What do you call the followers of a god?

Hope that’s clear enough.

What I mean is: Today people who believe in God call themselves Christians. (and other names too. I know) What did followers of Zeus, Apollo etc… call themselves back in the day?

In the ancient Greek city states, the worship of Zeus, Apollo, etc, was the state religion, and believing in those gods was the norm and what was expected. So worshipers of those gods didn’t, for the most part, have any special names. It was just assumed everyone, or every Greek, at least believed in those gods.

They didn’t really call themselves anything, as noted above. In ancient times, religion was often tied into ethnicity, so it was obvious that Greeks followed Greek religion, Jews followed Jewish religion etc.

This is actually a matter of scholarly nitpicking, since it’s anachronistic to refer to them as ‘pagans’, or any really as any cohesive group.

I was just thinking that this was a question for Helen’s Eidolon. And, on preview, she’s already answered.

If a person happened to be an initiate in a particular cult (eg - the Eleusinian Mysteries) then they may have used a designated title.

Well, they were called “Greeks”, of course. They would have used the Greek word for “Greeks”, but that’s what they would’ve been called.

Hope that’s clear enough.

What I mean is: Today people who believe in God call themselves Christians. (and other names too. I know) What did followers of Zeus, Apollo etc… call themselves back in the day?

Nitpick

People who believe in “God” also call themselves Jews and Muslims (even though it’s the same god). It’s only the ones who think Jesus had something to do with the whole affair call themself “Christian”.

Nitpick

People who believe in “God” also call themselves Jews and Muslims (even though it’s the same god). It’s only the ones who think Jesus had something to do with the whole affair call themself “Christian”.

Yes, If you notice I put in parenthesis that they call themselves other names too. ;j

I just lack the vocabulary to say what I really mean I guess.

No, you said it. It’s up to us to read it.

With respect to your questions, there were atheists among the Greek philosophers very early on. Probably the first notable (i.e. vocal) one was Leucippus, teacher and mentor of Democritus, both from the 5th century BC. They were called “atomists”, and had four main tenets:

1. Everything is made of atoms and space between atoms
2. These atoms are indivisible and eternal. There are an infinite number of them, and they’re all made of the same stuff but have different shapes, sizes, and locations, thereby producing differences among things we can see.
3. Nature is random, and has no purpose or design.
4. All events are the result of atomic locomotion.

Diagoras, a disciple of Democritus, welcomed the common description of him as an “atheist” — [symbol]a6eos[/symbol] — and was described by Cicero in *De Natura Deorum * I, 23 as “without respect for the gods”. Epicurus was another.

Theists were identified by their culture: Hellenists, Romans, Jews, etc, a fact that made early Christians all the more enigmatic as they hailed from various cultures. Interestingly, Christians were also considered to be atheists by the Hellenists and Romans.

Okay, I now have a little more time to go into an answer. Everything as stated above is totally correct… for the earlier periods of Greek religion. Once the Christians started to become a majority, and it became clear that one could be either a Christian or… a follower of Greek religion, there was, to a certain extent, labelling of the other group.

Christians called them ‘paganos’, which one might want to roughly translate to ‘country hick’. It’s unlikely that they called themselves that. Their own terms tended to be more like ‘follower of the old religion’ or ‘Hellene’ (the Greek word for Greek, as stated above). Although most scholars of the Late Antique period complain about the word ‘pagan’ and then continue to use it, I went the pretentious route and self-consciously called them ‘Hellenes’ in my undergraduate thesis.

Interestingly, Christians were also considered to be atheists by the Hellenists and Romans.

I’m sorry, I don’t remember that. They were certainly considered blasphemous and wrong, but I don’t recall anyone calling them athiests. I could, of course, be forgetting - could you give me an example?

Yes, If you notice I put in parenthesis that they call themselves other names too. ;j

I just lack the vocabulary to say what I really mean I guess.

After I posted I realized that’s what you meant. No harm no foul.

Bear in mind, there were a lot of broad similarities among ancient pagan religions. Whether you were a Babylonian, a Viking, an Egyptian, a Greek, a Persian, or whatever, you tended to have a pantheon of very similar gods with different names. In all likelihood, you had a god of the heavens and a goddess of the earth, a god of the sun and a goddess of the moon, a god of war and a goddess of the harvest, a god of the sea and a goddess of fertility, etc.

So, two thousand years ago, a Jew or a Christian had beliefs that were VERY different from those of almost every race on the planet. It was only logical for them to give their religion a name that identified it as something new and very different from pagan religions.

But there was little need for different pagan nations to differentiate their gods. Most pagan nations tended to assume they were all worshipping the same gods by different names.

I’m sorry, I don’t remember that. They were certainly considered blasphemous and wrong, but I don’t recall anyone calling them athiests. I could, of course, be forgetting - could you give me an example?

No. In fact, I should have worded it the way you did. Thanks for that tweak.

But there was little need for different pagan nations to differentiate their gods. Most pagan nations tended to assume they were all worshipping the same gods by different names.

In fact, when addressing a prayer to a particular god, it was common to use all the names you knew of for that god, and then append “Or whatever name you would prefer to be called”. Just in case the correct name for that god was the one used by the people two valleys over, whom you’d never met.

This is also the reason, I’ve heard, why Zeus (whatever you call him) had so many extramarital dalliances. In some of the mythologies, the Thunder God was married to the Sky Goddess. In some, he was married to the Fertility Goddess, or the Earth Goddess, or the Moon Goddess, or the Goddess of the Lake, or… So once all of the different places’ Thunder Gods were identified as being different names for the same fellow, that left the problem of what to do with all these goddesses to whom he was supposedly married.

In fact, when addressing a prayer to a particular god, it was common to use all the names you knew of for that god, and then append “Or whatever name you would prefer to be called”. Just in case the correct name for that god was the one used by the people two valleys over, whom you’d never met.

That was the general practice of the Romans, but you should be careful about generalizing, because Roman polytheism wasn’t the only polytheistic system out there. And the reasons the Romans did that wasn’t because they were polytheistic, but because of their specific view of the gods and Roman spirituality.

And, not to double post, but there’s some question as to whether or not the ancient Romans really did "use all the names you knew of for that god, and then append “Or whatever name you would prefer to be called”. That’s from older scholarship from the 50s and 60s, and fits in with older anthropological theories about the evolution of religion, and is not as widely accepted today.

Well, I originally heard it from my Latin teacher, so I suppose it’s reasonable that it applied only to the Romans. But Fr. Bede wouldn’t have passed on shoddy scholarship to us. Well, not unless the shoddy scholarship involved alcohol or kinky sex.

I’m sorry, I don’t remember that. They were certainly considered blasphemous and wrong, but I don’t recall anyone calling them athiests. I could, of course, be forgetting - could you give me an example?

One reference would be the Martyrdom of Polycarp ix.2:
“Therefore when he was brought forward the Pro-Consul asked him if he were Polycarp, and when he admitted it he tried to persuade him to deny, … as they are accustomed to say: 'Swear by the genius of Caesar, repent, say: ‘Away with the Atheists’…” (Kirsopp Lake translation)

Well, I originally heard it from my Latin teacher, so I suppose it’s reasonable that it applied only to the Romans. But Fr. Bede wouldn’t have passed on shoddy scholarship to us. Well, not unless the shoddy scholarship involved alcohol or kinky sex.

Well, when did he teach you Latin, and when did he himself learn it? I’m sure he didn’t just make it up, but like I said, that theory (part of the “numina” theory) has fallen out of favor nowadays.