all connected to different people, which subsequently means that religious concepts differ.

Then again it is hard for us to fully comprehend exactly what it was like to worship the gods in an ancient Greek formality, as our religious notions are derived from a Christianised background, even though we are not all Christian. One major fact that expresses that our religion is different to the ancient Greeks is that we pray to one God, but they have many different gods all for different things, whom are both male and female, and they each have limited powers which is connected to the fields in which they are in charge of, consequently providing lots of checks in place to make certain that these gods do not become too powerful. I think having many different gods to perform different tasks is much more realistic than having one god who is supposedly perfect in every way. Defining certain powers to specific deities in the ancient Greek world was to me a brilliant idea, in the way that these topics which the deities were assigned to, for example Demeter the goddess of agriculture, can be looked after in detail, rather than one God who has to see to everything.     

But nowadays we have the option in whether to believe in religion or ‘God’ as we know him, as Zaidman and Pantel define that ‘the divine is external to the world, it has created the world and mankind, it is present within mankind, and it is confined’ (p3). Many people choose not to believe and others are strong believers in the Christian God, or other gods depending on what religion you place your faith within. But in ancient Greece it does not seem as though there could be any true or false deities; but Zaidman and Pantel describe them as ‘not external to the world: they did not create either the cosmos or mankind, but were themselves created; they had not always existed, but had usurped power’ (p4), which shows a stark contrast between modern day and Ancient Greek religion. If you chose not to worship a particular deity, by not respecting or showing reverence towards them; for example like Euripides shows Hippolytus didn’t acknowledge Aphrodite in a respectful way and therefore she punishes him, ending in his death and the ruin of his family. This is expressed when the Chorus say ‘love, whose coming is devastation and every mortal calamity’, which in context of the tragedy is them warning Hippolytus to worship and respect love, in this case Aphrodite but also he must fear it. But on the other hand a way we can compare modern day religions to ancient Greek religion is by looking at it this way; if we have one God, we can observe Zeus as our God’s equivalent as he is king of the ancient Greek gods, he is their almighty which somewhat relates to our god.   

After these various views on religion my conclusion on how to understand ancient Greek religion, is that we must take into consideration that the way we live now is completely different to how they lived back then. This is highlighted by Zaidman and Pantel again in ‘Religion in the Ancient Greek City’ (1992: p3) as they say ‘the function of religion cannot be the same in a society such as ours, in which communal life is very largely secularized, and in one where religion was thoroughly intertwined with all areas of public and social interaction’. Also we can derive from that fact that not everyone believes in religions and certain gods but some people take it extremely seriously. I personally do not believe in a ‘God’ as we have no stern proof that he exists but I do believe that there is something there that has created the world and made us who and how we are today, also there must be something out there which has made religion apparent in the world, whether it be in the ancient world or now.