# When did the Greek/Roman gods go away? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 13, 2009, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666 "2009-10-13T16:18:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2009, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666/21 "2009-10-13T19:00:02Z")
> [@Koxinga](#): > > not through greater philosophical perceptiveness, but a simple lack of imagination. From the way they’re portrayed, I get the idea that the Romans were a rather wooden-headed lot. You know that Onion gag, “[Kitten Thinks of Nothing but Murder All Day](http://www.theonion.com/content/node/51603)”? The Roman state was like that. John Keegan in A History of Warfare: > [@](#): > > Roman imperialism was in large part the result of quite rational behaviour on the part of the Romans, but it also had dark and irrational roots. One of the most striking features of Roman warfare is its regularity – almost every year [for century after century] the Romans went out and did massive violence to someone – and this regularity gives the phenomenon a pathological character. When all you can think about is stabbing, certain nuances get lost. ---
**Author:** ![wmfellows](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c2a13f/32.png) [@wmfellows](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wmfellows)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2009, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666/22 "2009-10-13T19:10:33Z")
> [@fandango](#): > > The last (old-school) pagan temple in Europe was in Uppsalam in Sweden. It was destroyed in the 11th or 12th century. > > Not sure about when the last Greco-Roman temple closed (and probably soon after opened “under new management”) Isn’t the Baltics conversion later than that? ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2009, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666/23 "2009-10-13T19:23:18Z")
Actually, I do know a woman who is a practicing pagan, second generation here from Iceland, and they never stopped being pagan. Not sure how she justifies it, but that isn’t of particular interest to me. As a heretic, I’m pretty mellow about what everybody else believes in. mrAru is what he jokingly calls ‘scots heretic’ [episcopalian] and we have an arrangement, I won’t feed him to the lions and he won’t burn me at the stake. It seems to work for us 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2009, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666/24 "2009-10-13T19:45:41Z")
Actually, Iceland certainly did stop being pagan. Iceland was Christianized in 1000 AD, and in the 1500s had Lutheranism imposed by Denmark, which is the state religion to this day, and the vast majority of Icelanders are nominally Lutherans. Any Icelanders who identify as pagans are neopagans who practice a reconstruction the ancient pagan religions. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2009, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666/25 "2009-10-13T19:47:14Z")
Excuse me? ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2009, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666/26 "2009-10-13T19:55:06Z")
Damn, I love wikipedia: > **[Religion in Iceland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Iceland)** > > Religious affiliation in Iceland (2023) > Religion in Iceland has been predominantly Christianity since its adoption as the state religion by the Althing under the influence of Olaf Tryggvason, the king of Norway, in 999/1000 CE. Theretofore, between the 9th and 10th century, the prevailing religion among the early Icelanders — who were mostly Norwegian settlers fleeing Harald Fairhair's monarchical centralisation in 872–930, with some Swedes and Norse British settlers — was the northern Germa... ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2009, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666/27 "2009-10-13T20:13:21Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > …This [http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/03/style/03iht-pagan.t.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/03/style/03iht-pagan.t.html) explains how pagan iconography contributed to Western Christianity, specifically the way in which we envision Jesus… Isn’t the Virgin Mary (at least the Catholic/Orthodox version) basically the goddess **Isis** under a new name? ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2009, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666/28 "2009-10-13T20:32:42Z")
> [@alphaboi867](#): > > Isn’t the Virgin Mary (at least the Catholic/Orthodox version) basically the goddess **Isis** under a new name? No. Isis was an important figure in late Roman religion, and it’s likely that aspects of the feminine divine as expressed in the veneration of the Virgin Mary do date back to the worship of Isis, but it’s really simplistic to say that Isis became Mary. It ignores (1) the feminine divine in Roman paganism (Diana, Juno, Vesta, and the others) and (2) the explicitly Christian dichotomy between Eve (original bad mama) and Mary (redeeming supermom). Isis wasn’t split into those two poles. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2009, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666/29 "2009-10-13T20:40:25Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > Actually, I do know a woman who is a practicing pagan, second generation here from Iceland, and they never stopped being pagan. Just to chime in here as well: as **Lemur866** said, it’s simply not possible that her family wasn’t Christian. It’s an important part of Neopagan lore that their religion continued to be practiced in secret, particularly by women, and that it was “rediscovered” in the 20th century. Of course there would be no evidence: it was **secret**. So attempts to debunk hit a stone wall. As a rule, from what evidence we do have: 1. Paganism was much more focused on practice than belief. Christianity is (somewhat) more focused on belief, especially in theory. So it’s pretty easy to keep doing some of the pagan stuff and become