Did the Ancient Greeks Ever Climb Mount Olympos?

If you know anything at all about Greek mythology, you are probably aware that the ancient Greeks believed that the most important deities in their pantheon, known as the δωδεκάθεον (dōdekátheon), which means the “Twelve Gods” in Ancient Greek, lived atop Mount Olympos, which is a real mountain in the region of Thessalia in northern Greece.

This has led many people to wonder why the ancient Greeks never climbed Mount Olympos and saw that there were no gods up there. The assumption that they never did this has led many people to assume that the ancient Greeks as a whole must have been deeply superstitious and uninquisitive.

The surprising truth, though, is that the ancient Greeks did climb Mount Olympos and it doesn’t seem to have destroyed their religion. In fact, by late antiquity, regular trips up the mountain seem to have become incorporated into the religion itself.

The Greeks and climbing Mount Olympos

The question of why the ancient Greeks supposedly never climbed Mount Olympos has been asked countless times on Quora. Almost all iterations of the question seem to assume that, if the Greeks had climbed Mount Olympos, it would have destroyed their religion. Here are just a few examples:

• “Why didn’t the Greeks climb Mt Olympus (Mytikas) and see that there weren’t any gods up there?“
• “Why didn’t the ancient Greeks climb Mount Olympus?“
• “Have any ancient Greeks ever climbed the Olympus? What did they do when they didn’t find any Gods?“
• “In Greek mythology, the gods are said to live atop Mount Olympus. Olympus is a real mountain and one can climb. Did the Ancient Greeks never climb the mountain? If they did, how did they explain when no actual gods lived there?“
• “Do records indicate if any of the Ancient Greeks ever climbed Mount Olympus to search for their gods?“

Almost all of the answers to these questions claim that the ancient Greeks never climbed Mount Olympos, giving various reasons why they supposedly never did so. As we shall see, all of these reasons are wrong.

Not especially difficult to climb

One of the most popular reasons given for why the ancient Greeks supposedly never climbed Mount Olympos is that the mountain just would have been too difficult for them to climb. The problem with this explanation is that it just isn’t true.

Mount Olympos is actually not an especially difficult mountain to climb. During the summer, when temperatures are usually above freezing and there is no snow, you can literally just hike up to the top of Mount Olympos’s third highest peak, Agios Antonios, and back down again in about a single day without even having to use any kind of climbing equipment.

Today, for modern mountain-climbers, Mount Olympos is considered a “non-technical hike,” meaning basically anyone who is physically fit can hike up the mountain without prior training or expertise. In fact, roughly 10,000 people are estimated to climb Mount Olympos each year. For comparison, it is estimated that only around 800 people climb Mount Everest each year.

ABOVE: Photograph of Mount Olympos

Not considered hubris either, or at least in late antiquity

Another commonly suggested reason why the ancient Greeks supposedly never climbed Mount Olympos is because climbing the mountain would have been considered an act of hubris. There is certainly some evidence to support the idea that some people during the early part of Greek history may have believed that attempting to climb Mount Olympos could be considered an act of hubris, at least if it was done in a certain manner.

Famously, in a story first referenced in Book Six of the Iliad, the legendary hero Bellerophon tried to fly to the top of Mount Olympos on the back of the winged horse Pegasos, apparently with the aim of proclaiming himself a god, but Zeus sent a gadfly to sting Pegasos, leading him to buck Bellerophon off his back. Bellerophon fell into a thorn bush and gouged out both of his eyes, leaving him permanently blind.

Here, though, the act of hubris seems to have been more Bellerophon’s presumed intention to proclaim himself a god and not necessarily the attempt to scale Mount Olympos itself. We might wonder how differently the story of Bellerophon might be if the hero, instead of trying to fly up to the top of the mountain on a winged horse, had instead climbed it as a devoted pilgrim, chanting prayers to the gods all the way and carrying an offering for them.

Interestingly, the Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BC) wrote a tragedy based on the myth of Bellerophon in which he seems to have portrayed Bellerophon as a convinced atheist. The play itself has not survived, but a fragment from it has been preserved through quotation by the later writer Pseudo-Ioustinos in his treatise On Monarchy. The fragment reads in Greek:

“φησίν τις εἶναι δῆτ᾿ ἐν οὐρανῷ θεούς;
οὐκ εἰσίν, οὐκ εἴσ᾿, εἴ τις ἀνθρώπων θέλει
μὴ τῷ παλαιῷ μῶρος ὢν χρῆσθαι λόγῳ.
σκέψασθε δ᾿ αὐτοί, μὴ ᾿πὶ τοῖς ἐμοῖς λόγοις
γνώμην ἔχοντες.”

Here is my own translation:

“Does anyone really say that there are gods in heaven?
There are not! There are not, if someone among human beings is really willing
to not foolishly believe an ancient fable.
Think for yourselves; don’t have an opinion based on my words.”

This is one of the very few surviving passages of ancient Greek literature in which we see an unambiguous expression of atheism in the modern sense. (For information about some of the other passages, you can read this article I published in September 2019.)

