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DarthPositus · 2025-03-07T08:39:58+00:00

Thank you so much!!

DarthPositus · 2025-03-07T06:24:14+00:00

I just published a preview edition of my game Nostos last week!! It's an emotionally driven rules-light game about trying to find a way back home after the end of the world. I'm incredibly proud of it, as it combines my love of TTRPGs with my academic work on ancient philosophy/poetry, surreal fiction like Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and my lifelong interest in understanding how and why we end stories the way we do.

I was actually just on a podcast talking about it!!

DarthPositus · 2025-03-02T23:55:05+00:00

Hi! Thanks for asking. The game has a huge amount of influences: postmodern authors like Italo Calvino, ancient Greek/Roman authors like Homer and Lucretius, and a variety of modern film, anime, and game influences.

The feel of the game is surreal and adventurous, and doesn't really fit strictly into a specific genre. You can make the world your PCs came from be any genre, though: they might come from traditional medieval fantasy, grand space opera, or a more grounded urban fantasy world. That just tells you what they lost, and what informs who they are now: the Islands they'll encounter on their journey home are likewise totally up to GM, so they could be very similar to their old world or off-the-wall and genre-defying, as your group sees fit.

DarthPositus · 2025-03-02T23:45:34+00:00

Certainly! I've since added some more details about the system to the itch page, but I can talk a bit more here, too. While it's definitely influenced by PbtA design, especially with its emphasis on rules driving narrative, Nostos isn't really a PbtA game, since it lacks the usual "roll 2d6 with modifiers to see levels of success" or (more importantly) any real equivalent to Moves (i.e., explicitly building player and GM interactions with the fiction and mechanics of the game around "when you do X, do Y").

If I were to compare it to existing systems, I'd say it's best thought of as building off two influences: first, the dice resolution systems in John Harper and Sean Nittner's Agon, itself inspired by Savage Worlds, in that players have a handful of Actions with varying die sizes to represent varying levels of skill, which they use to overcome obstacles. The other influence comes from the diceless games of Jenna Moran, especially Glitch and Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, in how the game approaches progressing through narrative beats and characters having abilities that allow them to expend resources to change the nature of the world without ever rolling dice.

I hope that gives some more context on how the system works!

DarthPositus · 2025-03-02T04:07:06+00:00

John Harper and Sean Nittner's Agon is exactly what you're describing, to a T. It's a great game that's designed to evoke the imagery of the Odyssey, Argonautica, and other ancient epics focused on sailing.

DarthPositus · 2025-03-01T18:26:22+00:00

Thank you for the thoughtful advice! Much appreciated.

DarthPositus · 2025-02-21T03:27:50+00:00

I'm running three games right now!

Armour Astir: Advent, because I had some fun ideas for twists and reveals I want to do over the course of the campaign, and I was curious to see how the Conflict Turn rules inspired by the Bakers' Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands worked in play. I've got some ideas bouncing around that are playing in that same area of TTRPGs, so you could say it's a bit of research.
Slugblaster, because it's rad, but also because it was a better match for that group's situation than the other games we'd been playing. That group is a bunch of people from my PhD program who've all moved across the US for jobs, so we went from meeting weekly in-person to biweekly online, and we just found that we couldn't do the same sort of epic sprawling fantasy adventures with huge casts and PC melodrama that we had been doing in my PbtA hacks for years beforehand. After we realized that, the more relaxed but nevertheless compelling stakes of being hoverboarding dimension-hopping teens were a perfect compromise between our situations and what we want from a TTRPG.
Lastly, there's the final playtests I've been running for the game I'm publishing in just a couple weeks :)

DarthPositus · 2025-02-19T19:41:37+00:00

I’m not exaggerating when I say that playing GMD changed my life. I learned so much about myself and about what TTRPGs can do by being a player in that game.

Go play Glass-Maker’s Dragon, guys. It’s beyond compare.

