30th April 2005, 2:09 PM
DJ, you're making a fundamental error. To Greeks, it wasn't myth... at least, not to most of them. No more than the Bible is myth to you. Yes, there were lots of stories, but that's mainly because this is from before most things got written down... so it's natural that there will be many stories, and many versions of the gods. The pantheon is a lot more complex than just listing the gods and saying 'each one was in charge of this'... but even so, the stories would probably be thought by most people to be true. Sure, not all would. But the majority were religious, and that meant believing in the gods, and that meant believing in some of the stories, at least, unless you had some different idea of what religion is... and even then (like Plato, with his world of forms), with a philosophy Christians can come closer to accepting, a good bit of liberal interpretation is needed to get it away from being at least partially polytheistic.