Why people hating on Zeus equals to hating on a whole ancient society and… it’s kinda dumb
If you have been in the part of social media that discusses ancient religions or ancient mythology you might know Zeus is hated badly. If you worship Zeus like I do I’m pretty sure you are aware of how many people actually waste times of their live doing bad jokes of how every woman on ancient Greece was pregnant with Zeus’s kid or another type of bullshit, and I’m tired of that. There are already like 100 posts on other Zeus worshippers giving their take on this topic but you know what? I want to be the 101 so here I am. I’f you hate Zeus I ask you nicely to grab your coffee, water, tea, whatever, sit and read this post.
this post is written with a target audience of people who do not have much knowledge aside from the myths and what social media say, I’ll be including the very basic theological and cultural aspects of Ancient Greece in this post so let’s consider this a baby course into epithets and the human kind changing their ethic code through time.
Before we officially start I’m sure some Zeus haters already have arguments to throw at me as soon as they finish reading this post so let me tell you, as a MUN delegate who’s obsessed with debate, some argument starters I won’t even read if you start a sentence with them:
“I believe or I think” I’m sorry but I don’t care about your personal biases I want facts.
“X media thing portrays” x media or x author is not a reliable source of information, unless it’s a historian with good background resources or reliable sources I won’t even take it in mind
“In other religions…” this is hellenism not other religions
“But in x myth” myths are not literal
“But x deity” all deities are different
Anyways, let’s start with what’s a myth, the merriam webster dictionary says a myth is “a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural”. My religion teacher back on catholic school also added to this definition a “moral code or cultural reflection religions implied into their followers”, and it’s accurate.
In baby words, myths explain things our society can’t explain while also reflecting our culture and behaviours.
History has shown us that many religions don’t take their myths completely literally, most times they take them as metaphors or teachings to follow or simply they use them as propaganda to increase certains individual power, and this includes Ancient Greeks. If a king wanted to increase his power to scare people that may want to rebel he could easily say he was the child of Zeus, which is an explanation to why so many kings and heroes were kids of the all-mighty deity. Ancient Greeks also had to find a way to explain different phenomenons, and as many cultures before and after them, myths were a perfect way of doing so. To finish with myths and their uses, as many religions did and still do, the ancient Greeks needed a way to spread lessons to their people without the need of sitting them down and literally teaching them. Instead of doing this they preferred giving examples of things not to do. What makes Hellenism so different to actual modern religions is that the practice was and is more important that the actually texts, that can be a base but at the end of the day they are not the structure of the religion.
Now, a huge mistake many people commit is thinking the myths we nowadays read are the original myths. That’s a mistake. Ingrid Holmberg says in her essay titled as The Creation of the Ancient Greek Epic Cycle “Their research (addressing Milman Parry and Albert Lord.) and the research of their followers has revealed that the Greek epic oral tradition formed a huge, interconnected, and variegated web of legendary and mythical narratives that comprised the corpus of the epic cycle(…).” Harvard university also addresses this topic by saying “Basically, the “question” came down to this: were the Homeric poems composed with or without the aid of writing? Parry’s project, the comparing of Homeric poetry with the living oral traditions of South Slavic heroic poetry, led him to conclude that the Homeric texts were indeed the products of oral composition.”
So tell me, years of investigation affirms that the myths were told from mouth to mouth, the poets did not write their original work down but after many years later someone did… the version written is a version passed generation from generation by someone who heard them from their parents who heard them from their grandparents that might have edited and changed the original version for hundreds of years. Knowing all this areyou’re still going to judge a culture and a religion through myths? Really? Because that’s plainly dumb.
Let me give you an example, I write you a message and then pass it through google translator 20 times, and send it. And actually did! The message I’ll translate 20 times is “Hello dear readers of the internet, this is an experiment with google translator to explain how dumb is to literally judge a myth that has been changed hundreds of times. Not only that, a myth that reflected a society with different a ethic code, in some hundreds of years if society still exists they are going to judge some things we do… so em don’t waste your time on that”. After passing that message through 20 different languages in google translator this is how it ended up: Hello, dear internet reader, you will be judged not only by this, but also by some of the hundreds of years that we have done with the growth of social networks … so don’t waste time. Don’t waste.
I’m not trying to say that historians and their translations are as bad as google translator, I know this people have studied years to do what they do, I’m just saying that the original stories were told so many times that we have hundreds of adaptations and changes. Here’s an example, if you read a copy of the iliad written by x guy and then grab another copy written by another guy… you’ll find many differences in the translation.
Now that we got the translation clear thing you’ll probably still say “yeah anyways still myths say Zeus is a pr3d4tor who cheated on his wife muuultiple times”. And to that I’ll laugh ten minutes because yeah but no. Look at my beautiful hazel and eyes and tell me, do you think Ancient Greek men cared about women? And how they were treated? and how they were portrayed in the moment of explaining things?
If you say yes I beg you to go study some history.
A year a go I went down the rabbit whole of homosexuality in the ancient world, wrote an essay on it, and I found out men repeled women and they saw them as baby machines (i mean, some still do) so some societies had this idea that the closest relationship to love you could have with someone was with another man. So, understand that the ancient world didn’t give a damn about women. Most myths shows them as trophies, that’s no surprise for anyone at this point. So of course, they saw women as baby machines and as myths are reflections of society, do you really expect the Ancient Greeks to portray them as something else aside baby creators? Nooo!!!! Ofc they were not going to do that, they needed mothers to give an explanation to the hundreds of kings saying they were Zeus’s kids, and they found them.
