Greek Religion

Like "Christian religion", Greek religion refers to a complex set of ideas, rituals and values that we could easily spend the rest of our lives researching.  And we're not going to do that.  Most of us are already familiar with the key Greek gods and goddesses, so we won't spend our time examining them, either.  Instead, it's worth outlining some basic differences between the Greco-Roman beliefs and our Judeo-Christian heritage.

There Is No "Bible", and Homer Is It
Aside from the Homeric legends and oral mythologies, the Greeks and Romans never wrote down a dogmatic set of religious beliefs, laws and practices -- in part because there really is no, single, unified "Greek people".  We can almost say that The Iliad and The Odyssey were the "Ancient Greek Bible", but that terminology pollutes the concept with our own conception of what a "bible" is or should be.

Suffice it to say that The Iliad and The Odyssey were studied the way Jews and Christians studied the bible, that it was accepted as "true" in the religious sense, so that Homer was "truly inspired" by the Muses the way Moses and Abraham spoke to God etc.  And further it was seen as the foundation for discussions of righteous behavior.  But the comparison sort of ends there.

The Gods Are Not "Moral Actors"
Often the hardest thing to wrap our Judeo-Christian-Islamic minds around is that the Greeks do not look to their gods for moral guidance.  This is obviously a radically different conception of what a god is or is for.

We could say that while the Hebrew God makes man in his own image, the Greeks made their gods in their own image.  The cosmology is essentially inverted:  the Greeks reasoned that if humans are selfish and petty and tend to create social discord, then the forces of the universe must also be selfish and petty and tend to create social discord. 

So they reasoned that if there is moral discord in this life, it must come from gods experiencing moral discord.  Thus, the gods are not the place to root one's morality.  Note, then, that the Greek gods become upset when Greeks violate ritual elements of their religion (consider Chrsyses and the beginning of The Iliad or why Odysseus' men do not return home) rather than when the Greeks treat each other "immorally".  This explanation does not entirely explain a Greek gods' attitude toward human behavior, but it explains much of it.

Thus, the Greeks blame the Trojan war on divine folly, which leads to human folly:  The gods choose Paris, son of Trojan King Priam, to decide who is the most beautiful goddess: Hera, Athena or Aphrodite.  All three goddess offer Paris bribes, and Aphrodite's bribe wins out: she offers him the love of the most beautiful woman alive (Hera offered great kingdoms and Athena military might and wisdom).  Of course that most beautiful woman was Helen, who was already married to King Menelaus. Oops. 

But also note that the goddesses themselves were petty and jealous and even willing to use bribery to win.  In some ways, then, we'll see that for the Greeks, winning is everything. Winning is, itself, an inherent moral good.  We inherit this element of our own competitive culture from these books.

Ethical Culture vs. Religious Dogma: Virtue and Honor
However, immoral behavior can and does upset the social order in a manner that is both logical and somewhat religious, usually in the form of determining the "fate" of one's descendents (we'll look more at that when we examine Classical Greek tragedy); the root cause of human folly may be divine folly, but that folly is in turn passed down through time by human error and cause and effect.

"Man is a political animal" say Aristotle, by which he means we are social creatures, pack animals; we cannot and do not live alone and we are innately dependent upon one another. This is especially true for the Greeks.

So how does an immoral cultural maintain ethics? The short answer is "virtue" and "honor" and, I believe, love, or mutual responsibility and respect rooted in Humanism. 

"In short, honor is attributed to those who benefit a people, and so individuals benefit their communities [polis] in the selfish pursuit of renown" (Aerin Trosky). Conversely, dishonor is given to those who harm their own polis.

Honor is perhaps the key to understanding The Iliad (and perhaps The Odyssey, as well): it's what drives selfishness -- each man fights to have status over the others, to be seen seen as "great" or, perhaps, greater than or the greatest -- and honor is what what reins in that selfishness: Achilles can live a long life if he runs from battle, but he will be remembered with dishonor, or he can die young, in battle, but be remembered after his death as an honorable soldier.

It's easy for us to judge Achilles as being too selfish -- and certainly this is a fair judgment -- but it's worth recalling that we are judging him from the comfort of our seats, here at home, and that like Achilles most every one of us has chosen our selfish lives over serving, and perhaps dying for, our country, despite the fact that we are at war.

The Greeks are interested in this difficult, ambivalent, ironic reality: that both our instincts and our cultures drive us toward selfishness, and this can drive us to true greatness, but ultimately the greatest honor goes only to those who sacrifice the self, in their case in the greatest of all sacrifices: to die young on the battlefield.

So, as you judge Achilles' struggle with these questions, make sure to judge yourself, as well.