When the first Indo-Europeans entered Greece in the early centuries of the second millennium BC, they arrived not without gods. So much is clear from comparisons with other Indo-European cultures. It is much harder to know whom they brought and how they called their gods. For reasons unknown, at an early stage the Greeks seem to have dropped the term *deiwós, ‘god’, attested in nearly all branches of the Indo-European family, which is a derivative of IE *dyew-/diw-, which denoted the bright sky or the light of day. Instead they opted for theós, originally ‘having the sacred’, cognates of which have been recognized in Armenian and, rather recently, in Lycian, Lydian and Hieroglyphic Luwian. The change must have happened at an early stage of Greek history, as it had already taken place in Mycenaean times, the oldest period for which we have evidence regarding the gods of ancient Greece, as the frequent attestations of Linear B te-o show.

Traditionally, the Indo-Europeans located their gods in heaven, as did the Greeks. In Homer, and thus surely going back to Mycenaean times, the gods are the ‘heavenly ones’ or those ‘who occupy the broad heaven’, whereas mortals live on the earth, but the expression ‘gods and men’ with its variants must be equally old and is formulaic in Homer.

It is a commonplace to say that sacrifice constitutes the central act of the worship of Greek gods and heroes in the Greek cities. One of the likely reasons for this central position is the fact that many other actions, such as processions, dances, prayers, athletic contests and, more generally, festivals and the deposition of votive offerings, were associated with sacrifices or performed in contexts which in some way or other included aspects of sacrificial practice. As Michael Jameson said, in a very concise manner: ‘Ritual activity was crucial for any Greek social entity. Although we emphasize social and political functions, for its members it might almost be said that the raison d'être of the group was the offering of sacrifice to a particular supernatural figure or group of figures.’ It is then a little surprising that some studies on the religion of the Greek polis do not put the sacrificial question at the centre of their considerations.

Another commonplace is to suggest that the sacrificial ritual functions as a mediation between the worshippers and the divine or heroic powers. These are very general statements with which everybody can agree. The difficulties arise when we want to go further and try to explore the significance of this act. Now, the first difficulty comes from the fact that, for many anthropologists, ethnologists, sociologists or specialists in ancient civilizations, the sacrificial act can be explained by one general theory, capable of interpreting all civilizations throughout time.

The encounter of humans with the divine, however it may be mediated, is central for many religions. The way people conceive these encounters, the way they believe they perceive the divine, and the way they react to this contact are culture-specific. In this chapter I discuss as case studies some images referring to encounters of this kind, most of them from the fifth and fourth centuries BC. I point out their significant characteristics and I try to analyse these characteristics, arguing that different concepts of gods are reflected in different concepts of their presence. These different concepts are portrayed as much in the ways gods reveal themselves to humans as in the reactions of humans to the divine appearance.

An example may illustrate the cultural character of these concepts. In his famous marble statue of St Theresa in the Cornaro Chapel, Gianlorenzo Bernini sculpted an image of a woman perceiving the divine. In this case, perception is interpreted as being totally possessed by the divine, as an ecstatic unio mystica. The result of this experience was, in St Theresa's own words, burning love towards God. In the world of classical Greek religion, this would be a rather strange concept. Greeks getting into contact with gods or supernatural beings usually do not show exaggerated reactions. If there is any emotion described in our sources, it is rather respectful, sometimes even fearful, reverence rather than joy – let alone love.

‘What is a Greek god?’ was the question addressed by Albert Henrichs in chapter 1 of this volume. The question I would like to ask here concerns a group of female divinities belonging to the classical Athenian pantheon all associated with sites characterized as garden sanctuaries. From the perspective of landscape architecture it is this: ‘What would the Greek gods amount to if they were not associated with heroes?’

HEROIC AETIOLOGIES

A significant number of the Attic tragedies that have come down to us end with an aetiological section involving the establishment of a cult. This is particularly true of the tragedies of Euripides. One of the best-known examples comes from Euripides' Hippolytos. Among the consequences of Hippolytos' tragic death is that his tomb at Troezen is to become the focus of a hero cult in which ritual acts will be performed. On the eve of their marriage, the girls of the city will cut off their hair and offer it to the young hero who denied the power of Aphrodite and refused to accept his own adulthood. This prenuptial ritual is attested also in other Greek cities: the memory of the young hero who has died in tragic circumstances is kept alive in performances consisting of musical offerings and the cult associates the hero with the goddess who encompassed his downfall – Aphrodite.

Greek gods and polytheism as a distinctive feature of Graeco-Roman culture and religion were favourite themes among the Christian apologists of the second century. In an attempt to promote monotheism as characteristic of Christian religion, the apologists not only presented pagan religion as a typically polytheistic belief, but also established the ‘disarmingly simple model … according to which mankind … had progressed from polytheism to monotheism under the catalytic action of Christianity’. This idea was pushed so far that the evolutionary model was altered and polytheism presented as a temporary involution: as a corruption of the original monotheism, polytheism had its roots in the transgression committed by Adam and Eve. Since then human beings had surrendered to externalities and sensualism, as a result of which polytheism and its concomitant idolatry established itself as the way, par excellence, to channel human religious experience.

