Euhemerus

Euhemerus (Template:Lang-grc [Euhēmeros], "happy; prosperous") (late 4th century BC) was a Greek mythographer at the court of Cassander, the king of Macedon. Euhemerus' birthplace is disputed, with Messina in Sicily as the most probable location, while others champion Chios, or Tegea.

Life

Little is known about Euhemerus's life, and his birthplace is disputed. Classical writers such as Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, and Polybius, maintained that Euhemerus was a Messenian, but did not specify whether he came from the Peloponnesian or the Sicilian Messene, which was an ancient Greek colony. Other ancient testimonies placed his birth at Chios, or Tegea. Most modern scholars however generall agree that Euhemerus came from the Sicilian Messene (Messina). Diodorus Siculus is one of the very few sources which provides other details about Euhemerus' life. According to Diodorus, Euhemerus was a personal friend of Cassander, king of Macedonia (c. 305 - 297 BC) and the most prominent mythographer for the Macedonian court. Sometime in the early 3rd century BC Euhemerus wrote his main work Sacred History ("Hiera Anagraphê").

Euhemrus' Sacred History

Only quoted fragments, remain from Euhemerus' main work, a Sacred History. Diodorus Siculus included fragments from Euhemerus’ writings in the Arabian geography of his fifth book and in the mythology of his sixth book. The sixth book of Diodorus’ Bibliotheca is lost, but Eusebius cites a fragment from it at length in his Praeparatio Evangelica. The ancient Roman writer Ennius first translated Euhemerus' work into Latin, but this translation is also lost. Lactantius however in the 3rd century AD included substantial references to Ennius' translation in the first book of his Divine Institutes. From these extant fragments and references, modern scholars have been able to "compile what is presumably a fairly complete picture of Euhemerus’ work".

Euhemerus' work may have taken the form of a philosophical fictionalized travelogue, universally accepted today as a philosophical Romance, incorporating imagined archaic inscriptions, which his literary persona claimed to have found during his travels. Euhemerus claims to have traveled to a group of islands in the waters off Arabia. One of these, Panchaea, is home to a utopian society made up of a number of different ethnic tribes. His critique of tradition is epitomized in a register of the births and deaths of many of the gods, which his narrator persona discovered inscribed on a golden pillar in a temple of Zeus Triphylius on the invented island of Panchaea; he claimed to have reached the island on a voyage down the Red Sea round the coast of Arabia, undertaken at the request of Cassander of Macedon, according to the Christian historian of the fourth century AD, Eusebius of Caesarea. Euhemerus references a rational island utopia. The ancient Hellenic tradition of a distant Golden Age, of Hesiod's depiction of human happiness before the gift of Pandora, of the mythic convention of idealized Hyperboreans, made concrete in the legendary figure of the Scythian philosopher-hero Anacharsis, or the idealized "Meropes" of Theopompus had been recently enriched by contacts with India. Euhemerus apparently systematized a method of interpreting the popular myths, which was consistent with the attempts of Hellenistic culture to explain traditional religious beliefs in terms of a rational naturalism. Herodotus presented rationalized accounts of the myth of Io (Histories I.1ff) and events of the Trojan War (Histories 2.18ff). Euhemerus went farther, asserting that the Greek gods had been originally kings, heroes and conquerors, or benefactors to men, who had thus earned a claim to the veneration of their subjects. Zeus for example, was according to him, a king of Crete, who had been a great conqueror; the tomb of Zeus was shown to visitors near Knossos, perhaps engendering or enhancing among the traditionalists the reputation of Cretans as liars.

It is not easy to judge Euhemerus' importance among pagan thinkers. Cicero's essay De natura deorum ("On the nature of the gods"), iii.53ff, contains some euhemerist views, which are put in the mouth of Cotta, but whether as an explication or as a refutation has been argued; how widely this reductionist system actually spread among the educated class is debatable. It is said that Euhemerus was a firm upholder of the Cyrenaic philosophy, and that by many ancient writers he was regarded as an atheist: his work was translated by Ennius into Latin, but that work too is now lost.

Euhemerism

He is chiefly known for a rationalizing method of interpretation, known as Euhemerism, that treats mythological accounts as a reflection of historical events, but shaped by retelling and traditional mores.

