When the Ancient Greeks would conquer another peoples, they would claim that their main God, the head of their pantheon, is just another manifestation of the Greek head god, Zeus (Romanized as Jupiter), so, there really is not that much of a difference between them. They all worship the same capricious head god – this time, this side won, but if Zeus (by any other name) wanted, the other side would have won.
No shame in defeat – God’s did it. A way to ‘save face’…
We may not appreciate this now in our time, but, that is an extremely important aspect of integrating the defeated peoples’ culture into the winning one in a positive, constructive manner.
It seems that the Ancient Greeks understood (knowingly or not) that destroying a conquered culture’s ‘origin myth’ is devastating, for – what we now know – is a few generations.
So, whether by instinct, knowledge or wisdom, the Ancient Greeks avoided that.
Instead of denigrating the defeated peoples’ mythology, they went out of their way to graft it on to their own mythology, thereby giving the conquered peoples’ a channel to integrate into the Greek culture. This benefited both: new blood, new ideas – but within the same overarching cultural framework that is necessary to hold a society together.
Which makes ‘integrating’ the various ‘goddess queens’ that much more difficult…(coming next)
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 