Strange though it may seem, these conceptions are not confined to antiquity and the Middle Ages, however. On the one hand, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), at the end of the eighteenth century, and the philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), in the middle of the nineteenth, are both representatives of the evolutionary model. On the other, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–87), at the end of the seventeenth century, established the scheme according to which monotheism was not only the climax of the spiritual and theological evolution, but also the original, pure and spiritual religion.

The present chapter does not survey the whole of Greek theology, or even all of early Greek theology. Rather, in keeping with this book's theme of ‘identities and transformations’, I want to ask: how much of the Olympians do the first Greek philosophers retain in their world-systems? The answer, of course, is not straightforward, for reasons it will be the purpose of this chapter to explore.

One way of getting at the question with which this volume begins, ‘what is a Greek god?’, is to consider figures whose divine status is in some kind of doubt. In this chapter I review the case of Herakles, whose special status as something in between a god and a hero has exercised scholars from antiquity to the present day. Most recently the debate has focused particularly on cult practice, looking at Herakles in the light of broader discussion of the traditional Olympian-chthonian opposition, and of the extent to which ritual reflects the character of its recipient. There are, however, other elements apart from ritual which need to be taken into account in an assessment of Herakles' character, and what I aim to do here is to offer an overview of the criteria by which he has been categorized on the hero-to-god scale, and to consider the extent to which such categorizations help us appreciate what Herakles actually meant to an ancient Greek worshipper.

GOD OR HERO?

To begin with it is worth going back to basics and reviewing the defining features we might look for in a Greek hero. In mythological terms we might take parentage as a starting point, and decide that Herakles' combination of a divine father and mortal mother is a good heroic qualification, on the same model as Perseus, Theseus, Achilles, Sarpedon and many others.

How important are gods to the Greek novel? And how much do the novels encourage the view that the gods are active in human affairs? In this chapter I consider the frequency with which named, and also unspecified, gods are mentioned and how essential they are to the action of the novel. I shall conclude that in many cases it is not enough simply to view them in terms of literary convention and that literary convention itself depends on some acceptance within the world of the novel of beliefs that would be held in the real world.

The range of narrative literature considered by specialists in the ancient novel has increased and diversified over the last twenty or so years. The more diverse the novel, the less that can be said in general about any single issue, ‘gods in the novel’ included. For this chapter, however, I revert to the so- called ‘ideal novel’, by which I mean the novels of Chariton, Xenophon, Achilles Tatius, Longus and Heliodorus. These form an unusually close-knit group of apparently very similar plots and often comparable tastes. It is unfashionable but not wholly irresponsible to speak of them as a genre. At the same time, they do themselves vary in character, and perhaps the divine is one area where they differ significantly. These are all imperial texts: the earliest, Chariton, must be mid to late first century AD, and the latest, Heliodorus, could be anywhere between the 220s and the 350s.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constitute a crucial period in the history of the study of the Greek gods. These years witnessed the demise of approaches that had been influential for several centuries and the emergence of others, the impact of which is still felt in the discipline.

In this final chapter I examine both declining and emerging approaches to the Greek gods in German and British scholarship in this period with a primary, although not exclusive, focus on Apollo as a case study. On the German side, I look at one of the last examples of the elemental model of interpretation, as it appears in the work of Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (1845–1923), and at two alternative theories, the theory of universal gods of Ernst Curtius (1814–96) and the theory of Sondergötter of Hermann Usener (1834–1905). On the British side, I look at the interpretation of the Greek gods in the new context created by anthropology in the last years of the nineteenth century in the work of Lewis Richard Farnell (1856–1934) and Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928).

I am particularly interested in the role played by broader cultural and religious factors in the formulation of, and opposition to, models of interpretation of the Greek gods in the scholarship of the period.

Over the past couple of decades Pausanias has become the centre of a minor academic industry, a point made recently by Glen Bowersock. The growing scholarship in this area has taken Pausanias' profile seriously and his work at face value. One of the major trends has been the appreciation of Pausanias' work as a complex literary enterprise and not just as a databank to be plundered without taking into consideration the context of each piece of information, be it chronological or narratological. Such a flourishing interest in Pausanias' work has also been inspired by the increasing interest in the Greek world under Roman rule, the world to which Pausanias belonged, and the related question of what it meant to be Greek when power was held elsewhere.

Pausanias was a serious scholar and a tireless traveller. Maybe he can also be considered as ‘dry, sober and pedantic’, as a German scholar described him in 1890. Perhaps he is almost ‘one of us’, as Snodgrass concluded in a wonderful paper on Pausanias and the Chest of Kypselos in 2001. However true these identifications may be – and perhaps all are true – Pausanias had many problems to solve and many choices to make in order to transpose his vision and understanding of the material and cultural landscapes of Greece into a literary work. The Periegesis is the result of these choices and not a photographic image of what Greece was like at this time. This is true for every piece and type of information. It is even truer as far as religion is concerned, especially since Pausanias still belongs to the system he describes. On this level, he is not one of us. Therefore, reading Pausanias in order to consider the question of Greek gods implies that we should take into account his own position on the matter, on the one hand, and the way he reports the many results of his visits on the spot, combining them with literary references, on the other hand.

