Did the Ancient Greeks Really Believe in Their Myths?

On Quora, I have noticed there seems to be an endless number of questions dealing with the same overall theme: “Did the ancient Greeks and Romans really believe in their gods?” and “Did the ancient Greeks really believe in their myths?”

I think these questions are born from a strange discordance that people have noticed between the ancient Greeks’ reputation for rational skepticism and the stories we still tell about their gods and heroes—stories that—let’s face it—in most cases are pretty unbelievable to say the least.

Thus people have wondered, “How on Earth could a people so supposedly enlightened believe in such absurd stories?” As it turns out, though, believing in the Greek deities and believing in Greek myths are two different things; many people in ancient times believed in the deities without necessarily believing in all the stories attached to them.

A deeply religious culture

There is no doubt that the vast majority of people in ancient Greece wholeheartedly believed in the existence of the Greek deities. This is evidenced by countless pieces of evidence gathered from a vast array of different kinds of sources. For one thing, the Greek deities are almost constantly mentioned in classical Greek texts as though they were actual beings. People are described as praying to them and swearing oaths by them, which wouldn’t make much sense unless most people believed in them.

Furthermore, the ancient Greeks built countless temples to their deities. Many of these temples are colossal structures that were certainly extremely labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive to produce. Take, for instance, the Parthenon, the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, or the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos. All of these were monumental structures dedicated as houses for the gods. People don’t usually build massive, often extremely expensive temples to deities that the majority of them don’t even believe in.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the ruins of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, a massive ruined temple in Athens, Greece, which was begun in the Archaic Period and completed in the Roman Era. People don’t usually put massive amounts of time, effort, and money into building colossal temples like this one to deities they don’t believe in.

Likewise, the ancient Greeks made sacrifices to their deities on an almost daily basis. As I discuss in this article I wrote back in September 2019, animal sacrifice was a normal part of existence in the ancient world. In ancient Greece, pretty much any time people in ancient Greece ate meat from any animal other than a fish was after a sacrifice.

As I discuss in this article from November 2019, there is even one report from Ploutarchos of Chaironeia’s Life of Themistokles that, on at least one particularly desperate occasion, the classical Athenians may have even engaged in human sacrifice in effort to win the favor of the gods. People don’t normally perform sacrifices—let alone human sacrifices—to deities that most of them don’t believe in.

People in ancient Greece didn’t just talk about the gods almost constantly, build temples to them, and offer sacrifices to them; they also made efforts to communicate with the gods. People frequently consulted oracles in effort to learn what the gods thought about things.

They didn’t just consult oracles for major decisions; sometimes people consulted oracles about matters that seem to us thousands of years later endearingly mundane. For instance, at some point between the sixth and third centuries BC, a man named Agis posed the following question to the oracle of Zeus and Dione at Dodona, as translated by Pierre Bonnechere:

“Agis asks Zeus Naios and Dione about his pillows and blankets, whether he has lost them or whether someone else has stolen them.”

The question has survived through an inscription, but the oracle’s reply has been lost to time.

I could go on and present more evidence, but I think most of my readers probably get the picture; the ancient Greeks were, on the whole, a very deeply religious people and the vast majority of them certainly believed in the existence of the gods.

ABOVE: Detail of a Paestan red-figure bell-krater dating to c. 330 BC or thereabouts depicting the oracle of Delphoi sitting atop a tripod

The outliers

The evidence I have presented so far is more than enough to demonstrate that most people in ancient Greece believed in the deities. Nonetheless, this evidence does not demonstrate that everyone necessarily believed in them, since individuals are, of course, capable of disagreeing with other members of their society. People were every bit as capable of disagreeing with each other back then as they are today and all it takes is a look at any internet discussion to know that people today hold a wide range of diverse opinions.

I wrote an extremely detailed article back in September 2019 about what evidence there is for the presence of atheism in ancient Greece. I highly recommend reading that article, but I will briefly summarize some of its main points here. Basically, there is ample evidence for the existence of people who questioned traditional ideas about religion and the nature of the gods, but there is precious little evidence for the existence of people who outright denied the existence of all deities entirely.

The ancient Greeks did have the word ἄθεοι (átheoi), which literally means “godless ones.” Nonetheless, this was a largely meaningless snarl-word that was applied pejoratively to anyone who did not conform to traditional religious norms. Very few of the people to whom this term was applied in antiquity would be considered atheists today. The closest we probably come to a true ancient Greek atheist is the Sophist Protagoras of Abdera (lived c. 490 – c. 420 BC), who wrote in the surviving fragment from his now-lost treatise On the Gods:

“Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not, nor of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life.”

By any definition, Protagoras would be considered an agnostic if he were alive today.

There were some people in ancient Greece who saw the deities through a philosophical lens as more-or-less personified beings. This kind of belief is attested in variety of sources, most notably in the Derveni Papyrus, a philosophical treatise from the late fifth century BC that has survived through a surprisingly well-preserved papyrus roll discovered in 1962 at the site of Derveni in northern Greece.

ABOVE: Democritus and Protagoras, painted between 1663 and 1664 by the Italian Baroque painter Salvator Rosa. Protagoras was what we might describe today as an agnostic.

