[dramatic music]
Athens, Greece.
A city alive with commerce and culture.
It is also a city of faith— Greek Orthodox faith,
part of the great eastern arm of Christianity.
[man singing]
But there was another world here once, of which only
tantalizing fragments remain.
Those who reach back through time, both above
ground and below, are in search of a world that was equally alive
and equally devout:
The world of the Ancient Greeks.
It still speaks to us today through one of its legacies, Greek mythology.
It was populated by many gods and goddesses, each with certain powers
in the world and each with a story of their own.
[mysterious music]
For tens of thousands of years, predating biblical times,
accounts of the gods and their doings were passed down by storytellers.
[King Constantine] It is extremely hard, but one tries to fantasize of
what was it like in those days.
I think favored stories of gods, uh, must have been,
thinking back, what did a child think and was impressed about was, how did
Zeus give birth to Athena from a headache?
Apollo, who was a very wise young man,
who then developed into being the god of order, of music, of arts.
Poseidon, who created storms when he was angry.
Athena, who was the protector
of our capital city and was in favor of peace.
[narrator] Presiding over all was Zeus, god of the sky, god of thunder.
[thunder]
[Thomas F. Scanlon] Zeus is a sky god and you're in the domain
of Zeus when you're out there in nature.
Zeus had some control over whether you
had a good day or a bad day and a good life or a bad life.
He had two jars on
the door sill and there was a jar of good and a jar of evil, and to each man,
Zeus would pour out a portion of good and a portion of evil.
[narrator] There was Aphrodite and Artemis, two sides of the same coin.
Aphrodite, and what is she the goddess of?
Um, she is the goddess of sexuality—female sexuality.
She's the goddess of beauty.
She's associated with lots of fertility issues.
You have Artemis on the other side,
Artemis who is this chaste, chaste virgin.
[narrator] And Apollo, who, like all the gods and goddesses of Ancient Greece,
had more than one power.
[Richard Martin] He is the organizer, the civilizer, he's the one who
brings roads to places where there were never roads before.
He's the one who heals,
but he also can bring plague.
And this is something that happens in the
case of many Greek gods.
If they can cause something, they can also stop it.
He was a god—I heard it most brilliantly put—a god of
distance, and therefore he would deal with people not face to face and hand to hand.
He was better at shooting his bow and killing people from a very far-off
distance, and therefore his loves, perhaps, are best kept at a distance too.
[narrator] These gods and goddesses evolved as the Ancient Greeks sought
to find meaning, and perhaps faith, in an often challenging world.
[mysterious music]
Their stories were embellished and changed over time as
different civilizations came into contact with Ancient Greece.
[Christina Sorum] Greece has been inhabited since about 70,000 BCE, and
there were invasions of people from the Middle East and from the north,
and each invasion led to—not another set of divinities—but further layers of
divinity added to the existing divinities.
So Greek gods are a real amalgam of
multiple cultures, cultures of the Middle East mostly.
[Thomas F. Scanlon] The Greek gods were of such diversity that they are unlike any—
many of the other gods from around the Mediterranean, because they
incorporated elements of a lot of different peoples around them, and they
don't clearly match a lot of the other peoples, say, in Celtic or Italian religions.
[narrator] These stories were passed down through oral tradition, but
sometime around 750 BC, they were collected, organized and written down.
Although scholars debate whether one author or many authors were involved
in this effort, the popular belief is that there was just one—Homer.
[Thomas F. Scanlon] As far as we know, the real crystallization of Greek
mythology was around the time of Homer, 750 BC.
And with Homer, we find the
creation of Greek mythology and the creation of the gods.
Homer gave the Greeks their gods.
Homer was effectively the closest thing the Greeks had to a bible.
[narrator] In the beginning, Homer tells us, there was Okeanos, a spirit in
the form of a great, circular, endless river flowing eternally back upon itself.
There was another presence too— Tethys, sometimes called the first mother.
When they finally mated, they began the line of descent, which eventually
produced the gods and goddesses of the Ancient Greeks.
[peaceful music]
Some 50 years after Homer, the poet Hesiod composes
the Theogony, in which he too describes the creation of the gods.
But according to Hesiod, the world began differently.
First, there was a
supernatural presence called Chaos, by which Hesiod means emptiness,
not disorder.
[Christina Sorum] Once upon a time, there was Chaos, and after Chaos there
was a goddess called Gaia, "earth."
And Gaia slept with—married, mated—
Uranus, "heavens."
[narrator] Uranus, however, did not want children.
He felt threatened by
them and kept them from being born.
[dramatic music]
Gaia conspires with Cronus, one of her unborn children, who
castrates his father, presumably from within his mother's womb.
[dramatic music]
Uranus' severed genitals fall into the sea, from which a
surprising entity emerges: Aphrodite, goddess of love.
These stories make up
what is known as Greek mythology, derived from the Greek word "mythos."
It implies something untrue, but for the Ancient Greeks, these stories were a matter
of faith.
They helped explain how and why the world works as it does.
[Thomas F. Scanlon] Interestingly, love and war, or violence and sex, are
deeply connected in Greek mythology, and not only in Greek mythology but in
a number of mythologies.
Why are these two things deeply connected?
I think that the ancient peoples, and certainly the Greeks, felt that deeply passionate
feelings were somehow connected in the human mind and in the human emotions.
That is, great desires and great fears or great hatreds were somehow linked.
[narrator] In this way, the stories and characters of Greek mythology had
real-life application.
[dramatic music]
Hesiod's creation story goes on to tell how Cronus frees his
brothers and sisters from Gaia's womb.
These beings would be known as the
Titans, born only after their father has been castrated.
The theme of conflict
between father and son continues as Cronus himself now kills his own children.
[Christina Sorum] Cronus married Rhea.
Every time Rhea gave birth, he'd
swallow the children.
Rhea desperately wanted to have some children, and so
she took one baby, Zeus, when he was born, and wrapped him up and hid him in
a cave in Crete to be raised, and gave Cronus a stone wrapped up in swaddling
clothes that he swallowed, so that he thought he was swallowing the baby.
Well, Zeus grew up, came attacked his father, and all the children emerged,
and those were the beginnings of the Olympian gods.
[narrator] Zeus retrieves the rock with which his mother deceived his father.
It can be seen even now at the sacred shrine of Delphi.
There's always a kind of inherent conflict and tension
between fathers and sons.
Greece has been, really, until this century,
a subsistence economy, and so if you have a small farm, the father is in charge of that.
The son, even the first son, is not going to get any kind of rights
until the father moves on—retires or dies.
[Christina Sorum] What is the concern there?
There's a real concern,
obviously, about issues of succession and power.
[narrator] After Zeus rescues his brothers and sisters from their father,
they seize Mount Olympus.
