Examples Of Greek Gods And Goddesses

The gods and goddesses that the Greeks worshiped helped them to explain a lot of what they did not understand in the world around them. For example, take the story of Persephone. They could not understand the changing of the seasons, or why winter occurred with crops being unable to grow. To explain this, they came up with Persephone’s story, which was that the god of the Underworld (Hades) capturing her to have her as his queen. Demeter’s sadness at the loss of her daughter led to what would have been an eternal winter if not for a compromise that was made. The compromise entailed that Persephone would live with Hades for half of the year, and with her mother the other half. The time that she lives with Hades became known as winter, when the crops do not grow due to Demeter missing her daughter. The six months of the year that Persephone does live with Demeter is when the crops grow as a result of her happiness to be reunited with her daughter.

Another example of the Greeks using the gods to explain what was unknown to them would be that of Poseidon when it came to earthquakes.

The earth shaking can seem like a divine act to those without geographical understanding, so of course they would chalk it up to an act of wrath from an unhappy god. Living in a land surrounded by water, they would also need an explanation of events such as tsunamis for the same reason they need one for earthquakes. They are terribly destructive events that, at the time, they could not think of any other logical reasoning for their occurrence. When a bad storm occurred, or someone was struck by lightning, they would think that it was Zeus showing his anger towards

mortals.
Death is a concept that is difficult for all societies, especially ancient ones, to come up with an explanation for. The Greeks also explained death through the use of a god, specifically the god of death called Thanatos. To them, he was the reason that people died, and because of that was seen as a dark figure. They both hated and feared Thanatos as much as anyone would a figure that caused their loved ones, and eventually themselves, to die. They did not view Hades, the God of the Underworld, as bad. They simply saw him as the ruler of the land where the dead reside.
I could go on and on about how each and every god or goddess gave an explanation for something confusing to the Greeks, because that was the purpose of practically every god that there was (and we know that there were many). In everything from the rising and setting of the sun being caused by Apollo and his chariot to the winning and losing of battles being the result of how favorably Ares looked upon them, the gods can be seen as a mode of making sense of the unknown. Even dreams, luck, and rainbows had explanations through the gods and goddesses by the names of Hypnos, Tyche, and Iris. It really is interesting to see how such seemingly simple things to us now were explained back before much scientific understanding of the world existed.