Overview

Despite the rousing stories of male heroism in battles, the Trojan War transcended the activities of its human participants. For Homer, it was the gods who conducted and accounted for what happened. In the first part of this book, the authors find in Homer s Iliad material for exploring the everyday life of the Greek gods: what their bodies were made of and how they were nourished, the organization of their society, and the sort of life they led both in Olympus and in the human world. The gods are divided in their human nature: at once a fantasized model of infinite joys and an edifying example of engagement in the world, they have loves, festivities, and quarrels. In the second part, the authors show how citizens carried on everyday relations with the gods and those who would become the Olympians, inviting them to reside with humans organized in cities. At the heart of rituals and of social life, the gods were omnipresent: in sacrifices, at meals, in political assemblies, in war, in sexuality. In brief, the authors show how the gods were indispensable to the everyday social organization of Greek cities.

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Reviews

An accessible and well-written work... It manages the difficult task of actually bringing the thoughts of some ancient Greeks to life and it is a mine of information on Greek religious texts... It is certainly a book anyone with a serious interest in Greek religion should read. -- Classics

""An accessible and well-written work... It manages the difficult task of actually bringing the thoughts of some ancient Greeks to life and it is a mine of information on Greek religious texts... It is certainly a book anyone with a serious interest in Greek religion should read."" - Classics

'Though the material is basically well known, the authors treat it in a highly original and stimulating manner, applying the perspective of social anthropology to mythic material normally viewed in simply narrative terms. The authors manage this feat with great success, and they force us to rethink the nature of the Greek gods, to see them as projections of Greek mental and social structures, as part of a continuous, homologous cultural whole rather than as a divine apparatus set apart for purely theological or literary purposes. The writing style is often witty, charming; the whole approach is very intellectually engaging.'Joseph Russo, Haverford College

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