What sort of thing are those which the ancient Greeks called “gods”?

And if we can answer that, perhaps we can also answer this: how should we mortals relate to these gods, whatever they turn out to be?



Athena, in the opening scene of the Iliad, holds Achilles back by his hair to prevent him from striking his king in anger. Did a goddess really do that, or did the thought occur to him? The goddess is invisible; an observer could not tell the difference.

If the thought was his, how did it occur to him? Some inner voice of prudence interceded to restrain his rage. Where would Achilles, of all men, have learned prudence? From other men, of course: mentors and tutors wiser than himself, whose voices and steady attitudes, though contrary to his nature, had taken up residence in his mind, and were available to stay his hand when it was wise to do so. Mentors: a word which comes to us from the man Mentor in the Odyssey, whose form Athena took when she advised Telemachus. Did a goddess really do that? Or were those his own words? If his own, where would he have learned to speak so wisely… does it matter? The man spoke wisely—Athena took his form—these are the same thing.

An odd lens. Surely our thoughts are our own. But is it not the case that the bulk of what we know of wisdom comes to us by way of the words of others? We learn proverbs and aphorisms at a young age, and years later come to recognize their real significance. Only a fraction of our wisdom is the product of firsthand experience, or insights of our own. And even that part is a synthesis of ideas from elsewhere. So wisdom can arise within us, but it is not our wisdom, not really. We say it is Athena speaking.

To name the goddess is to say: this virtue, which appears to be of us, to represent our nature, is not ours alone; it was passed on to us, just as, by expressing it, we pass it on to others. If we have been especially wise and clever it is by recognizing, and respecting, her voice in us, and by tempering our other impulses—in other words, by a virtue more like piety than like wisdom itself.

To claim Athena’s wisdom as our own—as ours, as of us—is a form of hubris. This is a statement about reality: if you come to believe that every thought which arises in you is good, you will cease to do the harder parts of thinking: waiting, listening, and double-checking your intuitions against reality; in time you will cease to be wise.

To be loved by Athena—as Odysseus was, to a fault—is to be a clear and capable channel for her. It was always an error to name Odysseus as the most cunning or shrewd of men: what he was was devoted. He served her well and so she served him. By memorializing him in writing Homer has conveyed Athena to the rest of us.

What “is” Athena, then? She is these patterns of thinking which we call wisdom, which have been circulating within humanity for millennia. They are her thoughts. We only convey them to others. She exists, in a certain sense: she affects the world, by way of our words and actions. Certainly she is immortal. The goddess, in this telling, is some sort of collective phenomenon in human minds, borne of our ability to think—or of the titan Metis, whose name means “thought”…



Can something similar be said for the other Olympians?

Aphrodite comes to mind. Beauty enthralls us; desire compels us towards one another like a force of nature; love binds us. She sets our lives into motion, or diverts our course. In The Iliad it is Aphrodite who drives the whole plot: it was her grant of Helen to Paris in reward for his judging her fairest of the gods which set the Trojan War into motion. Did a goddess really do that? Or was it her beauty and his desire, his beauty and hers? Does it matter?

Where Athena joins minds to minds, Aphrodite joins bodies to bodies. Athena is subtle, while Aphrodite is almost impossible to ignore. We are ashamed of her power over us, and we find ourselves pretending not to be overwhelmed by her. She governs us anyway. We inch towards the object of our attraction without allowing our desire to be known. We invite the other to make a move; perhaps they invite us in turn; perhaps we flirt, each maintaining a plausible deniability, spiralling towards one another while trying not to take responsibility for whatever comes of the liaison. We each act as though some third party is governing us—Aphrodite.

When we surrender to her Aphrodite will bind us to a partner. We will become a part of something larger than ourselves. This, it turns out, is usually not something young people want, and we put it off while we try to first become ourselves—to be known in our own divinity, to move through the world under our own will, taking as we like, as Zeus did. But we cannot have it both ways. This is the character of impiety to Aphrodite: the desire to be known is in contradiction with desire itself. Each works against the other: ambitions run aground when they come into contact with the reality of desire; relationships fly apart when we try to hold open multiple visions of our own lives. We cannot have many fates at once, we have only the one. It is love which will force the issue.



