They lived on Mount Olympus which is a real place , and they had regular meetings to discuss what mortals were up to, who Ares pissed off last week, and whether they should finally declare those stupid helmets with the brooms on them out of fashion. The concept of the Twelve Olympians is pretty standard Greek mythology stuff, but the names of the 12 weren't really consistent. According to Greek Gods and Goddesses , the turnover at the Olympian board of directors was about what you would expect for a typical government agency, with some gods resigning because they were fed up with all the stupid cat fighting about whose fault the problems were oh, wait, that's Congress , and with some gods taking over for the gods who resigned, until eventually no one on Earth knew what the heck was going on up there.
Hestia, for example, left the council and was replaced by Dionysus. Back on Earth there was a statue of Hephaestus included among the Twelve Olympians, even though he wasn't one of them, and Hades is conspicuously absent, even though he was. So if you consider all the different Greek myths and the varying ways the stories are told, there are actually 14 Twelve Olympians. Don't feel bad if that's confusing, though. It makes more sense than about nine-tenths of what happens in Congress.
The image of the wooden horse full of malevolent Greek soldiers is such a part of world consciousness that most people never question whether it actually happened. So far, historians haven't been able to find evidence that the characters in the story actually existed — Helen, who was supposedly the whole reason for the war, is probably total fiction.
Homer may have based his story on a real city, however. In , a German "adventurer" named Heinrich Schliemann excavated a nine-layer city in Turkey, mostly by blowing it up, and found what he believed to be Helen's jewels. He was wrong — the jewels predated fictional Helen by a thousand years — but he did reveal a city that resembled fictional Troy. Most modern archaeologists think Homer based his story on the Troy that existed in the sixth or seventh layers.
Here's where it starts to sound a little questionable, though. The actual city appears to have perished in an earthquake, so archaeologists came up with a rather tenuously connected theory — maybe, just maybe, the Trojan horse was symbolic of Poseidon, who was the god of horses and of earthquakes. So the Trojan horse represented Poseidon who represented earthquakes and there wasn't really a war, but doesn't that make a much better story anyway?
Or something. You be the judge. In the Christian tradition, the underworld is ruled by a super-sized baddy. Satan is all about tempting innocent humans to the dark side and then throwing them into a pit of hellfire for all eternity, and there's something about playing a fiddle in there somewhere, too.
Anyway, most people who grew up with some concept of the underworld think of Hell and Satan and all the fire and brimstone, so we sort of project those ideas on to lords of the underworld from other traditions. But that concept of pure evil doesn't really exist in the Greek tradition.
There's Ares, who was sort of evil but mostly just really annoying, and there's Hades, who was indeed god of the dead but was not the bright red, horned, cloven-hoofed monster we like to imagine sits on a throne in the underworld. According to the Theoi Project , Hades not only ruled the kingdom of the dead and presided at funerals, which actually does sound kind of creepy he was also "god of the hidden wealth of the earth," which meant that fertile soil and mines were under his domain as well.
He did abduct Persephone, which is one very large strike against him, but in all fairness that's pretty much what the Greek gods and goddesses liked to do as a hobby, so it's not like the abduction particularly set him apart from the rest of his brethren. We like to define the Greek gods and goddesses the same way we define ourselves: according to the one specific job we do. For example, you might be Fred the Nurse or Agnes the Firefighter. But it was actually not that simple. According to Springhole.
We already know that Poseidon had something to do with earthquakes and horses but was also the god of the sea, and apparently we also get to blame him for the fact that it hardly ever rains in California anymore.
And there was also Hermes, who not only had to run around with the gods' stupid notes because Agnes the Goddess of Having Your Nose in a Smartphone All the Time hadn't joined the Olympians yet but was also the god of commerce, athletes, travelers, cattle, writing, giving speeches, telling stupid jokes, being nice to visitors, stealing stuff, oh and astrology.
Also, he had to ferry departed souls to the underworld. The date attributed to the writing down of the Homeric epics is connected to the earliest evidence for the existence of Greek script in the 8th Century BC.
The Greeks knew that their alphabet later borrowed by the Romans to become the western alphabet was adapted from that of the Phoenicians, a near-eastern nation whose letter-sequence began "aleph bet".
The fact that the adaptation was uniform throughout Greece has suggested that there was a single adapter rather than many. Greek tradition named the adapter Palamedes, which may just mean "clever man of old". Palamedes was also said to have invented counting, currency, and board games. The Greek letter-shapes came to differ visually from their Phoenician progenitors - with the current geometrical letter-shapes credited to the 6th Century mathematician Pythagoras.
Did Pythagoras invent Pythagoras' theorem? Or did he copy his homework from someone else? It is doubtful whether Pythagoras c. But the Babylonians knew this equation centuries earlier, and there is no evidence that Pythagoras either discovered or proved it. In fact, although genuine mathematical investigations were undertaken by later Pythagoreans, the evidence suggests that Pythagoras was a mystic who believed that numbers underlie everything.
He worked out, for instance, that perfect musical intervals could be expressed by simple ratios. What made the Greeks begin using money? Was it trade or their "psyche"? It may seem obvious to us that commercial imperatives would have driven the invention of money.
But human beings conducted trade for millennia without coinage, and it's not certain that the first monetised economy in the world arose in ancient Greece simply in order to facilitate such transactions. The classicist Richard Seaford has argued that the invention of money emerged from deep in the Greek psyche.
It is tied to notions of reciprocal exchange and obligation which pervaded their societies; it reflects philosophical distinctions between face-value and intrinsic value; and it is a political instrument, since the state is required to act as guarantor of monetary value. Financial instruments and institutions - coinage, mints, contracts, banking, credit and debt - were being developed in many Greek cities by the 5th Century BC, with Athens at the forefront.
What do you think would happen if Greek mythology was actually true? Let us know in the comments below. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Delivered by FeedBurner. Saturday, November 13, Sign in. Forgot your password? Get help. Password recovery. New Study Raises Questions. Please enter your comment! They were often used to teach people about events that they could not always understand, such as illness and death, or earthquakes and floods.
Legends are like myths, but they are slightly different. While myths are completely made up, legends are based on events that really happened. The Greeks believed in gods and goddesses who, they thought, had control over every part of people's lives. The Ancient Greeks believed that they had to pray to the gods for help and protection, because if the gods were unhappy with someone, then they would punish them.
They made special places in their homes and temples where they could pray to statues of the gods and leave presents for them. The Greeks had a different god for almost everything.
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