From this stronghold, they battle for control of the
world against their father, aunts, and uncle—all of whom are Titans.
Finally, the gods and goddesses of Olympus prevail.
They acknowledge Zeus, who
is also god of the sky, as their king.
But human beings have yet to appear
on the scene.
[ominous rumbling and music]
The story of creation in Greek mythology goes on in Hesiod's telling.
Generations of gods continue to struggle with one another,
all before humanity's arrival in the cosmos.
I think it says something very interesting about a
culture, whether it considers its formative moments to be ones of conflict or
ones of sort of unified production— peaceful production.
I am overwhelmed each
time I study or teach a course that deal with Greek mythology, how persistent
these conflicts are.
[narrator] After triumphing over the Titans, the great god Zeus marries
Metis, a Titan herself, and therefore his aunt.
Eventually, they have a daughter
who births fully grown and armed from his forehead.
This is Athena, goddess of warriors.
Other gods and goddesses enter the world, each with different functions.
They all have, however, one thing in common, an attribute which
sets them apart from virtually all other divinities in the ancient world—
their images are human.
[Richard Martin] If you think of Egyptian religion, with its gods having
animal heads, various animal bodies, or Near Eastern, Akkadian, Mesopotamian,
Hittite religion, where you see divinities associated with lions and other
fierce animals,
the Greeks' decision to somehow represent the gods as
being like Greeks is really an innovation.
We're not really sure where it
came from.
[Christina Sorum] When you think about divinity, you're talking about
the unknown, and you really can only talk about the unknown in terms of the known.
In the Hebrew bible, in Genesis, it says God came down and he walked
in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening.
It's almost impossible to talk
about divinities without doing something like that.
Xenophanes said if horses
could draw, horses would draw their gods as horses.
[narrator] In Homer's telling, it is only after the gods and goddesses
take up residence on Mount Olympus that the story of human beings begins to unfold.
The Judeo-Christian account of the world's beginning
culminates in God's creation of man, who is given dominion over all the other
creatures on Earth.
However, the Ancient Greeks believe the birth of humans is
of little importance to the cosmos.
[Thomas F. Scanlon] Although the Greeks had a human-centered universe,
their view of man was almost as an afterthought.
He was a smaller creature
in the universe, something certainly lesser than the gods.
And therefore,
the creation of humans had to take a second or third place down the line in the
Greek world of the cosmos and the Olympian deities.
So why was the creation of
man given such a small role in the creation of the universe?
[Richard Martin] It could be that Greeks just assumed that human beings
were always around, that human beings are in fact so important that there was
never a stage when they didn't exist.
Um, it's still something of a mystery.
[Greg Thalman] I like to think that Greek myth reflects a certain understanding
by the Greeks of humans' place in the world.
That humans are not the center
of things, that there's a whole wealth of created world into which humans
have to fit.
This is a great contrast with a number of other cultures and belief systems.
[15:41 peaceful music]
[narrator] As with the dawn of the gods, Greek mythology contains
different tellings of the creation of man.
In none of them are mankind's
beginning's auspicious.
[Christina Sorum] We lived like ants in the ground and we couldn't read
and we didn't know the seasons and we didn't know the weather and we couldn't think
and we couldn't hear.
We were just despicable worms and worth despising.
[narrator] In Homer's version of the creation of humans, the god
Prometheus forms the first man out of mud and breathes life into him.
In Hesiod's telling, Zeus creates succeeding races of men—
gold, silver, bronze, and iron.
It seems that each race symbolizes different
aspects of the human condition.
The first race of men is made of gold.
Their lives are easy, their crops abundant.
They literally feast with the gods.
[Christina Sorum] In the beginning, there was a golden age, and people
lived on the Earth and all the crops grew of their own accord and everybody was
good and everybody was just.
And those people, after a while, just disappeared.
[narrator] The golden race appear to have lived a perfect existence,
seemingly in paradise.
And yet this race vanishes without explanation.
In the biblical account of paradise, life's hardships are seen as a result of
Adam and Eve's fall from grace in the Garden of Eden.
For the golden race of men in Greek mythology, there is no such explanation
for their disappearance.
The reason for their fate remains a mystery.
[Richard Martin] The Greek system, in which humans and their creation
are not really a topic of concern, is so different from what you find in Genesis,
where we have this focus on the creation of the first man.
Of course, in Genesis
it's related to the further story, what happened after the first man and woman
disobeyed God.
In Greek myth, disobeying the gods is not such a big deal as it
is in Genesis.
So doesn't Hesiod have an answer, or why doesn't Hesiod give an
answer to why the golden race came to an end?
With the Judeo-Christian myth of the fall from the
Garden of Eden, because that clearly was the fault of Adam and Eve, and what that
means is there is no real, really good explanation for why the world is
so difficult now—why humans can't have an easy time.
[narrator] After the golden race becomes extinct, Zeus fashions men
from silver, but this race is not very evolved.
[Christina Sorum] The silver age people were babies forever, and then they
had this short period of maturity, and then they had a horrible old age.
And they disappeared under the Earth.
They were more arrogant and did not
worship the gods sufficiently.
[narrator] Next come men of bronze, who exterminate themselves through
constant warfare.
Eventually, the race of men who live today appears.
They are said to be men of iron.
[Thomas F. Scanton] So basically, this story of degeneration has moved
to the present age, where actually it shows a balance in these various views of
the important things in life for the Greeks.
Namely, your attitudes to the gods
and your attitudes towards warfare and fighting for your city-state and how you
can get along or not get along with each other.
[narrator] Interestingly, all these stories account for the creation of
only half the human race, man.
Woman is created as an affliction—a punishment—
and all because of a trick.
[Thomas F. Scanlon] The first woman was sent to the Earth as a punishment
to mankind.
This sounds incredibly misogynistic, and it was an incredibly
misogynistic story on the part of Hesiod, who told this in 700 BC.
But the story goes that one of the gods, Prometheus, tried to trick the master and king of
all the cosmos, Zeus.
[Christina Sorum] Prometheus is a trickster god, he's a smart god.
"Prometheus" means "forethought."
Um, he—he killed a sheep and he took the sheep
and he took all the good, wonderful meat and he put it inside the disgusting belly,
and he took all the bare bones and he wrapped them up in the beautiful
white shining fat, which is of course what burns in a sacrifice.
And he presented these two bundles to Zeus, and he said, "You pick."
[narrator] Zeus knows he is being tricked by Prometheus, who represents humankind.
In retaliation, Zeus punishes man by taking away fire.
[ominous music]
Prometheus, in return, steals the fire back and gives it
to humanity.
[Thomas F. Scanlon] And by stealing and giving men this gift of fire, he
he was therefore punished indirectly by having a woman created who was given to
human beings.
Now, Zeus didn't just sort of give this evil thing, as he thought,
to mankind.
