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.