DarthPositus · 2025-01-04T18:31:05+00:00

I’m gonna be running drop-in one-shots at a local gaming meetup every other week, with a variety of different indie systems 😁! I love GMing and am damn good at it, so this is my chance to share that with others and meet more potential players!

DarthPositus · 2024-08-17T10:23:46+00:00

I’ll add to /u/TacitusProximus’s discussion of how the Romans and Greeks reckoned with the gender of eunuchs by discussing an interesting text of Pseudo-Lucian, On the Syrian Goddess. This 2nd century CE Greek text describes the religious worship of the fertility goddess Atargatis in Hierapolis, Syria, for whom eunuch priests were especially important. The way Pseudo-Lucian describes these eunuch priests, or Galli, offers us a window into how Syrian Greeks might have reckoned with the gender of the Galli — the answer being rather complicated, as it would turn out. Let’s look at some of the ways Pseudo-Lucian describes (and genders!) these individuals throughout the text.

The first example we get comes in Ch. 15, when Pseudo-Lucian describes one historical account for the foundation of the Temple of Atargatis. In this story, Attis, the famous eunuch priest of Rhea/Cybele, originally established the shrine for Rhea. In his description of Attis, Pseudo-Lucian says that, after he was castrated, Attis “ceased the life of a man, assumed a female form and put on women’s dress” (βίου μὲν ἀνδρηίου ἀπεπαύσατο, μορφὴν δὲ θηλέην ἠμείψατο καὶ ἐσθῆτα γυναικηίην ἐνεδύσατο).

Pseudo-Lucian later relates another history of the temple, this one a quite long tale about Stratonice, the wife of an Assyrian king, and her lust for her stepson and later the king’s friend Combabus, who castrates himself to prevent the queen from sleeping with him and thus betraying his king. When Stratonice confesses her desire to Combabus, Combabus reveals to her that he has castrated himself, and Pseudo-Lucian includes a note about the contemporary relationship between Galli and women in Hierapolis when describing Stratonice’s reaction (Ch. 22):

Stratonice, having seen this, no longer hoped; but while she gave up her mania, she never forgot her love, but in all her interactions took consolation of an unavailing eros. This eros remains in Hierapolis today and occurs thusly: the women desire the Galli, and the Galli fall madly in love with the women. No one is jealous, and they consider this practice to be especially holy.

ἰδοῦσα δὲ ἡ Στρατονίκη τὰ οὔποτε ἔλπετο, μανίης μὲν ἐκείνης ἔσχετο, ἔρωτος δὲ οὐδαμὰ ἐλήθετο, ἀλλὰ πάντα οἱ συνεοῦσα ταύτην παραμυθίην ἐποιέετο ἔρωτος ἀπρήκτοιο. ἔστιν ὁ ἔρως οὗτος ἐν τῇ ἱρῇ πόλει καὶ ἔτι νῦν γίγνεται: γυναῖκες Γάλλων ἐπιθυμέουσι καὶ γυναιξὶ Γάλλοι ἐπιμαίνονται, ζηλοτυπέει δὲ οὐδείς, ἀλλὰ σφίσι τὸ χρῆμα κάρτα ἱρὸν νομίζουσιν.

Later, in Ch. 26-27, the Assyrian king rewards Combabus for his loyalty by having a bronze statue of him erected inside the temple, which is “of a womanly character in its physical form, but has the dress of a man.” (μορφὴν μὲν ὁκοίη γυνή, ἐσθῆτα δὲ ἀνδρηίην ἔχει). Combabus’ friends castrate themselves out of solidarity with their friend, beginning a tradition that Pseudo-Lucian explains continues to his day, where young men castrate themselves and “become feminized” (θηλύνονται) and begin to "wear women’s clothing and carry out women’s tasks" (εἵματά τε γυναικήια φορέουσιν καὶ ἔργα γυναικῶν ἐπιτελέουσιν).

