ABSTRACT
Homer and Hesiod recorded numerous stories about the gods, and their works reflect many of the beliefs about the gods held by the Greeks in the period under discussion (cf. doc. 12.10). In the Iliad the gods have many negative characteristics: they are jealous, capricious, cruel, selfish, devious, petty, vindictive, and obstinate, behaving, in fact, exactly as human beings do. The traditional view of the gods in Homer was not without its sceptics and a number of the pre-Socratic philosophers as part of their questioning of conventional beliefs criticized the traditional mythology of the Olympian religion and its ceremonial and rites of worship (see docs 12.12-16; cf. 9.32-35). But these sceptics only serve to confirm the rule: most Greeks believed in the gods about which Homer and Hesiod wrote, and traditional Olympian religion remained the normal form of belief in the period under discussion.
