Are you familiar with the Image of God concept? It’s inherent in the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Sufism that human beings were created in the image of God. The Ancient Greeks had a different take, however, on creation and the gods.

When we talk about Greek gods and goddesses, we’re talking about mythology. A myth is ‘a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Put simply, the Ancient Greeks made up their gods and goddesses. There was no absolute truth as is practised by faiths today; no scripture and doctrine. Instead, there were stories, told to explain how the world worked.

That is not to say that Ancient Greek gods were not worshipped. They were. Sacrifices and offerings were made to honour and appease the deities (and the monsters, too; in my novel Aphrodite’s Tears, the people of Helios hold a festival each year for Typhoeus, the volcano whose presence is a looming threat over them all; read more at https://hannahfielding.net/staging/1129/typhoeus/).

But as Stephen Fry writes in his wonderful book Mythos, ‘Greeks did not grovel before their gods. They were aware of their vain need to be supplicated and venerated, but they believed men were their equal.’

Humans the equals of gods? It’s certainly a very different dynamic to that of religions founded on the Image of God concept.

Fry writes: ‘Their myths understand that whoever created this baffling world with its cruelties, wonders, caprices, beauties, madness and injustice, must themselves have been cruel, wonderful, capricious, beautiful, mad and unjust. The Greeks created gods that were in their image…’

How easy it is to identify with the god in a myth who is just like a mortal – passionate, emotional, complicated, flawed. It strikes me that these gods having been created in the image of man, not vice versa, is exactly what has made Greek mythology endure for so long. We enjoy the stories of Zeus and Poseidon and Apollo and Hera and Athena and Aphrodite, because they are really the stories of us.

These gods may be awesome, and fearsome, and immortalised in great statues, but in them we see our own likeness – in them we find our humanity.