And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you

with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust.

Today's episode, Created in Our Image, Xenophonies against Greek religion.

In Homer's Iliad, there's a rather steamy bit in which Hera decides to seduce her husband Zeus.

The reason Hera wants to do this is that she's backing the Greek invaders against the Trojans, and Zeus is on the Trojan side. So in order to help the

Greeks she needs to get Zeus to stop paying attention for a while and a surefire way to

get a man's attention is to seduce him, right?

So with a little help from Aphrodite and the God's sleep, whom she bribes by promising

to let him marry one of the divine graces, she persuades Zeus to lie with her, after which he falls into a deep post-coetal snooze.

While he's asleep, Hector, the Trojan's mightiest warrior, is badly wounded.

Zeus, as you can imagine, is really annoyed when he wakes up.

He says to Hera, in the translation of Martin Hammond,

Impossible creature. It is surely your vile scheming that has put

godlike Hector out of the battle and panicked his army. You may soon be the first to feel

the benefit of your troublesome mischief when I flog you with blows of the whip.

Now, you may find it odd to think that the ancient Greeks told stories like this about the gods, the very same gods that they sacrificed to,

prayed to, built temples to. But there are plenty of stories like this. For example,

according to Heseid, Zeus's father Kronos cut off the genitals of his own father, Uranos, with a sickle, and then Kronos's mother threw them in the water.

It was out of the resulting froth that Aphrodite was born. In another

tale Aphrodite and Aries get caught committing adultery. The Greeks found it possible to

recount such stories while still finding their gods worthy of worship.

Their understanding of the gods found full expression in the poems of Homer and Heseid.

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