He called it a beautiful evil.
She's one you can't do without.
She's a kalon kakon
in the terms of the Greek— a "beautiful bad thing."
And so Greek myth, Greek poetry,
likes to have it both ways.
Women are beautiful, women are something irresistible.
At the same time, women make you work and so they're a bad thing.
[Christina Sorum] I do think that, throughout Greek mythology, you see a
repeated emphasis on the threat that women pose.
The threat they pose because of
your need for them, the need to have children, and the very real fear of losing
control because of desire.
The overwhelming feminine sexuality threatens men.
[narrator] Zeus does not give just any woman to men.
Indeed, he gives men
a kalon kakon, a beautiful evil.
Her name is Pandora, and she comes with a
jar full of evils to let loose in the world.
The first woman in Greek mythology is Pandora, and her story
echoes that of Eve and the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.
Given a jar and told not to open it, Pandora does so anyway, and all the evils
of the world are let loose.
All sickness, pain, suffering, disease.
Too late,
she closes the jar leaving only one thing behind: hope.
But what is hope doing
in Pandora's jar full of evils?
Hope is there as an evil, which is, I think, fascinating.
Hope is an evil because hope allows you to act with the sense that you
can control the future, and in Hesiod, that is a very dangerous thing to do.
You can't control the future.
And to be—it's to act under a delusion.
[Thomas F. Scanlon] Is hope something good or something bad?
And the Greeks love this kind of dilemma because hope was—could be good, could be bad.
And so it was ambiguously left back in the jar for humans to use or to avoid.
[narrator] Pandora is perhaps the most prominent, but certainly not the
only example of women being a source of evil in Greek mythology.
Some scholars find a deeper meaning for this disparagement of women, and point
to Aphrodite, the goddess of love.
[Christina Sorum] If you look at the myths of Aphrodite, that she was the
most beautiful and the most sexually desirable thing ever, men are afraid of her.
She—she sees a man, a human being, Anchises, on a hill outside of Troy,
and she wants to sleep with him.
And she goes to him and he says, "You are too beautiful to be a human.
You must be a goddess and I don't want to sleep with you."
And she says, "Oh, no, I'm just a maiden from the neighborhood."
They go to bed together, and and when he wakes up, she's become her goddess self,
and he's terrified.
He's terrified he's going to be emasculated—that he'll lose
his strength.
[narrator] In contrast, the Ancient Greeks believed that Athena,
the goddess without a sexual role, is a great force for good.
[dramatic music]
[Fritz Graf] Athena is the protector.
Athena is the warrior divinity who
leads the just defense war.
She is the city goddess and, in many respects,
the most important divinity the Athenians have.
And that might be true for many
other city, where you have an acropolis with the temple of Athena on top.
[narrator] And thus the world of Greek gods and goddesses is not merely
a collection of colorful stories, but a window on an ancient civilization,
its thoughts and its values.
[Richard Martin] The kind of non-linear thinking that you see in myths,
the sort of narratives that leap all around, that introduce strange creatures,
look a lot like dreams.
And so the question, I think, is whether Greek myths are
somehow the collective unconsciousness of Greek civilization at an early period.
[narrator] Whether conscious or unconscious, the gods are very much
present in the everyday lives of ancient Greeks.
[Thomas F. Scanlon] In each of the mountains, in each of the plants,
in each of the emotions they felt, they felt that there was a god in control
behind this.
[peaceful music]
One of this attractive and unusual things about Greek
religion from the beginning is its responsiveness to environment.
There are nymphs, for example, who inhabit watery places.
There are nymphs of the
mountains, nymphs of the trees.
There's an acknowledgement that rivers are a kind of religious force.
And Greek religion in this way has a certain
affiliation with modern ecology— the recognition that individual places have
a value, a kind of numinous quality, a sacred quality.
[Richard F. Scanton] The Greeks had particular terms for "sacred."
In fact,
they had several terms for "sacred."
One of them is heras.
And heras means that
it belongs to the gods.
In fact, the Greek word for religion is ta hiera,
"the sacred things."
[narrator] And so, the stories in Greek mythology are used to explain an
often difficult and random world.
[mysterious music]
Winter is born when Persephone, daughter of the goddess Demeter,
is kidnapped by the god Hades and taken to the underworld to be his bride.
[Christina Sorum] Demeter was horrendously upset to have lost her daughter
and began searching the world looking for her daughter.
Couldn't find her daughter, wept, cried, crops didn't grow.
Hence, the gods weren't getting sacrifice.
So finally, some gods went to Zeus and said, you know, you've got to
get Persephone back, so her mother makes the crops grow so that we get our
sacrifices and all the people don't die.
[narrator] Eventually, Persephone is allowed to return to her mother
on one condition.
Each year, Persephone must spend three months with Hades.
It is during this time that her mother, Demeter, goddess of agriculture,
is inconsolable.
And thus, each year, the fields lie barren in the cold of winter.
And thus, life's larger hardships were explained.
Personal difficulties,
however, were often explained by some offense to the gods.
Those who offended
the gods were punished not by some earthly authority, but by the
gods themselves.
[thunder]
[Greg Thalmann] There's a Greek word, in fact, deisidaimonia, which means a fear of the gods
or respect for the gods, and this was a positive thing.
Life was felt to be fairly precarious and you needed to do everything you could to get
whatever powers ruled the world on your side to keep you safe.
Many of them
lived one drought away from starvation, and you just didn't mess around with
the world like that.
One of the things I love about Greek myth is it never
lets people off the hook.
It never says, "This happened because the gods made it happen."
It's our fault.
If we can just understand why.
It's sort of a,
I think, a difficult world to exist in.
[narrator] In a difficult world, people often look for a hero, someone
to bring deliverance from a life seemingly filled with adversity.
Some believe
a child born of a Greek god and an earthly woman prefigures the appearance of Christ.
Was this destined to happen?
One of the most famous figures in Greek mythology may possibly
have helped pave the way for a later event pivotal to human history.
Heracles, better known to us as Hercules, is born because the great god Zeus
lusted for a beautiful mortal woman.
She, however, is a faithful wife.
Zeus takes on the appearance of her husband and manages to have her.
The outrage is compounded by the fact that Zeus himself is
married to one of his sisters, Hera.
[Greg Thalman] The notion that the gods are not always ethical,
not always honest, is also one that makes sense when you think about it.
And the Greeks seem to have been comfortable with it for many centuries.
It makes sense
because if the god are humans, but better off somehow—more strong,
more powerful, immortal—they never have to take consequences of anything they do,
whereas humans do.
The burden of acting ethically, of thinking about consequences,
falls on human beings, not on gods.
[narrator] Hera is unable to vent her anger upon Zeus.
[thunder]
In a move entirely characteristic of a Greek god, she turns
her wrath on the child born from her husband's infidelity.