Okay now, some of you may ask why did he “cheat” on Hera… more cultural aspects being reflected. Here’s what Jennifer Larson the writer of Ancient Greek cults has to say:
Now that we closed the marriage ethic issue The Zeus has many child joke or insult is even dumber because kids were so important for the social status in that era that they stablished the social status. During all Human’s story, money establishes your place in the social status: the more you have the higher you are. This also applied in the Ancient Greece. By having more kids it meant you had more to offer and to sustain your family, basically more kids = more money = more power = higher rank.
Studying children and childhood is of great importance because it provides insight into social norms and social life in ancient Greece. Children were important for the parents, the home, and city. Not having children led to inability to pass on the property and wealth of the father.
If Zeus, the KING of the gods and mortals, father of humanity, doesn't have a lot of children then what do you think it would do to how Ancient Greeks perceived him huh. If they measured by kids ofc their higher deity had to have a lot because that gave him power, please, it’s pure logic. The fact that he has multiple kids is a perfect reflection of how the Ancient Greece society acted, do you really want to sit down and complain about it? Why don’t you instead start thinking of a way of changing that capitalist mindset that still rules our society instead of bullying an old civilization and their cults.
—End of the cultural rant—
Okay cultural part has finished, let’s dive into my favorite topic ever: epithets. And I actually did like 3 polls on this, both on my twitter and my instagram, asking if my followers knew what an epithet was. I always had this thought that one of the reasons many people hate on deities is because they only see one side of their multiple-side self… and ofc the answer was no, they did not:
And epithets are soooo important to understand a deity, So assuming some people might not know what epithets are here is a brief summary extracted from a previous post of mine addressing epithets and their importance: Literal definition of epithet: an adjective or phrase expressing a quality or attribute regarded as characteristic of the person or thing mentioned.Let me give you an example: A friend of yours loves reading, they love it so freaking much, so one of your teachers is like “oh pepito the reader”, it’s obvious that pepito is a reader.Now examples with deities. Demeter Chthonia (of the Earth). WHAT DO WE ASSUME KIDS?! That Demeter is an Earth deity. Duh. And like that with all the deities.
Epithets basically tell us how deities were perceived when worshipped, and many of the people who love judging Zeus have ignoring epithets as their favorite hobby so here I am, giving you a list of my favorite ones to take in mind:
AGO′NIUS (Agônios), a surname or epithet of several gods. Aeschylus (Agam. 513) and Sophocles (Trach. 26) use it of Apollo and Zeus, and apparently in the sense of helpers in struggles and contests.
AGORAEUS and AGORAEA (Agoraia and Agoraios), are epithets given to several divinities who were considered as the protectors of the assemblies of the people in the agora, such as Zeus
ALASTOR (Alastôr). an epithet of Zeus, describing him as the avenger of evil deeds.
EVA′NEMUS (Euanemos), the giver of favourable wind
HETAEREIUS (Hetaireios), the protector of companies or associations of friends
HY′PATUS (Hupatos), the most high
LECHEA′TES (Lecheatês) i.e. the protector of childbed
NOMOS (Nomos), a personification of law, described as the ruler of gods and men.
PANHELLE′NIUS (Panellênios), i.e. the god common to, or worshipped by all the Hellenes or Greeks
PHY′XIUS (Phuzios), i. e., the god who protects fugitives
POLIEUS (Polieus), “the protector of the city;”
SOTER (Sôtêr), i. e. “the Saviour”
Theos Agathos - The Good God
MEILIKHIOS (Milichius) Gracious, Merciful
After reading all this epithets I want to ask one last time, do you still think Zeus is a jerk? When he has the literal epithet of being a Good God? A merciful one? A protector? THE PERSONIFICATION OF LAW?
A fact aspect I want to mention is how people love to completely erase the good sides of Zeus portrayed in many myths. In the Iliad Zeus loves one of his most loved sons, he wants to go and revenge him because he’s an amazing dad but he knows that if he does that he would be impartial and injustice to the other deities who have lost children but haven’t been able to do anything about it. Instead he mourns in silence just to refrain from making other deities feel less privileged, this happens in the freaking Iliad and I’m sorry but I think that is a perfect example of how good Zeus is even if myths are not literal.
IZeus is more than the character modern media converted him into, he’s way more than that. He’s a deity, with multiple aspects and multiple stories that have adapted to fit into into ancient societies idea of what was a higher deity. All the arguments people have against him show that they do not understand how myths work and they do not understand that ancient times came with ancient ideals.
So please, research and form your own criteria before hating on something you don’t actually know about. Give yourself the opportunity to listen all sides of the story and then after that you can say whatever you want. Most importantly, give yourself the opportunity to learn.
Hopefully this is my last post regarding this matter, if I quite changed your mind in any type of way then that’s great, if I didn’t that’s on you. That’s all I have to say and thank you for reading the post complete!
The Harvard post I quote at the beginning of the article is this one, if you have time please check it out : https://chs.harvard.edu/curated-article/gregory-nagy-orality-and-literacy/
