There are more human beings alive right now than there have ever been at any previous point in the history of the universe. Even so, our population continues to skyrocket. In fact, the human population of the world is predicted to reach eight billion on Tuesday, November 15th, 2022. According to this article the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) released a few days ago, approximately 7% of all the humans who have ever lived are currently alive right now.
Given this historic occasion, I thought I would share with my readers a myth that is referenced in various forms in a number of works of early ancient Greek literature. The myth claims that, once, in the heroic age, humans became so populous that Gaia, the earth, struggled to bear the burden of their combined weight. Zeus, the king of the deities, saw that Gaia was suffering and therefore resolved to create devastating wars to annihilate as many humans as possible in order to bring her relief. Although this is a myth that not many people today have heard, it is referenced in one of the most famous passages in all of ancient literature: the opening proem of the Iliad.
The trope of chief deities wanting to wipe out as many humans as possible in ancient Near Eastern literature
Before I say any more about ancient Greek literature, I feel I should note that myths in which a chief god resolves to kill off all humans or a large portion of them are very common and widespread throughout the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean.
One famous example of this myth occurs in the Atraḫasīs Epic, an epic poem in the Akkadian language that was most likely composed in around the eighteenth century BCE or thereabouts. I’ve discussed this epic previously in this blog post I wrote in December 2021 and this post I wrote in September 2022, but it is worth discussing again here.
In the poem, the deities create human beings as servants to work for them and worship them, but humans multiply to such an extent that they crowd the earth and make so much noise that Ellil, the chief god of the Mesopotamian pantheon, is unable to sleep with all the racket they are making, so he resolves to annihilate as many humans as possible and thereby reduce the world’s population. Tablet one, section seven, lines 7–14 read as follows, as translated by Stephanie Dalley in her book Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (page 18):
“600 years, less than 600, passed.
And the country became too wide, the people too numerous.
The country was noisy as a bellowing bull.
The god grew restless at their racket,
Ellil had to listen to their noise.
He addressed the great gods:
‘The noise of mankind has become too much;
I am losing sleep over their racket.’”
Ellil sends various calamities to annihilate humans. First, he sends a global plague, then a global famine, then a global drought, then a bunch of different plagues all at once, then a famine again, and then, finally, a global flood to destroy everything.
The standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which, as I discuss in much greater detail in the post I wrote in September 2022 that I linked earlier, was compiled by the Babylonian scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni sometime between c. 1300 and c. 1000 BCE, incorporates large amounts of material from earlier poems in the Akkadian language, including a version of the flood story that is extremely similar to the one found in the Atraḫasīs Epic and that is most likely directly based on it.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a baked clay statuette found in the Scribal Quarter of the city of Nippur in southern Mesopotamia dating to between c. 1800 and c. 1600 BCE depicting Ellil, the chief god of the Mesopotamian pantheon, currently held in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad
Another well-known example of an ancient Near Eastern myth in which a chief god resolves to annihilate all human beings is, of course, the famous story in the Book of Genesis 6:5–9:17 in which Yahweh, the god of Israel, sends a global flood to wipe out all human beings except for one man, Noah, and his family, whom Yahweh chooses to spare.
The precise dating and composition of the various parts of the Torah (i.e., the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) is generally uncertain and highly contentious. Most critical scholars of the Hebrew Bible, however, generally agree that the primeval history of Genesis 1–11 consists of at least two different bodies of material written by different authors at different times. These bodies of material differ significantly in their focus, theology, language, and even which names they use for the god of Israel.
Scholars typically designate one body of material as “Priestly” or “P” and the other body of material as “non-Priestly” or “non-P.” Most (but not all) scholars agree that the Priestly material most likely dates either to sometime during the period when the Neo-Babylonian Empire ruled Judah and the Judahite elites were living in captivity in Babylon (lasted c. 586 – 539 BCE) or to the time shortly thereafter, within the first century of Achaemenid Persian rule over Judah (i.e., roughly sometime between c. 539 and c. 440 BCE).
David M. Carr, one of the foremost contemporary scholars on the composition of the Hebrew Bible, argues in his recent monograph The Formation of Genesis 1–11: Biblical and Other Precursors, published in 2020 by Oxford University Press, on pages 115–177, that the story of Noah in Genesis 6–9 consists of three main layers of material.