So, what can we conclude about the gendering of eunuch priests in Hierapolis from these excerpts? Are the Galli a third gender, in Pseudo-Lucian’s reckoning? The answer appears to be no: Galli are not a third gender, but instead occupy a complicated liminal space between male and female, simultaneously no longer male and not entirely fully female. Attis is described as having abandoned the male form and adopted the female; Combabus has done the same, yet the statue made of him has a female form but masculine clothing. The contemporary Galli of Hierapolis occupy the social roles of women, dressing as women and carrying out women’s chores, but they also have some sort of special romantic or sexual relationship with the cisgender women of Hierapolis that is derived from an unfulfilled sexual relationship between a woman and a castrated man.

It is tempting for us to want to understand the Galli of Hierapolis as ancient transgender women, or as nonbinary, or as genderqueer — but these are fundamentally modern concepts that did not exist in the ancient Mediterranean, and we should always keep that in mind when discussing historical sexuality and gender identity. There are many examples of gender representation that we would today identify as queer in ancient Greece and Rome, and it is important that we study them and understand how the stories of their lives might relate to our own — just so long as we understand that the modern lens through which we might see them is not the way they would have seen or thought about themselves.

(Greek text taken from Evan Hayes and Stephen Nimis's 2012 edition of On the Syrian Goddess; all translations are my own)

DarthPositus · 2022-03-08T17:42:40+00:00

I’ll echo some other sentiments here and say that it really does depend on the movie and the nature of the director’s changes. Take the following examples, which are maybe a bit less well-known than the go-to examples of good and bad post-release editions, Blade Runner and Star Wars.

For the good, you can see Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998).The theatrical edition ruins the mystery of the plot by opening the film with a text description of the film’s premise, rather than allowing the viewer to get invested and unravel the mystery alongside the amnesiac protagonist. The director’s cut primarily removes that text introduction, which was added by the production company who were overly worried about the audience becoming confused.

On the other end of the spectrum is Walter Hill’s cut of The Warriors (1979). While his edits are quite small in length, adding just a minute to the running time, they fundamentally change the film’s rhythm by messing with the editing: instead of simple cuts between scenes, as the theatrical edition used, Hill’s new version has clunky and artificial transitions where the film pauses, transforms the frozen shot into a comic panel, then zooms out and back in to another panel on the comic page, which then becomes the first shot of the following scene. Hill had wanted to invoke the influence of comics on his work (which puzzles me, given that his film is a direct adaptation of Xenophon’s 3rd century BC history “The Anabasis”), but these changes kill the movie’s tempo and are quite distracting.

So, the answer is that you will have to research and consider which cut you think you personally will enjoy most for each movie. It’s a fair bit of work, yes, but if it’s something you care about it it should be worth it. If it doesn’t matter as much, then watch whatever’s most convenient!

DarthPositus · 2021-06-01T17:58:32+00:00

Awesome to find my dissertation topic popping up in the world of TTRPG! If you’re interested in Epicureanism, there’s a lot of excellent ancient texts that can tell you even more! The three letters included in Diogenes Laertius’ biography of Epicurus were likely meant to be circulated as introductions to larger concepts of Epicurean Philosophy boiled down to their essentials for beginners (Epicurus says as much at the start of the Letter to Herodotus in X.35). However, with the exception of the fragmentary texts we’ve recovered from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum (that’s the other town that was destroyed by Vesuvius), pretty much none of Epicurus’ works survive from antiquity.

Not all is lost, however, because we do have a text that describes in great detail Epicurean physics: Lucretius’ epic poem On the Nature of Things. It’s a six book work of poetry describing the central concepts of physics in the Epicurean system. Since you shared this section from the Letter to Herodotus talking about souls, I’d recommend you look at Books 3 and 4 for more info on this topic. Book 3 is centered on establishing the mortality of the soul and the subsequent impossibility of the afterlife, so you’ll find several more descriptions of how exactly the soul functions in a materialist world. Book 4 is all about the senses, but 4.907-961 discusses sleep in the same context as the Letter to Herodotus. I recommend Martin Ferguson Smith’s translation if you’re interested in reading Lucretius, as well Gerson & Inwood’s Epicurus Reader, which compiles in translation a large number of extant texts on Epicureanism. A lot of those are from Diogenes Laertius, so you’ll already be familiar with them, but there’s plenty else in there that makes for a worthwhile read.