According to the third-century AD Cilician poet and biographer of philosophers, Diogenes Laertius, Stilpo of Megara was run out of Athens in the late fourth century BC for insulting the city's patron goddess:

The garment of Pheidias' Athena was made of gold, over a ton of it, but this last insult, apparently, did not concern the Areopagites. At issue, despite Stilpo's attempted diversion through grammatical analysis, was the relation of the image to the imaged, and Stilpo's affront to the former had to be punished to restore honour to the latter. (Theodoros, in contrast, apparently escaped with impunity.)

This chapter seeks to understand something of Herodotus' attitude towards the gods, both by examining his text for internal indications and by comparing the practice of other early writers. There have been, to be sure, many excellent studies of Herodotus' gods, and his religion. In general one may study Herodotus' text either to discover evidence of religious practice and belief, or to assess the role of the gods in the Histories themselves. The second of these is the primary focus here, but more than the usual point that the gods are deeply implicated in the course of history, in various interesting ways, I wish to stress that they are also deeply implicated in the historiography, and linked to Herodotus' most basic conception of his task.

Herodotus, after all, did not have to work the gods into his explanation of historical events. Living not much later, Thucydides excluded them; in the next generation the pious Xenophon put them back in. Ctesias cheerfully gives Semiramis the divine mother and fabulous biography Herodotus had passed over in silence. These differences show that we are dealing with individual preference, not (as it was once popular to suppose) evolution from superstition to reason, from mythos to logos. In Herodotus' own day Sophists were busy finding anthropocentric ways of explaining the world. Herodotus could have told a secular story, but he did not.

One of the most celebrated works of art in antiquity, famous for its artistic qualities, the impression it left on its observer and its technical excellence, was Pheidias' enthroned Zeus made for the sanctuary at Olympia. It is interesting that this particular statue was, according to the tradition, approved by two authorities: Zeus himself and Homer.

According to widespread tradition, Pheidias' representation of Zeus was inspired by the following verses from the Iliad (1. 528–30): ‘As he spoke, the son of Kronos bowed his dark brows, and the ambrosial locks swayed on his immortal head, till vast Olympos reeled.’ The statue, made according to the Homeric description of the god, pleased the deity too. Pausanias relates a tradition according to which Pheidias prayed to the god ‘to show by a sign whether the work was to his liking. Immediately, runs the legend, a thunderbolt fell on that part of the floor where down to the present day the bronze jar stood to cover the place’ (5.11.9).

This story not only emphasizes the status and great artistry of Pheidias' Zeus, but is also an important testimony of the role the Homeric epics played in the shaping of the Greek concept of divine. Herodotus (2.53.2) famously stated that it was Homer and Hesiod who taught the Greeks the ancestry of the gods, gave the gods their epithets, distributed their honours and areas of expertise, and described their outward forms.

If we are going to talk in anything but generalities about gods, we need to provide a clear focus on both the time and place under discussion. The more precise we can be about both, the more substance our comments can have. While the gods may be absolute, human perceptions of them are not. What follows here is a discussion of evidence for local perceptions of gods from the southeastern region of Italy usually called Apulia. The focus will be on the fourth century BC, particularly the first half of it, which was a creative period of transition for which we have a great deal of evidence.

Let me define the region more precisely, both geographically and culturally (Fig. 16.1). Apulia is the term used for the region of south Italy that stretches from the tip of the heel, up the east coast as far as the Gargano, and inland to the Bradano river. Taranto was the one Greek city in all of Apulia; the rest of that vast area was inhabited by Italic people who had been there for centuries before the arrival of the Greeks. By the eighth century BC three archeologically distinct local cultures can be recognized – the Messapians to the south, the Daunians to the north, and the Peucetians between them. It is likely that Messapian was the language of all three groups – as opposed to Oscan, which was the language of the Samnites to the north and the Lucanians to the west.

There are some obvious and therefore less interesting ways in which the Greek gods show up in the magical texts of later antiquity. Sometimes the process involves shrinking a large-scale communal sanctuary down to the size of a personal shrine that can be placed in a house or even on top of a table. Thus Eitrem showed long ago how a series of divination spells in the Greek magical handbooks invoke Apollo by traditional cult names and require various implements and images associated with his oracular sites in Delphi, Klaros and Didyma. Indeed, one spell instructs us how to assemble a miniature temple for the god, replete with a small Delphic tripod and a laurel-bedecked cult statue. In addition to expropriating and miniaturizing Apollo's shrine, the hymns embedded in the recipe equate the god himself with Helios, the Jewish angels Gabriel and Michael, and the Egyptian sun god Re. Another unremarkable kind of survival is when chthonic deities like Hermes or Persephone continue to be invoked in cursing rituals that have clearly evolved from much earlier Greek defixiones, as in this archetype of a popular binding spell reconstructed from a recipe in PGM IV 335–406 and five lead curse-tablets, all of which were found in Egypt and date to the fourth century AD: