Writes James Goss, Teacher of Classics
On Friday the 13th of March, I gave a talk on some underappreciated Ancient Greek Gods as a part of the Classics Lecture Group. In this talk I decided to focus on some of the Gods who aren’t really talked about in myths but are still important to the Greek world in their own different ways. In this talk I covered five different Gods: Pan, the Anemoi, Momus, the Horai and Plutus.
Pan is the god of the wilderness and is often found causing trouble in the mountains of Arcadia, scaring shepherds and chasing nymphs. I thought that Pan is still significant to the Ancient Greek world, having many dedicated worshippers across Greece.
After, I moved to The Anemoi, which was a group of four gods who controlled the wind, with each God controlling one of the Cardinal directions, Boreas (North), brought Winter and harsh weather, Zephyrus (West) brought spring and gentle breezes, Notus (South) brought summer and storms and finally Eurus (East) brought Autumn and unpredictable weather patterns. I believe that these gods were significantly undervalued, as Greece was very much a seafaring region, where sailing between lands was common, and sailors and people of Greece would often pray to the winds for protection and favour when traveling by boat.
Third up was Momus, the God of satire and blame. He didn’t control a natural force, but rather made fun of the Gods of Olympus, finding faults in everything that they’d do. For example, he found Aphrodite’s sandals too squeaky. Eventually he was banished from Olympus for his actions. I found Momus interesting, as playwrights and writers would often use Momus as a way to criticize social and political topics which they couldn’t do themselves, imbibing him with direct involvement in Ancient Greek society through comedy.
Penultimately, we covered the Horai, who were a group of either three sisters controlling agriculture, the flow of time and the seasons (if you believe the later myth), or twelve, each controlling an hour of the day, if you subscribe to the earlier. Even though they keep the universe running, they’re not talked about enough and didn’t have a large following across Greece despite their importance.
Finally, Plutus was the god of wealth and agricultural abundance. Unfortunately, he was intentionally blinded by Zeus, as if wealth could see, all of the wealth in the world would go to the good and virtuous. By blinding Plutus, Zeus made sure that wealth was distributed evenly all across the land. Plutus also appears in one of Aristophanes’ comedies, where the central premise centres upon a scenario where Plutus could see, exploring how would it affect society. Predictably, it just makes everything worse.
There are still so many different Gods that I didn’t go over in this talk, as there are hundreds of Gods which aren’t really ever mentioned, tailoring to almost every part of life. I’d recommend looking into some of these Gods, as a lot of them have many interesting myths and stories that you may never have even heard of.
