Antiquity is a long time, and the voices of the general population are for the most part very difficult for us to recover. They did not, by and large, leave us an explicit record of how they felt about these matters. And so, not being an expert in that area, I will unfortunately have to ignore the opinion of the vast majority of people and focus instead on a few intellectuals who did leave us an explicit record. Hopefully, someone else will be able to chime in about those matters.

Anyway, let us begin with a relatively early author, Xenophanes of Colophon (born c. 570 BCE). His general attitude toward the traditional stories about the gods is nicely illustrated by the following fragment:

Both Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all deeds which among men are matters of reproach and blame: thieving, adultery, and deceiving one another.

The implication here seems to be that these attributions are incorrect and impious because they attribute to the gods human characteristics, and more specifically human character flaws. As we will see below, this criticism reaches its full flower in Plato’s Republic. But for now let us stick with Xenophanes. Aristotle tells us that:

Xenophanes used to say that those who the gods are born are just as impious as those who say that they die, since either way it follows that there is a time when the gods do not exist.

This seems more innocuous, until one reflects on the fact that traditional Greek myths do speak of the gods being born. Zeus, for example, is the son of Cronus. Indeed, it is not totally grotesque to say that Hesiod’s Theogony is a complex family tree of various divine beings. So, again, Xenophanes view is strikingly critical of traditional myth. Perhaps the most intriguing bit of argument we have directly from Xenophanes is, however, the following interconnected fragments:

Mortals believe that the gods are born and have human clothing, voice, and bodily form… Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black, Thracians that theirs are blue eyed and red haired… But if oxen or horses or lions had hands or were able to draw with their hands and accomplish the same works as men, horses would draw the figures of gods as resembling horses and oxen as resembling oxen, and each would make the gods’ bodies have the same bodily form as they themselves had.

Obviously, the point here is a warning against anthropomorphizing the gods. The focus in these fragments is on the physical aspects, but it is worth remembering the earlier admonishment of Homer and Hesiod for attributing human moral failings to the gods here as well. Saying that the gods commit adultery is just as silly as saying that the gods have blue eyes, because both are simply a projection of human characteristics onto a non-human entity. What, then, is it to be divine on Xenophanes view? We have a few fragments that give us some clues:

God is one (an alternative translation here would be ‘one god’), greatest among gods and men, not at all like mortals in bodily form or thought.

All of him sees, all of him thinks, all of him hears.

But without effort he shakes all things by the thought of his mind.

So the divine is something like a mind, fully conscious and aware, and is supremely efficacious. Though, the first fragment in the collection cautions us to understand these terms as, at best, analogies. For, the divine does not ‘think’ as a human thinks, though one supposes this is the best description that Xenophanes feels he can offer of what the divine does.

Let us turn now to Plato’s Republic, which contains perhaps the most influential and famous assault on traditional Greek myths from antiquity. Plato’s basic point is that the poets and “myth-makers” (377b11) must describe the divine accurately, something than have more or less uniformly failed to do:

Whether in epic, lyric, or tragedy, a god must always be represented as he is… Therefore, since a god is good, he is not - as most people claim - the cause of everything that happens to human beings but only of a few things, for good things are fewer than bad ones in our lives. He alone is responsible for the good things, but we must find some other cause for the bad ones, not a god… we won’t accept from anyone the foolish mistake Homer makes… if anyone tells us that it was brought about by Athena and Zeus or that Themis and Zeus were responsible for strife and contention among the gods, we will not praise him (379a-e).

Nor must mothers, believing bad stories about the gods… terrify their children with them. Such stories blaspheme the gods and, at the same time, make children more cowardly. (381d-e)

The first quotation is more or less the argument from our first Xenophanes quote more fully wrought. The idea is that the gods, just in virtue of being gods, are perfectly good. And so all these myths about the gods going around lying and raping and stealing are quite literally nonsense; you might as well describe how a circle went around having four sides. A further, and frankly more philosophically interesting, argument relates to the whether or not divine beings can change in any respect. Plato seems to be thinking in Republic that they cannot:

Do you think that a god is a sorcerer, able to appear in different forms at different times, sometimes changing himself from his own form into many shapes, sometimes deceiving us by making us think that he has done it? Or do you think he’s simple and least of all likely to step out of his own form?... Would he change himself into something better and more beautiful than himself or something worse and uglier? It would have to be into something worse, if he’s changed at all, for surely we won’t say that a god is deficient in either beauty or virtue. Absolutely right. And do you think… that anyone, whether god or human, would deliberately make himself worse in any way? No that is impossible. (380c-381c)

The argument here is extremely clever, and the conclusion extremely surprising. Here is one way we could sketch it:

• A divine being is perfect in every respect

• If something is perfect in every respect changes, it gets worse in at least one respect

• So, if a divine being changes, it gets worse in at least one respect

We could further flesh this out by arguing, as Socrates does here, that any change in a divine being is not imposed on it by something external, but must rather arise from the divine being itself. But clearly it seems absurd to say that anything, much less a divine being, would make itself worse unless compelled to by something external. And so divine beings cannot change at all in any respect. The point I want to drive home here is not necessarily that you should accept the conclusion of this argument, but rather to demonstrate how far we’ve strayed from the traditional view of the gods you get in Greek myth.

And that, I think, is probably a good place to stop rambling, though there is much more that could be said here regarding Plato, both in the Republic and also in other texts. The Phaedrus, for example, present Socrates as far more amenable to the insights made available via myth, and indeed as critical of those who go about offering rationalizations of them rather than attempting to get at the underlying point of the myth (229b-230a).

Further Reading

• On Xenophanes, a good introduction can be found in Philosophy Before Socrates by Richard McKirahan.

• On Plato on this issue, a good scholarly introduction can be consulted here.