He argues that, in around the mid-seventh century BCE, an author or group of authors living in the kingdom of Judah produced a single, independent proto-Genesis text that is the source for most of the non-Priestly material of the primeval history. He argues, however, that this text did not include a flood story and instead featured Noah only as a culture hero as the inventor of viniculture and wine. Then, at a somewhat later date, someone edited the non-P proto-Genesis to add the non-P flood narrative.
Then, Carr argues, during the Babylonian captivity, Judahite priests living in exile in Babylon composed the Priestly Source as a single, independent document, which included the Priestly version of the flood myth. He argues that, later, perhaps sometime during the period when the Achaemenid Empire was ruling Judah (lasted 539 – 332 BCE), a person who was most likely either a priest themself or one with priestly affinities edited the non-P and P documents together, conflating the originally separate flood narratives into one.
The non-Priestly flood narrative, which, according to Carr, is probably more ancient, describes Yahweh’s decision to send a global flood to wipe out all of humanity as follows in Genesis 6:5–7, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE) with the divine name restored:
“Yahweh saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And Yahweh was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So Yahweh said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the humans I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air—for I am sorry that I have made them.’”
The Priestly flood narrative describes Yahweh’s decision as follows in Genesis 6:11–12, as translated in the NRSVUE:
“Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw that the earth was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth.”
Both the non-P and P flood narratives differ from the older Mesopotamian version of the flood story found in the Atraḫasīs Epic in that they claim that Yahweh decided to annihilate nearly all humans because he saw that humans were wicked, rather than because humans were making too much noise for him to sleep.
ABOVE: Illustration by the French artist Gustave Doré (lived 1832 – 1883) for an edition of the Bible first printed in 1866 depicting the global flood that Yahweh sends to destroy all flesh in Genesis 6
The mysterious “will” or “plan” of Zeus in the proem to the Iliad
As we can see, the trope in which the chief god of a pantheon resolves to annihilate all human beings or a large portion of them from the face of the earth is well attested throughout the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean. Now let us turn to look at some of the places where this trope appears in works of early Greek literature.
The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter verse that originated in oral tradition and was originally passed down orally. Although the poem most likely evolved to a significant degree over time, it most likely became fixed in something resembling the form in which it has been passed down today in around the second quarter of the seventh century BCE.
Starting in around the late sixth century BCE, the Iliad, along with its sister poem the Odyssey, started to become widely known and celebrated, at first in Athens and then gradually throughout the rest of the Greek world. It may have been around this time in the late sixth century BCE that someone wrote the poem down in its entirety for the first time.
The earliest surviving written fragments and quotations of the Iliad display many significant textual variations, but, in around the third century BCE, scholars working at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt standardized the epic into the “vulgate” edition that has been passed down through the manuscript tradition to the present day with a generally high degree of fidelity. (For more about the date of the Homeric epics, this blog post written by the New Zealand classicist Peter Gainsford gives an excellent overview.)
Arguably the most famous passage of the entire Iliad is the proem at the beginning of Book One, in which the poet invokes the Muse, the goddess of poetry and music, to grant him the divine inspiration to tell the story of the wrath of the warrior Achilleus. The first seven lines of the standard version of the Iliad that has been passed down through the manuscript tradition read as follows in the original Homeric Greek:
“μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.”
This means, in my own very close, literal translation:
“Sing, goddess, the wrath of the son of Peleus Achilleus,
ruinous, which set myriad sufferings for the Achaians [i.e., the Greeks],
and sent many brave souls of heroes to Haides [i.e., the underworld]
and made them carrion for dogs
and for all birds, and the will [or plan] of Zeus was fulfilled,
from when exactly the two first separated and quarreled:
the son of Atreus, king of men, and heavenly Achilleus.”
Here, the poet uses the phrase “Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή” (“and the will [or the plan] of Zeus was fulfilled”) immediately after describing how the wrath of Achilleus caused many heroes to die and made them into corpses for scavengers to prey on. The context of the phrase within the proem itself makes it clear that a lot of people dying was the will of Zeus.
