Ed Simon at The Hedgehog Review: By 1140, when the Italian monk Gratian compiled the first collection of ecclesiastical laws, the Corpus Juris Canonici, the last Olympic Games were 747 years in the past, held in the same year that the Oracle of Delphi delivered its last prophecy, a little more than a century before the Byzantine emperor Justinian I closed Plato’s Academy, in 529 CE. Ever since Rome became Christian, starting with its legalization by Constantine I in 313 and then its establishment as the religion of the empire by Theodosius 380, Europe had existed in the long dusk of its classical past, the ancient rites discarded or suppressed, the oracles made mute, the gods gone silent. Yet within Gratian’s compendium, with its stipulations for restitution and penitence, there is a curious section that mandates a “penance for forty days on bread and water” for those who have “observed Thursday in honor of Jupiter.” In another section, there is discussion of the punishment warranted for those caught worshipping Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt. If these penitentials reflect a reality in the twelfth century, are we then to imagine that in the age of Peter Abelard and Hildegard von Bingen and of the Cathedrals at Notre Dame and Westminster Abbey, that there were people still genuflecting before Jupiter?
Even though Gratian was drawing on older, possibly outdated sources, his rulings raise a question: When exactly did Jupiter cease throwing his thunder bolts, Apollo driving his chariot, Bacchus preparing his reveries? Because European Christianization was often a top-down affair, as when Theodosius declared the empire officially Christian, common sense would suggest that many, at least for a time, preserved the old ways. Any familiarity with this process in the first few centuries of the Common Era attests to the complexity of the transition, as pagan elites feuded with the Christian rabble, until the tables were turned and the believers in the classical gods came to be found only among a rusticated peasantry, such as with the ethnic minority of the Maniots of Laconia and Messenia who are said to have performed the ancient rites and tended to the sacred groves as late as the tenth century.
Unlike the Egyptian deities or the Babylonian gods hidden behind impenetrable hieroglyphics and cuneiform, the Greek and Roman pantheon endured by surviving as living memory among the descendants of those who once worshipped them, even if a full understanding of them was often occluded. That depaganization was a slipshod and erratic affair is well attested, from the endurance of the Norse gods in the names of days of week among Germanic-speaking peoples to the holiness of oak trees among the Celts, from the Finno-Ugric animism that was practiced by the so-called “barbarians” at Rome’s peripheries to the paganism of Lithuania which was astoundingly the official religion of that kingdom until the thirteenth century. “The transition from pagan to Christian is the point at which the ancient world still touches ours directly,” writes Robin Lane Fox in Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World from the Second Century AD to the Conversion of Constantine. “We are heirs to its conclusion.” But even while the Vatican is decorated with statues of Athena and Laocoon, or Renaissance paintings such as Michelangelo’s celebrated School of Athens, which includes depictions of Apollo and Minerva, we tend to ignore that Mediterranean paganism endured in the same way that Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavic polytheisms did.
To paraphrase the title of the 1983 book by French philosopher Paul Veynes, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, do we still believe in them? Paradoxically, the omnipresence of the Olympians explains why we seldom wonder where they have gone. Because we are so familiar with them as figures, we acknowledge their persistence even without believing them in any strict sense. Certainly, in the centuries after the conversion of the empire, when the members of the Greco-Roman pantheon were recast as demons rather than deities, they inspired a different kind of belief. The Church Father Justin Martyr writes in his second-century First Apology about “those who are called gods,” listing Dionysius, Apollo, Persephone, Aphrodite, and Asclepius as “spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places,” not gods but devils. A pagan convert to Christianity at a time when the old religion was still dominant, Martyr’s position was a theological mainstay into the Middle Ages, but the never-entirely-eclipsed presence of the Greek pantheon in European art and literature—if not worship—makes one question if Apollo and Dionysius were ever entirely reduced to the demonic.
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