What the majority thought of the outliers

I think I have now established that most people in ancient Greece believed in the existence of deities, but some people held unconventional views about what these deities were like and a few people seem to have even had doubts about the gods’ existence. Now I imagine that many of my readers are probably wondering whether people who held unconventional religious views in ancient Greece were persecuted. The answer is that, in general, they usually weren’t, but that is not a hard-and-fast rule.

One point that is essential to emphasize right from the start is that ancient Greek religion was centered on practice, not belief. In ancient Greece, it generally wasn’t considered especially important what you personally thought the deities were like; what mattered was that you worshipped the deities ordained by the state, that you took part in public religious activities, and that you abided by conventional religious rules and norms.

As long as you acknowledged the gods of the state and did all those other things, most people generally didn’t really care that much about what you personally thought the gods were like. The ancient Greeks had no concepts of “heresy” or “orthodoxy.” The closest concept they had to “heresy” was ἀσέβεια (asébeia), which is usually translated as “impiety.” This term typically refers to the act of refusing to acknowledge the gods of the state.

People were sometimes brought to trial for impiety, but, in nearly all recorded cases of people being brought to trial under this charge, there is known to have been some other political motive at play. For instance, most famously, the philosopher Socrates (lived c. 470 – 399 BC) was accused of impiety, but the actual reasons why he was brought to trial are suspected to have been because influential people found him annoying and because he had some unsavory connections to political figures such as the general Alkibiades and Kritias, the leader of the Thirty Tyrants, the murderous regime installed by the Spartans after Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC that is estimated to have killed roughly one twentieth of Athens’ population.

ABOVE: Alcibiades Being Taught by Socrates, painted in 1776 by the French Neoclassical painter François-André Vincent

Believing in myths versus not believing in myths

It is quite apparent that the vast majority of people in ancient Greece believed in the existence of the Greek gods, but they had differing conceptions of what those gods were like. Some people believed in the anthropomorphic deities of the Homeric poems; whereas other people envisioned the deities in a more abstract sense. Nearly everyone, though, believed in deities of some kind.

When it come to the question of whether or not the ancient Greeks really believed in their myths, however, matters are far more complicated. People in ancient times were far more likely to doubt the veracity of myths and stories than they were to doubt the existence of the gods. There were certainly many people in ancient Greece who seriously doubted and sometimes even outright rejected the literal truth of the Greek myths.

References to people doubting the truthfulness of the Greek myths are all over the place in surviving works of ancient Greek literature. One of the earliest Greek writers to criticize traditional mythology was the poet Xenophanes of Kolophon (lived c. 570 – c. 475 BC), who savagely critiqued the traditional idea of the gods as anthropomorphic beings capable of immoral actions. Here are three surviving fragments of Xenophanes’s writings, translated by Kathleen Freeman:

“(FRG 14) But mortals believe the gods to be created by birth, and to have their own (mortals’) raiment, voice and body. (FRG 16) Aithiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thrakians have gods with grey eyes and red hair. (FRG 15) But if oxen [and horses] and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies [of their gods] in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses.”

Other surviving fragments of Xenophanes’s writings clearly indicate that he still believed in the existence of divine beings, but he was resistant to the idea of them being anthropomorphic.

ABOVE: Fictional seventeenth-century engraving depicting how the artist imagined Xenophanes of Kolophon might have looked. No one knows what he really looked like.

The spread of mythology skepticism

There is a great deal of evidence from later writings that, by the end of the fifth century BC, a very large number of Greek intellectuals had serious qualms with accepting the traditional myths at face value and many of them were convinced that these stories couldn’t possibly be true—or at least not in the way that most people believed them to be.

For instance, in Plato’s dialogue Phaidros, the Athenian aristocrat Phaidros is portrayed walking with the philosopher Socrates outside of Athens by the Ilissos stream. Phaidros asks Socrates whether the place where they are walking is the place where Boreas, the god of the north wind, carried off the princess Orethyia, the daughter of King Erechtheus of Athens. Socrates replies that the actual spot was some distance away.

Then Phaidros asks Socrates whether he believes the story. Socrates replies that all the wise and clever men say that the story is false, but that he himself is happy to believe that it is true, since that is what the common folk believe and, since he does not know himself, he does not feel it would be his place to speculate about things that are not his concern.

ABOVE: Detail of an Apulian red-figure oinochoe by the Salting Painter depicting the wind-god Boreas abducting the Athenian princess Oreithyia, dating to c. 360 BC

On Incredible Tales by Palaiphatos

There are several surviving ancient Greek texts that attempt to offer up rational explanations for various traditional myths and stories. My favorite is a rather amusing work titled On Incredible Tales, which was written by an obscure author named Palaiphatos.

It is unclear when exactly Palaiphatos lived, but he most likely lived at some point between the end of the fifth century BC and the middle of the second century BC. The Souda, a tenth-century AD Byzantine encyclopedia, appears to claim that he was a contemporary of Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BC), but it is unclear whether this is in fact correct.

