The Gods of Greece, the Autocrats of the Ancient World (Part Four)

We’re almost at the end of the list of the twelve Olympian gods of ancient Greece. We’ve covered almost all the famous ones by now, but in the ones that remain we see perhaps a gap in between what the Greeks saw as important, and what we see as important today.

We have covered the gods of the sky and the sea, clearly vital parts of a functional ecosystem. Alongside them we have noted that the land was for mortals, a kind of neutral territory where all deities could meddle equally (or complain to Zeus if they weren’t getting their way, which happened a deal more than you might think, for gods). We have even thrown in the god of the underworld and the afterlife, who is technically not an Olympian but rather off doing his own thing.

We have covered the god of war and the goddess of beauty. We have seen the goddess of motherhood, who was almost always annoyed, and we have seen the goddess of wisdom, who was always right about everything in a way the Greeks found deeply attractive. We have seen the wild goddess of the hunt and her twin, the blonde musclebound (and faintly boring) god of being Greek.

Who is left in the pantheon with roles as important as these, which other aspects of the world as the Bronze Age Greeks saw it were represented by these final gods. What was an important as wisdom, as beauty, as creation itself?

Some of these may be, at first, surprising to the modern reader. Of the four remaining gods we have two goddesses, of hearth and home and of the harvest, and two gods, one of the forge and one of announcing things. Important jobs, for sure? But interesting for their inclusion nonetheless.

These were gods who personified the most important aspects of Greek life, after all. It makes sense for the harvest to be important, but the herald of the gods? Was Hermes just hanging around because Zeus was too busy and too important to make his own proclamations?

Similarly, it is pretty easy to understand who any people of the Bronze Age might see the forge as some kind of magic. Metals were the hot new thing, changing the world more rapidly than ever before. He who had command of bronze could rule an empire, so of course this power came with its own god.

But a goddess of hearth and home, an area pretty much covered already by Zeus’s wife Hera? What was it about the family unit which merited a second goddess, especially devoted to its safekeeping?

And finally, there is the secret god. The thirteenth of the twelve, a younger and a far wilder god than the rest. This last god was the god of wine, or getting completely wrecked in the Greek sunshine and dancing with total abandon and a total lack of care. People died in his orgies, he was that out of control.

So these gods may not be, in the end, as important as the gods already covered. But, in their personalities and in the things that differentiate them from the others, they may be the most interesting gods of all.

Header Image: Dionysus, a god of resurrection in the same vein as Jesus and the thirteenth of the twelve gods of Olympus. Source: Carole Raddato / CC BY-SA 2.0.