Enda80

Listening to a audio book by Bart E. Ehrman, he mentioned that in the days of ancient Rome, the pagans did not believe in the stories about the gods literally the way some people today might believe in the stories of the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament literally. Is this true? Were ancient pagans less susceptible to literalism than the Judaists of the time?

Also, Ehrman stated that the ancient pagan religions were not scriptural or doctrinal religions.

Heathen Dawn

I only know that the Greeks didn’t take their mythologies literally by the Classical Period (c. 400 BCE). As for the Romans, our resident Roman pagan Ojuice5001 probably knows the answer to that.

That’s right, neither ancient nor modern pagan religions are scriptural. Doctrines do exist, but latitude to choose between them is greater than in the Abrahamic religions.

mrmoderate

It would seem that the Roman Pagans would think of the stories of the gods as metaphorical especially since by the time of the Caesars the Roman gods had adopted much of the Greek gods history.

More than likely there were some Pagan fundies who perported that the stories were literal. To be a fundamentalist is to be a narrow minded individual and I don't believe modern society invented narrow mindedness.

It seems to me that God had affected the thinking of the Pagan believers but rather than understand that one supreme entity was responsible for creation the pagan believers simply fractionalized the creations to be of different gods. Demi-gods are common in many older faiths. In the Native American beliefs of many tribes there were demi-gods responsible for certain aspects of nature but there was a belief in a singular god almighty. There really is not much of a stretch between paganism and monotheism, just a matter of how God is understood.

Heathen Dawn

There are many varieties of pagan theology. Here are the most common ones in neopaganism:

Varieties of Pagan Theology

Ojuice5001

First, what does it mean to "take the Greek myths literally"? Well, taking the myths as literally as possible, you'd have gods with human bodies. Like Heathen Dawn says, this concept declined among the Greeks before too long. Now the Greeks and the Italian-native Etruscans were the major influences on Roman religion. And the Etruscans thought of their gods as being hardly personal, let alone corporeal. So I'd say that the Romans had little tendency to think of the gods as physical either.

On the other hand, how symbolic are we talking about here? There have been two important symbolic interpretations among the educated people of the Empire. The allegorical interpretation says that, for instance, every character in the myth of Persephone stands for an aspect of the change of seasons. The extreme-soft-polytheist interpretation (which can easily coexist with the first) sees the portraits of the various gods as being aspects of the One God, being a form of monotheism.

But what about priests and uneducated laymen? How did they interpret the gods? Undoubtedly some people went to either extreme, the extreme of physicalism or the forms of symbolism outlined above. But how did most priests or average Joes see the gods? My opinions on this are fairly close to my own theology, so clearly I speak from considerable bias. (But I say that, as well, those are biased who imply either that the typical pagan was a Homeric literalist or that he took the gods lightly to the point of virtual skepticism. I've heard both of those viewpoints, and disagree with them.)

The two main ways in which people probably did take the myths literally are the issue of anthropomorphism of personality, and the issue of control over chance events. As I said, I think that few people believed in bodily anthropomorphism--that the gods had bodies, and those bodies looked like those of humans. But it was probably quite common to see the gods as having roughly the same fickle personalities as the myths portray them with. Other people felt that the gods should be morally superior to humans, and that would constitute a disagreement with the literal portrayal of the myths.

And second, the idea of control over chance events; giving the gods credit for the weather, or one's own personal fortunes, etc. I think that this is one of the issues involved in the question of literalism, and that this concept was quite commonly held--that people in the Empire did give the gods credit for chance events, just as they do today. I defend this concept, as against those who think it is either refuted by science or unworthy of religious consideration. In truth, it's enough of a cultural universal that it would seem quite likely, on that basis alone, that the Greeks and Romans held to it too.

Ojuice5001

It's fair to say that when you get to the point where the emperor declares himself a god, and the people go along with it, there's some degree of nonliteral interpretation going on.

While narrow-mindedness is of course older than Christianity, I think you're making some unwarranted analogies here. Mythic literalism and narrow-mindedness go hand in hand among Christian fundies, true. But it's hard enough seeing why this is the case with Christians. Maybe it's because the same kind of person tends to question both. Or maybe it has to do with the content of the Bible, which, interpreted literally, reports both amazing miracles and commands from God to kill pagans.

But there wouldn't seem to be a logical connection between belief in miracles and narrow-minded intolerance, just psychological quirks or the holy books of a few religions. So there's no reason to think that polytheist literalism and intolerance would go hand in hand. If anything, a literalist would probably think that the gods are off on Mount Olympus and therefore aren't watching to make sure that he follows their will and harangues his neighbors to do the same!

Like literalism itself, ancient thought on this issue was rather complex, and hard to make sense of today. While I definitely think that hard polytheism is the most true-to-life way of seeing things, I do not deny that there was a tendency toward monotheism even apart from Yahweh's influence. It's hard to say what was really going on, but one possible explanation is that there is a Supreme God and he was influencing the pagans in question. Not that I believe this, just acknowledge the possibility.

lpetrich

We are likely to get the most detail about the opinions of the parts of society likely to be literate, since literacy had not been widespread back then. And such people tended to reject the literal truth of their society's religion, sometimes regarding it as false though socially useful, as I explain in The Royal-Lie Theory of Religion.

They had various other theories, of course; perhaps the most popular was euhemerism, the idea that the gods were originally human heroes who were exaggerated to superhuman proportions. Thus, Zeus could once have been a king with an eye for the ladies.