Europe to AD 1500

Abstract

By contrast to the earlier civilizations in the Levant, in Ancient Greece, the core country of the Olympic civilization, we find a more complex attitude to the human predicament. Although here, too, gods were important and death constituted a disturbing event in social life, neither became the object of the degree of concern that the former had generated in Mesopotamia and the latter in Egypt. On the whole, the gods in ancient Greece tended to look more like men than did the gods of Egypt (which often took the form of animals) and were less powerful than those of Mesopotamia. The Hellenic gods were also more intimately involved in human matters. A more numerous category of demigods, or heroes, some of them born from liaisons of gods with humans, made the line of demarcation between the two species of beings less clear-cut.