That being said, the average modern person reading this proem on its own with no context would still most likely find little to suggest that the “will” or “plan” of Zeus referenced here refers to a wider, cosmic-level plan to annihilate as many human beings as possible. When we consider this passage in light of other works of Archaic Greek literature, however, the meaning of this passage becomes horrifyingly evident.
ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons showing an ancient Greek polychrome vase painting depicting Achilleus fighting the Aithiopian king Memnon, dating to around 300 BCE or thereabouts, now held in the Rijksmuseum voor Oudheden in Leiden, the Netherlands
Hesiodos’s Works and Days
Hesiodos of Askre was an early Greek poet who most likely flourished sometime in around the first half of the seventh century BCE and most likely composed his poems for oral performance. Two long narrative poems attributed to him have survived to the present day complete: the Theogonia and Works and Days, both of which are composed in dactylic hexameter. Although Hesiodos shares many supposed details about his personal life and opinions in his poems, the speaker of the poems most likely represents more of an artistic persona than an actual historic individual.
In his Works and Days, Hesiodos says that the deities have created five races of human beings in succession. First, there was the race of gold, then the race of silver, then the race of bronze, and then, fourth, came the race of heroes, many of whom died fighting in terrible violent conflicts, including the War of the Seven against Thebes and the Trojan War. Hesiodos describes the creation and destruction of the race of heroes as follows in his Works and Days, lines 156–165:
“αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ καὶ τοῦτο γένος κατὰ γαῖ᾽ ἐκάλυψεν,
αὖτις ἔτ᾽ ἄλλο τέταρτον ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ
Ζεὺς Κρονίδης ποίησε, δικαιότερον καὶ ἄρειον,
ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονται
ἡμίθεοι, προτέρη γενεὴ κατ᾽ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν.
καὶ τοὺς μὲν πόλεμός τε κακὸς καὶ φύλοπις αἰνή,
τοὺς μὲν ὑφ᾽ ἑπταπύλῳ Θήβῃ, Καδμηίδι γαίῃ,
ὤλεσε μαρναμένους μήλων ἕνεκ᾽ Οἰδιπόδαο,
τοὺς δὲ καὶ ἐν νήεσσιν ὑπὲρ μέγα λαῖτμα θαλάσσης
ἐς Τροίην ἀγαγὼν Ἑλένης ἕνεκ᾽ ἠυκόμοιο.
ἔνθ᾽ ἤτοι τοὺς μὲν θανάτου τέλος ἀμφεκάλυψε.”
This means, in my own English translation:
“But when also this race became covered beneath the earth,
then, yet again, Zeus the son of Kronos made another, fourth race
upon the much-nourishing earth, more righteous and nobler,
a god-like race of hero-men, who are called
demigods, the race before our own upon the boundless earth.
And evil war and the terrible din of battle destroyed some of them:
some beneath seven-gated Thebes, in the land of Kadmos,
fighting for the sake of the sheep of Oidipous,
and others on ships upon the great depth of the sea
leading toward Troy for the sake of lovely-haired Helene.
There, truly, the fulfillment of death enshrouded them.”
In this passage, Hesiodos stops short of outright saying that Zeus intentionally caused all these wars in order to wipe out as many humans as possible. Two fragmentary poetic sources from the Greek Archaic Period, however, expressly draw the connection that this passage does not.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bronze portrait head discovered in the Villa of the Papyri in Pompeii, believed to be a fictional representation of the poet Hesiodos
The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women
The Catalogue of Women is another early Greek narrative poem in dactylic hexameter. In antiquity, it was almost universally regarded as the work of Hesiodos, but modern scholars almost universally agree that the poem cannot possibly have been composed by the same author as the Theogonia and Works and Days.
The Catalogue of Women has, unfortunately, not survived to the present day complete, but many long fragments of the work have survived and scholars are able to reconstruct its framework. The poem receives its name because it is structured around the genealogies of famous women, especially those whom male gods raped or had sex with and who gave birth to legendary heroes.
Several aspects of the poem, including the fact that it mentions Kyrene, a Greek colony on the north coast of what is now Libya in North Africa that was founded in around 631 BCE or thereabouts, indicate that the Catalogue cannot have become fixed in the form it is known today through fragments until the late seventh century BCE at the earliest.
