I thought this would be particularly interesting to a few here, especially DWill, Robert Tulip, and perhaps Camacho and a few others. I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in Greek civilization. It's a rather approachable 300-page book, part of his series called the Hinges of History.
From Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter
What did they believe, these Greeks? Were the gods real to them or just metaphors? Certainly, they did not have creeds or dogmas, confessional or doctrinal positions such as we have come to expect from religions. And just as certainly, there was a graduated spectrum of interpretation, as there must be always be in things religious, that spanned classes and communities and that shifted in emphasis from one period to another. What is so striking about the Homeric gods—as opposed to the One that most of us are familiar with (though familiar is surely the wrong word)—is their lack of godliness. Oh sure, they have power beyond the dreams of the world’s most powerful king, but they exercise this power just the way he would—heavy-handedly, often mercilessly, even spitefully. And they are taken up with their own predictable domestic crises—who’s sleeping with whom, who’s getting back at whom, who’s belittling whom. Could anyone actually believe in such gods?
In the absence of something better, yes. It is hard for us—after so many centuries of monotheism (and more recent centuries of agnosticism and atheism)—to retroject ourselves into the Greek religious consciousness. The stories of the gods, which were multiform and seemingly limitless, came down to the Greeks from many streams of oral tradition, which they had no way of critiquing. They could not say, for instance, as we can, that the story with which this book began, of Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, was just a clever metaphor that gave a preliterate society an “explanation” for the changing seasons—in class with such things as “Why the Snake Has No Legs” or How the Giraffe Got Its Neck,” which we have long since banished to the nursery. But if we look seriously at the Demeter story, we may find ourselves even in the twenty-first century captivated by its poetry and depth of emotion—which may lead us to exclaim something like “Well, this doesn’t explain anything scientifically, but there is something very satisfying about it. It has the truth of a dream.”
Dreams, as we all know, can be very truthful, even if at the level of conscious critique they are full of mad illogic. Some such thoughts surely occurred to men like Socrates and Plato, who advised their followers to reconceive the myths as metaphors—not metaphors as naïve explanations of natural phenomena, but as attempts by society’s dreamers to find a language that can penetrate to the heart of reality. These philosophers understood that though the myths were naïve in the sense that they were anthropomorphic, presenting the gods as if they were men, the myths were also attempting—at a deeper level—to feel the intangible and say the unsayable.
The Greek gods changed as the Greeks themselves were changed by the events of their history. The rigid figures of the archaic kouroi have much in common with the gods of Homer, Hesiod, Solon, and even Aeschylus: these gods are human beings made gigantic, as full of needs as of power and requiring the stateliness of ritual—soothing actions performed in the same way over and over again—in order to be assuaged. Such actions always require loss for men and gain for the gods—libation, animal sacrifice, in great crises even human sacrifice—but there is also an exchange, an economy of the divine. For by our ritual, carried out with punctilious sincerity, we may avoid divine displeasure and find ourselves recipients of heavenly grace. When the house of Oedipus is plunged into confusion over what seem to be conflicting oracles, Jocasta emerges from the palace, carrying her suppliant’s branch, wound in wool, determined to perform the ritual of supplication that can avert the wrath of the god. She addresses the chorus, as she makes her way to Apollo’s shrine:
Lord of the realm, it occurred to me,
just now, to visit the temples of the gods,
so I have my branch in hand and incense too
Odeipus is beside himself. Racked with anguish,
No longer a man of sense, he won’t admit
the latest prophesies are hollow as the old—
he’s at the mercy of every passing voice
if the voice tells of terror.
I urge him gently, nothing seems to help,
so I turn to you, Apollo, you are nearest.
She places her branch on the altar of Apollo and continues her prayer:
I come with prayers and offerings . . .I beg you,
Cleanse us, set us free from defilement!
Look at us, passengers in the grip of fear,
watching the pilot of the vessel go to pieces.
Though Jocasta performs the prescribe rites, we know that these cannot avail because the defilement within the palace is too grave to be washed away by a few prayers and a well-placed olive branch. Lord Apollo, principle of justice and the terrifyingly unseen presence throughout the play—“nearest” in a way Jocasta has failed to reckon with—will not, in the end, be mocked. He will bring his justice to perfection, and this will entail the suicide of Jocasta, the blinding of Oedipus, and the permanent humiliation of the entire family. Jocasta cannot know all this at this point and therefore cannot be aware how insufficient are her paltry rites. At the center of Greek religion is the belief that, though we can at times successfully invoke the mercy of the gods on us and our causes, we must pay for our sins, whether they are conscious or not—and if the sins are big, we must pay big time. How different is this from common belief and practice even in our day, whatever the particular doctrines of a given religion may be? We can understand Greek religion because, at its heart, it operates on the same internal dynamic that fuels all (or certainly almost all) religion. The aboriginal Christian prayer Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy) is a Greek prayer far more ancient than Christianity.
But there is also an undercurrent in Jocasta’s speech that suggests a shift in religious perspective—not so much in the time of the tyrants as in the time of Sophocles, the play’s author. For there is something a tad slapdash about Jocasta’s approach to the gods. She doesn't believe in oracles, which she finds “hollow.” It has “just now” “occurred” to her “to visit the temples of the gods” and she chooses the temple of Apollo because it’s “nearest” to her palace. Does she believe or doesn’t she? She seems a skeptic in trouble beyond her usual coping mechanisms, the sort of person who in our day might slip into a church when her world is falling apart but would otherwise give scant thought to divinity.
In the period when Sophocles was writing Oedipus, Athens was reaching the acme of its arete, its moment of supreme artistic and political confidence. Its empire was booming: the Athenian colonies and sister cities from mainland Greece to Italy, from the Aegean coast of Asia to the coast of the Black sea, were creating greater general wealth through the growing exchanges of staples and exotica, and Athenian democracy and military power—which went hand in hand—were the envy of the world. Athenians held themselves, not the gods, responsible for this turn of events; and though they certainly continued to fulfill the rites and rituals of Greek religion, as does Jocasta, they relied on their own native strengths and smarts to keep their enterprise going. They had become an essentially secular people.