The Daily Moaner

.

A Surfeit of Gods:

These days we only have one God, due to sucessive cut-backs over the ages, though He has three different guises. These all look completely different, except for the Holy Ghost who is invisible.

Bored... Drunk

But Ancient Greece was overflowing with gods. Goddesses too, and many junior, assistant gods.  Much of the time they were pretty bored, just hanging around Mount Olympus, doing Rude Things and knocking back ambrosia.  A bored and drunken god might take human form, or turn himself into a swan or a ram, and then go out in the Greek countryside and cause trouble.  This was a Bad Thing.

The most important god, the head god,  was the god Zeus, a sort of Ancient equivalent to Gordon Brown.   Zeus was born on several different mountains, though not all at the same time.  He was married to various goddesses, ladies, etc and had numerous bits on the side.  The Sun and the Mirror would have loved him even more than Katie and Peter.

Zeus had many affairs, and wasn’t too fussy about what sex they were, or whether they were his sisters, which is Not Very Nice.  In fact, he wasn’t always bothered if they weren’t even human, which is strictly forbidden by the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

Zeus never went out without his thunderbolts, which he would throw around when he was in a bit of a mood.  Nowadays, this would earn him an ASBO, or a terrorism conviction.  He was also fond of turning people who upset him into rocks, tortoises, eagles and in one case, mountains.  Like Gordon Brown, he was in desperate need of anger-management classes.  This was another  Bad Thing.

Many of the other gods and goddesses were assigned to look after various aspects of Greek life and culture, much like our Cabinet Ministers though more efficient.  Aphrodite looked after love and beauty, and Athena was responsible for wisdom, an area not covered in our present culture.  Ares was minister god of War.  Try to imagine Bob Aynsworth as the god of War.  It’s impossible.

Thingies:

Apart from gods, there was an assortment of other beings, which lay in wait for the unwary traveller, and wary ones too.  These were the Thingies, and consisted of Furies and Gorgons, Naiads and Dryads, and Harpies and Harmans.  The Thingies were eventually superceded by Batman and other super-heroes. 

A Harpy Attacks a Hero

Many of these beings were Not Nice At All, like modern-day females who want to Ban Everything.  But modern historians have theorised that these females were just at the wrong time of the month.  Other theorists insist that the female monsters are just myths based on mosquito’s stinging a hero on his bare buttocks.  Or worse.

Apart from the female Thingies, there were hundred-handed giants, satyrs, and centaurs. The centaur had the top half of a horse on the bottom half of a man, and was not a Pretty Sight.  There was also a Cyclopes,  a bad-tempered creature with only one eye, which has no equivalent in modern — oh… wait!

All of these Thingies specialised in leaping out and doing unimaginable things to people, which we are not able to print here, as they are unimaginable.

Heroes:

Nothing Much to Write Home About

As if all the above was not enough, there was also a multiplicity of heroes, so numerous that even Wikipedia cannot sort them out.  Many of these heroes were simply people who Had Not Learned a Trade, and were forced to earn a living by Slaying Things. (On the other hand, they may simply have been mass-murderers).

Heroes are usually portrayed in Art and Statuary as being naked, as the going rate for Slaying Things was not always good, and clothes were expensive.   (Going out naked is also forbidden by the Sexual Offences Act 2003).  Naked heroes were also, according to my sister, Nothing Much to Write Home About either.  However, a really sucessful hero could, if he played his cards right, gain promotion and become a god himself.

Some sucessful heroes (or possibly mass-murderers) are Theseus, Heracles, and Jason and the Argonauts, an early Greek bouzouki band.  They all had many completely unbelievable adventures, much like Indiana Jones.

Bribery:

All the above gods etc were open to a bit of bribery, much like the modern Church, where we place our bribe into a collection plate.  In Ancient times, the bribe took the form of a sacrifice, and early Greeks liked nothing more on a weekend than a bit of  barbecuing sacrificing to their favourite god, which they thought would bring them luck.

Mostly they would sacrifice an animal, possibly a chicken or next door’s cat.  Or sometimes, a sheep or a goat, though some Greek men like to keep the prettiest ones back. 

But in times of trouble, the Greeks would sacrifice virgins, when they were in season.  Though any quick-witted virgin could avoid this fate by claiming that Zeus had got in first, during the night, and deflowered her.  Even if she was secretly still flowered.

Eventually, after hundreds of years, these practices died out, just before virgins became extinct. The Ancient Greeks slowly evolved into Modern Greeks, due to Darwin. We owe the Greeks a lot. But they owe us a lot more.

Although technically conquered by the Romans, their culture triumphed and they continued to flourish right up to modern times, when they joined the EU.

We shall be taking a closer look at the Romans in the Next Chapter.  Possibly. After we’ve had a rest.

Before Modern Greece there was not-quite-so-modern-Greece, about which there are no books.  But before that , there was Ancient Greece, though of course the inhabitants did not realise that they were Ancient.  Although they lacked many modern conveniences, they had an advantage in not having to learn about us  at school. This saved a lot of time.

The women of that time wore long dresses and nice hair-styles, and mostly just lay about looking beautiful or doing the ironing;  while the men wore long white beards with matching long white robes, while they waited for the trouser to be invented.

The main occupation of the men was arguing with each other about Philosophy, and inventing the Triangle.  Sometimes this was done in their bathtubs, but mostly in the Senate, like modern-day America, though without the fillibuster.

There was another class of person, which was the Slave, who was used as a servant.  Slaves were allowed to have families and to own property, but had no other rights.  This was a Bad Thing.  Nowadays, we have outlawed Slavery, and just have Taxpayers.

It was the Greeks who invented the marathon, when Phipidides Piphidapeas a messenger ran to Athens with the news of the battle at Marathon.  He took two days, about the same as traversing London at rush hour, but then collapsed and died, because Pheidippides phelt  phucked.

These days in Britain, we do not have any History happening, just current affairs.  The Greeks though had lots of History, which was happening on a day-to-day basis.  Herodotus was the Father of History, though it is not known who the Mother was.

When they weren’t arguing with each other, the Greeks liked nothing better than a good War.  There were lots of Wars, even more than Bush and Bliar started.  The Greeks fought the Spartans and the Thracians and the Persians and many others. They just couldn’t get on with anybody.

Knossos

In those early times, the Ancient Greeks built mostly ruins, not having yet got the hang of erecting modern houses which would stand up. Most of these buildings (See left)  attracted many draughts, which went right up their robes.

The Greeks also liked to invent things like Mathematics, including pi which was named after Pi-thagoras.  Pi is a really hard sum which goes on forever.  It is also an irrational number and really needs anger-management classes.

As mentioned above, Pi-thagoras also discovered several species of Triangle.  But he spent his declining years in a fruitless search for the long-theorised left-angled triangle.

More Conguent Than Others

It is awesome to think that the Triangle has hardly changed at all, from that day to this — though Orwell proclaimed that some Triangles are more congruent than others.

They also made important advances in medicine, astronomy, art, literature, science, and other things, being general all-round clever-clogs; though not, of course, as intelligent as Stephen Fry.

Whereas modern countries like the UK have politicians to rape and pillage them, early Greeks had to do make do with mythical beings which littered the countryside, causing general havoc and despair for the unwary traveller. Much like a modern railway. Which leads us neatly into the subject of Greek Gods and Goddesses.

But that will be covered in Chapter Two…   if we can be bothered.