One fragment of the work (Fragment 204, lines 93–106) says that Zeus intentionally planned and stirred up the violent conflicts that Hesiodos references in the passage of the Works and Days that I have quoted above in order to annihilate the race of demigods. The passages reads as follows in Greek:
“ἣ τέκεν ῾Ερμιόνην καλλίσφυρ[ο]ν ἐν μεγάροισιν
ἄελπτον. πάντες δὲ θεοὶ δίχα θυμὸν ἔθεντο
ἐξ ἔριδος· δὴ γὰρ τότε μήδετο θέσκελα ἔργα
Ζεὺς ὑψιβρεμέτης, †μεῖξαι κατ’ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν
τυρβάξας,† ἤδη δὲ γένος μερόπων ἀνθρώπων
πολλὸν ἀϊστῶσαι σ̣π̣ε̣ῦ̣δ̣ε̣, π̣ρ̣[ό]φασιν μὲν ὀλέσθαι
ψυχὰς ἡμιθέω[ν ….. ….. .]ο̣ι̣σ̣ι̣ βροτοῖσι
τέκ̣να θεῶν μι[…].[..]ο̣.[ ὀφ]θαλμοῖσιν ὁρῶντα,
ἀλλ̣’ ο̣ἳ μ[ὲ]ν μάκ̣[α]ρ̣ες̣ κ̣[…….]ν̣ ὡ̣ς̣ τ̣ὸ̣ πάρος περ
χωρ̣ὶς ἀπ’ ἀν[θ]ρ̣ώπων̣[ βίοτον κα]ὶ̣ ἤθε’ ἔχωσιν
το̣[..]ε̣.ε̣αλ̣[ ἀθα]νάτω̣[ν τε ἰδὲ] θ̣νητῶν ἀνθρώπων
…[ ]κ̣α̣λ ἄλγος ἐπ’ ἄλγει”
This means, in my own translation:
“She [i.e., Helene] gave birth to Hermione the lovely-ankled in the great halls,
unhoped for. And all the deities were put into two minds
from her strife. For indeed, at the time, Zeus the High-Thunderer was plotting
horrific deeds to mix up confusions upon the boundless Earth,
and already he was making haste to destroy
the plenteous race of mortal humans, a pretext to annihilate
the souls of demigods [. . .] among mortals,
children of the deities [. . .] seeing with eyes,
but the ones who are blessed [. . .] just as before,
separate, away from human beings, would hold their life and customs
and, [for the children] of deathless ones and mortal humans,
[he declared] suffering upon suffering.”
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a first-century CE Roman marble statue of Zeus seated upon his throne with nineteenth-century painted plaster additions, currently held in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg
The Kypria, Fr. 3
The Catalogue of Women, however, is not the only Archaic Greek poetic source that expressly describes Zeus as intentionally causing all the wars at the end of the heroic age in order to annihilate humans. Another source that expressly describes him as doing this is the Kypria, an early Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter that, like the Iliad, originated in oral tradition. I have mentioned it on this blog a few times before, including, most notably, in this post I wrote back in July 2019 about other poems that were attributed to Homer in antiquity aside from the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The Kypria has, sadly, not survived to the present day except for a few fragments that have been preserved through quotation in later sources. Unfortunately, the fact that so little of the work has survived makes it nearly impossible to reliably date. As a result, there is no scholarly consensus for the date when the Kypria became more-or-less fixed into something resembling the form in which it was known for most of antiquity. All we can really say is that the Kypria developed out of oral tradition sometime in the Greek Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 490 BCE) and was fairly well known in the Greek world by the fifth century BCE.
The opening seven lines of the Kypria (which modern scholars have numbered as Fragment 1) have been preserved through quotation in an ancient scholion, or scholarly commentary, on the Iliad 1.5. These seven lines claim that Zeus found that there were so many humans on the earth that they were weighing down their earth with their collective mass. As a solution to this problem, the Kypria says that Zeus devised a plan to cause the Trojan War in order to annihilate as many humans as possible. The lines read as follows in the original Greek:
“ἦν ὅτε μυρία φῦλα κατὰ χθόνα πλαζόμεν’ αἰεὶ
<ἀνθρώπων ἐπίεζε> βαρυστέρνου πλάτος αἴης,
Ζεὺς δὲ ἰδὼν ἐλέησε καὶ ἐν πυκιναῖς πραπίδεσσι
κουφίσαι ἀνθρώπων παμβώτορα σύνθετο γαῖαν,
ῥιπίσσας πολέμου μεγάλην ἔριν Ἰλιακοῖο,
ὄφρα κενώσειεν θανάτῳ βάρος. οἱ δ’ ἐνὶ Τροίηι
ἥρωες κτείνοντο, Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή.”
