: This is highly debatable, and I simply don't believe it's
: true. People of the time may have paid lip-service to
: their local myths and folklore, as we in this country
: do with some of the more fanciful elements of our
: religions, but that doesn't mean that they really
: believed them. An author now may write a book about
: angels and demons, mythic elements of a popular
: religion that many people subscribe wholeheartedly to,
: but it doesn't mean that the book is anything more
: than a work of fiction. As Gracchuss said regarding
: the Roman gods in "Spartacus,"
: "Privately, I believe in none of them. Neither do
: you. Publicly, I believe in them all." Classic
: authors may have taken figures of popular beliefs of
: their time, as we might take the character of the
: Devil, and spun them into works of fiction which, when
: passed down through centuries of retelling, slowly
: became myth.
Well... that's assuming you take historical films as historical truth. And if we did that, we'd have to come to the conclusion that Emperor Commodus was killed in the arena by General Maximus (in "Gladiator"). Which would be not only wrong, but also impossible, since Maximus didn't exist.
While it's true that many in Late Imperial Rome took their legends with a generous pinch of salt (Ovid, for example, is at times extremely irreligious about his subjects in Metamorphoses), it's probably fair to say that there was a gradual progression to this point of easy-going disbelief. The Greeks, for example, almost certainly had a much greater faith in their legends than the Romans who later pillaged their beliefs, and, while some authors may have made their own interpretations of the legends (for example, for Aeschylus to equate the Erinyes with the Eumenides in "Eumendies" was, at the time, extremely controvertial), but you can see the same in any religion. After all, new interpretations are the main reason why most of Europe and America aren't Catholic.
Beyond that, simply looking at the Mediterranean is failing to see the larger picture. It's difficult to say whether the Sumerians really believed in the Gilgamesh Epic, since we know so little about them (and most of that is from arceological evidence). However, the Norse did enough brutal things in the Allfather's name to make it seems pretty likely that they believed in the myth surrounding him and the other Aesir. And it's not hard to see why. In the depts of a six-month winter, it doesn't take much of a stretch of imagination to see it just carrying on getting worse. Indefinitely. Take the sun out of the equation, swallowed by a giant wolf or otherwise, and you've got Ragnarok. Jotunheim (the realm of the ice giants) is even on the map. It's a massive glacier in the North West of Norway.
As for the Aztecs, well, they cared enough about their mythology to force all their subject peoples to admit that Huinzilopoctli was superior to the local deities (indeed, a city would normally surrender after its principal temple fell). And I won't even go into the mass human sacrifices to keep the sun burning...
Uh... btw Forrest, if this isn't on-topic enough, just give the word. I'm just interested in this sort of thing.