Ares: war, yes. But more precisely we can identify Ares with the emotional engine of war: a pride which refuses to be underestimated or made small, and seeks retribution for offenses, but which so relishes in opportunity to impress our power upon others that it invariably offends in turn, such that Ares then takes their side. Fights have a way of escalating beyond all reason. Once set into motion a war will run its own course, as if under its own momentum. The whole Iliad serves as an example.

For another sense of Ares, think of a soldier in wartime. Who is to blame for his actions taken under orders? The soldier himself? His commander? The enemy advancing towards him? All “caused” his actions, in the simple sense that, if they had not affected him, he would have acted differently. But to have caused something is different from being blameworthy for it. Sometimes blame can be assigned, if there has been a clear violation of a duty, but often no. Some things are just in the nature of war. We say these are Ares’ doing.

Piety to Ares has a sense of respect for the realities of power. For all of history, human populations have borne a responsibility to themselves to cultivate strength, so as to dissuade their neighbors from getting aggressive ideas. To reject strength, perhaps imagining pacifism to be virtue, is to ignore the reality of one’s world and one’s place in it, and will eventually arouse the envy of the others. At the same time, Ares will punish the hubris of those who overrate their own strength—imagining themselves little gods of war who are entitled to other people’s stuff.

For examples we may think of, first, Troy, which imagined itself impregnable and was rightly punished for its entitlement; then of the Mongol hordes, the last gasp of the prehistoric character of Ares, who were not punished—instead the rest of the world was punished for its weakness and disunity, being unable to organize at scales commensurate to the risks they were, in fact, exposed to.1

The equilibrium of these two forces defines the world as governed by Ares alone: might makes right. But such a world would pay a constant toll of grief as it continuously renegotiates who, exactly, deserves what. The other gods have learned to keep Ares under control.



Apollo? The restorative force of civilization: he slays monsters, heals the injured, staves off plagues, and prescribes the proper rituals and prophecies by which the favor of the gods may be retained and calamity avoided. His is the force of fear which keeps death at bay.

In the absence of an active crisis the force of Apollo tends to bind too tightly. Religious ceremonies become obsessive-compulsive rites of purification, in which no word may be misplaced for mortal fear of impiety. Every decision must be checked with augurs rather than risk acting without divine favor. These and other dysfunctions appear often in the ancient world.2

Contra the Apollonian rigidity we find Dionysian dissolution: drunkenness, revelry, laughter, dance, the festival—all serve to set us free from the overgrowth of rigid compulsions. We must be able to laugh about things, and to forget them. So it is necessary to release our grip on life, and to accept some impurities, even impieties. The risk is loss, but a measure of loss is our lot in life, being mortal; we cannot hope to avoid it forever.

These two half-brothers stand opposed. A healthy life is one in equilibrium between the two, or more likely, in a kind of slow oscillation, each correcting the excesses of the other.



What of Zeus? Zeus, in Homer, is the enforcer of right relations among men. The Odyssey can be read as a sequence of illustrations of xenia, the norms of behavior for guests and hosts: the cyclops assaults Odysseus’s men and so is not protected as a host; the suitors in Odysseus’ home are in violation and so are unprotected as guests. In either case the punishment is exposure to the “legitimate use of violence”, which today we would consider the domain of the state but which, at the time, belonged to Zeus. His lightning is the justified wrath which punishes the violation of a custom. Zeus’s anger is like that of a father, which to a child feels like thunder directly overhead. The fear induced by this power elevates a mere norm to a rule, understood by all as a “right relation”, to which anyone may make an appeal. Thus Zeusian force stabilizes societies, and sets the stage for justice.

