Scaling Mount Olympus

Home of the Greek Gods

My friend the brilliant cellist and musician Steven Isserlis today emailed me a question (asking for a friend): If the Greeks knew that the gods lived on Mt Olympus, why didn’t they go there?

It’s true that they didn’t go there, whether for sightseeing or for pilgrimage. The simplest reason for that is that in ancient times it was impossibly remote, both geographically and physically. It stood in a very sparsely populated area of northern Greece between Thessaly and Macedonia. It was therefore well chosen to be the abode of gods: the highest mountain in Greece at 9,500 feet, it was impossible to climb: (the peak was only scaled first in 1913). Greeks made pilgrimages to holy places where roads and villages allowed them to stop and rest en route, such as Delphi, and Olympia in the Peloponnese (not to be confused with the mountain). Olympus had no such amenities; the mountain itself is very steep, and some of the time the peak is above the clouds and covered in deep snow.

There are more complex reasons, however. Mount Olympus was sacred from early times - so sacred that even the attempt to scale it could be considered sacrilegious. A famous ancient myth (first in Homer’s Iliad) tells of the winged horse Pegasus on which the hero Bellerophon sought to fly up to the dwelling of the Olympian gods. This was viewed by the gods as an act of hubris (overreach), and Zeus dispatched a gadfly that goaded him until he fell and plummeted to his death. Homer also tells how Hera, queen of the gods, in a fit of anger at her lame son Hephaestus, flung him down from Olympus: it took him a whole day to fall to earth (being immortal he survived, and in some versions of the myth the fall itself accounts for his lameness; perhaps the story reflected the unhappy experience of a foolhardy mountaineer). In another myth the giants Otus and Ephialtes tried to assault the gods on Olympus; they too were defeated. So the idea of mere mortals going up there would have been daunting.

In general, moreover, mortals could not approach the supreme god Zeus except through intermediaries (compare Jesus’s statement ‘no one can come to the Father except through me’, John 14.6). Of the two famous places of religious pilgrimage, Delphi was sacred to Zeus’s son Apollo, while Olympia was founded by the hero Heracles in honour of his stepfather Zeus. While Delphi was sited high up on Mount Parnassus, it was in a populated and attractive area of mainland Greece and was easily accessible by foot. Olympia was in the mostly flat NW Peloponnese, and as the site of the Olympic Games became the destination for vast numbers of visitors every four years after the Games were established in 776 BC.

The funniest take on the notion of Olympus’s remoteness is the comic scenario played out in the comedy Peace of 421 BC by the poet Aristophanes. During the Peloponnesian War the doughty peasant Trygaeus (‘Wine-Man’) flies up to Olympus on a dung beetle (a flightless insect in fact), fueled by balls of dung, in order to bring the goddess Peace (Eirene) back to earth. In an inversion of the Pegasus story, Trygaeus is ultimately triumphant. Aristophanes has fun observing the hero’s - and the actor’s - fear of flying: The beetle is hoisted aloft by a crane operated by a stage-hand, with Trygaeus clinging to its back. It bucks and dives when it catches a whiff of evil-smelling sources of food far below. Trygaeus shouts out in alarm:

Hey! What are you doing, sniffing out cesspools? Lift your head up. Fly directly to the palace of Zeus, stop foraging for food. What now? By Zeus, there’s a man down there taking a crap in the Piraeus!
(The actor breaks the dramatic illusion and speaks in his own voice):
This is scary. This is no time for messing around. Crane-operator, watch what you’re doing! I can feel the wind whistling round me. If you’re not careful, the dung-beetle will get his dinner - because I’ll shit myself for sure...