The sources of these tales range from Homer to Ovid, a span of about eight hundred years. Yet these myths show a certain consistency. Most of them revolve around some conflict. The Greeks were contentious and loved fights, contests, battles of wit, trials. The Homeric epics, the Olympic games, the dialogs of Plato, the drama festivals, the public trials, and the recurrent warfare between Greek cities all bear witness to the prevalence of conflict in Greek culture. Of course conflict arises in any society, but the ancient Greeks made a 'way of life of it and created a dynamic but very unstable civilization.
In these myths of the gods we can locate the source of conflict in a keen sense of honor. The reason the Greeks accepted these diverse gods is that they behaved in ways similar to the Greeks. Although Olympian morality was almost nonexistent, the gods and goddesses possessed a very sharp sense of what was due them. The Greeks were a proud people, and they created gods and goddesses who lived by pride. Handsome, vigorous, immortal, these deities were exceedingly jealous of their own honor. A common theme of these myths was that mortals who infringed the rights of the gods suffered terrible punishments. Arachne, Actaeon, Teiresias, Anchises, Metaneira, Pentheus, and Adonis are cases in point. Another frequent theme was that disputes among the gods must be settled by arbitration. Poseidon and Athena, Apollo and Hermes, Aphrodite and Persephone, and Demeter and Hades had to settle their arguments in this way. And often one or both of the disputants were unhappy at the outcome. A heaven full of proud deities is just as unstable as a country in which pride is rampant. The only thing that held Olympus together, in fact, was the might of Zeus, who presided as supreme judge. Gods like these would have found the Sermon on the Mount unintelligible.
Three of the myths recounted in this section are vegetation myths. The story of Demeter is connected to the annual birth and death of grain, while that of Dionysus is related to the cycle of the vine. Unlike the other gods, both deities must undergo great suffering, Demeter through the loss of her daughter and Dionysus through his own dismemberment. Moreover, in each tale the underworld plays an important part. As the kingdom of Death it stands for the state to which every living thing must come. But the fact that Persephone and Dionysus are able to emerge from it, just as grain and grapes are reborn each year, holds out the hope of resurrection to mortals.
The third vegetation tale, that of Aphrodite and Adonis, is a restatement of the myth of Ishtar and Tammuz, which appears under "Babylonian Mythology." The Greeks tended to turn Ishtar's story into a parody of vegetation myths. The quarrel between Aphrodite and Persephone seems like little more than the wrangling of two matrons over a common lover.
Again we notice the ascription of personality to the gods. Generally the personality depends upon a god's functions. Thus it is natural that Poseidon be tempestuous as the god of the sea, or that Artemis be mannish as the goddess of the forest, or that Hermes be clever as a god of commerce and thievery, or that Aphrodite be seductive as the goddess of love, and so on. Yet while the gods gained in vividness and particularity from this process, they lost any transcendent quality they might have had and became almost parochial in their appeal. Once their characters, functions, and deeds had been defined, the Greek gods really could not develop anymore. For all their glamour they became lifeless stereotypes. And the end result was that people ceased to believe in them.