In human terms, Zeus punishes not by wrath directly—rarely does lightning strike the deserving—but by a kind of karmic force which withdraws from the impious the usual protections from, and compensations for, violence and misfortune. So Agamemnon is punished for his prideful self-serving as king first by a series of defeats in battle and ultimately by a humiliating death at the hand of his own vengeful wife.

Zeus also enforces vows and oaths, and commands piety itself—to all the gods, to laws, and to the duties of one’s office or role in the social order. Broadly we can identify Zeus with the bonds of which all social structures are wrought, especially those in unequal relations, especially among men: political leaders and citizens, generals and soldiers, kings and subjects, masters and slaves, or in the modern world managers and subordinates. Zeus, it should be emphasized, constrains both parties in such relations: those in power by the mandate of piety and the threat of karmic retribution or even insurrection; those beneath by their duties and the threat of anger, or of ejection from the social structure.

Of course Zeus, especially in the older myths, is hardly pious himself. Much of the discord of the myths begins with one or another of his infidelities, just as much of the discord of Homer and the tragedies unfolds from the impieties of mortals.

It falls upon Hera to contain him, though she is often unsuccessful. The marital bond is Hera’s chief domain—she is its force, just as Zeus is the force of other bonds. As with Zeus, this bond comes in two forms: first a command that the husband and wife each play their part voluntarily and devotedly; second a threat of wrath to backstop the vows—jealousy being Hera’s unfortunate signature. In this way she defines the right form of marriage; we cannot simply have it however we like, lest we invite strife and discord (i.e. Eris) into our lives.

As mother of many of the gods, Hera may be also considered to govern the relationship of children and parents. We see little of Hera’s maternal nature in the myths, though. And the Olympian household, being not a particularly peaceful one, should probably not be taken as any sort of exemplar of parenting styles.



Let us stop there. Something of a general character of “gods” has appeared. What is of the gods are those aspects of human relations which cannot really be said to arise solely from the persons involved. We try to assign credit or blame, but cannot do so convincingly. The chain of causality passes through us: to earlier influences, to the collective, or to nature. We say such things are the work of the gods, or of fate.

The gods themselves we identify with certain phenomena within the medium of our collective thoughts and emotions. The gods do exist, in a sense: they act on us; we must abide them. And the failure to respect the gods is, in fact, an error, and will tend to be punished.

But the gods in the present conception hardly have anything to do with the usual sense of a “god”. They seem more “forces of nature”: like gravity, perhaps? Even this is too strong. They seem to be real in the way a proverb or aphorism might be true: a general tendency of human nature, rather than like natural law.

And we hardly have any answer for how we should relate to them. We will evidently be punished for disrespecting them… sometimes. Eventually. But this comes up short of defining what we should do. Certainly we should not worship the gods, so described, any more than we would worship gravity. Maybe it’s helpful to anthropomorphize them? But likely it’s harmful: stories have a way of forgetting the original sense of things, especially stories retold so many times.

I do not think we are prepared to answer our questions. Some further understanding is required.



  1. The colonialism and imperialism of recent centuries we can see as some kind of descendant-god of Ares himself, acting via other means but according to similar principles. More on this later. The “Pax Americana” of the past eighty years is backstopped by American military power, with appropriate piety to Ares. But of course this period is riddled with overreaches and entitlements, which have gradually eroded American credibility and will be punished in time. Recent examples of hubris can be seen in Russia and Iran. Russia was immediately punished for overrating their own strength, Iran is currently punishing America for the same error. The situation with Israel and Gaza is related but somewhat different; in that case the matter is moral power, which operates by similar rules but cannot be said to be of Ares. ↩

  2. See The Ancient City for a wonderful account of the rigidity of ancient religion and its gradual denaturing by the political interests of those alienated from power, and later by philosophy, among other things. For a firsthand experience of the psychic phenomenon of Apollonian rigidity, we need only think of the often-irrational precautions around Covid: masks worn outdoors and taken off to go into a restaurant, vaccines distributed to teachers working from home, etc. The human mind apparently does not function well in a plague. ↩