Euhemerus

Euhemerus (Greek: Εὐήμερος [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.

[edit] Life

Little is known about Euhemerus's life, and his birthplace is disputed. Classical writers such as Diodorus Siculus,^[1] Plutarch,^[2] and Polybius,^[3] 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 generally agree that Euhemerus came from the Sicilian Messene (Messina).^[4] Diodorus Siculus is one of the very few sources which provides other details about Euhemerus' life. According to Diodorus,^[5] 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").

[edit] Euhemerus' 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.^[6] The sixth book of Diodorus’ Bibliotheca is lost, but Eusebius cites a fragment from it at length in his Praeparatio Evangelica.^[7] 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.^[8] Various other fragments of importance also also found in the later literature of Augustine of Hippo.^[9] From these extant fragments and references, modern scholars have been able to "compile what is presumably a fairly complete picture of Euhemerus’ work".^[10]

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;^[11] 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.^[12] 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. Euhemerus asserted 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.^[13]

[edit] Euhemerism

Euhemerus is chiefly known for a rationalizing method of interpretation, known as "Euhemerism" that treats mythological accounts as a reflection of historical events, or mythological characters as historical personages but which were shaped, exaggerated or altered by retelling and traditional mores. In more recent literature of myth, such as in Bulfinch's Mythology, Euhemerism is called the "Historical Interpretation" of mythology.^[14] Euhemerism is defined in modern academic literature as the theory that myths are distorted accounts of real historical events.^[15] Euhemerus was not the first to attempt to rationalize mythology through history, as euhemeristic views are found in earlier writers, including Xenophanes, Herodotus, Hecataeus of Abdera and Ephorus.^[16][17] However Euhemerus is credited as having developed the theory in application to all myths, considering mythology to be "history in disguise". ^[18] In a scene described in Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates offers an euhemeristic interpretation of a myth concerning Boreas and Orithyia:

Therefore in Socrates euhemeristic approach of the myth of Boreas abducting Orithyia, he rationalized the story of Boreas, the northern wind, as having pushed Orithyia off the rock cliffs through the equation of Boreas having being a natural gush of wind and Orithyia as a historical personage. However Socrates despite holding some euhemeristic views, mocked the concept that all myths could be rationalized, noting that the mythical creatures of "absurd forms" such as Centaurs and the Chimera could not easily be explained.^[20]

In the ancient 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 or historical events subsequently given supernatural characteristics through distortion or retelling. Subsequently Euhemerus was considered to be an atheist by his opponents, most notably Callimachus.^[21]

[edit] Deification

Euhemerus' views were rooted in the the deification of men, usually kings, into Gods through apotheosis. In numerous ancient cultures, kings were exalted or venerated into the status of divine beings and worshipped after their death, or sometimes even while they ruled. Dion, the tyrant ruler of Syracuse in Sicily was deified while he was alive and modern scholars consider his apotheosis to have influenced Euhemerus' views on the origin of all Gods.^[22] Euhemerus was also living during the contemporaneous deification of the Seleucids and "pharaoization" of the Ptolemies in a fusion of Hellenic and native Egyptian traditions.

[edit] Tomb of Zeus

Euhemerus argued that Zeus was a mortal king who died on Crete, and that his tomb could still be found there with the inscription bearing his name.^[23] This claim however did not originate with Euhemerus, as the general sentiment of Crete during the time of Epimenides of Knossos (c. 600 BC) was that Zeus was buried somewhere in Crete. For this reason, the Cretans were often considered atheists, and Epimenides called them all liars (see Epimenides paradox). Callimachus, an opponent of Euhemerus' views on mythology argued that Zeus' Cretan tomb was fabricated, and that he was eternal:

A later Latin scholia on the Hymns of Callimachus, attempted to account for the tomb of Zeus. According to the scholia, the original tomb inscription read: "the tomb Minos, the son of Jupiter" but overtime the words "Minos, the son" wore away only leaving "the tomb of Jupiter" which had misled the Cretans into thinking that Zeus had died and was buried there.^[25]

Influenced by Euhemerus, Porphyry in the 3rd century AD claimed that Pythagoras had discovered the tomb of Zeus on Crete and written on the tomb's surface an inscription reading "Here died and was buried Zan, whom they call Zeus".^[26] Varro also wrote about the tomb of Zeus, but few accounts could agree of its precise location on Crete.

[edit] Euhemerism and Christians

Hostile to paganism, the early Christians, such as the Church Fathers embraced euhemerism in attempt to undermine the validity of pagan Gods.^[27] 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."^[28]

[edit] 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.

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Wisdom of Solomon

[edit] Early Christian apologists

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.

Eusebius in his Chronicle employed euhemerism to argue the Babylonian God Baal was a deified ruler and that the God Belus, was the first Assyrian king.^[29]

Euhemeristic views are found expressed also in Tertullian, De idololatria the Octavius of Minucius Felix and in Origen.^[30] 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, compiler of the most influential early medieval encyclopedia, devoted a chapter "De diis gentium"^[31] 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.^[32] 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.^[33]

[edit] Middle Ages

Christian writers during the Middle Ages continued to embrace Euhemerism, such as Vincent of Beauvais, Petrus Comestor, Roger Bacon and Godfrey of Viterbo.^[34][35]

[edit] 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.

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.

[edit] Euhemerism in the modern world

Euhemeristic intepretations of mythology continued throughout the Early modern period from the 16th century,^[37] to modern times. In 1711, the French historian Antoine Banier in his Mythologie et la fable expliqués par l'histoire ("The mythology and fables of the ancients, explained") presented strong arguments for a euhemerist interpetation of Greek mythology.^[38] Jacob Bryant's A New System or Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1744) was also another key work on Euhemerism of the period, but argued so from a Biblical basis. Of the early 19th century, George Stanley Faber was another leading Biblical euhemerist. His work The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (1816) proposed that all the pagan nations worshipped the same gods, who were all deified men. Outside of Biblical influenced literature, some archaeologists embraced euhemerist views since they discovered legends or myths could verify archaeological findings. Heinrich Schliemann was a prominent archaeologist of the 19th century who argued myths had embedded historical truths. Schliemann was an advocate of the historical reality of places and characters mentioned in the works of Homer and claimed to have discovered artefacts of Greek mythological figures (see Mask of Agamemnon).

Herbert Spencer embraced some euhemeristic arguments in attempt to explain the anthropocentric origin of religion, through ancestor worship. Rationalizing methods of interpretation that treat some myths as traditional accounts based upon actual historical events are a continuous feature of some modern readings of 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.^{[39][40][41][42][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]}

[edit] See also

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

[edit] Notes

[edit] 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

[edit] 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.