Heracles is perhaps
the most famous Greek hero, a figure particularly important in Greek mythology.
Even in his infancy, Heracles is a god with extraordinary strength.
Hera sends deadly serpents to his cradle,
and Heracles strangles them both.
[dramatic music]
[Greg Thalman] Many of the Greek heroes did in fact have one divine
parent and one mortal parent.
More generally, a hero was a man of more than
normal strength who was somehow marked out for a life of achievement, but also
a life of enormous difficulty.
Uh, they were very difficult, uh, to integrate
into society precisely because of their great capacities.
[narrator] The vengeful Hera continues to pursue her husband's
illegitimate son throughout his life, periodically driving him into fits of
anger and madness.
Deeply regretting the murders and other crimes he commits
during these fits, Heracles undertakes great tasks of repentance, often the
killing of tyrants and monsters.
At the end of his life, Heracles is granted immortality,
and taken by his father Zeus to live with him on Mount Olympus.
And thus, the story of Heracles may have paved the way for
the Apostle Paul, who brought word of a new faith to the Greeks centuries later.
[Richard Martin] They had a story of a son of god, Heracles, who suffered
and died and then went through an apotheosis, himself went up to Olympus,
and so the story of another son of God who suffered and died and went to heaven
would not be all that non-familiar.
In the same way, the notion that a god could
take on human form and look exactly like one of us, was completely acceptable
to a pagan Greek audience.
And so early Christianity proceeded in Greece and struck
roots in Greece quite easily.
Not quite a Christ figure, but elements of that, because
it was someone—someone who through toil and suffering and labor and loyalty
achieved divinity.
[narrator] While Heracles is unique, he is only one of many heroes who
walk among the Greeks.
There are Achilles and Ulysses, great warrior of the Trojan War.
And Theseus, whose feats include killing the dreaded Minotaur,
the creature that feasted on the flesh of Greek youths.
[foreboding music]
[narrator] But heroes did not have to be offspring of the gods, nor were
they necessarily heroic in today's terms, risking grave danger for the sake
of others.
For the ancient Greeks, a hero was someone who broke the bonds of
ordinary life, regardless of the consequences.
[Richard Martin] It's not necessary that a hero be descended from a god or
a goddess, it's not necessary that a hero even do something good in life.
And so achievement is more doing something extraordinary and being recognized
for it.
Now the extraordinary thing that a hero could do could even be killing
a number of the enemy, or killing people in his own community,
in such a strange fashion that the gods have to be consulted, so the heroes are
dangerous, unusual individuals, extraordinary but not necessarily
extraordinary good.
Heroes really are a projection of what it is to be human on
a large scale.
They really focus both the great potential of human beings at
their best and also the, uh, the vulnerabilities of humans.
[narrator] Another unlikely hero is Oedipus, who kills his father and
marries his mother.
Having fulfilled his terrible fate, Oedipus then blinds himself
and seeks redemption.
It is a story for the ages, speaking to the darker side of
feelings between parents and their children.
I think there definitely was a thread of Greek
culture and of Greek mythology which was interested in the conflict between
father and son.
Obviously Freud—Sigmund Freud— saw this and picked up on it
in the story of the Oedipus and the Oedipus Complex.
And I think there was a
threat of generational conflict that the Greeks actually feared, but recognized
as real at the same time.
[narrator] The story of Oedipus and his parents raises another age-old question:
Are the lives of humans preordained?
Or do humans have the
power to exercise free will?
Oedipus is someone who for no reason ever given has—has
this fate that he will kill his father and marry his mother.
When Oedipus has
realized that he is not the son of the king of Corinth as he thought he was,
he says I'd count myself as the child of chance.
And by chance, he means
something very random.
Uh, there is no plan. Uh, by the end of the play,
it's turned out that everything he's ever done has fit into a plan and that, uh,
if he is the child of chance, it's chance in a sense that's closely aligned with fate.
[Christina Sorum] He, Oedipus, the man, made choices.
When he learned he
was going to kill his father and marry his mother, he fled his home not
knowing he was adopted.
Um, and of course meets his father on the road and kills him and
then arrives in the city and marries his mother.
Um, he chose to leave his home.
Uh, he did a terrible thing, but he didn't do it trying to do evil.
And fate
didn't make him do it.
[narrator] The question of a person's fate versus the role of free will
was of such importance to the ancient Greeks that they personified fate in
the form of three goddess.
[Richard Martin] When you read the poetry of Homer, it seems that it goes two ways.
On the one hand, the Fates are a group of three women,
Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos.
Their names meaning "the weaver," "the alloter,"
and "not turning back."
And they weave a thread for each person's life when that
person is born and determine when that person's life is gonna end.
On the other hand,
we see in Homer's poetry that fate is power above the gods.
The gods
bow to fate in several instances.
[Christina Sorum] You can look at the story of Oedipus and talk about fate.
Was he fated to kill his father and marry his mother?
Yes.
What does that mean?
Does that mean he didn't have any free will?
No.
It doesn't mean that.
It means
that's what was going to happen.
The Greeks had a complicated view of how the world worked.
On the one hand, the gods controlled a lot of actions of human beings or
had an effect upon it.
But yet, the humans also could control their own
individual destinies and call a lot of the shots.
So there's this funny
relationship between what the gods control and what humans control.
And you know what?
They loved this ambiguity.
[narrator] And so the ancient Greeks came to terms with the fact that
there were no guarantees in life.
Some of their concerns seem hauntingly
familiar today.
[Richard Marin] This consciousness that the Greeks have, that you cannot
have too many generations on the Earth at the same time, is even expressed in a myth,
the myth of the beginning of the Trojan War, which says that the Earth
was burdened with too many people and cried out to Zeus to relieve her buden.
And so Zeus invented the Trojan War to get rid of a lot of people.
[dramatic music]
[mysterious music]
The stories of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece
are eternal.
They still speak to us today.
Among the deities were two groups of lovely sisters who
dwelt on Mount Olympus:
The Graces and the Muses.
The Graces bestowed beauty,
charm, and gratitude on the mortal world.
The Muses had a profound impact on
how generations since have passed the tales of the gods and the sagas of that
long-gone era through oral tradition.
[peaceful music]
From their lofty plain, they descended to the Earth teaching
history, astronomy, and the arts.
[Katerina Zacharia] Each one of the nine Muses is associated with a
particular subject, usually concerning the arts and sciences.
For instance,
Cleo, the proclaimer, is the one that is associated with epic poetry
and is the Muse of history.
Now the Muses are very well known because we have
words like "museum," the [inaudible] of the Muses that are in contemporary English
and of course Greek.
[Christina Sorum] Greek stories are about those things that people regard
as important.
They wouldn't have persisted if they weren't.
