Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World by Tim Whitmarsh Page A

Palaephatus comments that “it seems to me that Artemis can do whatever she wants; but it is not true that a man can turn into a deer or
vice versa.
” Again, the Europa of myth was abducted by Zeus, who had turned himself into a bull; he swam from Tyre to Crete, where they consummated their union. Palaephatus’s response is similar: it is not possible for a bull to swim that far, and Zeus could have found a better way to get her to Crete. We can take these cases as evidence that he thought omnipotent deities to be real—but that is not the only way of reading them. His real point is that the myth does not make sense
on its own terms.
If you believe in an omnipotent Zeus, it falls to you to explain why he had to turn himself into a bull in order to transport a young woman to Crete. Omnipotent gods are part of the problem of myth, but not part of the solution. The rewritten “true” versions he proposes do not contain deities. For Palaephatus at any rate, rejection of epic ideas about the gods had become a definitive way of being modern. 18
    The Greeks’ lack of sacred scripture was not in fact a lack at all. It facilitated the great cultural revolutions of the classical period, which saw theological explanations for the way of the world displaced and new, naturalistic explanations coming in. To have a shared cultural reference point that could be debated, explored, or rewritten without fear of blasphemy was a huge cultural stimulus, without which the Greek intellectual tradition would, conceivably, have been hobbled from the start.

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Battling the Gods
    T he Greeks did not have sacred scripture, but they did have myth. Huge amounts of it. Greece teemed with stories. These myths could have religious elements, but they had no intrinsic connection with religious practice. Greek religion was an expression of the community through shared sacrifice and feasting on the sacrificial meat. A myth was something completely different: a story told about people, gods, or demigods from long ago, which put its finger on an issue of collective importance.
    What was myth for? First of all, it created a shared set of stories that encapsulated the values of an entire people. Knowing the stories of Achilles, Heracles, Medea, and so forth was a central part of what it meant to be Greek. On a smaller scale, there were also myths that were specific to a particular region, like the Athenian story of Aglaurus, who jumped to her death from the Acropolis when she saw Erichthonius, a primal being with a serpent’s tail: this kind of local myth was important for binding together members of a
polis
community but was probably not widely known outside. Not that “Greek mythology”—the English phrase gives the false impression of a system—was fixed and unalterable. Given the regional diversity of the Greek world, and the absence of sacred texts or strong centralizing institutions, myths naturally circulated orally in multiple forms. Like religion in general, myth reflected the plural nature of Greek culture: a figure like Heracles would have been known by all Greeks, but specific details will have varied from locale to locale. 1
    Secondly, myth could explain why things are the way they are. The past was the key to the present. Prometheus once tried to trick Zeus at a feast by wrapping bones in fat, dressing the inedible parts so as to look edible. That is why mortals now sacrifice those indigestible bits to the gods, keeping the rest (conveniently!) for themselves to consume. Why are there different ethnic groups within Greece, each speaking a different dialect? Because Hellen, the original Hellene (Greek), had three sons, Dorus (founder of the tribe called the Dorians), Xuthus (whose sons Ion and Achaeus give their names to the Ionian and Achaean lines), and Aeolus (founder of the Aeolians). This type of myth—“etiological” is the technical term—represents a strong, normative statement about the way the world should be. We do what we do