Greek Mythology God and Goddesses Documentary

[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.