Euhemerus (Ευήμερος) (working late fourth century B. C. ) was a Greek mythographer at the court of Cassander, the king of Macedon. Greek mythology is the body of stories belonging to the ancient Greeks concerning their gods and Heroes the nature of the world and the origins and significance Cassander ( Greek: Κάσσανδρος, Kassandros; ca 350 - 297 BC King of Macedon (305 - 297 BC was a son of Antipater Macedon or Macedonia ( Greek grc Μακεδονία grc-Latn Makedonía) was the name of a kingdom centered in the northern-most Euhemerus' birthplace is disputed, with Messina in Sicily or Messene in the Peloponnese as the most probable locations, while others champion Chios, or Tegea. Sicily ( Italian and Sicilian: Sicilia) is an autonomous region of Italy. Messene was also the name of a Greek colony in Sicily, initially founded as Zancle and nowadays known as Messina. Chios (Χίος pronounced ˈçio̞s alternative transliterations Khíos and Híos) is the fifth largest of the Greek islands, situated Tegea was a settlement in ancient Greece and it is also a municipality in modern Arcadia, Greece, with its seat in the village Stadio.

He is chiefly known for a rationalizing method of interpretation, known as Euhemerism, that treats mythological accounts as a reflection of actual historical events shaped by retelling and traditional mores. In the skeptic philosophical tradition of Theodorus of Cyrene and the Cyrenaics, Euhemerism forged a new method of interpretation for the contemporary religious beliefs. In ordinary usage skepticism or scepticism ( Greek 'σκέπτομαι' skeptomai, to look about to consider see also spelling differences Theodorus (Θεόδωρος the Atheist, of Cyrene, was a philosopher of the Cyrenaic school who lived around 300 BC. The Cyrenaics were an ultra- Hedonist Greek school of philosophy founded in the 4th century BC supposedly by Aristippus of Cyrene, although many of the principles 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. Greek mythology is the body of stories belonging to the ancient Greeks concerning their gods and Heroes the nature of the world and the origins and significance Living at court in the generation following the superhuman feats of Alexander the Great and Alexander's subsequent deification, with the contemporaneous "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. Alexander the Great ( or, Mégas Aléxandros; July 20 356 BC June 10 or June 11 323 BC also known as Alexander III of Macedon (el Ἀλέξανδρος Γ' Pharaoh is the title given in modern parlance to the ancient Egyptian kings of all periods The Ptolemaic dynasty (sometimes also known as the Lagids, from the name of Ptolemy I's father Lagus) was a Hellenistic Macedonian royal family This article focuses on the cultural aspects of the Hellenistic age for the historical aspects see Hellenistic period. Greek mythology is the body of stories belonging to the ancient Greeks concerning their gods and Heroes the nature of the world and the origins and significance "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. ^[1]

In Classical religion, which lacked a revealed text and a prophetic tradition, a fluid theogony absorbed most contradictory claims. Theogony ( Greek: Θεογονία theogonia = the birth of God(s is a Poem by Hesiod describing the origins and genealogies The tenets of Euhemerus, exceptionally, were attacked, even viciously. ^[2] 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. The Church Fathers, Early Church Fathers, or Fathers of the Church are the early and influential theologians and writers in the Christian Church Other fragments survive quoted by Lactantius in his treatise De Falsa religione ("Concerning False Religion," 1. Lucius Caelius (or Caecilius? Firmianus Lactantius was an Early Christian author (ca 11), a context sympathetic to Christian mythography. Euhemerist ideas apparently also survived in Philo of Byblos, who transmitted a euhemerist view of Phoenician religion, if we may trust the account of him 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"^[3] (see Euhemerism and the early Christians below). The more famous Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE-40 CE was an educated Hellenized Jewish philosopher Phoenicia ( Phoenician: Phoenician nunsvg|12px|נ]]Phoenician nun

