Little is known about Euhemerus's life, and his birthplace is disputed. Classical writers such as
Diodorus Siculus,
Plutarch, and
Polybius, maintained that Euhemerus was a Messenian, but did not specify whether he came from the
Peloponnesian or the
Sicilian Messene, which was an ancient Greek colony. Other ancient testimonies placed his birth at
Chios,
Tegea (Pseudo-Plutarch,
Plac. Phil.), or
Agrigentum (
Clement of Alexandria,
Protrept.; Arnobius,
Adv. Gent.). Most modern scholars, however, generally agree that Euhemerus came from the Sicilian Messene (
Messina). Diodorus Siculus is one of the very few sources who provide other details about Euhemerus' life. According to Diodorus, Euhemerus was a personal friend of
Cassander, king of Macedonia (c. 305 – 297 BC) and the most prominent mythographer for the Macedonian court. Sometime in the early third century BC Euhemerus wrote his main work "Sacred History" ("Hiera Anagraphê").
Euhemerus' Sacred History Only quoted fragments remain from Euhemerus' main work,
Sacred History.
Diodorus Siculus included fragments from Euhemerus’ writings in the Arabian geography of his fifth book and in the mythology of his sixth book. The sixth book of Diodorus’
Bibliotheca is lost, but
Eusebius cites a fragment from it at length in his
Praeparatio evangelica. The ancient Roman writer
Ennius first translated Euhemerus' work into Latin, but this translation also is lost.
Lactantius however in the third century AD included substantial references to Ennius' translation in the first book of his
Divine Institutes. Various other fragments of importance are also found in the later literature of
Augustine of Hippo. From these extant fragments and references, modern scholars have been able to "compile what is presumably a fairly complete picture of Euhemerus’ work". Euhemerus' work may have taken the form of a philosophical fictionalized travelogue, universally accepted today as a philosophical
Romance, incorporating imagined archaic inscriptions, which his
literary persona claimed to have found during his travels. Euhemerus claims to have traveled to a group of islands in the waters off Arabia. One of these,
Panchaea, being home to a utopian society made up of a number of different ethnic tribes. His critique of tradition is epitomized in a register of the births and deaths of many of the deities, which his narrator
persona discovered inscribed on a golden pillar in a temple of
Zeus Triphylius on the invented island of
Panchaea; he claimed to have reached the island on a voyage down the
Red Sea round the coast of
Arabia, undertaken at the request of Cassander, according to the Christian historian of the fourth century AD,
Eusebius. Euhemerus refers to a rational island
utopia. The ancient Hellenic tradition of a distant
Golden Age, of
Hesiod's depiction of human happiness before the gift of
Pandora, of the mythic convention of idealized
Hyperboreans, made concrete in the legendary figure of the
Scythian philosopher-hero
Anacharsis, or the idealized "Meropes" of
Theopompus had been recently enriched by contacts with
India. Euhemerus apparently systematized a method of interpreting the popular
myths, which was consistent with the attempts of Hellenistic culture to explain traditional religious beliefs in terms of a naturalism. Euhemerus asserted that the Greek gods originally had been
kings, heroes, and conquerors, or benefactors to the people, who had thus earned a claim to the veneration of their subjects. According to him, for example,
Zeus was a king of
Crete, who had been a great conqueror; the tomb of Zeus was shown to visitors near
Knossos, perhaps engendering or enhancing among the traditionalists the reputation of Cretans as liars. ==Euhemerism==