Greeks Case

Fahdir Deen

ACE 15-2219

Prof. Susan Budd

Midterm Assignment

I chose to read the chapter "Myth and Religion" from the book, "The Greeks," by HDF Kitto. This chapter gave me a great understanding why Greeks believed in so many different gods. How the Greeks were able to create all these stories, and how they were able to pass these stories down from generation to generation.

Before we are able to understand the multiple stories of these gods, we must first understand the people that lived during this time. Majority of the Greeks were uneducated farmers and simple people of this time. The put their trust in and belief in the people that they felt were smarted than them. Some of these individual were poets, and noble man.

In the early days the gods that the Greeks believed were the simplest one. Some of these gods were sky, earth and water gods. These were the main gods of this time, and those gods were the people were concern with. As time went on and curiosity grew, people started asking more questions as to why things happen. They turned to learned people of their time for these answer. This is how the myths were born. Since even the educated Greeks during this time could not truly explain or answer certain questions, they created stories to answer these questions. Myths became explanations. As soon as one poet created a story another poet would create another. These stories were then used in plays, which cause these stories to spread like wildfire. This was easy for the common people of this time to understand. As the years went by these stories were told and retold.

The majority of Greek gods we hear about today are mostly Myth. Because they stories intrigue a person interest, and were actually written by poets for plays and performance we as individual tend to gravitate to these stories. These myths give gods a human like essence which we relate to. This is why the original gods have taken a back seat to these myth gods we all know today.