Ha, you got me – I left out mentioning the Colossus of Rhodes due to that similarity.
Of course, the Statue of Liberty was gifted to the US by the French as a symbolic gesture of shared ideals. I doubt we would have built it ourselves. And as impressive as it is, technology, infrastructure, and a much larger labor pool made it a much smaller undertaking than any of those Greek temples/monuments.
No, because the pagan religions were not monotheistic faiths with a clergy, a common creed, and scriptures. In modern faiths, belief is half the battle–“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.” “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his last Prophet.” Classical religion wasn’t like that.
Will Durant on ancient Greece:
Within these constraints, the Greeks and Romans took their gods very seriously indeed. Temples were raised, statues were bathed and dressed, sacred fires were maintained (in Rome, by the college of Vestal Virgins), processions and festivals were held, sacrifices were offered, prayers were recited, oracles and soothsayers were consulted. But, taking your particular god or gods seriously did not require subscribing to every element of classical mythology.
Or ionic.
Haha, well done.
I agree with most of this list, but can you support the view that the bolded sentence should not be the other way 'round?
Well, yes, but also because the freakin’ Christians won’t serve in the legions even when the Germans are sacking the crap out of the provinces and the plague has reduced manpower and we really, really, REALLY need some recruits. Some Romans viewed Christianity as a national security issue for precisely that reason.
More broadly, back when Greek and Roman gods were widely worshiped, vanishingly few people believed in the kind of mutual exclusivity in religion that we have today. They saw no conflict in offering a sacrifice to one god one day and another the next, even if you hadn’t heard of that god a week ago. They recognized the idea that some gods were local, not universal, and it might make sense to offer sacrifices to some gods in some cities and other gods in other cities. And upon discovering some new group of barbarians with weird gods, the most likely reaction was to try to figure out how their gods were really just representations of your own regular gods, and if they were so weird you couldn’t do that, you offered a sacrifice to their gods without worrying that you’d offend your own gods. I’m struggling to remember exactly the compromise that the Romans worked out with the Hebrews, but I believe they agreed that the Hebrews would offer a sacrifice to YHWH and ask for him to bless the Emperor or Consul or whoever, and called it a day. The sorts of religious conflict we’ve had since the advent of Christianity was pretty unknown back then.
Of course they believed in all that stuff. How else could they explain the universe? Myth was the only science they had.
If you don’t believe in the gods, then give me a better reason why the sun rises every morning.
The Romans had a huge respect for tradition - even traditions that they didn’t like or share. So while they figured Jewish monotheism was a crazy idea, they respected the way the Jews had been practicing it for over a thousand years.
I believe the didactic levels increase with time,
they become stories that teach morals but not stories that are conducive to religion and god worship…
The stud on this question is Paul Veyne and his book Did the Greeks believe their myths?
I won’t insist on it. But Queen Elizabeth, and with her the roughly 50% of England and 15% of North America that can show a Royal ancestor, runs back through the House of Wessex to Woden – and not in the sense of “the son of Aeneas, the son of the goddess Venus” or “Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.” but just as a name midway through a list of 16 ancestors of Cerdic. (I tend to the Euhemerist approach usually.)
The word you guys were looking for is iconic.
There was a self called Messiah in 400’s BCE who believed he should die for the people. His name was Simon.
This is exactly what I was going to say. If you’ve ever been to Athens, it’s pretty clear that at least a good bit of people believed in them enough to spend huge amounts of time and labor to build elaborate temples in honor of them.
I wouldn’t say that. Greek philosophers might have had views about gods diverging from the literal content of mythology, and it was perfectly acceptable to hold such views (at least during the late periods of Greek history, I wouldn’t know for earlier eras).
However, believing these stories litterally was acceptable too, and things like sacrifices were very serious deals.
There’s a significant difference between a religion like Christianity and religions of the antiquity. Christianism includes a set of “mandatory” beliefs. Greeks or Mesopotamians had rather a contractual relation with their gods. Believing or not that god X had done such or such thing, that there’s or not an afterlife, etc…wasn’t important. But making the proper sacrifices was, and mightily so. People had to keep their end of the bargain with gods if they wanted them to keep theirs. In fact, you can still see that contractual relation in the old testament.
There are many fun things about the way gods were perceived during the antiquity. Gods could be “punished”, as a result of a poor crop for instance, they could be taken as “prisoners” when conquering another city, etc…
But they definitely weren’t seen a justs imaginary beings like Santa.
The word you were looking for is whoosh. Don’t let the Doric you on the way out.
This. It’s hard for us moderns to imagine what it was like to live your life with no science at all. And I’m not just talking about post-Enlightenment science, but no systematic synthetic explanations of the operation of the universe whatsoever.
Say you’re a Greek goatherd living in 500 BC. The gods for you are real because you can see them going about their business every night, wandering around in the night sky while you watch your flock. The planets weren’t named for the gods – they literally were the gods, because attributing agency to a star that moved was a decent explanation for why it was acting like that.
Lots of things in the natural world demand explanation. Why does the sun rise? Why does the wind blow? Why does it rain sometimes and not others? The real explanations for these things are complicated, and if all you know of the world is your tiny village in the middle of nowhere, then attributing these events to the actions of unseen beings isn’t a bad way to try to make sense of them.
So for people like the goatherd, of course the gods were real. You could see them going about their business every day. And you did what you could to stay out of their way and keep them happy. It wasn’t until people started really trying to systematically analyze exactly how the gods and the world worked that they began to recede into the category of nice stories.
Until this started, it wasn’t just the goatherds who thought that way, it was also the philosophers and kings. In fact, educated men were probably *more *likely to believe mythology, because that’s what being educated meant - familiarity with myth. A goatherd could only guess what the gods were doing; a scholar who’d memorized the Illiad would know.
A funny passage from the Acts of the Apostles show some Greeks believing Paul and Barnabas were gods because of a miraculous healing…
Paul and Barnabas in Lystra and Derbe
8 In Lystra there was a man sitting who could not use his feet and had never walked, for he had been crippled from birth. 9 He listened to Paul as he was speaking. And Paul, looking at him intently and seeing that he had faith to be healed, 10 said in a loud voice, “Stand upright on your feet.” And the man[c] sprang up and began to walk. 11 When the crowds saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in human form!” 12 Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. 13 The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city,[d] brought oxen and garlands to the gates; he and the crowds wanted to offer sacrifice. 14 When the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of it, they tore their clothes and rushed out into the crowd, shouting, 15 “Friends,[e] why are you doing this? We are mortals just like you, and we bring you good news, that you should turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. 16 In past generations he allowed all the nations to follow their own ways; 17 yet he has not left himself without a witness in doing good—giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filling you with food and your hearts with joy.” 18 Even with these words, they scarcely restrained the crowds from offering sacrifice to them.
I thought of this at first too. **Chronos **mentioned lady liberty but I had in mind something more pervasive - Lady Justice, who adorns our courthouses the world over - not just in the US. In addition to that the various statues of Washington, Jefferson, and even Santa Claus…
From what my Philosophy professor said, by the Golden Age, much of Greece didn’t believe in the Olympian Gods anymore. The peasantry, maybe, but the movers and shakers didn’t. Hence all the philosophers.
You can see a pseudo-analogy nowadays in some people half-believing in ancestral spirits in the form of something but not wholesale belief as one would towards a full-fledged religion.
Or really just agnostics vs being religious.