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:

Is the hoary old cliché ‘good to think with’ still good to think with? In my view, yes. One concept that certainly is (and was) good to think with is metamorphosis. In antiquity it was good to think with about just two things, but because those two things are nothing less than the limits of humanity and the nature of the gods, that is, I think, quite enough to be going on with.

Stories of metamorphosis which explore the limits of humanity – stories which I am not going to discuss in this chapter – narrate transformations of human beings as an alternative to death: prolongations of existence as laurel, wolf, spider, constellation. There is plenty of scope for more investigation here, for instance in relation to why certain genres play down the notion of human exit via metamorphosis, whereas others gleefully accept it; not to mention the radical differences even within a single genre – I have in mind the resolutely death- centred Iliad at one end of the epic spectrum, the much more transformation-friendly Odyssey a little further along, and, at the far end, the radically open, feverishly metamorphic world of Nonnos. There is also room for more work on the interaction between the metamorphic tradition, considered globally, and other types of belief in the perpetuability of humanity through changed, sometimes non-human forms, beliefs based on the assumed persistence of the soul after death.

Olympia was the foremost sanctuary in honour of Zeus in the ancient world, and although the god had many manifestations at Olympia, none is so well known as the regal seated Olympian Zeus created by Pheidias for the temple of Zeus in c.438–432 BC (Figs. 8.1–8.3).1 Its size, c.13.5 m high, and material, ivory and gold, guaranteed its fame, and it became the prevailing image of Zeus on coinage and in other media thenceforth. More common throughout Olympia's earlier history, however, are dynamic, standing images of the god and other dedications to Zeus that emphasize his concerns with adjudication, oaths and, above all, warfare. Military matters figured heavily at Olympia, as they did at other Panhellenic sanctuaries, such as Delphi. However, the emphasis upon warfare – weapons, victories, trophies, spoils – and its close association with athletics is particularly pronounced at Olympia, where Zeus was the chief god and the primary recipient of military thank-offerings, as we know from inscriptions to the god, especially in his guise as ‘Zeus Olympios’. At no other sanctuary in the Greek world were athletic victory statues so prevalent, and their juxtaposition with military monuments is, I would argue, intentional and designed to underscore the similarities between athletics and warfare. While many gods had connections with warfare, and Zeus receives honours in this regard elsewhere, such as at Dodona, Olympia seems to represent a special case.

In a seminal 1978 article on Aphrodite and Persephone in Locri, the late Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood (1945–2007) broke new ground by raising the problem of the relationship between the local and Panhellenic persona of a Greek divinity. However, this is only one aspect of Greek polytheism. In addition to the relationship between the local and Panhellenic persona, we also have to think about the relations between the various gods as they are reflected in the divine pecking order: which gods are more important than others and how we can distinguish these hierarchies. By paying close attention to the ways the Greeks represented the divine hierarchy, we may gain insights into the manner in which they perceived and constructed their own human world. As a small contribution to this project I would like to offer some thoughts about Hephaistos, who is well known as a maker of important and beautiful objects (see below), but nevertheless was not a very important god in historical times. I will be mainly concerned with the manner in which the Greeks constructed his divine persona and the means by which they indicated his low status. We will conclude with some observations on possible inferences from this divine representation for a better understanding of his human worshippers.

It is surprising that an idea apparently so central to Greek religion as the twelve gods or Dodekatheon can be traced back no further than the late sixth century BC. This is when an altar of the twelve gods was set up in the agora at Athens by the archon Peisistratos, son of Hippias, and grandson of Peisistratos the tyrant, in 522 BC, during the regime of Hippias. It was a modest, square structure, situated in the northwest corner of the agora, discovered during the construction of the Athens–Piraeus railway, and now bisected by it. The altar of the twelve gods was the symbolic centre of the city: in one of his Dithyrambs for Athens (fr. 75) Pindar calls on the gods who come to the ‘incense-rich navel in holy Athens and the glorious, richly adorned agora’, on the occasion of the ritual reception of Dionysos there at the Dionysia festival. The striking word ‘navel’ (ὀμφαλός) suggests Delphi, the navel-stone and exact centre of the earth, where two eagles let go from the East and the West met. Distance was measured from the Athenian altar: Herodotus (2.71.1) points out that the distance from the city of Heliopolis in Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea was almost exactly the same as that from the altar of the twelve to Olympia. A verse inscription from the fifth century specifies the distance from the altar of the twelve to the Peiraeus. One gets a glimpse of a well-organized measuring system.

The Greek gods are still very much present in modern consciousness, whereas the ancient rituals have been long forgotten. Yet even though Apollo and Dionysos, Artemis and Aphrodite, Zeus and Hermes are household names, they have hardly been at the centre of the modern study of Greek religion. From the most influential and innovative students of Greek religion of the last half of the twentieth century, Walter Burkert concentrated on myth and ritual, and Jean-Pierre Vernant made his name with studies of the psychological and sociological aspects of Greek culture. The gods were never the real focus of their attention. In fact, their lack of interest continued a situation that had already begun at the start of the twentieth century when classical scholars started to turn their attention to ritual rather than myth and the gods.