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. David Friedrich Strauss (or Strauß; January 27 1808 &ndash February 8 1874 was a German theologian and writer In Epistemology and in its broadest sense rationalism is "any view appealing to Reason as a source of knowledge or justification" (Lacey 286 Johann Gottfried Eichhorn ( October 16, 1752 - June 27, 1827) was a German Protestant theologian of Enlightenment and early Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus ( 1 September 1761 &ndash 10 August 1851) was a German theologian and critic of the Euhemerus's rationalizing, skeptical method, which reduces religion to what we would now call anthropology or sociology, has seemed like the forerunner of those sciences. Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion, makes religion into a kind of hopeful mirage seen by pre-scientific pre-psychoanalytic humankind. Sigmund Freud (ˈziːkmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt born Sigismund Shlomo Freud (May 6 1856 &ndash September 23 1939 was an Austrian Psychiatrist who founded Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud. Written in 1929 and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur The Future of an Illusion ( Die Zukunft einer Illusion) is a book written by Sigmund Freud in 1927 Even Freud, rebuked by Jules Romain^[4] and other friends, worried that he—too much the humanist—had failed to understand the spiritual experience. Jules Romains, born Louis Henri Jean Farigoule ( August 26, 1885 - August 14, 1972) was a French poet and writer and the "Euhemerism" is sometimes used pejoratively to mean naive reductionism by modern secular thinkers, who misunderstand religious behavior by attributing to the pious only those motives (economic, psychological, utilitarian) which are secular.

Contents 1 Euhemerus' Sacred History 2 Euhemerism and the early Christians 2.1 Cyprian 2.2 Arnobius 3 Snorri Sturluson's "euhemerism" 4 Euhemerism in the modern world 5 See also 6 Notes 7 External links 8 References

Euhemerus' Sacred History

Only quoted fragments, mainly in Diodorus Siculus, remain from Euhemerus' main work, a Sacred History ("Hiera Anagraphê"), which 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. As a Literary genre of High culture, romance or chivalric romance refers to a style of heroic Prose and verse Narrative 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;^[5] 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. A persona, in the word's everyday usage is a social Role or a character played by an Actor. Panchaea ( Greek:) is a fictional Island, first mentioned by ancient Greek philosopher Euhemerus in the late 4th century BC The Red Sea is a Salt water Inlet of the Indian Ocean between Africa and Asia. The Arabian Peninsula (in Arabic: شبه الجزيرة العربية šibh al-jazīra al-ʻarabīya or جزيرة العرب jazīrat al-ʻarab)

This lost work references a rational island utopia. Utopia is a name for an ideal community taken from the title of a book written in 1516 by Sir Thomas More describing a fictional Island in the 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. The term Golden age is best known from Greek mythology and legend but can also be found in other ancient cultures (see below Hesiod ( Greek: Hesiodos) was an early Greek Poet and Rhapsode, who presumably lived around 700 BCE In Greek mythology, Pandora (from Greek:, "giver of all all-endowed" was the first woman In Greek mythology, according to tradition the Hyperboreans were a mythical people who lived far to the north of Thrace. In Classical Antiquity, Scythia ( Greek Skuthia) was the area in Eurasia inhabited by the Scythians, from the 8th "He marvelled that among the Greeks those who were skillful in a thing vie in competition those who have no skill judge" Theopompus, a Greek Historian and Rhetorician was born on Chios about 380 BC. India, officially the Republic of India (भारत गणराज्य inc-Latn Bhārat Gaṇarājya; see also other Indian languages) is a country ^[6] 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. The word mythology (from the Greek grc μυθολογία mythología, meaning "a story-telling a legendary lore" Herodotus presented rationalized accounts of the myth of Io (Histories I. Herodotus of Halicarnassus ( Greek: Hēródotos Halikarnāsseús) was a Greek Historian who lived in the 5th century BC ( 484 BC&ndash In Greek mythology, Io (ˈaɪoʊ or /ˈiːoʊ/ World Book «EYE oh», in Ancient Greek Ἰώ) was a priestess of Hera in Argos 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. A listing of Greek mythological beings Many of the gods and goddesses had Roman and Etruscan equivalents. 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. Zeus (zjuːs in Greek: nominative: Zeús /zdeús/ genitive: Diós; Modern Greek /'zefs/ in Greek mythology Crete ( Greek: Κρήτη transliteration: Krētē, modern transliteration Kriti) is the largest of the Greek islands and the Knossos (alternative spellings Knossus, Cnossus, Greek Κνωσός kno̞ˈso̞s also known as the Knossos Palace is the largest ^[7]

It is not easy to judge Euhemerus' importance among pagan thinkers. Cicero's essay De natura deorum ("On the nature of the gods"), iii. Marcus Tullius Cicero ( Classical Latin ˈkikeroː usually ˈsɪsərəʊ in English January 3, 106 BC &ndash December 7, 43 BC was a Roman De Natura Deorum (The Nature of the Gods is a work by Roman orator Cicero written in 45 BC 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;^[8] 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. Hedonism is the Philosophy that Pleasure is of ultimate importance, the most important pursuit Atheism Quintus Ennius (239 - 169 BC was a writer during the period of the Roman Republic, and is often considered the father of Roman Poetry. Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome.

