1 Hour of Ancient Greek History and Lore Explained

The earliest recorded pushback against Greek myth didn't come from an outsider to the tradition, looking to undermine a core element of ancient Greek culture.

In fact, it came from within the culture itself, and it came much earlier than you would expect.

In the sixth century BC, a poet and thinker named Xenophanes of Colophon launched what might be the first sustained intellectual critique of anthropomorphic religion in Western history.

His argument was devastatingly simple.

Humans invent gods that look like themselves.

He pointed out that the Thracians imagined their gods with red hair and blue eyes, while the Ethiopians depicted theirs with dark skin.

He went further, suggesting that if horses and cattle had hands and could paint, they'd draw gods that looked like horses and cattle.

And this thinker wasn't some fringe crank shouting into the void.

He was widely read, widely discussed, and his ideas rippled outward through Greek intellectual life for centuries.

Around the same period, early Greek natural philosophers were already proposing non-divine explanations for phenomena that myth had traditionally attributed to the gods.

Thales of Miletus argued that earthquakes weren't caused by Poseidon's trident, but by the earth floating on water.

Anaximander proposed that life originated from moisture acted upon by the sun, not from the creative whims of Prometheus and some hunks of clay.

These thinkers weren't atheists in the modern sense, but they were systematically removing the gods from their explanatory role in the natural world.

This is arguably more radical than simply denying they exist.

since it suggests that even if they do, the Greeks may not have it right.

If anyone illustrates the complexity of Greek attitudes toward myth, it's Plato.

On one hand, he was arguably the most influential religious thinker in the Greek tradition.

On the other, he wanted to ban Homer and Hesiod from his ideal city.

His objection wasn't that the myths were false in some literal sense.

His problem was that they depicted the gods behaving badly, engaging in deception, jealousy, adultery, and violence.

He believed these stories corrupted the moral character of citizens who heard them.

In his republic, he proposed a radical program of censorship.

Only myths that portrayed the gods as perfectly good and perfectly rational would be permitted.

What's fascinating here is that Plato didn't reject myth as a form.

He actually invented his own myths, elaborate allegorical stories designed to communicate philosophical truths he felt couldn't be expressed through pure argument alone.