Euhemerus (???µe???,
Euhemeros) (working late fourth century B.C.) was a Greek
mythographer at the court of
Cassander, the king of
Macedon. Euhemerus' birthplace is disputed, with
Messina in
Sicily or
Messene in the Peloponnese as the most probable locations, while others champion
Chios, or
Tegea.
He is chiefly known for a rationalizing method of interpretation, known as Euhemerism, that treats mythological accounts as a reflection of actual historical events shaped by retelling and traditional mores. In the skeptic philosophical tradition of Theodorus of Cyrene and the Cyrenaics, Euhemerism forged a new method of interpretation for the contemporary religious beliefs. Though his work is lost, the reputation of Euhemerus was that he believed that much of Greek mythology could be interpreted as natural events subsequently given supernatural characteristics. Living at court in the generation following the superhuman feats of Alexander the Great and Alexander's subsequent deification, with the contemporaneous "pharaoization" of the Ptolemies in a fusion of Hellenic and native Egyptian traditions, Euhemerus was trained in the rational philosophizing current of Hellenistic culture; the two strains meet in his materialist rationalizing of Greek myth. "Euhemerus may be credited as the writer who systematized and explained an ancient and widely accepted popular belief, namely that the dividing line between gods and men is not always clear," S. Spyridakis, among others, has observed.[1]
In Classical religion, which lacked a revealed text and a prophetic tradition, a fluid theogony absorbed most contradictory claims. The tenets of Euhemerus, exceptionally, were attacked, even viciously.[2] Of the Latin translation, only a few brief fragments have come down to us, where they were quoted in patristic writers, especially in a fragment said to be from Diodorus Siculus, preserved by Eusebius in his history of the Church. Other fragments survive quoted by Lactantius in his treatise De Falsa religione ("Concerning False Religion," 1.11), a context sympathetic to Christian mythography. Euhemerist ideas apparently also survived in Philo of Byblos, who transmitted a euhemerist view of Phoenician religion, if we may trust the account of him preserved in the pages of the Christian historian Eusebius of Caesarea "It was Eusebius' object to refute the pagans, not recover the history of Phoenicia"[3] (see Euhemerism and the early Christians below).
In modern times Euhemerism has been compared, specifically by David Friedrich Strauss, with many nineteenth-century German rationalists, such as Johann Gottfried Eichhorn and Heinrich Paulus, in their interpretations of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Euhemerus's rationalizing, skeptical method, which reduces religion to what we would now call anthropology or sociology, has seemed like the forerunner of those sciences. Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion, saw religion as a kind of hopeful mirage seen by pre-scientific pre-psychoanalytic humankind. Even Freud, rebuked by Jules Romains[4] and other friends, worried that he—too much the humanist—had failed to understand the spiritual experience. "Euhemerism" is sometimes used pejoratively to mean naive reductionism by modern secular thinkers, who misunderstand religious behavior by attributing to the pious only those motives (economic, psychological, utilitarian) which are secular.
