The Gods of Olympus

November 4, 2013
Durham University classics professor Graziosi offers an engaging, if simplistic, history of the Greek pantheon. She recounts mythic tales, of course, but her focus is on the Olympians’ changing cultural role throughout human history. Fittingly, the gods are most prominent as individualized characters, as the archaic Greeks understood them to be human-like deities traversing the “very real landscape” of the Aegean. Their identities become more abstract as cultural tides subsequently cast the gods as “strictly literary” allegorical concepts, amoral political allies useful for “personal advantage,” and “trivial apparitions” and “incidental decoration.” Graziosi crosses the centuries elegantly, using the gods’ constant presence to suggest that history is an ongoing continuum, era divisions being the somewhat arbitrary constructions of later generations. Disappointingly, this account of the Olympians stops short of the modern era. Though Graziosi insists on their significance to any contemplation of humanity, and even suggests that her work is an addition to an ongoing dialogue, no attention is paid to more recent interpretations, such as the beloved and influential Harryhausen films, among other popular contemporary treatments. Still, it’s an intelligent and entertaining examination of the Greek deities’ timeless ability to “express different, human truths.”

January 1, 2014
Graziosi (Classics/Durham Univ.; Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic, 2002, etc.) celebrates the longevity of the "cruel, oversexed, mad, or just plain silly" Olympian gods, "the most uncivilized ambassadors of classical civilization." The author leaves aside the secondary gods, demigods and Roman household gods but not the soi-disant gods such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, who spread the word. This is a study of how the cult of Olympus flourished in ancient Greece and spread through conquest. Alexander was the prime catalyst as he conquered lands from India to Africa and brought his gods along to marginalize the local gods. The library at Alexandria allowed the educated to read and learn from the writings of Homer, Hesiod and other thinkers. Plato first challenged the divinity of the gods, envisioning a single, good, everlasting God as opposed to the radical, cruel gods of early literature. He opened a debate that continued through the Stoics, Epicureans and beyond. When the Romans took Greece, they translated the entire pantheon to Rome. They adopted the Greek culture for the simple reason that it was predominant in the regions they conquered, and they tended to maintain local rule. The leaders of Christianity tried the hardest to topple the Olympians, wooing believers away with promises of eternal life and the resurrection of the body. Ultimately, the gods were turned away but not forgotten. It was during the Renaissance that their presence was felt again, resurrected by poets and taken up by artists and sculptors. Even today, a complete education is based on classical Greek writings, and "thinking about humanity," writes the author, "must include at least some consideration of the Olympian gods." Graziosi's easy style and focus on the history of the world as told by the gods of Olympus make this a book to savor.

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December 1, 2013

By knowing the history of Olympian gods, argues Graziosi (classics; Durham Univ.), we can better understand the human condition. She starts with a look at the 12 major gods who appear in the Elgin marbles and their origin stories. The gods reflect various aspects of human nature and attitudes, which have shifted over time. For instance, the Greek war god Ares was a marginalized and somewhat despised figure, but in the Roman pantheon, he became the major god Mars. Graziosi also addresses the tensions among archaic poetic descriptions of the gods in Homer and Hesiod and classical Athenian religion, the mythmaking of Hellenistic Egypt, and the allegorical use of the gods in other religions, including the representations of the gods in classical Islamic astronomy. Covering so much in a short book does not always result in compelling explanations for why we still pay attention to the Olympian gods. Nevertheless, the examination of each period is fascinating. VERDICT Accessible to general readers, this work will be fun for anyone wondering whatever happened to the Greek gods over the centuries, as well as those specifically interested in classical reception.--Margaret Heller, Loyola Univ. Chicago Libs.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2014
Children still learn about Zeus and Athena in elementary school, a fact we take for granted. But in this history of the Olympic gods in Western culture, classicist Graziosi makes it clear how remarkable that is. After all, the Olympians started as local gods on the small Greek peninsula. Thanks to the great artistic and philosophical achievements of the Greeks, Rome adopted the gods when it became a great power. Having survived the Roman takeover of the world, the gods faced their greatest challenge yet when Christianity swept the Mediterranean. As Christianity became less a matter of choice and more a matter of force, the gods were sidelined as either demons or abstractions. The survival of classical philosophy in this new world depended on Christian scholars who found in it useful figures of allegory or traces of the true revelation still to come. In this way, the gods made it to the Renaissance and beyond as symbols of creativity and the life force. Graziosi's volume is an engaging trek through the gods' story of persistence and transformation and their relationship to European history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)