Why did the ancient Greeks have so many gods?

Spectator

28-05-2025

Writing in a lesser organ, Matthew Parris wondered whether most ancient Greeks 'really, sincerely, did believe in their bizarre pantheon of gods'.
Belief in a single god was at that time limited to two peoples: Jews and Zoroastrians (and Egyptians once, briefly). To everyone else, perhaps the sheer variety of the world, the extraordinary generative power of nature and the impossibility of making secure predictions about anything suggested a multitude of powers at work. Since it was obvious that earth and sky combined to control nature – man's only resource – it was not unreasonable for the ancient Greeks to see those features as the first two gods and then, constructing them as a human couple (the family being such a central Greek concern), to assume they generated not only other gods but the whole physical world too. The farmer-poet Hesiod (c. 680 bc) named more than 300 such gods, from Zeus and the Olympian gods at the top to Night, Day, Sleep, Oceans, Mountains, Rivers, Winds, Hades and so on, all with different functions. Result: you name a feature of human life, there was probably a god for it, all the way down to gods of weeding, muck-spreading, reaping and mildew.
But what did those gods require? Obviously, what humans required, that is, respect, in the shape of acknowledgement. That could consist of a prayer, an offering left on an altar, or (at the communal level) a hecatomb (100 oxen sacrifice). And what did humans hope for in return? Primarily, the means of life, especially 'the blessings of the gods visited on them, for ploughing and for harvest, each in its season, with unbroken regularity' (Isocrates). That was achieved as long as the rituals were properly carried out – the sole function of priests, male and female. But if, say, Athenians felt that the gods could help their political ambitions, that was something for the democratic assembly to discuss.