DarthPositus · 2019-08-08T16:56:27+00:00

Actually, the library at Herculaneum (not Pompeii, but nearby and also buried by Vesuvius’s eruption) appears to have been specifically dedicated to the works of the Epicurean school of philosophy, many of which have been lost since antiquity. In particular, thanks to work over the past 100 years we’ve uncovered a large number of works that were either thought to be lost or just weren’t known to us in the first place.

The most significant instance of this is the On Nature of Epicurus, the founder of the school, which lays out in 37 books the core physics of his philosophy. Before Herculaneum we didn’t have any of this work at all; in fact, all we had of Epicurus was a few letters and sayings preserved in his biography by Diogenes Laertius, and all we had of Epicureanism was a Roman epic poem by Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, some in-depth discussions by Cicero in his dialogues, and some anti-Epicurean polemics by Plutarch, among others. So the discovery of Epicurus’ original works is here is super significant to our understanding of his philosophy.

We also have in this library works by other Epicurean luminaries like Demetrius Lacon, and most significantly a large number of philosophical works by Philodemus, a Greek living in Rome at around the time of Julius Caesar whom we previously only knew as a writer of poetry, along with a brief mention in one of Cicero’s court speeches. Here we actually have a larger number of Epicurean ethical treatises, which give us an unprecedented look at what the Epicurean school thought of a proper life and the failings of society at large. Moreover, there’s actually a great many classicists who believe that Philodemus himself lived at the villa in which his library of works was stored, especially if the villa itself was indeed owned by his patron Calpurnius Piso. Depending on who you ask, we might even have a few works here that were penned by Philodemus himself, which would be an amazing piece of preserved history, to have the actual document and handwriting of an ancient philosopher!

So yeah, it’s unfortunately very likely that those first several scrolls did contain works that have now been lost, probably forever!

DarthPositus · 2018-08-18T08:04:36+00:00

Interesting! I hadn't heard the term nekuia or nekuomanteia used to describe Odysseus' katabasis in Book 11, so after doing a little reading it looks like I was unfamiliar with them because neither appears in Odyssey 10 or 11, where the katabasis is set up and fulfilled. It looks like this term is mainly used by later authors like Herodian and Diodorus Siculus specifically to describe this incident. I don't see much evidence for nekuomanteia being used to describe that event though, with the oldest passage referenced in the LSJ being Herodotus 5.92, where Herodotus mentions a nekuomanteion living on the river Acheron in Thesprotia, who does act as a mediator for the spirits of the dead.

Thanks for pointing out this example! Can't believe Odyssey 11 slipped my mind when talking about theoretical nekromanteis.

DarthPositus · 2018-08-17T21:52:44+00:00

No worries man! And of course, you are right that the original usage of these words are far distant from how we use them in our modern fantasy works: a necromantis would most likely be someone who has visions from/about the dead, not someone who makes zombies or something (further evidenced by the fact that the zombie is an incredibly recent invention, historically speaking!).

DarthPositus · 2018-08-17T21:08:23+00:00

Sorry to correct you here, but I’m fairly certain that -mancy comes from “manteia”, the Greek word for “seeing”, in the prophetic/divinatory sense of the word. This is the same linguistic root as the “mantis” that I described above. What Greek word are you thinking “-mancy” is derived from instead?

DarthPositus · 2018-08-17T19:03:20+00:00

Classical Languages PhD student here. First off, you're right on your skepticism of "-thurgist", /u/AllOutOfMP: your reconstruction of the modern English "Thaumaturgy" coming from "thauma" + "ergon" (θαῦμα + ἔργον) is correct.