The intellectual climate was prepared for this development, Jean Seznec observed at the start of his Survival of the Pagan Gods. Rationalizing philosophical speculation on the divine in the human soul and the recent history of Alexander the Great's Dionysian expedition to India alike had prepared the way. "In the skeptic philosophical tradition of Theodorus of Cyrene and the Cyrenaics, Euhemerus forged a new method of interpretation for the contemporary religious beliefs. Though his work is lost, the reputation of Euhemerus was that he believed that much of Greek mythology could be interpreted as natural events subsequently given supernatural characteristics. Living at court in the generation following the superhuman feats of Alexander the Great and his subsequent deification, with the contemporaneous deification of the Seleucids and "pharaoization" of the Ptolemies in a fusion of Hellenic and native Egyptian traditions, Euhemerus was trained in the rational philosophizing current of Hellenistic culture; the two strains meet in his materialist rationalizing of Greek myth. "Euhemerus may be credited as the writer who systematized and explained an ancient and widely accepted popular belief, namely that the dividing line between gods and men is not always clear," S. Spyridakis, among others, has observed.

In Classical religion, which lacked a revealed text and a prophetic tradition, a fluid theogony absorbed most contradictory claims. Unusually, the tenets of Euhemerus were attacked, even viciously. Of the Latin translation, only a few brief fragments have come down to us, where they were quoted in patristic writers, especially in a fragment said to be from Diodorus Siculus, preserved by Eusebius in his history of the Church. Other fragments survive quoted by Lactantius in his treatise De Falsa religione ("Concerning False Religion," 1.11), a context sympathetic to Christian mythography. Euhemerist ideas apparently also survived in Philo of Byblos, who transmitted a euhemerist view of Phoenician religion, according to what was preserved in the pages of the Christian historian Eusebius of Caesarea: "It was Eusebius' object to refute the pagans, not recover the history of Phoenicia." (see Euhemerism and the early Christians below).

In modern times Euhemerism has been compared, specifically by David Friedrich Strauss, with many nineteenth-century German rationalists, such as Johann Gottfried Eichhorn and Heinrich Paulus, in their interpretations of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Euhemerus's rationalizing, skeptical method, which reduces religion to what is now called anthropology or sociology, has seemed like the forerunner of those sciences. Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion, considered religion as a kind of hopeful mirage by pre-scientific pre-psychoanalytic humankind. Freud, rebuked by Jules Romains and other friends, worried that he—too much the humanist—had failed to understand the spiritual experience. "Euhemerism" is sometimes used pejoratively to mean naive reductionism by modern secular thinkers, who misunderstand religious behavior by attributing to the pious only secular motives (economic, psychological, utilitarian).

Euhemerism and the early Christians

The usefulness of euhemerist views to early Christian apologists may be summed up in Clement of Alexandria's triumphant cry in Cohortatio ad gentes: "Those to whom you bow were once men like yourselves."

The Book of Wisdom

The Book of Wisdom, a deuterocanonical book, has a passage, Wisdom 14:12–21, giving a euhemerist explanation of the origin of idols.

Cyprian

The early Christian apologists deployed the euhemerist argument to support their position that pagan mythology was merely an aggregate of fables of human invention. Cyprian, a North African convert to Christianity, wrote a short essay, De idolorum vanitate (On the Vanity of Idols) in 247 AD that assumes the euhemeristic rationale as though it needed no demonstration. Cyprian begins:

That those are no gods whom the common people worship, is known from this: they were formerly kings, who on account of their royal memory subsequently began to be adored by their people even in death. Thence temples were founded to them; thence images were sculptured to retain the countenances of the deceased by the likeness; and men sacrificed victims, and celebrated festal days, by way of giving them honour. Thence to posterity those rites became sacred, which at first had been adopted as a consolation.

Cyprian proceeds directly to examples, the apotheosis of Melicertes and Leucotheia; "The Castors [i.e. Dioscuri] die by turns, that they may live," a reference to the daily sharing back and forth of their immortality by the Heavenly Twins. "The cave of Jupiter is to be seen in Crete, and his sepulchre is shown," Cyprian says, confounding Zeus and Dionysus but showing that the Minoan cave cult was still alive in Crete in the third century AD. In his exposition, it is to Cyprian's argument to marginalize the syncretism of pagan belief, in order to emphasize the individual variety of local deities:

From this the religion of the gods is variously changed among individual nations and provinces, inasmuch as no one god is worshipped by all, but by each one the worship of its own ancestors is kept peculiar.

Euhemeristic views are expressed also in Tertullian, De idololatria the Octavius of Minucius Felix.

Arnobius

Arnobius' dismissal of paganism in the fifth century, on rationalizing grounds, may have depended on a reading of Cyprian, with the details enormously expanded.