Palaiphatos’s On Incredible Tales has probably not survived to the present day in its original complete form, since the Souda references the work as having been composed of five books, but only one book of it has survived to the present day. The surviving book may be a summary of Palaiphatos’s original or merely a portion of Palaiphatos’s original.

In any case, the work that has survived opens with the following introduction, as translated by Jacob Stern:

“Here is a work I have written entitled ‘On Unbelievable Tales.’ Now some people, who have no acquaintance with philosophy or science, are too credulous and believe everything that is said to them. Others, of a more subtle and inquisitive nature, totally disbelieve that any of these tales ever happened. My own belief is that there is a reality behind all stories. For names alone without stories would hardly have arisen: first there must have been deeds and thereafter stories about them.”

The remainder of the work goes through many of the best-known stories from Greek mythology involving supernatural elements and tries to find rational explanations for them. For instance, Palaiphatos’s first chapter deals with the centaurs, mythical creatures who are said to have had the bodies of horses, but the heads, arms, and torsos of men.

Palaiphatos realizes that creatures of this sort certainly never existed, but he comes up with the creative explanation that perhaps stories about centaurs arose from people seeing raiders riding on horseback from behind at a great distance so that all they could see were the horses’ bodies and the upper bodies of the men riding them. Thus, Palaiphatos argues that they must have mistaken the men on horseback for men with the bodies of horses.

ABOVE: Ancient Roman mosaic from the dining room of Hadrian’s Villa, dating to between c. 120 and c. 130 AD, depicting a centaur alongside various wild animals

Ironically, many Palaiphatos’s explanations are even more fanciful than the original stories themselves. Take, for instance, the story of Medeia. In traditional Greek mythology, Medeia is said to have been a sorceress from the land of Kolchis who tricked the daughters of the tyrant Pelias into killing their father by showing them how she could make an old goat young again by chopping it to pieces, boiling it in a cauldron full of magic herbs, and pulling it out, fully rejuvenated. Pelias’s daughters—who were apparently not very bright—therefore chopped their father into pieces and boiled him in a cauldron, thinking that this would make him young, but they did not put in the right magic herbs, so he died and did not come back to life.

Palaiphatos in his On Incredible Tales chapter 43, takes a completely different interpretation of the story. According to Palaiphatos, Medeia actually invented the steam bath, which helped reduce wrinkles and made people look younger, but those who were ignorant thought she was boiling people alive. Pelias, Palaiphatos reasons, only died because he was extremely old and weak and could not handle the heat.

Of course, I imagine most of my readers can tell why this approach is silly right from the get-go. Quite simply, Palaiphatos starts out with the unjustified assumption that there must be a definitive grain of truth behind every story and he does not consider the possibility that all of the stories he examines may simply be made up entirely. Consequently, Palaiphatos concocts all sorts of wild tales of his own in effort to discredit the traditional stories.

Using exactly the same reasoning as Palaiphatos, we might interpret the novel The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien as a misunderstood and conflated tale about four humble farmers from the English countryside (who just happened, by sheer coincidence, to be abnormally short) standing up against an evil factory corporation known as MorDor (whose logo is obviously a giant burning eye) that is taking over their village and driving townsfolk out of their jobs. Clearly, this would be absurd.

ABOVE: Illustration from 1894 by Dugald Sutherland MacColl after a scene from an Attic black-figure amphora from Etruria, now held in the collection of the British Museum depicting the ram rising from the cauldron rejuvenated

The myths no one questioned

Some myths were doubted more frequently than others. Many people seem to have doubted the truth of some of the more outlandish stories, such as the whole story about Medeia tricking Pelias’s daughters into murdering him. The less outlandish stories, however, were almost never doubted. For instance, we have no record that I am currently aware of that anyone in ancient Greece ever seriously doubted the historicity of the Trojan War.

People did question the truth of specific myths related to the Trojan War, but the historicity of the war itself basically went unquestioned. This is not especially surprising, though, when you consider that many people even today in the twenty-first century still believe many of the stories about the Trojan War, even though, as I discuss in this article from March 2019, there is very little evidence to substantiate that anything worth calling the “Trojan War” actually happened.

Troy was a real city that existed in the late Bronze Age and it is possible that there may have been several military conflicts between various Mycenaean kingdoms and the city of Troy. Nevertheless, it is highly unlikely that there was ever a ten-year-long sustained siege of Troy, that legendary figures like Agamemnon, Helene of Troy, Hektor, Achilleus, Odysseus, or Aias ever existed, or that there was ever a real Trojan horse.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the walls of the acropolis of Troy VII

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a portion of the walls of Troy VII

Conclusion

The vast majority of people in ancient Greece really believed in the Greek gods, but there were some dissenters who questioned traditional ideas about the gods and a few people who were not completely sure about the gods’ existence. For the most part, people who had doubts about the gods do not seem to have been widely persecuted. Although these individuals could be legally brought to trial for impiety, this seems to have been rarely done except when there was political motivation to do so.

Many people doubted the truth of the more outlandish stories from Greek mythology, but the less outlandish stories were more widely believed. The historicity of the Trojan War seems to have basically gone more-or-less unquestioned.