Euhemerus
Euhemerus, whose Greek name meant "happy" or "prosperous," gave his own name to an entire way of reading myth. He lived in the late fourth century BC, and today he is remembered mainly for one radical claim: that the gods people worshipped had once simply been human beings.
Early Christian writers put that claim to work. Lactantius used Euhemerus's belief that the gods began as ordinary humans to argue that Christianity's God stood above and beyond them.
Almost nothing of Euhemerus's own writing survives. His major work exists today only in scattered fragments and later quotations. Ancient sources cannot even agree on which city he came from. Who was this obscure mythographer, and what exactly did his lost book claim to reveal? Why does his name still attach itself to a working theory of myth, long after his own lifetime?
Messina, on the island of Sicily, is the location most modern scholars accept as Euhemerus's birthplace. Ancient writers disagreed. Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, and Polybius all called him "Messenian" without saying whether they meant the Peloponnesian Messene or its Sicilian namesake.
Other testimonies put his birth elsewhere entirely. Pseudo-Plutarch placed him at Tegea, while Clement of Alexandria and the Roman writer Arnobius argued for Agrigentum, and still other accounts named Chios.
It was at the court of a Macedonian king, not in any of these four cities, that Euhemerus made his most lasting mark.
Cassander ruled Macedon around 305-297 BC, and it was during this reign that Diodorus places Euhemerus at his side. Diodorus also calls him the leading myth-writer attached to that court.
Sometime in the early third century BC, Euhemerus produced his major work, a text titled Sacred History, or Hiera Anagraphe in Greek. That book has not survived in any complete form. What remains of it comes down through other writers, copying, quoting, and translating fragments across several centuries.
Diodorus Siculus preserved pieces of the Sacred History inside his own multi-volume history of the world. He folded Euhemerus's Arabian geography into his fifth book and mythological material into his sixth.
That sixth book of Diodorus's Bibliotheca is now lost in its own right. The fourth-century Christian historian Eusebius, however, quoted a long passage from it in his Praeparatio evangelica.
The Roman poet Ennius made the first Latin translation of Euhemerus's work, though that translation is also lost today. Lactantius, writing in the third century AD, quoted Ennius's translation extensively in the first book of his Divine Institutes. Augustine of Hippo preserved still more fragments in his own writings.
Piecing together these fragments, modern scholars have managed to compile what one account calls "a fairly complete picture" of Euhemerus's work.
Euhemerus's narrator claims to have sailed down the Red Sea and around the coast of Arabia, reaching a group of islands he calls Panchaea. Eusebius adds that Euhemerus undertook this voyage at Cassander's own request.
Panchaea, in the story, wasn't empty. It was home to a utopian society built from a number of different peoples. That blend of invented travel writing and political utopianism runs through the whole work.
At the heart of Panchaea stood a temple to Zeus Triphylius. Inside it, on a golden pillar, Euhemerus's narrator claimed to have found something remarkable. It was a register recording the births and deaths of many of the gods.
This invented inscription became the evidence at the center of his critique of traditional religion. It was the proof he used to argue that behind every myth might stand an ordinary human life.
Hesiod had already described a distant Golden Age of human happiness, set before the gods gave Pandora, centuries before Euhemerus wrote his own utopia. The idealized Hyperboreans belonged to this same tradition, as did the legendary Scythian philosopher-hero Anacharsis and the imagined "Meropes" described by the historian Theopompus.
By Euhemerus's own time, this old tradition of imagined perfect societies had been enriched further by new contact with India. Euhemerus used it to build a systematic method for reading popular myths, one that fit the wider Hellenistic effort to explain traditional religion through naturalism.
That naturalistic method gave Euhemerus a way to explain every god the Greeks worshipped, starting with the king of the gods.
Near Knossos, ancient visitors were shown what was said to be a tomb, and Euhemerus insisted it belonged to Zeus. In his account, Zeus had once been a real king of Crete and a great conqueror who earned the loyalty of his people. That very tomb, he argued, was physical proof that Zeus had actually lived and died like any other man.
This was the pattern Euhemerus claimed for every god: kings, heroes, conquerors, or generous benefactors who earned enough devotion that later generations worshipped them.
This same story, according to ancient testimony, may have reinforced a reputation Cretans already had among traditionalists, that of being liars.
Xenophanes, Herodotus, Hecataeus of Abdera, and Ephorus had all floated versions of this rationalizing approach to myth long before Euhemerus. Euhemerus is credited with extending this method to every myth, not just isolated cases, and later writers named the whole approach euhemerism, after him.
Bulfinch's Mythology, a later popular collection of myth, calls this same idea the "historical interpretation" of myth. In current academic use, euhemerism is defined more simply still: myths as distorted accounts of real historical events, altered through generations of retelling.
Euhemerus is remembered for treating every myth the same way, as what one modern description calls "history in disguise."
Common questions
Who was Euhemerus?
Euhemerus was a Greek mythographer active in the late fourth century BC who served at the court of Cassander, the king of Macedon. He is best known for originating euhemerism, the theory that mythological gods were originally human kings and heroes.
Where was Euhemerus born?
Euhemerus's birthplace is disputed. Most modern scholars accept Messina in Sicily, though ancient sources also named Chios, Tegea, or Agrigentum.
What did Euhemerus write in Sacred History?
In his Sacred History, or Hiera Anagraphe, Euhemerus described a voyage to an island called Panchaea, where a golden pillar in a temple of Zeus Triphylius recorded the births and deaths of the gods. The original text is lost and survives only through fragments quoted by later writers such as Diodorus Siculus, Eusebius, and Lactantius.
What is euhemerism, the theory named after Euhemerus?
Euhemerism is the theory that myths are distorted accounts of real historical events, with mythological figures originally real people whose stories were altered through retelling. Bulfinch's Mythology calls this the historical interpretation of myth.
Why did Euhemerus claim Zeus was originally a king of Crete?
Euhemerus argued that the Greek gods, including Zeus, had originally been kings, heroes, conquerors, or benefactors who earned the veneration of their people. He pointed to a tomb of Zeus said to be shown to visitors near Knossos as proof that Zeus had once lived and died as a man.
How did Christian writers use Euhemerus's ideas?
Early Christian writers such as Lactantius used Euhemerus's belief that the gods were originally human to argue that the pagan gods were inferior to the Christian God. Lactantius also preserved substantial portions of Ennius's Latin translation of Euhemerus's work in his Divine Institutes.
All sources
1 references cited across the entry
- 1JournalEuhemerus in ContextFranco De Angelis De Angelis — 2006-10-01