Isidore of Seville

Isidore of Seville, compiler of the most influential early medieval encyclopedia, devoted a chapter "De diis gentium" to elucidating with numerous examples and elaborated genealogies of gods, the principle drawn from Lactantius, "Quos pagani deos asserunt, homines olim fuisse produntur." ("Those whom pagans claim to be gods were once mere men.") Elaborating logically, he attempted to place these deified men in the six great periods of history as he divided it, and created mythological dynasties. Isidore's euhemeristic bent was codified in a rigid parallel with sacred history in Peter Comestor's appendix to his much translated Historia scholastica (written ca. 1160), further condensing Isidore to provide strict parallels of figures from the pagan legend, as it was now viewed in historicised narrative, and the mighty human spirits of the patriarchs of the Old Testament.

Martin of Braga

Martin of Braga in his De correctione rusticorum wrote idolatry stemmed from post-deluge survivors of Noah's family who began to worship the Sun and Stars instead of God. In his view the Greek Gods were deified descendants of Noah who were once real historical personages.

Snorri Sturluson's "euhemerism"

In the Prose Edda, composed around 1220, the Christian Icelandic bard and historian Snorri Sturluson proposes that the Norse gods were originally historical war leaders and kings. Odin, the father of the gods, is introduced as a historical character living in present-day Turkey, tracing his ancestry back to Priam, the king of Troy during the Trojan War. As Odin travels north to settle in the Nordic countries, he establishes the royal families ruling in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway at the time.

And whatever countries they passed through, great glory was spoken of them, so that they seemed more like gods than men.

Thus, while Snorri's euhemerism follows the early Christian tradition, the effect is not simply to discredit the divinity of the gods of a religion on the wane, but (on the model of Virgil's Aeneid), to legitimize the current rulers.

Euhemerism in the modern world

As among archaic tribes it is possible to trace the evolution of family and tribal gods from great eponymous chiefs and warriors, so, euhemerism claims, it is equally possible to see those gods as abstractions of the tribal ethos, personalized with names. Among the Romans the gradual deification of ancestors and the apotheosis of emperors were prominent features of cult, an extension of Greek veneration of heroes. Another example could be the recent connection of a bible passage with an Anatolian treaty

All theories of religion which give prominence to ancestor worship and the cult of the dead are to a certain extent euhemeristic.

In the preface to Arthur Golding's 1567 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses into English, Golding offers a rationale for contemporary Christian readers to interpret Ovid's pagan stories. He argues:

The true and everliving God the Paynims did not know: Which caused them the name of Gods on creatures to bestow.

Humanity was endowed with "little seeds and sparks of heavenly light" which motivated them to seek the divine, but mistakenly perceived gods in creatures, rivers, trees, fire, wind, virtues, vices, and abstract concepts. Additionally, Golding argues that Ovid's tales must be interpreted euhemeristically, as allegories for such concepts:

Then must we think the learned men that did these names frequent,

Some further things and purposes by those devices meant.

By Jove and Juno understand all states of princely port:

By Ops and Saturn ancient folk that are of elder sort:

By Phoebus young and lusty brutes of hand and courage stout:

By Mars the valiant men of war that love to fight it out...

In 18th-century France, the abbé Antoine Banier, in his Mythologie et la fable expliqués par l'histoire (1711 and later editions), was frankly Euhemeristic; other leading Euhemerists were Étienne Clavier, Guillaume de Sainte-Croix, Desiré-Raoul Rochette, Emile Hoffmann and, to a great extent, Herbert Spencer.

Rationalizing methods of interpretation that treat some myths as traditional accounts based upon actual historical events are a feature of some modern readings of Greek mythology. The twentieth century poet and mythographer Robert Graves offered many such "euhemerist" interpretations in his telling of The White Goddess (1948) and The Greek Myths (1955). His suggestions that such myths record and justify the political and religious overthrow of earlier cult systems have been received with at least some skepticism. Axel Olrik, in Principles for Oral Narrative Research (1921; translated by Kirsten Wolf and Jody Jensen, 1992) denies (§30) that such readings could be valid.

See also

• Palaephatus
• Prodicus of Ceos
• Leon of Pella
• Mythological kings of Sweden
• List of legendary kings of Britain
• Mythological Anglo-Saxon kings

External links

• Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities 1898: Euhemerus
• Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911: Euhemerus
• Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol V: Cyprian, "On the Vanity of Idols" e-text
• The Ancient Library

References

• Smith, William. 1870. "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology." (London: C. Little and J. Brown) sub "Evemerus"
• Abbé Banier's Ovid commentary Englished The Euhemerist tradition in Banier's "historical" commentaries on Ovid's Metamorphoses.
• Brown, Truesdell S. "Euhemerus and the Historians" The Harvard Theological Review 39.4 (October 1946), pp. 259–274. Includes a comprehensive redaction of the existing fragments of Euhemerus' Sacred History.