Christian. A lot of magical practices and festivals are thus pretty direct continuations of pagan practices. But after 1000 to 2000 years, Christianity penetrates to a fairly deep level, too. That’s like a fundie student of mine who proclaimed earnestly “but Christmas isn’t a Christian holiday!” Um, yes it is… now. That can change, too. 2. Once the hierarchies (political and otherwise) Christianized, there was a strong disincentive to be pagan. There was a strong incentive to be Christian, and often a financial one as well. There’s nothing to say that a given Icelandic family couldn’t have kept alive most of their pagan practices. It’s less likely that they kept up the worship of the old gods, but not impossible. The Jewish _conversos_ did for hundreds of years; why not Icelanders? But it’s far more likely that they took on their paganism in the 20th century as a heritage religion, telling themselves the polite fiction that they’d never given it up because of the customary areas in which there was continuity. ---
**Author:** ![outlierrn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/outlierrn/32/3005_2.png) [@outlierrn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/outlierrn)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2009, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666/30 "2009-10-14T17:06:02Z")
> [@billfish678](#): > > It will take the invention of warp drive and big honking phasers to finally wipe the last of them from this galaxy, along with some arrogant and ungrateful military officers 🙂 Dude, would it kill you to gather a few laurels? ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2009, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666/31 "2009-10-14T17:18:26Z")
There were certainly survivals of cult practices and stories/folklore recorded quite late – up to only a few centuries ago. But I don’t know if these practices date to Classical times or not. They’re certainly not Christian, but people did them “because they had always done them”. But even if these are legitimate survivals of Graeco-Roman (or even earlier) deity worship, they don’t seem to have been consciously recognized as such, so it’s not a full survival. Look in Fraser’s **Golden Bough** about St. John’s eve practices and the like, or in anthropologist’s or folkklorists’ records of European practices. I don’t think anyone above mentioned the Emperor Julian, who came after Constantine and attempted to revive and re-establish the traditional worship of the gods:L > [@](#): > > After gaining the purple, Julian started a religious reformation of the state, which was intended to restore the lost strength of the Roman State. He supported the restoration of Hellenic paganism as the state religion. His laws tended to target wealthy and educated Christians, and his aim was not to destroy Christianity but to drive the religion out of “the governing classes of the empire — much as Buddhism was driven back into the lower classes by a revived Confucian mandarinate in 13th century China.”[80] > > He restored pagan temples which had been confiscated since Constantine’s time, or simply appropriated by wealthy citizens; he repealed the stipends that Constantine had awarded to Christian bishops, and removed their other privileges, including a right to be consulted on appointments and to act as private courts. He also reversed some favors that had previously been given to Christians. For example, he reversed Constantine’s declaration that Majuma, the port of Gaza, was a separate city. Majuma had a large Christian congregation while Gaza was still predominantly pagan. > > On 4 February 362, Julian promulgated an edict to guarantee freedom of religion. This edict proclaimed that all the religions were equal before the law, and that the Roman Empire had to return to its original religious eclecticism, according to which the Roman State did not impose any religion on its provinces. Practically however, it had as its purpose the restoration of paganism at the expense of Christianity. > **[Julian (emperor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_the_Apostate)** > > Julian\[i\] (Latin: Flavius Claudius Julianus; Ancient Greek: Ἰουλιανός Ioulianos; 331 – 26 June 363) was the Caesar of the West from 355 to 360 and Roman emperor from 361 to 363, as well as a notable philosopher and author in Greek. His rejection of Christianity, and his promotion of Neoplatonic Hellenism and persecution of Christians, caused him to be remembered as Julian the Apostate in the Christian tradition. > A nephew of Constantine the Great, Julian was one of few in the imperial family to... Julian’s own writings are still extant, and make interesting reading. Or you can read Gore Vidal’s novel of his life. Julian’s death in 363 pretty much ended official support for the cults, though. And he didn’t live long enough to produce a serious re-establishment of them. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2009, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666/32 "2009-10-14T17:47:07Z")
> [@billfish678](#): > > It will take the invention of warp drive and big honking phasers to finally wipe the last of them from this galaxy, along with some arrogant and ungrateful military officers 🙂 “What does God need with a spaceship?” – James T. Kirk, theologian 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2009, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666/33 "2009-10-14T17:53:14Z")
> [@alphaboi867](#): > > Isn’t the Virgin Mary (at least the Catholic/Orthodox version) basically the goddess **Isis** under a new name? I suppose it depends on your definition of “basically is,” to apply a little Clintonian metaphysics. Mary is Mary, seen by them as the holiest of the saints and honored by God, but not deified. Nonetheless, a fair amount of her _cultus_, both historically and in the present day, owes more than a little to Isis, Serapis, the _Mater Deorum Magna_ (“Diana of the Ephesians”), and similar goddesses. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-the-greek-roman-gods-go-away/513666.md?page=1)