List of Greek deities

The following section is based upon Walter Burkert's Greek Religion (1985), particularly his chapter "III: The Gods". Twelve Olympians The main deities of the Greek pantheon were the twelve Olympians. They were believed to reside on Mount Olympus, from which they derived their name, and were connected as part of a familial group which had Zeus at its head. This family included two generations: the first consisted of children of Cronus and Rhea – Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter, and Hestia – and the second consisted of children of Zeus – Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Hermes, and Dionysus (though Aphrodite and Hephaestus were sometimes said to not be children of Zeus). In myth, the Olympians were preceded by another group of gods, the Titans (among them Cronus and Rhea), who were supplanted by Zeus and the Olympian gods in a war known as the Titanomachy, after which Zeus became ruler of the gods. In cult, the notion of the twelve gods (or ) is first attested in the latter half of the 6th century BC, when the Altar of the Twelve Gods was constructed in Athens. Around the same time, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes referred to the division of a sacrifice into twelve pieces, and in 484 BC the poet Pindar mentioned the honouring of twelve gods at Olympia. By the classical period (5th–4th centuries BC), this idea of twelve gods had become established. Although the Olympians were consistently considered twelve in number, the individual gods which comprised this group of twelve could differ by region; in particular, Hestia and Dionysus were sometimes excluded. Although Hades is the brother of the first-generation Olympians, he was not included among the twelve Olympians owing to his residency in the underworld. In addition to the canonical twelve Olympians, there were numerous other gods generally believed to live on Olympus. Chthonic deities The word "chthonic" is applied to deities who were believed to inhabit the underworld or to be otherwise subterranean in nature, and who were associated with fertility or the dead. Hades and Persephone, the rulers of the underworld, were the principal chthonic deities. They were not the only gods held as chthonic, though such figures were typically only referenced through allusion and with apprehension. Nature deities While many of the major Greek gods were associated with aspects of nature, various lesser deities are classed as nature gods because they personify particular parts of the natural world. Some such deities stood for parts of nature that played a role in the lives of all people – such as the earth, sea, Sun, Moon, and winds – and so were held as divine throughout Greece (though these gods did not experience the same development in myth and cult as figures such as the Olympians). Other nature deities – the river gods and nymphs, who represented features of the landscape such as rivers, springs, or mountains – were each worshipped only in a specific town or area. They were numerous, and their cults were found throughout the Greek world. Other major deities Foreign deities worshipped in Greece Greek poleis (city-states, : polis) were able to adopt new gods fairly easily, a process which involved starting a cult in their honour. Some deities were introduced from abroad (such as Cybele), experiencing some amount of alteration in the process, and others were original creations (such as Serapis) that pulled from existing divinities of different origins. The choice to adopt a new deity was largely pragmatic, and seems to have been decided through the regular political systems of the polis. Which gods were considered "foreign" (a designation that could include gods from elsewhere in Greece) was also determined by the authority of the polis. The Greeks thought that different cultures all revered the same set of deities, who were simply known under varying names. Because of this, when the Greeks encountered gods of other cultures, they identified them with their own deities (in a process known as ). == Early deities ==