I mean, if stories
are going to last and be retold for several thousand years, there must be
something in them that has meaning for the people who hear them
across generations.
[narrator] Evidence of the divine was everywhere.
To the Greeks, the gods
were as real as the fields they tilled and the families they raised.
[Greg Thalman] The number of little shrines that would be all around
the city, the number of dedications to gods in big sanctuaries, really does speak
to a pretty strong belief in them.
Life was felt to be fairly precarious and
you needed to do everything you could to get whatever powers ruled the world
on your side to keep safe.
[narrator] From cradle to grave and from season to season, every phase of
human life was intertwined with the gods.
[narrator] As ever-present as they were for the ancient Greeks, the
same gods were not always worshiped throughout the land.
3,000 years ago, Greece was a patchwork of independent city-states linked by
a common language, culture, and trade.
But while the principle deities such as Zeus, Prometheus,
and Demeter were worshiped in all of the more than 700 different city-states,
each town and village laid claim to its own god.
Richard Martin] The landscape of Greece is just full of gods,
gods who might not even be heard of in the next village.
Every little stream,
every spring of fresh water—something you come to appreciate in the dusty Greek
climate—has its own divinity.
[Thomas F. Scanlon] The hills divided up village from village
and people from people.
So each village was encouraged to have its own favorite gods and
its own favorite heroes.
And I think that, in terms of the natural layout of
the land, was very important in the formation of myth and of their religion.
[narrator] The gods were many, as were their functions.
Hermes was the protector of flocks and herds of domesticated animals.
Hera was the goddess of marriage as well as paternity.
Eros prevailed over matters of love.
Hephaestus was the god of fire and volcanoes.
Poseidon ruled over the sea.
There was Pan, part human and part goat.
He was recognized as the shepherds' god.
And there was Artemis, protector of nature and the young.
Artemis is associated with young, blooming nature,
with young animals.
But Artemis is also associated with the initiation of young women.
So there's a continuum in Greek thinking between what happens in the
natural world and what happens in what we would identify as a very different
human social sphere.
To Greek mythological thinking, these are all part of the
same phenomenon.
And that's why Artemis can be the huntress, the one who is
associated with the wild, but also the one who tames young girls.
[narrator] Of all the deities that influenced human life, Demeter was
one of the most important.
Celebrated once every five years, she was the goddess
of corn and crops.
Greeks looked at and lived with their landscape for an
awfully long time and developed stories by watching nature and by living with it.
And the worship of a kind of Earth-goddess who protected the Earth and
saw to the welfare of the crops and withheld the crops if people didn't behave themselves,
all of that was part of the Greek view of the cycle of nature.
[narrator] The relationship between man and the divine was not simple.
However, theirs was an uneasy alliance.
Though the gods were powerful and
immortal, they were not beyond human questioning.
The ancient Greeks often
criticized the immoral behavior of the gods.
They could act in excess.
Each one had passions,
had made mistakes, but the mortals had to respect their own boundaries.
This is the main difference between gods and mortals.
Gods could do anything
they liked, do as they please.
Mortals had to refrain from excess.
Greek gods and goddesses are facets of what could become of a deadly passion,
what could happen to mortals if they really step over a boundary.
[Richard Martin] Now we might think of criticizing the gods as a kind of
blasphemy, but in fact it reinforces the notion that the gods do exist.
I think what was really being criticized were other Greeks' attitudes about the gods.
Something that's very hard for us to understand is that the Greeks could play
with their notions of gods.
[narrator] Superior to the humans over whom they held sway, the gods were
nevertheless subject to the same passions, failures, and weaknesses of mortals.
They knew love, despair, and tragedy.
They took on human form and were
vulnerable to injury and illness.
But unlike people, they healed quickly.
Thomas F. Scanlon] Of course, they weren't just humans.
They were different from humans in many ways.
They first of all obviously never died,
secondly they had incredible powers of strength and knowledge.
But the reason why they're in human form is that the Greeks had tremendous pride
in the human form.
The Greeks had such high value for the perfection of human
intelligence and physicality that they could not imagine a more perfect form to
attribute to the gods.
[Greg Thalman] This notion that the gods are "humans-plus" seems to have
answered a very deep need in the Greeks.
It's a sort of fantasy of overcoming
all the weaknesses that make us humans what we are.
[dramatic music]
[narrator] The gods were also subject to similar laws which governed humanity.
Hermes was the guardian of travelers.
When he cleared a pathway
by killing the hundred-eyed monster called Argos, he had to stand trial for the deed.
[Christina Sorum] Well, he killed.
He's a god but he's polluted.
And so he had to stand trial.
And the way the gods all cast their votes was by putting a stone at his foot,
which made a stone heap, which is called a "herm."
[narrator] Though the gods were not perfect, they were not powers to
be trifled with.
[Greg Thalman] What you did need to do was be careful not to offend the
gods, not to set yourself up as the gods' equal, not to be arrogant in that way,
because that was inviting disaster.
Not from any other humans, but from the
gods themselves.
There's the story of Salmoneus, who had himself driven
around on a cart, banging on shields or some noise-making implement, saying that
he was Zeus and trying to imitate Zeus' thunder, and he was probably dispatching
a thunderbolt.
[thunder]
I think everybody believed that somebody really
powerful had to be in charge of lightning, and the obvious candidate was Zeus.
Zeus was a weather god, primarily.
In fact, when it rained, you said "Zeus is raining."
You didn't say "It's raining."
And so lightning, this powerful,
strange thing that can kill you, obviously had to be under the control of
someone like Zeus.
[narrator] In Athens, the people also worshiped a god with no name,
one who was simply referred to as the "unknown god."
[Richard Martin] The shrine to the unknown god was probably the
Athenians' way, in their own religious system, of covering their bets.
Just in case there was a god out there that they hadn't managed to worship, a god
that might do something to them,
they had a shrine to the unknown god.
[narrator] The Greeks rationalized the world around them.
Philosophy and intellectual thought flourished,
most of all, in Athens.
It was here that Athena
presided in noble splendor over the people.
Goddess of war and patron of the arts,
she was honored in the form of a gold ebony and ivory statue at the Parthenon.
It was believed that her symbolic presence would make the city
invincible to attack.
Thousands came to pay tribute to her here in one of the
finest buildings ever constructed.
But of all the sacred places in Ancient Greece, few approached
the significance of a tree-lined valley of unsurpassed beauty and strange power.
For it was here that the Greeks came to learn of their future.
This is Olympia.
2,500 years ago, a 40-foot-high statue stood here.
It was made of gold and ivory and was considered one of the seven wonders
of the ancient world.
Dedicated to Zeus in celebration of his omnipotence, this
ancient wonder presided over the oldest known organized sporting event on Earth,
the Olympic games.