It is clear that a century of scholarly neglect of such an important area of Greek religion cannot be remedied by the appearance of a single book. That is why we have brought together a team of international scholars with a view to generating new approaches to, rather than providing a comprehensive survey of, the nature and development of the Greek gods in the period from Homer until late antiquity. Moreover, we have tried to go beyond the usual ways of handbooks which traditionally concentrate on the individual divinities.

THE GODS IN TRAGEDY

It is often emphasized that we must be careful to avoid seeing the Greek gods through Christian spectacles. But the emphasis has, I suggest, itself often distorted our view. Here, for instance, in an influential paper on the Oedipus Tyrannus, is E. R. Dodds:

But what is this supposedly decisive opinion of Achilles? That Zeus has two urns, from which he distributes to men either a mixture of sorrows and blessings or mere sorrows. This idea, which occurs only this once in Homer, does not in fact exclude the possibility that Zeus upholds justice and punishes injustice. True, the Homeric Zeus does not on the whole have such a role, at least as far as our conception of justice is concerned. But what has been ignored until recently is that he and other gods have a strong sense of the reciprocal obligation imposed on them by (especially) animal sacrifices, even if they are sometimes unable to fulfil it.

This volume has sought to put the gods back into Greek religion, a realm from which modern scholarship with its emphasis on ritual and anthropology had rather paradoxically ousted them. When we direct our attention to the gods themselves, what is striking is the variety, both of gods and of ways of experiencing them. Which gods are important changes with place and time. Not every god makes it into everyone's pantheon; while some such as Zeus and Apollo are core members, others such as Ares and Dionysos might be included but might not. Gods may be promoted up the hierarchy in one region but not in others and they may, like Herakles, fluctuate in status between god and hero. Those gods best known to us in their Panhellenic guise may have been better known to the communities of the Greek world by their local character, which would have found expression in the traditions and folklore of the area. By studying this variety we can come closer to making sense of those who worshipped them. As Jan Bremmer puts it at the end of his chapter on Hephaistos, thinking about gods teaches us much about mortals.

Along with the variety of gods that permeated the Greek world was the multiplicity of ways they could be encountered. While the study of ritual certainly increases our understanding of Greek religion and society, it may also distract from the ancient experience of the divine. Gods could be present to the devotees of mystery cults, they could be called up by spells, they could become manifest through oracles, and they could be celebrated in festivals. Statues of gods brought the god before the people, sometimes in a very direct way as the statues were carried through the streets in sacred processions.

The only existing full-scale study of Lucian's thinking on the subject of the divine is that undertaken in the 1930s by the French scholar Marcel Caster. He came to what seems to me a startling conclusion, that Lucian was an atheist in the modern acceptance of the word; he was someone who went well beyond the Epicurean position, that there were gods, but that they did not intervene in the world, to the much more radical proposition that there were no gods at all. Caster had reached that judgement by telling himself that only someone who was seriously irreligious and who indeed thought the notion of the divine was a bad joke could have mocked the gods as Lucian did; Lucian's abiding concern was with preserving Greek culture from bad taste, ignorance and barbarity. It is possible to draw quite different conclusions, as I shall attempt to do, from much the same body of evidence.

To get at what Lucian himself thought is difficult. There are a number of reasons for this. For a start, Lucian virtually never, while speaking in his own voice, commits himself to a position on the nature of the gods and their place in the cosmic order. It is besides not at all easy to say when Lucian is speaking in his own voice and not that of a persona assumed for the moment.

THE LIVING GOD AND HIS OR HER IMAGE

In the ancient world people imagined a god or a goddess by referring to a double ‘image’ of the divine being: one is the invisible and immaterial god in opposition to the visible and material world of humankind; the other represents it as a material image, in shape and size almost that of a human being. As I will argue in this chapter, most people were aware of the difference between these two images. Christians, however, accused their pagan adversaries of confusing the two – by taking the material representation as the invisible living god, they worshipped a dead stone, a tree or a beast. Yet the Christians themselves blurred the border between the divine and humankind, since they identified the invisible god with the material and visible man Jesus. They developed this notion by looking back to an older discourse on adequate images of divine beings:

1. a discourse on Pheidias' masterpiece of the Olympian Zeus as the ideal representation of the invisible god;

2. a parallel discourse which argues that the relation between the invisible god and the material man called his son can be understood in the same framework as the relations between god and his image. In this respect the man Jesus Christ is the material visible image of God.

INTRODUCING ORPHISM

The title of this chapter includes two concepts which require explanation, since they are not self-evident: ‘later’ and ‘Orphism’. On the one hand, we must start from the assumption that what we call Orphism is not a doctrinal system, unique, dogmatic and always coherent. Various authors decided to ascribe their own poems to Orpheus, a mythical character, in order to give them the prestige of a great name and the status of revealed texts, which would consequently be true. Since they are authors from different times and even with different ideas, we may suppose that the doctrine found in different passages of the Orphic corpus will not be one and the same. Yet this tendency to variety and ideological dispersion is counterweighed by the fact that the name of the mythical poet was associated with specific themes (eschatology, the origin and destiny of the soul, salvation). Therefore, it was not possible to attribute to Orpheus any doctrine whatsoever, and even less to attribute any doctrines which contradicted those contained in other poems of the corpus. That is the reason why, in spite of the variety of answers to some questions which is found in poems of different times, we will also find some ideas in the poetry ascribed to Orpheus which remain practically unaltered across the centuries.