Roman/Hellenic apologetics

[Anonymous No.10076550]

Anyone care to give some recommendations on any philosophical/apologetic books by Greeks/Romans on the Greek/Roman religion/mythology. It seems most books I can find on the Hellenic religion are basically the mythology itself instead of apologetics. Where is the Greek Aquinas? Where is the Greek Augustine?

Everything can't have been destroyed by the Christian, could it?

[Anonymous No.10076615]

What they do is not apologetics, because when discussing the gods they never claim the topic at hand is the Final Ultimate Truth that they would have privileged access to, here's Cicero's famous quote from De Natura Deorum:

>There is in fact no subject upon which so much difference of opinion exists, not only among the unlearned but also among educated men; and the views entertained are so various and so discrepant, that, while it is no doubt a possible alternative that none of them is true, it is certainly impossible that more than one should be so.

Apologetics, forced conversion and other monotheistic behaviors are a violence meant to eradicate diverging opinions, whereas the worst a pagan could do is to claim your gods are his gods via interpretatio graeca, and worship them too in an old temple or new. Paganism means freedom from dogma and the metaphysical-political savagery commonly called organized religion. The whole idea of religious war and competing systems of belief is foreign to the pagan world. Caesar goes to the Gauls to conquer them and sees them worshipping "Uenus", "Mars", etc. not some enemy deity.

It was for this reason that Lyotard would borrow the term "paganism" to speak of the situation in the then current year:

>Just as pagan religions believe in a number of different gods rather than just one God, Lyotard's pagan philosophy represents a concern for pluralism and multiplicity (terms he uses synonymously to oppose the idea of universality). This concern for difference, multiplicity and pluralism is related to Lyotard's basic commitment to an ontology of singular events: if reality is constituted by unique happenings, then there will be no universal law of judgement which will be able to take account of each and every event in a way which does them all justice. Paganism suggests that there are irreducible differences in the order of things, and that we must take things on their own terms without attempting to reduce them to universals.
Pagans were tolerant and post-moderns before it was "cool."

The closest thing to what you're looking for is Porphyry's Adversus Christianos, but he's a platonist rather than a pagan priest.

[Anonymous No.10076621]

Anyway the best books on Greek and Roman religion are:

Burkert, Walter. 1985. Greek religion: Archaic and Classical.

Beard, Mary, John North, and Simon Price. 1998. Religions of Rome. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Beard covers also how Christianity came to Rome.

>Where is the Greek Aquinas? Where is the Greek Augustine?
Plotinus and Proclus

[Anonymous No.10076630]

Thanks for the info but well forget the word apologetics then.

There is tons of what i'm looking for in Hinduism, there should be tons for the Greek religion.

I'm looking for religious texts that goes beyond the story of Zeus fucking some young thot and then turning her into a tree or some shit.

[Anonymous No.10076633]

If someone knows books about historical and political events in ancient greece, like, the trojan war was caused by political conflicts, please rec me this kind of stuff.

[Anonymous No.10076674]

>>10076630
Plato defends the immortality of the soul in Phaedo, the existence of the gods in Laws, etc.

[Anonymous No.10076679]

Maybe Neoplatonism was what I was looking for all along... But the little I've read about it, it seems like nothing but Pantheism.

The idea is that i'm really interested in "paganism"(no i don't want to convert or some shit) and I would like to try and understand how European paganism might have looked today if Christianity had never been created.

How Norse paganism for example would have evolved into when it eventually would have had contact with more "evolved" Hellenic religion or just how the philosophers of ancient Greece viewed the Gods.(the ones who saw them as real, be it just archetypes, real bearded men in the sky or real gods in one sense but in another just different paths to "the one")

[Anonymous No.10076688]

>>10076674
Thanks, yeah maybe I should have just started reading the actual philosophers. I do have the "presocratics" on my shelf which is just collected dust.

But somehow I thought none of the well-known philosophers actually believed or argued infavor of the Gods in any meaningful way except perhaps "because muh culture".

[Anonymous No.10076714]

>>10076630
>There is tons of what i'm looking for in Hinduism
Can you recommend some? I've been interested in Hinduism for quite some time, I'd like to know more

[Anonymous No.10076728]

I can't remember the name of the philosopher, but there is one in the Byzantine tradition towards the end of their civilization that thinks Christianity was a mistake and unable to stand up to outsider barbarians. His solution was to re-vitalize Byzantium by arguing a return to belief in Greek myth.

It might have been Plethon?

[Anonymous No.10076730]

>>10076714
start with the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads

[Anonymous No.10076746]

>>10076679
Just read Burkert and Beard, these questions require archaeology, not just primary texts, which you can find in their bibliographies and citations anyway.

Platonism is not "just pantheism", Proclus is not trying to synthetize pagan religious ritual with it out of it being "muh culture."

Replace the Catholic and Orthodox saints with gods and demigods for festivities, artwork, local cult. The citizen is the priest of himself as far as private ritual is concerned, public ritual is attended by specialized priests and priestesses. Mystery religions find new ways to reinterpret old myth and ritual, f.e. quoting Pythagoras to get people to stop sacrificing animals. Gods as human emotions and impersonal features of nature. If you look carefully, like Novalis you can "see" tits and asses of nymphs swimming in turbulent waters because Christianity didn't kill your imagination. For every issue there is the relevant god in the indigitamenta.

[Anonymous No.10076760]

>>10076728
>After his death, Pletho's Nómon singrafí (Νόμων συγγραφή) or Nómoi (Νόμοι "Book of Laws") was discovered. He had been compiling it throughout most of his adult life, and it became famous as the most heretical of his works, detailing his esoteric beliefs.[2] It came into the possession of Princess Theodora, wife of Demetrios, despot of Morea. Theodora sent the manuscript to Scholarius, now Gennadius II, Patriarch of Constantinople, asking for his advice on what to do with it; he returned it, advising her to destroy it. Morea was under invasion from Sultan Mehmet II, and Theodora escaped with Demetrios to Constantinople where she gave the manuscript back to Gennadius, reluctant to destroy the only copy of such a distinguished scholar's work herself. Gennadius burnt it in 1460

[Anonymous No.10076782]

>>10076746
Thank you my good friend, this is really helpful.

I'll do as you said. Too bad many of the neoplatonist doesn't seem to have much published in English or if it is, it's Createspace publishing which seems a bit iffy.

[Anonymous No.10077419]

Why do people on /lit/ respond to topics they know nothing about?

OP most anti-Christian works are lost but they are quoted extensively in the apologetic works of Christians themselves. Justin Martyr would be a good place to start. Cyril of Alexandria responds to the arguments set forth by the pagan emperor Julian in his "Contra Galilaeos", so he'd be up your alley too.

Julian the Apostate would be another one to check out.