[Richard F. Scanton] Every four years, the Greeks from all over the Greek
world and the islands in Italy would come to Olympia to celebrate this festival.
[narrator] Restricted to only males, including spectators, naked athletes
competed for crown and glory under a burning sun in five events:
the broad jump, discus throwing, javelin hurling, wrestling, and the
200-yard dash.
[triumphant music]
While the object of the games was to win, the purpose was to worship.
[Richard F. Scanton] According to one scholar, David Sansone, he believed
that the athletic event is an expenditure of ritual energy for the gods.
And in fact, one way of showing this is that what the athletes did was sweat.
And they sweat and they had dirt on them and they had olive oil on.
And after
they finished competing, they cleaned off the scum from their skin using a strigil.
And they actually collected the scum from the athletes, which was
thought to have magical properties.
And in a sense, they were reaping the
product of human energy and having this as a magical potion that the gods would honor.
[narrator] This, then, was Olympia.
And to this day around the world,
winning an Olympic event remains an accomplishment beyond comparison.
[Constantine] Winner had the luck to win the Olympic games and
come first.
My country hadn't had the first place in any Olympics for over fifty years.
All this was very exciting for a young person.
You know, the idea that
you get on to the podium.
Your achievement is honored only by a
medal and nothing else.
You hear the national anthem of your country, you see
the great flag going up, these things remain in your mind.
And I—I've often
said that that is the greatest feeling in my life, other than getting engaged
to my wife.
[narrator] Another site central to the ancient Greeks is Delphi.
Mystical and mysterious, Delphi is perhaps best known as a place where a
famous oracle resided.
Also known as the Oracle of Apollo, she provided clues
to those who sought insight into the future.
[mysterious music]
[Richard F. Scanton] The Oracle of Apollo was a priestess who was named
the "Pythia," people would come from all over the known world to seek the advice
of this priestess for important questions—
often affairs of state, political questions and direction.
[narrator] Unfortunately, the oracle spoke in a language no one could understand.
Her pronouncements on the future had to be translated by a prophet,
but even then her prophecies were often obscure.
There's one famous ambiguous answer in which
a great king asks the oracle, "Should I go to war?"
And the oracle says, "If you go
to war, you will destroy a great kingdom."
And so the guy goes to war, and
of course his kingdom is the great one destroyed.
He should've read that the right way.
The oracle always gives you a kind of question in return—a puzzle,
an enigma—that you have to answer.
[Christina Sorum] Humans are born, and they grow up, and they make a
choice to do this and to do that.
At any point in their life, they could go
to Delphi, and hear an oracle, like, "Beware of the sea because it will kill you."
And you spend your whole life avoiding the sea so that you won't get killed.
Then one day, you're in an aquarium and a tank bursts and you drown in the
seawater in this salt-water aquarium, or something more sensible than that.
Did fate make that happen?
No.
It's just the god knew the future and could say
that it was going to happen.
[peaceful music]
[narrator] Delphi was also the place where the son of Zeus presided.
His name was Apollo.
In addition to presiding over Delphi, Apollo had other responsibilities.
He was the god associated with sexuality and love.
Ironically,
Apollo himself was never known to be a great lover.
[Christina Sorum] Apollo is beautiful.
He's the most beautiful male,
as Aphrodite is the most beautiful female.
He is the best athlete, he is a
beautiful singer, he is strong and a marvelous archer, he's your perfect
human being—your perfect male.
And he has this sad, sad life.
He falls in love
over and over and over and none of the women want him.
And he attempted to rape girls at certain occasions in his life.
He's really a god, I think, of distance and rationality more than a god of love.
[narrator] Perhaps the most tragic of Apollo's romantic escapades was
his love for Cassandra, daughter of the king of Troy.
As Greek mythology would have it,
Apollo and Cassandra's tragic affair would directly impact the course
of history.
[Christina Sorum] He falls in love with Cassandra, who is a princess in
Troy, and he says, you know, "I'll give you the gift of prophecy if you will
sleep with me."
And she says "Okay" and he does, and then he—she rejects him, and he makes
it so no one will ever believe any of her prophecies.
[narrator] And thus, according to Homer, a seemingly insignificant
lovers' squabble later played a major role in one of the classic battles of the
ancient world: the Trojan War.
The Greek stories of Homer told of a glorious day
in which all the Greeks actually did one thing together.
They did an expedition,
and they fought the Trojans.
[narrator] According to Homer, the conflict begins when Paris, son of
the king of Troy, kidnaps the beautiful daughter of a Greek king.
Furious at the abduction,
the king and his brother unite all the leaders of the Greek world
to join in an attack on Troy.
[1:01:38 dramatic music]
For ten long years, they lay siege to the city, but to no avail.
Troy is a fortress—all but impenetrable.
And then, a Greek general named
Odysseus comes forward with a plan that will echo through history.
He suggests that the Greeks build an enormous wooden horse
and pretend to leave Troy, as if the great horse were a parting tribute.
But Helen, the Greek princess, who has now fallen in love
with her captor, knows her people well and suspects a trick.
Helen, who went and imitated the voices of many
wives of the companions of the Greeks, and walked around the Trojan horse,
hoping that some of them might hear the voices of their wives and really cry out.
Odysseus was the one that restrained his companions from revealing themselves.
[indistinct yelling]
[narrator] And so tragedy awaits the unsuspecting Trojans.
The horse is brought inside the walled city.
But they have one more chance when Cassandra,
the Trojan woman who spurned the god Apollo's advances, also tries to warn
her fellow citizens.
Another warning came from Cassandra, the Trojan princess.
She had been given the gift of prophecy by Apollo in exchange for
sleeping with him.
But in the end, she refused.
So Apollo made sure that
nobody would believe in her prophecies.
[narrator] And thus the god Apollo gets his revenge on Cassandra,
the mortal who spurred him.
It is unfortunate for the citizens of Troy.
After much feasting and celebrating, the Trojans fall asleep.
Late at night, under cover of darkness,
the Greek armies return.
Within the walled city of Troy, Odysseus and
his men slip quietly out of the wooden horse's belly and unlock the city gates.
The Greeks storm through the now-open gates and lay waste
to the city.
[intense music and battle sounds]
But revenge does not a better lover make.
Apollo would remain
a failure in affairs of the heart.
In stark contrast to Apollo and the area of romance
is the other god who presided over Delphi: Dionysus.
Dionysus, on the other hand, is a guy you'd expect to
have a lot of luck with the ladies.
He's a god who is a god of the vines,
he's a god of wine, he's a god of vegetation, he's a god of the sea.
So he's a god
who has been described as a god of the fluid element—a god of fluidity.
And I think that's an excellent description, because he's a god who can induce madness
on the individual.
Your mind can turn to a fluid mush if you're under the
influence of Dionysus, whether it's through drink or through some
religious ecstasy.
