The Gods of Olympus

The Greek gods and goddesses are not central to Herodotus’s Histories in the way they are central to Homer’s poems, the Iliad and Odyssey. In the Histories, the gods’ temples are often mentioned, and certain rites are cataloged, but the deities themselves are not active players in Herodotus’s account. Herodotus doesn’t meet Hermes, or hear any anecdotes from grey-eyed Athena.

Who counts as a Greek god or goddess is also not a simple binary “in” or “out” list. This category expands and contracts over an alarmingly long period of time. And what makes someone a god, rather than, say, a demigod (like Heracles), or some other kind of immortal (nymphs, Fates, Furies, etc.), is “unstable,” as scholars like to say.

What follows is a list of the twelve Olympian gods and goddesses that were likely well-known to Herodotus’s audience towards the end of the fifth century.

Olympian gods are a specific, Mt Olympus-dwelling group of deities (but even here we have to introduce a caveat: Poseidon very much lives in the ocean). The Olympian gods are not necessarily the most important, or most powerful; they are simply the ones with the mountaintop real estate. Once I have listed The Twelve, I will tidy up with some deities who were also known to the Greeks, but who did not dwell on the Mountain.

I have arranged the list in something of a “birth” order, developed by the Greek poet Hesiod, pictured here. It is from Hesiod that we get an early attempt at settling the question of the pantheon, in his Theogony, and roughly the “birth” order for each of the gods. Scholars (for instance, Martin Litchfield West, who was a British philologist and classical scholar) put the Theogony around 730–700 BCE — a couple of centuries before Herodotus. I have also included the Roman name by which the gods were also known.

God	Description	Image
Aphrodite / Venus	Goddess of love, beauty, and desire. Hesiod tells us that Aphrodite was born from the severed genitals of the primordial god Uranus — one of the protogenoi, the gods who came before the Titans and the Olympians. Homer, in a rival telling, makes her the daughter of Zeus instead.
Hestia / Vesta	Goddess of the hearth, home, and domestic life.
Demeter / Ceres	Goddess of the harvest, agriculture, and the earth’s fertility.
Hera / Juno	Goddess of marriage, women, and family.
Poseidon / Neptune	God of the sea, earthquakes, and horses.
Zeus / Jupiter	God of the sky, thunder, and law.
Athena / Minerva	Goddess of wisdom, strategic warfare, and crafts.
Apollo & Artemis / Diana	Apollo: god of prophecy, music, and healing. Artemis: goddess of the hunt, wilderness, and childbirth.
Ares / Mars	God of war, violence, and bloodlust.
Hephaestus / Vulcan	God of fire, the forge, and craftsmanship.
Hermes / Mercury	God of travelers, boundaries, and trickery.

Other gods, not part of The Twelve, but part of the pantheon of Greek deities, include the following:

Dionysus, whom the Romans called Bacchus, is sometimes part of The Twelve (replacing Hestia). There is what scholars call “real instability” here. Dionysus is the god of wine, ritual, and theater.

Hades and Persephone: Hades is considered a chthonic deity, which is just fun to say. Ka-thonic. Ka-thonic. His domain (assigned to him after a game of lots with Zeus and Poseidon) is the Underworld, and he is considered to be Lord of the Dead. Persephone is the daughter of Demeter, and was, depending on the source, kidnapped, or something less than kidnapped, by Hades, and was made his queen. Though neither is mentioned in Herodotus’s Histories, Hades, the physical location of the Greek underworld, where all dead souls were sent, is.

Pan: Pan is the least human-appearing of all the gods. He appears as a satyr, with the hairy legs and hooves of a goat, but the upper body of a man. He is the god of the wild, and shepherds, and rustic music. Herodotus reports Pan appearing to the runner Pheidippides on Mount Parthenium before Marathon, complaining that Athens neglects him (Histories 6.105–106); Athens believed it and built him a shrine on the Acropolis with an annual torch-race.

Helios: Helios is one of the Titans, the “parents,” if you will, of the Olympian gods. He is a personification of the Sun itself, though in later tradition — especially from the Hellenistic period onward — Apollo increasingly took on that role in the popular imagination. Helios — or, rather, a temple of his — is mentioned in the Histories: at 2.73, in his account of the phoenix, Herodotus describes the bird’s supposed visits to “the temple of the Sun” in Egypt.

Hecate: Hecate is a goddess of witchcraft, crossroads, and is associated with the moon. You may have come across her first in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where she and the Weird Sisters have a confab and then dance around a bit. (That section, by the way, is considered by some scholars to not be Shakespeare, but more likely from Thomas Middleton.)

Asclepius: Asclepius is the god of medicine, and his snake-entwined staff has been a symbol for doctors and hospitals and healthcare providers. His daughters are the Asclepiades:

• Hygieia (health)
• Iaso (recuperation)
• Aceso (healing)
• Aegle (good health)
• Panacea (universal remedy)