This means, in my own translation:
“There was a time when myriad tribes of human beings, wandering throughout the world,
were always weighing down wide, deep-bosomed Earth
and Zeus, seeing this, had pity and, in his cunning chest,
he resolved to alleviate all-nourishing Earth of human beings
by fanning the great strife of the Ilian war,
so that he might lighten the burden with death. And then in Troy
the heroes were dying, and the will [or plan] of Zeus was fulfilled.”
The phrase that I have translated here as “and the will [or plan] of Zeus was fulfilled” is “Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή”—the exact same Greek phrase that occurs in the Iliad 1.5.
ABOVE: Illustration from the Ambrosian Iliad (Cod. F. 205 Inf.), an illustrated parchment manuscript of the Iliad dating to the fifth century CE, depicting soldiers fighting and dying on the battlefield at Troy
Conclusion
With human beings now being more numerous upon the earth than we have ever been at any previous point in the history of existence, we had best hope that Zeus does not exist or that, if he does exist, he does not decide to wipe us out as he is said to have wiped out the race of heroes.
On the other hand, if Zeus is real and he is trying to annihilate as many humans as possible, that would certainly explain many of the grim events that have transpired in the past several years.
“The primate experiment has failed!” — Zeus Thunderer.
Ha!
I admit the idea of the flood myth as something of a later import from Mesopotamia (something we already know thanks to earlier literary works from the region) and that the Israelite account of the primeval history originally not having such a tale is interesting. One important indication of such is probably the primeval figure of Cain being the eponymous ancestor of a nomadic tribe called the Kenites who are mentioned in later books (the Hebrew words Cain “קַיִן, Qayin” and Kenite “קֵינִי, Qēinī” being quite similar). If Cain was the patriarchal ancestor of the Kenites, the later mention of Kenites wouldn’t make sense if we factor in the Flood since only Noah and his family would have been the only ones to survive it; with the rest of humanity (including the descendants of Cain) drowning to death in either the P or non-P version of the story.
Also the mention of Og as “last of the race of giants” which is really contrary to the Noah story.
Well… It fails to make sense only if we consider scripture either to be historically accurate, or, as the fundamentalists do, as the inerrant word of God. As legend, mythology, and origin tale, it doesn’t matter even a little bit. Indeed, as Karen Armstrong observes in The Bible: A Biography, the original audience for the biblical writings never expected their sacred scriptures to be literally or journalistically accurate, but to convey an emotional, spiritual, and archetypal account. And, oh, by the way, to tell a good story. I understand, then, that Jews have never hesitated to adapt their understanding of the Tanakh to the needs of living people. Christians, in my experience, freely do the same thing while pretending they don’t. If we expect mythology to be consistent or accurate, then we’ll never get past the question of where Cain’s wife came from. And to me, mythology is of greater value than history can ever be.
Apologies if my enthusiasm has led me into a hectoring or lecturing tone. I intend only to stoke the discussion.
I did not expect to learn that Zeus was an eco-terrorist.
The more stories featuring Zeus I hear, the more I wonder why so many people worshipped him.
Fear.
There are a couple of dimensions to this question of why the ancient Greeks and Romans worshipped Zeus.
The first aspect of this is that the ancient Greeks and Romans did not think about their deities in the same way that most Christians in the twenty-first century think about their God. Most ancient Greeks and Romans held absolutely no assumption that deities ought to be all-loving or all-merciful or that deities need prove themselves morally worthy in order to be worshipped. In most people’s minds, the moral character of a particular deity wasn’t really especially important.