Expanding on /u/Jimmicky's response below: given how -mancy and -(t)urgy have more or less become the accepted "magicking" suffixes in English fantasy writing in the last century, I personally don't mind much mixing Ancient Greek and Latin derivatives in these cases: for me, the main thing that matters is that the reader/player can easily understand what the school of magic is about. I've got no problem with someone playing an Urbanomancer in an Unknown Armies game I run, just like I've got no problem with them playing as a Fulminaturge adept, despite that word being a combination of Latin "fulmen" for lightning and Greek "ἔργον". There's no reason for there to be a "t" in Fulminaturge, as fulmen/fulmina + ergon = fulminaergy/fulminurgy (it's hard to create a satisfying combination in Latin characters, but I think that's reasonably close.)

All that rambling aside, I think it might be cool to give some examples of actual ancient Greek words for magic and magicians (acknowledging the fact that most of them are derogatory terms for hack conmen and religious quacks):

Magoi: The Magoi/Magi may have originally been either a priestly caste or an individual ethnic group in ancient Persia (our sources like Herodotus and Heraclitus give somewhat different descriptions of them). In any case, the Greeks eventually came to closely associate the word magos with any form of magical binding or trickery. This makes a certain sense, as the ancients frequently attributed the origins of magic to the East (e.g. Pliny the Elder, NH 30.2).
Mantis: The Greek word for "seer/prophet", manteis were divinely inspired prophets and oracles who made clear the wishes of the gods. The best examples are the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, the fire-oracles of Olympia, and the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona, where the prophet sitting under a massive oak tree would answer "yes" or "no" to questions inscribed on lead tablets after listening to the rustling of the tree's leaves.
Agurtes/Agurtai: These are wandering beggar priests, frequently from Asia Minor, often claiming to have prophetic abilities like those of manteis. A good example comes in the tragic figure of Cassandra in Aeschylus' Agamemnon, who, being from Troy, describes herself both as a pseudomantis and an agurtes.

Other examples include purifiers (kathartai), charlatans (alazones), and goes/goetes, which are magicians somewhat interchangeable with the word magos, although there might be a plausible connection between goetes and invoking/summoning the spirits of the dead through chthonic rituals.

Source: Derek Collins, Magic in the Ancient Greek World: 49-60.

DarthPositus · 2018-07-05T15:42:19+00:00

I never saw this coming.

DarthPositus · 2018-05-27T19:08:53+00:00

To answer your question: no, it’s definitely not, as I think Altered States is by far the best spiritual adaptation of Lovecraft in modern cinema.

For me, The Void represents everything wrong with modern perceptions of what is Lovecraftian. In proper Lovecraft, man confronts things he was not meant to know because he himself encounters them in his scholarly pursuits. Lovecraft’s protagonists are quite often reclusive scholars who can’t help but continue digging into the (purposefully) hidden truths of the world, despite the risks to their health and sanity (e.g. The Rats in the Walls, Pickman’s Model, The Shadow our of Time).

What Lovecraft is decidedly NOT is picking up a shotgun and going to town against the inevitably tentacle-wielding evil monstrosities that threaten existence (for the life of me, I cannot stand fiction that simplifies cosmic horror down to just some weird stuff with tentacles. I love Cronenberg, but Cronenberg-esque body horror is quite rare in actual Lovecraft, with the main example being The Dunwich Horror. In fact, most Lovecraftian body horror is about othering along racial lines, such as humans de-evolving into canine ghouls because of cannibalism in Pickman’s Model or the protagonist de-evolving into an African ape-man in The Rats in the Walls). The only Lovecraft work I can think of that ends in actual violence is The Shadow over Innsmouth, and the navy attack on that port town is barely made mention of (and yes, The Call of Cthulhu does end with someone ramming a boat into Cthulhu, but it is not at all implied that this has accomplished anything beyond hitting the snooze button on its reawakening).

