ABSTRACT
A polytheistic religion gives many different accounts of the divine beings, and these accounts, or theologies, reflect the divine patronage of their inventors. People sometimes raise their eyebrows when they hear of Pagan theology, but in fact the word 'theology' dates from Pagan times and was first used concerning Pagan deities. Theology soon moved out of poetry into sober prose. The philosophers took theology as part of natural philosophy, an account of the nature of the universe which included its divine inhabitants. Most people seem to have taken it for granted that gods and goddesses existed, since among other things people had seen them, in dreams and in the visions which were called 'epiphanies'. The second great school of the ancient world, that of the Stoics, on the other hand, saw the divine power as one and as immanent in the manifest world. Ultimately, the whole universe, both visible and invisible, was itself divine.