Euhemerism and the early Christians

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. Early Christianity is commonly defined as the Christianity of the three centuries between the Crucifixion of Jesus ( c A fable is a succinct story in prose or verse that features Animals Plants inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are Cyprian, a North African convert to Christianity, wrote a short essay, De idolorum vanitate ("On the Vanity of Idols") in 247 A. This page is about Cyprian bishop of Carthage For other Cyprians see Cyprian (disambiguation. D. that assumes the euhemeristic rationale as if needing 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. Melicertes Μελικέρτης (sometimes Melecertes, later called Palaemon Παλαίμων) in Greek mythology, the son of the In Greek mythology, Leucothea ( Greek: Leukothea (Λευκοθέα English translation: "white goddess" was one of the aspects 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. For the stars see Castor (star and Pollux (star, for the sculptural group in the Prado Museum, see Castor and Pollux (Prado, and for "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 A. The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age civilization which arose on the island of Crete. D. 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. Syncretism consists of the attempt to reconcile disparate or contradictory beliefs often while melding practices of various schools of thought "

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 (to the satisfaction of the modern mythographer). Arnobius of Sicca (died c 330 AD was an Early Christian apologist, during the reign of Diocletian (284 - 305

Snorri Sturluson's "euhemerism"

In the Prose Edda, composed around 1220, the Icelandic bard and historian Snorri Sturluson proposes that the Norse gods were originally historical war leaders and kings whose funereal sites have developed cults. The Prose Edda, also known as the Younger Edda, Snorri's Edda ( Snorra Edda) or simply Edda, is an Snorri Sturluson (1178 – September 23, 1241) was an Icelandic historian poet and politician 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. Odin (ˈoʊdɪn from Old Norse Óðinn) is considered the chief god in Norse paganism. Turkey (Türkiye known officially as the Republic of Turkey ( is a Eurasian Country that stretches In Greek mythology, Priam ( Greek Πρίαμος Priamos) was the king of Troy during the Trojan War and youngest son Troy ( Greek: grc Τροία Troia, also, Ilion; Latin: Trōia, Īlium, Hittite: Wilusa or In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans after Paris of Troy stole Helen from her As Odin travels north to settle in the Nordic countries, he establishes the royal families ruling in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway at the time. The Nordic countries make up a region in Northern Europe called the Nordic region, consisting of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, The Kingdom of Denmark ( ˈd̥ænmɑɡ̊ (archaic ˈd̥anmɑːɡ̊ commonly known as Denmark, is a country in the Scandinavian region of northern Europe "Sverige" redirects here For other uses see Sweden (disambiguation and Sverige (disambiguation. Norway ( Norwegian: Norge ( Bokmål) or Noreg ( Nynorsk) officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Constitutional Thus, while Snorri's euhemerism follows the early Christian tradition, the effect is not simply to discredit the divinity of the gods of a heathen religion on the wane, but (on the model of Virgil's Aeneid), to legitimize the current rulers. Publius Vergilius Maro ( October 15, 70 BCE &ndash September 21, 19 BCE later called Virgilius, and known in English as Virgil or For the group of nine Ancient Egyptian deities see Ennead. The Aeneid (əˈniːɪd in

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. Ancient Rome was a Civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC This article discusses cult in the original and typically ancient sense of "religious practice" (cultus A hero (from Greek grc ἥρως hērōs) in Greek mythology and Folklore, was originally a Demigod, the offspring of a mortal and All theories of religion which give prominence to ancestor worship and the cult of the dead are to a certain extent Euhemeristic. However, euhemerism isn't generally accepted by comparative religion scholars today as the sole explanation of the origin of the idea of gods. 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. The abbé Antoine Banier (1673—1741 a French clergyman and member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres from 1713 was a historian and translator Desiré-Raoul Rochette ( March 6, 1790 &ndash July 3, 1854) was a French Archaeologist. Herbert Spencer ( April 27, 1820 – December 8, 1903) was an English Philosopher; prominent classical liberal

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 Greek Myths (1955). Robert Graves (24 July 1895 &ndash 7 December 1985 was an English Poet, Translator and Novelist. The Greek Myths (1955 is a Mythography, a Compendium of Greek mythology, by the Poet and Writer Robert Graves His suggestions that such myths record and justify the political and religious overthrow of earlier cult systems have been received with 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. Axel Olrik (1864-1917 was a Danish folklorist, and a pioneer in the methodical study of oral Narrative.

See also

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

Notes

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.

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