Euhemerus

Euhemerus (Greek Εὐήμερος, Latin: Euhemerus; * to 340 BC; † 260 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, writer and Mythograph, born in Messana in Sicily (or Chios, or Tegea Messene on the Peloponnese ), and lived around 300 BC at the court of the Macedonian king Cassander.

Work

Euhemerus is the author of a work entitled Sacred Scripture ( hiera anagraphe ), from the excerpts in Diodorus Siculus, as well as quotes from a Latin translation of Quintus Ennius are obtained. It is a philosophical and utopian travel novel about the undertaken on behalf of Cassander trip to the fictional island Panchaea in the eastern sea, from their ideal polity he gives a realistic sounding description that also with Plato's description of Atlantis and Xenophon's Education of Cyrus ( Kyrupädie ) is compared. In the Temple of Zeus capital of Panchaea he claims to have found on a stele which the work entitled imaging "holy " inscription, which recorded as the fundamental law of the State of Panchaea the deeds of the first kings of that country, namely the later to become gods Uranus, Chronos and Zeus and they proved to be acts of human rulers who were revered for their outstanding achievements and cultural innovations of the later generations as gods or could be like Zeus worship as far back as gods.

Reception

This humanization of the gods, that was probably not meant as a rationalist critique of the myth, but rather plausibility of the ruler cult of his royal patron and political rulers generally should give an incentive to an advantageous for the community efforts for promotion of their posthumous fame, was of contemporaries such as Callimachus answered with fierce criticism and did not exercise a great influence over the ancient Greek allegory of the Olympian gods. She is in force but thanks Ennius with the Romans and especially found in the apologetics of the Christian Church Fathers, the resulting trimmed back the pagan gods word as exaggerated fables to a realistic and historic core.

The later as " Euhemerism " designated approach, due to the emergence of conceptions of God to mythical exaggeration of historical figures, was transmitted occasionally by Snorri Sturluson in the Middle Ages to the North Germanic gods and then has been found in modern times since the religious criticism of the Enlightenment numerous followers. The Abbé Antoine Banier (1673-1741) gave this interpretation in his three-volume magazine La mythology et les fables expliquées par l' histoire (1738-1740, Eng. Translation 1739-1740, Italian translation 1754-1764, German translation by Johann Adolf Schlegel 1754-1766) wide popularity. Representatives euhemeristischer interpretation of myths were the classical scholar Étienne Clavier (1762-1817), the historian Sainte -Croix (1746-1809), the archaeologist Desiré -Raoul Rochette (1789-1854) and the philosopher Herbert Spencer, or more recently the writer Robert of Ranke Graves. Also, the approach of modern biblical scholarship and biblical criticism since Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752-1827), Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus (1761-1851) and the founder of the life of Jesus research David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), biblical miracle stories attributed to natural processes, has sometimes been called by analogy as euhemeristisch.

Expenditure

• Geyza Némethy: Euhemeri reliquiae. Kjadja a Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, Budapest, 1889 ( = Értekezések a nyelu - és széptudományok köréböl, AI, 14, 11 )
• Giovanna Vallauri: Evemero di Messene: Testimonianze e frammenti. Università di Torino, Turin, 1956 ( = Pubblicazioni della di lettere e filosofia Facoltà, vol. 8, fasc. 3)
• Marcus Winiarczyk: Euhemeri Messenii reliquiae. Teubner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1991 ( = Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana ), ISBN 3-8154-1957-3