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Greek Campaign.

   
A couple of additional points.

The Greeks disagreed quite a bit about their gods, but for the most part were quite capable of thinking of them as overseeing morality in a general way (Zeus punishes you if you mistreat a guest, etc.) and at the same time in the myths as behaving like people would if they had very little to fear from others. It is, of course, worth remembering that ancient Greek society had slaves: the notion of having overwhelming power over another individual that would allow you to behave towards them pretty much as you liked was not some hypothetical thing, but a lived reality that you could see all around you every day, one that (as in all societies with slavery) included things like sexual assault, violent punishment for tiny slights (etc.).

Part of this is that the myths weren’t sacred scripture — they weren’t necessarily “true” in the way that Christian and post-Christian ideas inevitably expect “religious stories” to be. In fact, quite a number of the best-known Greek “myths” aren’t age-old traditional stories — they were literary creations with specific historical origins and known authors who came up with them, drawing on traditional settings and characters, but sometimes to a very minimal degree. If you went to see a Greek tragedy that featured gods, you would be aware that this didn’t have to be the “truth” about the gods, but what Aeschylus or whoever wrote the play wanted the gods in question to do onstage.

The conflict between the ways that the gods behaved in myths and the idea that they nevertheless enforced conventional human morality eventually bothered philosophers (“Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is bad among humans” - note that this assumes that gods do in stories what the authors want!). The notion that gods had to be good by definition is a reasonably common one among philosophers.

But probably such ideas made little impact among the mass of the population, who were not well educated, at least until they formed part of the package of Christian theology. They were probably comfortable with the notion of gods who were basically like big powerful people, and, like people really are, not entirely consistent.

You can see this in the Hades-and-Persephone story (=The Homeric Hymn to Demeter). Hades doesn’t actually commit sexual assault within the terms in which Greeks understood it. It’s an arranged marriage: Zeus and Hades agree in advance that Persephone will be Hades’ wife. This conforms to Greek practice, in which fathers had near-absolute power over their families, were expected to arrange marriages for their daughters, and were the ones whose consent was required for a marriage to be legitimate. And it’s only very recently in modern societies that the idea of sexual assault as something that can happen within marriage has been accepted, let alone the ancient Greeks.

Now, that’s not the whole truth about the way that the story is told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. The poem does emphasize Persephone’s terror. And even more, it emphasizes her mother Demeter’s grief. It’s a mythic heightening and exaggeration of the experience of a daughter separated from her mother by marriage. A Greek woman would normally marry at puberty. She would leave a household in which she had been comparatively sheltered and had intimate daily relations with her family, to enter one that was entirely alien to her. And her mother would come close to “losing” her daughter.

The version of the myth that has become the “standard” one is about exploring those aspects of women’s emotional experiences. But it’s not about the notion that the standard Greek marriage is somehow wrong - it’s about (at most) the price that women pay for it, and about the need to balance marriage with other important social relations (Hades and Demeter end up sharing Persephone).

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Originally Posted by Voord 99 View Post
The version of the myth that has become the “standard” one is about exploring those aspects of women’s emotional experiences. But it’s not about the notion that the standard Greek marriage is somehow wrong - it’s about (at most) the price that women pay for it, and about the need to balance marriage with other important social relations (Hades and Demeter end up sharing Persephone).
In essence, a coming-of-age story... where the simple innocence of childhood is lost, and the insights and maturity of adulthood is gained. An ancient equivalent of "Cat's in the Cradle" written for women, if you will.

Stories about the gods could be so diverse that at times the only thing a god shared with his namesake at the temple down the way was his name. Delian Apollo and Pythian Apollo were so different that there might be a separate temple to both in a big city. Romans took it even further by pasting over local deities with the names of their own gods—in that way Diana was the Virgin Lady of the Hunt in most of the Empire, but in Ephesus she was a fertility goddess.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Chaz Hoosier View Post
Stories about the gods could be so diverse that at times the only thing a god shared with his namesake at the temple down the way was his name. Delian Apollo and Pythian Apollo were so different that there might be a separate temple to both in a big city. Romans took it even further by pasting over local deities with the names of their own gods—in that way Diana was the Virgin Lady of the Hunt in most of the Empire, but in Ephesus she was a fertility goddess.
Also both romans and Greeks had multiple deities patronizing over same domain. Like there is Thanatos, the god of death and Hades the god of death.