Instead, the Greeks and Romans generally regarded worship more as a kind of reciprocal exchange; they believed that deities are powerful and that they can use their powers to reward humans whom they favor and punish those whom they disfavor. In accordance with this, they believed that, if humans showed honors to the deities and made regular offerings to them, they could keep the deities appeased and maybe persuade them to give them things that they wanted in return. This reciprocal relationship between humans and deities in ancient Greek and Roman religions is frequently summarized with the Latin phrase “Do ut des,” which means “I give so that you may give.”
The second aspect here is that individual ancient Greek and Roman people held often radically different conceptions about who the deities were and what their personalities were like. Some ancient Greeks actually completely rejected the portrayal of Zeus in works of mythic poetry such as those that I have quoted in the post above. The early Greek elegiac poet Xenophanes of Kolophon (lived c. 570 – c. 475 BCE), for instance, famously attacks the portrayal of the deities in the poems attributed to Homer and Hesiodos in his Fragment D8 (B11), asserting that the poets have made up all kinds of malicious lies about the deities. He declares:
“πάντα θεοῖς ἀνέθηκαν Ὅμηρός θ’ Ἡσίοδός τε
ὅσσα παρ’ ἀνθρώποισιν ὀνείδεα καὶ ψόγος ἐστίν,
κλέπτειν μοιχεύειν τε καὶ ἀλλήλους ἀπατεύειν.”
Or, in my own translation:
“Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the deities all things
that are shameful and reproachworthy among human beings:
stealing, having adulterous sex, and deceiving each other.”
In my understanding, and I am certainly no specialist but merely an interested general reader, the attitudes of the Greeks and Romans toward Zeus are not so different from the Jewish and Christian views of Yahweh, especially, and also Jesus. I might also bring to the discussion the Hindu relation to Shiva, or, to a lesser extent, the Norse concept of Odin . All these gods are, to their worshippers, Supreme Deities. That is to say, the entire universe is supported within the power of their being. According to Hesiod, Zeus, despite his “reproachworthy” and self-interested actions, was for the Greeks “the lord of justice,” worshipped for the redress of grievances and the punishment of wickedness. His fickleness, then can be seen to explain the self-evident unfairness of human existence on earth and its subsequent futility and alienation, where everything is meaningless, and the life of mortals withers like grass, people gain nothing from their labors, and humans have no advantage over the animals, where the oppressed have not comforter and power is on the side of the oppressor….Of course, here I have strung together a paraphrasing of comments from the Bible, sneaking in the implacable nature of Yaweh into the discussion. Yahweh almost murdered Moses in a quite Zeus-like pique at the beginning of the journey to free the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. In I Kings 22 we find an amazing account of God sitting at the head of his heavenly council, sending a “lying spirit” to the mouths of the prophets so they might misadvise Ahab and bring him to death in war. Lies? Murder? God? This story is reminiscent of the Tripurantaka, a Hindu story in which Lord Vishnu sent a false religion, drawing many away from the truth, so that three troublesome demons might adopt a new, false faith, leading Shiva to kill them. In the words of John Prine, “[A]ctually, all them gods is about the same.”
Who were the models for Ancient Greek and Roman statues? Would they physically pose in some sort of studio for sculptors?
Maybe I’m being stupid here, but even with an ancient Greek understanding of physics, shouldn’t it be obvious that dead people don’t weigh any less than living people?
I mean, iirc, the Hellenes believed that people were made out of primordial elements – which they thought to be earth, air, fire and water – imbued with life by the gods. So once that life left them, their bodies became elemental matter again.
Dead mud doesn’t weigh any less than living mud. Maybe it becomes part of Gaia’s body again, so it doesn’t count as weighing her down? It just seems like such an unintuitive reason to hate humans, especially with better ones available; I mean, Gaia is already styled as “The All-Nourishing”, so why not go from there and say she was exhausted by mankind’s agriculture sucking up her bounty?
Would the ancient Greeks have been acquainted with the concept of soil degradation?
“The first seven lines of the standard version of the Iliad that has been passed down through the manuscript tradition read as follows in the original Homeric Greek:”
What does the 8th line talk about?
I recall reading several years ago about someone collating all the flood myth stories to pinpoint an impact crater in the Indian Ocean. The finer details like names aren’t coming back to me right now. The basic premise was all the myths were inspired by an impact in the Indian Ocean. I’m surprised none of the snake oil salesman have picked up upon it in the intervening years.