Too late for edit:
Interestingly, only having a concept of logos, no mythos, can underlie either extreme of the religious spectrum. It can turn into either ‘There’s zero reason to believe that any gods are real the same way my fridge is real - therefore there are no gods,’ or into ‘I believe the Bible is true, therefore I must believe that it’s literally true.’
Modern humans have been traveling into the “heavens” for fifty years now without crashing into the pearly gates. This doesn’t seem to have put a dent in the wide belief in a Christian god, even among many astronauts.
But there’s always going to be that guy who tries it for himself.
Regards,
Shodan
No. You are projecting 21st century ways of thought back onto ancient times, when people thought very differently (and often more subtly than many modern atheists) about all sorts of things.
Probably the person who came nearest to being an atheist in classical Greece was Epicurus. He was quite open about his beliefs, and nothing bad happened to him.
Getting back to the OP’s narrowest question, is there any documentation (reliable or otherwise) of anyone in ancient Greece climbing Mount Olympus? If so, did this person give any account of his findings?
Socrates was also a friend of Alcibiades, and a teacher of Critias, one the the Thirty Tyrants. So there was more than a whiff of political payback in his trial.
I don’t believe this is true, at least not for all of Greek history. It’s fashionable to claim that the Greeks didn’;t believe in their gods, but I think that’s false.
First of all, though, I have to point out that we’re looking at an immense strip of history, across (if you include the Romans) a vast region of territory, and a large collection of classes. Do Americans today believe in their God? You’d get different answers in a typical town in the Bible Belt than in many places in Midtown Manhattan. And in either of those places you’d find a range of believers to skeptics. If you throw in a cross section across the five centies of Eurpean settlement you’d have even more difference. In all of those, though, you’d find lots of people who very definitely believe in the literal Biblical God.
Plato and Socrates might not have believed – although they were crafty in saying what they believed – but your average Athenian probably did. Why not? It was what he or she was brought up with.
The intellectuals and philosophers wouldn’t be impressed by an empty Olympus. Even if they believed in the existence of the gods, they wouldn’t be tied to a definite physical location.
Besides, you didn’t have to go all the way of there. Greece was full of sacred locations that were home in one way or another to the gods. Read Pausanias’ guides to the holy locations. That the gods were not permanently manifested there in physical form didn’t alter belief.
And people who worried about disrespect to the gods weren’t worried that people had the wrong ideas. They were worried that if you disrespected the gods, the gods would punish you.
But respect for the gods doesn’t mean you have to believe in them, it just means you shouldn’t insult them and should observe the proper rituals to appease them. Nobody cares if you believe in Zeus or not, they just don’t want to be standing next to you when you piss him off and he sends a thunderbolt your way. Or more likely, he punishes you in a more subtle way. Plenty of people today won’t step on a crack, not because they honestly believe that it will break their mother’s back, but because it seems like tempting fate.
… without hurting one’s nose.
More than just a whiff. But what really did Socrates in was his sentencing speech.
I don’t think the idea of climbing mountains just ‘because it is there’ ala Mallory, existed in the Classical world. Climbing mountains for aesthetic reasons seems only to date to Petrarch. What is surprising is that the first ascent of Olympusdoesn’t seem to have been until 1913. If the enterprising Victorians didn’t climb it it must be more difficult or remote than we think.
But the OP is wondering about a climb undertaken for religious reasons. It would be sort of the reverse of Orpheus’ trip to the realm of Hades.
I guess that’s another question: Are there any stories in Greek mythology of a mortal ascending Mount Olympus to meet the gods?
The process of seeking a higher being in high places, or other journys AND finding the answer is pretty darn common.
If you have a question that only God can answer and you get the answer God needs to be the one to answer that question.
Yes, the story of Bellerophon is instructive. Bellerophon was the world’s greatest horseman, so great that when he chanced upon Pegasus grazing he was able to lasso and tame it. Later the countryside was ravaged by the Chimera, a hideous creature with the head of a goat, a lion, and a snake that could breathe fire and was immune to weapons. Bellerophon stuck a lump of lead onto his spear, mounted Pegasus and flew off to fight it. He managed to fly close enough to jam the lump of lead into one of the creature’s mouths, where the fire melted it. The melted lead poured down the Chimera’s throat and killed it.
Bellerophon thought he was such a bad-ass after this exploit that he decided he was an equal to the gods. So he mounted up Pegasus and flew towards Mt Olympus. Zeus, who had until now watched Bellerophon’s deeds with approval, became angry at his hubris, and threw a thunderbolt at him. But the thunderbolt didn’t kill him, it knocked him off Pegasus and he fell to the ground, crushing his legs. Pegasus flew on to Olympus alone, where he was welcomed by the gods, and Bellerophon lived out his days as a crippled beggar.
So there you go.
I remember being taught that one of the Roman emperors climbed it. When he got to the peak, it promptly rained.
/begin slight hijack
No, he’s not. It’s the standard interpretation of Plato’s writings, by academics, for at least hundred years. Got it right here in my “Cambridge Companion to Plato”. IAAPS - at least until I transfer to med school.
And he’s certainly not wrong about the “believe or get murdered” part - history attests to that with abundant clarity. The rest, we can only ever speculate about.
/end slight hijack
On a more thread-relevant note, the answer to the question is: We simply don’t know. Few written records about such relatively mundane exploits exist from that time period.
I agree. The philosopher Xenophanes famously argued against Gods being the anthropomorphic super-men described in Homer, Hesiod and other such places. The fact that he felt the need to argue the point suggests pretty strongly that his contemporaries disagreed. They considered the fairly human-like Gods described in the myths to be literally true.
One doesn’t have to go back to Ancient Greece to understand how things can make spiritual sense without making literal physical sense.
With satellite imaging, etc, we can be fairly certain that the summit to Mount Kailash is not actually physically the home of Shiva, a stairway to heaven, various Buddhas, etc. But that doesn’t diminish it’s value as a place of pilgrimage, nor does it cast doubt on the value of the HIndu gods that are supposed to be there. Indeed, Hinduism has always been quite comfortable navigating the disconnects between the literal, the metaphorical, and the mystical.
Looking globally, the pattern is pretty much the norm among non-monotheist religions. I see no reason to believe that the ancient Greeks would be any different.
As to the original question, my understanding was that the Greeks didn’t have a super-clear idea of exactly what mountain “Olympus, Home of the Gods”. Herodotus identifies it with the mountain that’s called by that name today, but apparently other ancient authors identified it with other mountains. The name is thought to have just meant “really tall mountain” in some pre-Indo-Eurpean language, and according to Wikipedia, there were at least nineteen peaks in the ancient Greek world with that name.
So I suspect the answer is not that the Greeks didn’t think of their Gods as being literal humanoid beings, and not that they didn’t literally think of them as living on a mountain, but simply that they weren’t sure which mountain they were talking about.
As an addition, consider that the emphasis on belief is very Christian/Abrahamic. In Christianity the most important thing is that you believe in all the highly implausible tales. “Accepting Jesus as your saviour” means “really truly believing that he died for your sins”.
With that background, we always look for “belief” in other religions, when often that is not necessarily what is emphasised. For ancient greeks, doing the rituals was simply more important than whether you truly believed in your heart that Zeus threw thunderbolts.
Our own cultural background of the emphasis being on “belief” has completely skewed our understanding of other religions.