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Originally Posted by GrzegorzGD View Post
Also both romans and Greeks had multiple deities patronizing over same domain. Like there is Thanatos, the god of death and Hades the god of death.
Yes, but it's usually different aspects of the same domain. So it's more like Thanatos is a god of dying, while Hades is a god of the dead.

I think that all gets really fuzzy, to be honest. If you look at Eros and Aphrodite, for instance, it’s arguably most straightforwardly expressed as that Eros is the thing that Aphrodite is the goddess of. “Eros” is the Greek word for sexual desire. (English has no direct equivalent, due to Christianity).

But in literature and art (not sure about actual cult - was Eros ever the object of cult?) you express the idea that Aphrodite is the goddess of eros by making him a being with arms and legs (and wings) who is the child of Aphrodite. You come up with a myth in which Ares is his father, and so on.

Thanatos, similarly, is the Greek word for “death” - he’s perhaps not so much the god of death as actual Death itself personified in myth as a god. More or less so Heracles can wrestle him. There is, I think, exactly one well-known story about Thanatos, the Alcestis story. I wonder how much evidence there is that Thanatos was a figure that most Greeks were even familiar with as a “someone,” not a “something,” outside that particular story.

A lot of this is going to collapse in translation, where you have to choose between saying that Heracles wrestles Thanatos, wrestles Death, or wrestles death. But these were all the same in Greek.

But Hades is arguably not exactly the god “of” anything to as significant an extent as most of the major gods. He’s perhaps more conceptualized as Zeus’ brother who rules over the land of the dead. I think Greeks tended to stress the idea of a god as a god of something when that was something that affected your life in a way that made it worthwhile to sacrifice to that god. Hades is not much the object of worship, because, well, why would you?

As always, lots of Greeks, living in different places across a wide area, over hundreds of years of time, with beliefs about the gods that weren’t dogmatic and didn’t have the idea of “doctrine” attached to them — it’s all never going to be systematic or easy to generalize about. Especially given that the most famous versions of most stories are preserved in specific works of literature of different types and periods, many of them in Latin, and deliberately trying, in many cases, to put a new spin on an old story, or even come up with a new story entirely. Plus the stories are really important for us, but it was the actual influence of the gods on day-to-day life that was more likely to be important for the Greeks, and they’re not necessarily the same thing — Hera is, notoriously, a rather malign figure in most (not all) of the myths in which she is prominent, but the way in which she seems to have been regarded in actual worship seems to have been highly positive.

This is one thing that D&D rarely stresses enough: how do you experience the gods in ritual? Greek rituals could be weird, and unique to a particular god in a particular community. There was an Athenian festival (I think in honor of Demeter, but I forget) where everyone got together and sat around in public drinking in morose silence.

Instead, I often get the impression that no matter who the god is, your experience of religion in D&D is basically Christianity: you go inside a church (sorry, “temple”) and the priest preaches a sermon on the doctrine of that god, and there’s some sort of ritual act which probably isn’t actually taking communion, but might as well be. Plus the fluff about clerics always presents private individual prayer as a really important category of acts that embody your relationship with a god. Obviously, you could and did pray to a god as an individual in response to some need, if you were an ancient Greek pagan, but it didn’t have the central importance that it has in Christianity.

Depends on the setting mostly but in general, the biggest issue is that Greek Heroism is not the same as our new version of Heroism.

In Greek Heroism, Kratos from God of War series is indeed considered a hero, same as Perseus for example. Greek Heroism is more about deeds than morality, if you killed a big monster...that's all they care about, not if you did it for the right or wrong reasons.

Sure from a game of D&D point of view, it's understandable wanting to have Good and Evil Deities...so you can play an actual game, as most of the time...you aren't trying to be as realistic as possible and probably use more pop culture references of the gods to make your campaign playable.

