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The chapter analyzes the main features of Orphic gods. Most Orphic gods are the same as those of the Olympian religion. Yet there is a tendency in Orphism to identify gods with each other through various mechanisms, e.g. a god may be born more than once or reappears in another god. The Orphic tendency to unity may lead to an image of Zeus as supreme god who oscillates between creator god and a deity identified with the universe. The most un-Olympic of the features of the Orphic gods is the idea that human beings are of divine origin and can be re-integrated into their primitive condition. An important source for these themes is the Neoplatonic philosopher Damascius who gives evidence for the existence of three distinct Orphic theogonies.

This chapter discusses Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and its reception. It describes Harrison's relationship with Arthur and May Verrall, and also the London stage production of Murray's translation of Hippolytus, for which Harrison designed images of Artemis and Aphrodite. Two short books are noted: a popular book on Greek mythology (The Religion of Ancient Greece) in response to a request from the publisher Constable, and Primitive Athens as Described by Thucydides at the request of Wilhelm Dörpfeld, whom she met again when she presented a paper at the International Congress of Archaeology in Athens in 1905. Her struggle with depression, the death of her friend Ellen Darwin, uncertainty about her own future, and health problems are described.

The myth of Jason and the Argonauts, preserved in two extant epics by Apollonius and Valerius Flaccus, has inspired a number of films. This chapter builds on the discussion of Homer by exploring how two Jason and the Argonauts films engage with the Argonautica epics, and key themes such as narrative structure (the distinction between epic, romance, tragedy, and adventure) and the depiction of the Olympian gods. These epic narratives, in both literature and film, question and reassess epic conventions in important ways, as the chapter's discussion of Jason's heroism shows.

This chapter employs a historicising approach to laughter, of the kind elaborated in the same author’s Greek Laughter: a Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity, in order to investigate some important but elusive aspects of the Greek mythico-religious imagination. Its central focus is on depictions of divine laughter at opposite ends of the spectrum of ancient Greek culture, in Homeric epic and Lucianic satire. What does it mean to imagine gods who can laugh at and/or with one another, as well as at and/or with humans? Is such laughter a marker of distance between divine and human conditions of existence, or does the idea of laughter serve to limit the gods by subjecting them to inescapably human evaluation? The chapter rejects models of explanation (both ancient and modern) which treat the laughter of the Olympians either as a contamination of an originally purer conception of the gods or as consistently expressing a serenely detached state of immortality. It argues, instead, that divine laughter reflects tensions between the literal and the symbolic which are intrinsic to anthropomorphising Greek religious sensibilities, and that far from conveying blissful detachment divine laughter characterises gods who are heavily invested in the conflicts of the human world.

Under the heading “The Religion of Beauty” Hegel treats the polytheism of ancient Greece. The Greek religion shares with Judaism the idea that the divine is a self-conscious entity, and thus both represent religions of spirit. However, for Judaism, God was an object of thought and not of sense, and for this reason there were no images or representations of Jehovah. By contrast, it is, according to Hegel, one of the fundamental aspects of the Greek gods that they are represented in art. The analysis in Chapter 9 focuses on Hegel’s interpretation of how the Olympian gods arose out of an earlier generation of nature gods. This account is reflected in Greek mythology itself in the depiction of the war of the gods given in Hesiod. For Hegel, this represents clear evidence that the conception of the divine starts with natural deities and moves to gods of spirit.

This chapter focuses, in large part, on a medieval commentary on the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. It analyzes Martianus' work as an ascensional allegory in which the intellect (Philology) strives to join with a transcendent language (Mercury) that would enable humanity to articulate the workings of the divine mind (Pallas). The final result of this endeavor would be represented by the physical union of the first two of these personified categories, whose wedding is celebrated by the Olympian gods and accompanied by lengthy treatises on mortal learning in the allegorical figures of the seven liberal arts. The De nuptiis came to achieve its canonical status in the aftermath of the Carolingian renaissance, and its importance to the era is evinced by the glosses of Johannes Scotus Eriugena, Martin of Loan, and Remigius of Auxerre. Such growth in interest can primarily be explained in pedagogical terms. The chapter also turns to the glosses of Remigius of Auxerre, the most ambitious to have been produced during the ninth century.

Chapter 19 examines how Palladas in his epigrams turned ecphrasis into a medium for contemplating the tension between the Greek literary and cultural heritage and the sociopolitical and religious environment of his own turbulent times; in the hands of Palladas, ecphrastic modes are adapted to describe the dire realities of an age when statues of Greek gods were defaced, demolished, recast, or reconfigured by Christians. While ecphrases traditionally evoke the stable and essential features of the images they describe and interpret, Palladas’ ecphrastic epigrams pointedly focus on their enforced transformation and altered circumstances. His ecphrases thus become melancholy reflections on change.