[Katerina Zacharia] Strong emotion is Dionysus.
Formal expression is Apollo.
Of course, that idea, which is as well known as the division between
classical and romantic, is no longer valid.
Yet, the idea of relating Apollo and
Dionysus was one that was quite pertinent in antiquity.
During the three winter months
at Delphi that Apollo was absent, Dionysus replaced him.
Dionysus is
the god of civic disorder, but also the god of imperial democracy, whereas Apollo
is the god of civic order.
[narrator] And thus, as is so often the case with the gods of ancient Greece,
there is a moral to the story.
In this case, the lesson lies in the
very contrast between Apollo and Dionysus.
Dionysus is a god who— who is worshiped by women
and is worshiped in the countryside, and leads women out of their homes,
away from their looms, into the tops of mountains where they dance all night
and carry torches, and, men thought, drank a lot.
We think about Apollo as a god
of reason, as a god of order.
On his temple at Delphi, there are all these things.
It says "nothing too much"—medan agan, moderation in all things.
[1:06:50 narrator] While the gods loved to battle and ruled over earth and sky,
beneath the fertile folds and sun-drenched landscape of ancient Greece lay
another domain— a dark and foreboding place.
When the Greeks of ancient times died, they were either
buried or cremated.
Beyond death lay the underworld, a type of shadow existence
where there was no conscious afterlife.
No one went to heaven.
That was the exclusive domain of the gods.
After death, we have a soul, according to the
Greeks, which is called psykhe, which goes fluttering off like a shadow of smoke
into the underworld.
Now, when you get to the underworld, this place is called "Hades."
Or it's sometimes called "the House of Hades," because Hades is the
god of the underworld.
And there's a journey that the soul has to take.
[narrator] The journey was across the fabled River Styx,
or "River of Hatred," with a man named Charon to ferry the soul over.
You have to pay Charon your obols or two obols
to get across the river, and that's why these coins were put in the mouths of
the corpse upon death.
When you got there, the first thing you meet is Cerberus,
this three-headed guard dog, at the door to the underworld.
You went by—because you were a dead man, you were allowed in.
But if you tried to get in
as a live man, you were eaten alive by this thing.
[intense music]
[narrator] In Homer's telling, Hades is a grim and dreadful place.
It is so bleak, no temple for Hades exists anywhere.
The underworld is described
as a place where human spirits suffer an eternity of empty dreams.
[Katerina Zacharia] Hades is terrible and inexorable, but he is not the
punisher of souls like Satan in Christianity.
Psykhe in Greek means "breath,"
It comes from a verb psykhein, which is "to breathe."
Now one—when someone
dies, he no longer breathes.
Psykhe has really been translated as "soul."
Now, psykhes in the underworld have no consciousness.
[narrator] There are two levels to the underworld.
The first,
called Erebus, is where the human soul passes immediately after death.
The second is a deeper and more terrible place called Tartarus.
Those unrepentant and violent souls who have offended the gods are
banished to dreaded Tartarus.
[eerie music]
One of the most famous characters who was put into
Tartarus was a fellow named Tantalus, and Tantalus was made to stand
in a river with a fruit tree over his head, and he was eternally thirsty and eternally
hungry because whenever he reached to drink out of the river, the water would flow
through his hands and he couldn't get it to his mouth, and when he reached
for the fruit of the tree over his head, it would always move just out of reach.
And so he was eternally "tantalized," as we have the word from it now.
narrator] Thus the gods of their stories gave meaning to the different
cycles of life and even the possibility of an afterlife.
They also helped the Greeks establish a morality and a body of ethics.
In ancient Greece, one of the most advanced civilizations
of its time, these stories eventually inspired the birth of a new art form—
the theater.
Later, playwrights such as Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes
dramatized them, allowing the epic tales to come alive for people throughout
the centuries.
[Greg Thalmann] The relation of literature to myth and religious belief
among the Greeks is a very complicated one.
You have to remember
that for them, literature—poetry, especially—was not the preserve of an
educated elite.
It was not even originally, uh, meant to be read.
It was publicly performed.
It was accessible to everyone.
Richard Martin] They had various kinds of performances, they had oral
poetry, choral dancing, drama, but they would never think of it as something
like one category.
Especially, they would never think of reading this material.
You had it performed, and therefore it's much more deeply embedded in
the local culture.
It's not something that only a few people do—read these works.
It's something that everybody hears and sees.
[narrator] Some of the early authors crafted their plays and their poetry
around themes which were critical of the gods—
something which later
philosophers vehemently condemned.
Plato's criticism of traditional literature and of the
stories in them was that the gods essentially didn't act like gods.
I think Plato especially was very uncomfortable with that, because of his own notion
of what a god ought to be.
You can see some of the same critique in Euripides—
in his tragedies, his sense that, you know, gods shouldn't really act the way
that a lot of the myths he's treating dramatically show them.
Certainly, when you look at a drama like the Ion, in which
Apollo is represented as a rapist, you begin to question the value of a god
like that.
[narrator] Some philosophers believe that redemption is the moral
of the story.
By the end of the play, the woman who is raped becomes the
mother of Apollo's son, Ion.
He goes on to become the leader of the city-state of Athens.
Many of the plays reflected the more tempestuous side
of human nature in the conduct of the gods.
Sexuality and affairs of the heart
were controlled by Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, love and fertility.
Just like Apollo, Aphrodite lived a turbulent life.
Aphrodite was connected with warfare through her
union, her affair, with Ares, the god of war.
And they were two famous lovers.
Aphrodite wasn't actually married to Ares— she was married to Hephaestus
or Vulcan, the god of the forge.
But she had this flaming affair with Ares,
the war god.
And the question is, why are these two always getting together?
It's the fury of their mutual passions, which made them two gods that were
beyond the control of all the other gods.
And as the saying goes, you know,
that every lover is a soldier on a campaign.
[narrator] Thus, early Greek writings conveyed life's everyday lessons.
And yet, some of the works reflected a blatantly sexist attitude towards women.
One example is the story of Hippolytus.
He despised women, he despised female sexuality,
he was chaste, chaste, pure.
We'd send him to a psychiatrist, but— pure, pure as the snow.
His stepmother's nurse, handmaid, went to Hippolytus and told
Hippolytus that his stepmother was in love with him.
Hippolytus was appalled.
He was horrified.
When Greek men got together at the drinking parties at
the symposia, we know that they told stories, that they produced poetry,
which made fun of women.
In early Greek culture, women were seen as consumers
of men's effort.
The man had to farm, the woman simply consumed the efforts—
stayed at home, cooked, and was always on the man's back.
And it's a strong misogynistic string in Greek literature all the way through
the 5th and the 4th century.
[narrator] And so, Greek dramas and comedies unfolded in amphitheaters
throughout the land, with all-male casts playing the roles of gods as well
as goddesses, mortal men, as well as women.
