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).
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).