Unfortunately, we don’t know in what context within the play this passage was originally meant to be spoken, so it is unclear what connection Bellerophon’s denial of the gods’ existence has to his famous flight to Mount Olympos.

ABOVE: Attic red-figure epinetron, dating to c. 425 – c. 420 BC, depicting Bellerophon on the back of Pegasos slaying the Chimera

Evidence for the Greeks climbing Mount Olympos in late antiquity

Regardless of what happens in the myth of Bellerophon, at least in late antiquity, climbing Mount Olympos was apparently not considered an act of hubris at all. On the contrary, the Greek Middle Platonist writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – c. 120 AD) and the Christian Church Father Augustine of Hippo (lived 354 – 430 AD) both specifically mention that there were regular pilgrimages up the mountain by priests.

A fragment from one of the lost writings of Ploutarchos, preserved through quotation by the Byzantine philologist Ioannes Philoponos (lived c. 490 – c. 570 AD) in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorologica, records that Greek priests would regularly climb to the summit of Mount Olympos and find inscriptions they had left up there undisturbed every time they returned. Philoponos cites this observation as evidence to support his argument that the peak of Mount Olympos is above the clouds and that there is no rain or wind up that high.

The fragment from Ploutarchos reads as follows, as translated by F. H. Sandbach for the Loeb Classical Library:

“For people who have placed ash on top of some mountains, or have left it behind after sacrifices there, have when investigating many years later found that it was still lying as they left it. … Ploutarchos reports that letters, too, remained from one ascent of the priests to the next on Olympos, in Makedonia.”

Augustine of Hippo writes something very similar in his On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, but seems to misunderstand; Augustine claims that the priests would write things in the dust atop Mount Olympos and return years later to find their markings undisturbed by the wind. Ploutarchos, who is the earlier source, however, seems to be describing inscriptions carved in stone—not writing in the dust.

Archaeological evidence for the Greeks climbing Mount Olympos

In addition to the surviving ancient written accounts of priests climbing Mount Olympos regularly in late antiquity, there is also ample archaeological evidence of ancient Greek presence on Mount Olympos.

Archaeologists from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki have found ancient Greek pottery fragments near the tops of some of the peaks, a coin dated to the third century BC, and also the remains of burnt sacrifices and other offerings that were left for the gods atop the Agios Antonios peak. They have even found several ancient inscriptions atop the mountain like the ones described by Ploutarchos. Two of these inscriptions specifically mention “Olympian Zeus.”

For more discussion of the evidence for the ancient Greeks climbing Mount Olympos, you can read this article written by New Zealand classicist Peter Gainsford, who has a wonderful website called “Kiwi Hellenist” where he debunks popular misconceptions about ancient history.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Agios Antonios summit of Mount Olympos, where the ancient Greeks are known to have left offerings for Zeus and the other gods

The gods that weren’t there

There is overwhelming evidence that the ancient Greeks not only definitely climbed Mount Olympos, but that, at least in late antiquity, this was a relatively common occurrence and that people even sometimes offered sacrifices to the gods up there.

At this point, I am sure that many people are probably wondering how on earth anyone could possibly have continued believing in the Greek deities even after visiting the summit of Mount Olympos and discovering that there were no palaces of the gods.

The ancient sources do not answer this question directly, but the most likely explanation is that, quite simply, the ancient Greeks who lived close enough to Mount Olympos to actually climb it did not think that the gods literally, physically lived on top of the mountain in exactly the same way that humans might live there.

Certainly, some people in ancient Greece did indeed believe that the gods literally lived atop Mount Olympos in ornate palaces, eating ambrosia and drinking nektar just like they are described as doing in the Homeric epics, but the ones who were actually climbing Mount Olympos evidently did not believe this. It is likely that many of them thought of Mount Olympos as more of a metaphorical home for the gods, rather than their actual, literal abode.

As I discuss in this article from January 2020, almost everyone in ancient Greece believed that the deities existed in some form or another, but there was great diversity of religious opinion and the extent to which people believed the stories in Greek mythology to be literally true varied significantly. Some people believed that the stories were mostly allegorical, while others believed that they were literal truth. By and large, Greek religion didn’t depend on what people thought about the truthfulness of the stories attached to it.

It is worth noting that, in ancient Greek texts—even in the Homeric epics—while the gods are described as living on “Mount Olympos,” they actually seem to live in more of a generic, extremely remote paradise located somewhere in the sky. The physical geography of the real-world Mount Olympos is rarely ever invoked. Indeed, none of the ancient sources ever even specify which peak the gods were supposed to live on.

I am not the first to observe this. Indeed, the classicist John Chadwick notes in chapter six of his book The Mycenaean World, originally published in 1976, that the Olympian deities seem to be “placed not so much upon the actual Mount Olympus in northern Greece as in a remote area of the sky.”

ABOVE: Minerva and the Triumph of Jupiter, painted in 1706 by the French Neoclassical painter René-Antoine Houasse