But the Greeks were not the only ones absorbed by stories
of deities and heroes.
Others were watching too.
Far to the west, across the Mediterranean, a great new
empire was being born.
[dramatic music]
The Greek gods and goddesses, like classical Greece itself,
would know the ravages of time and change.
As functioning deities, they would eventually slip into
the mists of history.
And yet, they have not completely disappeared.
Even though they're not part of our religion, we still
need these stories.
They're wonderful, rich, richly suggestive tales about
how the world works and what we are as human beings.
Generation after generation
of modern students love—they're fascinated by these myths.
And I think that springs from something we all have in us, which is a desire to make
stories, a need to understand the world by making stories about it.
[narrator] Greek mythology has transcended the centuries coming
down to us not only from the great poets and playwrights, but through the
conduits of many other cultures.
One of the first was Rome, far to the west.
It absorbed much of what Greece had to offer.
[Richard Martin] The Romans discovered Greek religion, really,
in the third century BC, and began to make a bigger deal of it than it had been before.
We know that there had been cultural contact for a long time, but there
was a kind of prestige of the Greeks that the Romans felt they didn't have.
And so they took over, really, the Olympian system, and aligned their own local gods
with more recognizable, high-status Greek gods.
[narrator] In adopting the gods of the Greeks, the Romans imbued the
pantheon of deities with distinctly Roman characteristics.
The first priority
was to assign them Roman names.
Zeus became Jupiter in their terms.
Ares became Mars.
Athena became Minerva.
When I say became, I mean that they had these gods
existing already—Minerva, Mars, Jupiter— but they now aligned them in a new way
that said, "Yes, we're part of a continuum of culture with the higher-status Greeks."
[narrator] Other gods adopted by the Romans include Hera, who became
known as Juno.
Poseidon was renamed Neptune.
Hades reemerged as Pluto.
Aphrodite would forever be immortalized as the goddess Venus.
And so,
the Greek pantheon, to a large extent, became the Roman pantheon.
As mighty Rome developed into an empire, it eventually
occupied a little-known dusty corner of the Middle East called Judea.
Here, the Hebrews clustered around their capital city,
Jerusalem—where a new religion was being born.
Following the crucifixion of Christ,
word rapidly spread of his teachings.
Even Christianity found
connections in Greek and Roman philosophies,
particularly through the Apostle Paul.
We know that Paul was educated in Greco-Roman terms.
He quotes Euripides at least several times in his epistles.
Later on, notions
that had developed in Platonism, especially, became crucial in the ways in which
early Christians tried to make their religion more understandable to highly
educated class in the Greco-Roman world.
In the Orthodox Church even today, the Greek Christian church,
you still see some of the mysticism that you can identify in
the works of Plato in the 4th century BC.
[narrator] The Christian belief that Jesus was the son of God, yet born
of a mortal woman, also resonated with the early Greeks.
[Richard Martin] Because Greek religion was completely comfortable
with the notion of gods interacting with human women, I think it helped in
the spread of Christianity, in an early period, that a narrative like that was
at its core.
And so we'll never know cause and effect, and I certainly don't
want to attribute early Christianity wholly to the Greeks, but it helped that
the groundwork was laid.
[narrator] Despite the enormous cast of divinities that ruled over
the Greeks just a few centuries before Christ was born, a new idea sprang
up among the people—the notion of the existence of only one true god.
The Greek world shifted towards monotheism,
I would say sometime around the 400s and 300s BC, with the advent of philosophy.
And philosophers like Plato and Aristotle who were skeptical of
the Greek religion—the way it was written in mythology—but they did believe in
some supreme force.
Some supreme all-good, all-knowing kind of power.
[narrator] This movement toward monotheism in ancient Greece did not
go unnoticed by the Apostle Paul.
One day in Athens, Paul found himself addressing Greek
citizens from atop the Areopagus, a hill that was a meeting place for a
council of noblemen.
[woman narrator] "But Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said:
'Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are too superstitious.
For passing by and seeing your idols, I've found an altar
also on which was written: "To the unknown god."
What therefore you worship without knowing it—that I preach to you.
God who made the world and
all things therein and hath made of one all mankind to dwell upon the whole
face of the Earth." Acts 17:22.
[narrator] One of the most potent forces that shape Greek thinking
was an awareness of sin.
But 2,000 years ago, the concept of sin meant something
very different than the beliefs held by the early Christians.
The Greek word for "sin," the closest one, is a word
that means "to miss the mark," "to err," "to go wrong."
Now, what does that
mean to sin, if you go too high, it means that you're stepping beyond human limitations.
If you go too low, it means that you're not living up to your fulfillment.
And so, for the Greeks, a sin was really not fulfilling who you are.
[narrator] Though separated from us by untold millennia, the great
pageantry of gods, goddesses, and heroes, of Muses, Fates, and Graces,
of soaring accomplishments and bitter defeats, is as significant today as it was
to the ancient Greeks.
[Constantine] The interesting thing about the Greeks at that
period who venerated these gods, that they gave to the gods the attitude also
of human beings.
There was the fighting, there was the jealousy, there was the adultery,
there was the happiness, there was the truth, there was the peace,
there were all the different things that were going on in everyday life of the human beings.
It was all associated with the gods.
And I think that that is
part of the reason why these things have survived all these centuries in
the minds of people, and identified in the way the Greeks think even today.
[Greg Thalmann] Greek myth is a whole body of narratives.
Say something very complicated about the world, um, they—they speak to a kind of
optimism and a kind of pessimism at the same time.
[Richard Martin] Greek myth as a whole really does tell us, through a lot
of exemplary stories, a lot of different things about the nature of reality and
the nature of life:
What's important.
What we ought to care about.
[Thomas F. Scanton] One of the major lessons is that, to read any of
these stories, which are timeless treatments of big human questions of
personal morality versus the morality of the state and laws that are imposed,
and how do you negotiate these very difficult questions of the best behavior as
a citizen in this state?
Those are addressed by Greek myths and by Greek legends.
And you are left with this feeling that we don't know, really, what these
gods are or who they are, but, you know, we know there's some force out there.
There's some huge force that's controlling our lives, and that we have to keep
an open mind to what that force is doing.
That's why the Greeks can speak
across 3,000 years of history and tell us some questions, if not the answers,
to some of the most perturbing eternal questions in the world.
[narrator] There was another world here once.
And the gods and goddesses and people who lived here still haunt the landscape.
[birds chirping]
Their stories still travel across time.
As long as people
seek a deeper understanding of themselves and their world, ancient Greece lives on.
[woman narrator] "All ye are the gods of this great place.
Grant to me that I be made beautiful in my soul within, and grant that all my external
possessions be in peaceful harmony with my inner man, with myself."
Plato.