Homeric Hyms Intro

I opened my Homeric Hymns and proceeded to read the introduction. I was re-introduced to many characters I already knew from Greek mythology such as Zeus Hera, Apollo and Athena. I don't have anymore that the basic knowledge of Greek Mythology and the most time I've ever spent on it is the approximately 90 minutes it takes to watch the Disney animated version of Hercules. However the idea and "practice of Greek mythology has always fascinated me. The effort that the Greek people put into creating stories about their gods is some what mind blowing to me. The took the story telling way beyond the simple creation story and seemed to have written some stories just for the fun of it.

The introduction was pretty easy to understand, but with my limited knowledge of mythology I didn't realize just how many children Zeus had. I soon got bogged down in trying to connect and keep track of all the relations between the gods and mostly which ones Zeus had spawned. He was very promiscuous, something looked down upon today. However, the Greeks were notoriously promiscuous as a culture, having few of the lines concerning sexuality that we draw today. So I made a small leap and began to ask how these two ideas of promiscuity among the Greeks and their gods were connected. Obviously the Greeks wrote the stories so were the stories written to excuse or explain the Greek behavior? The idea that if the gods did it then it was OK for mortals to practice it was well? Or are the behaviors of the god/s of a culture inexplicably linked the culture that "worships" it? We can also see humans modeling their behavior after God in the example of Christians who model their behavior after Christ. Or perhaps the promiscuity of the Greek gods was simply of reflection of an already established Greek culture.