Greek

The Greek gods are a family, and the family has a history of violence. Hesiod sets it out plainly: Ouranos is overthrown by his son Kronos, Kronos by his son Zeus, and the threat of a third overthrow is the reason Zeus swallows Metis. Succession here is not inheritance. It is seizure, and the pantheon's stability rests on the last usurper having successfully closed the sequence.

Zeus rules, but his rule is bounded in ways a sovereign in other traditions is not. He presides over an assembly that argues with him, he is deceived by his wife and his brother, and above him sits an impersonal allotment that even he is not shown reversing. The Greek arrangement is a monarchy with a constant undertone of contingency.

The roster is nominally fixed and practically open. The Twelve are a real cultic category, but the lists differ, Hestia and Dionysos trade places, and the whole set sits inside a far larger population of gods, daimones, nymphs and heroes with local cult. Foreign deities entered readily, and were usually identified with a god already held rather than added beside one.

The door from mortal to immortal is genuinely open, which is rarer than it looks. Herakles is burned out of his mortal part and received on Olympos; Asklepios, Dionysos and Ganymede each cross the line by a different route. Below full divinity, hero cult gave hundreds of dead men and women real, located, sacrificial worship. The line between the human and the divine in Greek religion is a graded slope rather than a wall.

The Greek pantheon is unusually well documented and unusually badly balanced, because what survives is mostly poetry, and poetry had reasons of its own.

Homer and Hesiod are the foundation, and the Greeks said so themselves: Herodotos credits the two of them with having given the Greeks their gods' names, honours and shapes. That is a remarkable admission. It means the canonical account was understood, even in antiquity, to be a literary settlement rather than a revelation, and Hesiod's Theogony in particular reads as an argument for one arrangement of the divine world among several available.

Tragedy then does something different again. The Athenian stage takes the same gods and puts them under moral pressure, and a reader who takes Euripides as a straightforward report of belief will end up describing a religion nobody practised.

Underneath the literature is a much older and much drier layer. The Linear B tablets from Knossos and Pylos, administrative records rather than myth, already name Zeus, Poseidon, Hera and Dionysos in the Bronze Age, centuries before Homer. They tell us these gods received offerings; they tell us nothing whatever about the stories attached to them.

The cult record fills part of the gap. Inscriptions, sacred calendars, dedications and the physical remains of sanctuaries show a religion organised locally, by city and by deme, in which what mattered was the correct performance of a rite at a particular altar. Delphi and Olympia served all the Greeks. Everything else was somebody's neighbourhood.