You could of course take the angle that all the deities are neutral in some way, only aligned on the chaos/lawful axis, with most mortal worshipers trying to interpret their gods so you can have both evil worshipers of Zeus and good Worshipers of Zeus...and using the excuse they don't understand the will of the gods. I mean it could be interesting...but well from my experience as a GM most of the time...players don't really care. It's nice for worldbuilding...but players don't care.

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Originally Posted by Chaos Emerald View Post
Greek Heroism is more about deeds than morality, if you killed a big monster...that's all they care about, not if you did it for the right or wrong reasons.
I think that’s a little oversimplified. An awful lot of Greek tragedy, for instance, is about moral questions such as “Can you bury your relative’s body if he’s a traitor to the city?” and “What if, to take revenge for the death of your father, you have to kill your mother?” They’re ancient Greek moral questions (they’re disproportionately about your family obligations), but they’re moral questions.

Quite a lot of Greek myth is not about monster-slaying. Those stories are disproportionately the ones that we associate with it, because we generally acquire our sense of Greek mythology from retellings for children, which, oddly enough, tend to focus on stuff that appeals to children. (Perseus is not a particularly prominent figure in Greek myth as a whole, for instance, but he’s big in modern retellings for children, because his story is unusual in that it has prominent elements of the gods giving him magical gear to complete his mission, which is the sort of thing that children like.)

Cycles of revenge, adultery, warfare, hospitality: Greek myth is arguably more about these things. It’s just that it’s hard to get children’s stories out of them.

Take the Odyssey, for instance. How many people, because they encounter the story as children, think it’s basically about a guy who travels at sea and meets monsters like the Cyclops? That fantastic stuff is confined to one-sixth of the poem. Well over half of the poem is about the situation on Ithaca, which is to say it’s about a situation in which, while a guy is away, people have moved in on his property, are putting the moves on his wife, are sleeping with his slaves, and are threatening the life of his son. And about how he takes graphically violent revenge for all that and resumes control of his household. It’s about questions of right and wrong. We absolutely don’t want to confuse the Homeric notions of what those are with our notions, but that’s not the same as questions of right and wrong being irrelevant to the story.

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Sure from a game of D&D point of view, it's understandable wanting to have Good and Evil Deities...so you can play an actual game, as most of the time...
Well, but then why use the Greek gods at all, as the original poster wants to do? If you’re going to use the Greek gods, I think it makes sense to make them recognizable as such. That involves ditching the notion of Good and Evil gods. In fact, I think it involves ditching alignment entirely except as a vague shorthand for individual personality. It doesn’t involve ditching morality, but it’s not going to do well with morality reduced to an X- and a Y-axis.

Basically, if you’re going to use alignment, I think it probably works best with a somewhat Tolkienesque high fantasy set-up, in which you have an objective force of Good at war with an objective force of Evil and these are real things. Like Tolkien, you may be best off using Christianity. That’s dead easy for players to recognize, and has plenty of pop-culture references to draw on, if that’s your concern. But you could also use a Zoroastrian dualist set-up, which is easy to explain.

I wouldn't go that far. Greek philosophers talked a lot about what the good life entailed—they just didn't think the gods oversaw that behavior in any consistent way.

Greek philosophers did actually worry quite a bit about the goodness of gods, so that’s not really true, I think. It’s ordinary people who didn’t expect gods to be consistently “good.”

But philosophers also didn’t think that the stories about gods doing things that the philosophers viewed as evil were true, except as (e.g.) allegories. If you take Greek philosophy, as distinct from everyday Greek notions, as your point of departure for designing your view of the gods in a game, you will end up in a very different place from the Greek gods as popularly understood (then and now). Obviously, you would have to pick a particular Greek philosophy, as they had quite different views of the gods. But I don’t think that you will find a Greek philosopher who is known to have accepted the possibility of “evil” gods before quite a way into the Roman Empire.

(If then - I’m covering myself because Neoplatonism confuses me, and I don’t know what philosophical interpretations of Manichaeism were out there. But we would definitely be getting into that sort of thing, with roots in Zoroastrianism.)




 

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