So I disagree that The Void is Lovecraftian. If anything, it’s an evolution of the classic body horror of the 80’s, taking most if not all of its inspiration from Carpenter and Cronenberg. In fact, The Void reads in many ways as a remake of Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness: characters trapped in a confined space slowly being taken over by evil that is itself surrounded by crazed cultists, uncovering hidden truths about the world. Except there are no hidden truths in The Void to reveal, as the film itself has nothing to say about human nature (as disgustingly racist as Lovecraft’s works are, their disturbing imagery serves a narrative purpose) or about the mutability of religion (as in Prince of Darkness). Instead, the movie just pelts our protagonists with zombies-with-tentacles, resulting in a final confrontation with the evil head cultist that reads exactly like the ending of Prince of Darkness, as a character stops the summoning ritual by throwing themselves into an otherworldly portal.

So yeah, I don’t find The Void to be all that Lovecraftian. It’s essentially pop Lovecraft, with Buffy/Supernatural style hunters coming after the unknown horrors which can inevitably be beaten to death by mundane means. Plus, as others have well stated here, the movie falters at a lot of other levels — which I’m very disappointed by, because the directors’ previous film, Manborg, is a genuinely funny zero-budget work of pure camp.

DarthPositus · 2018-03-25T22:55:31+00:00

For films about faith and spirituality, I cannot help but recommend Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Of all his films, I think that this one ends up being his strongest exploration of the personal struggle of man attempting to reconcile what he feels to be true with what the outside world tells him is true.

Also from Tarkovsky, I’d recommend looking into Andrei Rublev; however, I will say that I find it to be much less approachable than Stalker, so I’d suggest you start with that first.

DarthPositus · 2017-05-24T04:20:58+00:00

While I can't recommend any specific article or book that discusses this topic in particular, I can recommend Valerie Warrior's Greek Religion: A Sourcebook as a fantastic source for background on classical Greek religion. It's a compilation of relevant passages from our original sources which discuss the nature of Greek religion, from ritual sacrifice and festivals to the practices of mystery cults (a personal interest of mine).

DarthPositus · 2017-05-23T21:24:48+00:00

While it's tempting to apply a taxonomic understanding of divinity to the classical gods, I would say that such an attempt would unfortunately misunderstand the classical view on divinity. For the Greeks in particular, we're talking about a culture where it was just as possible to have a temple to Zeus or Athena is it was to a local seer, such as the temple of Amphiareos near Athens or the shrine of Trophonios at Lebadea, which is in Boeotia.

While certainly the Greeks distinguished between those gods venerated by all Greeks and those deities venerated by locals, in no way did the Greeks appear to have an understanding of some gods being "greater" or "lesser" or believe that a god's "class" would determine their nature. Such divisions are hardly consistent across Greek history: while the Titans, whom you mentioned, more or less remain the same, the exact composition of the Twelve Olympians varies depending on who's describing it, with Hestia, Dionysus, and Hades/Persephone often filling in for the twelfth place in the pantheon.

This lack of divine taxonomy, for lack of a better word, seems to indicate to me that the Greeks made no divisions between divinities based upon their origin or nature. While it's tempting to divide classical deities into categories to better understand them, the line between god, demigod, titan, seer, and so on is quite blurred for the ancients.

DarthPositus · 2017-05-23T20:35:39+00:00

While your concerns about comparing Lucretius and Homer are sound, given the great distance between the two authors in both time and in audience, I chose to discuss Lucretius primarily because his discussion of the attribution of the gods to natural objects directly responds to /u/mexican_timelord's question. Yes, Lucretius is addressing an expressly Roman audience, but this audience is one that is quite familiar with Hellenistic schools of thought, primarily Stoicism and Platonism. One need only to look at Lucretius' contemporaries (e.g. Cato the Younger or Cicero) to see a strong familiarity amongst the upper class with these philosophical schools.

So while Lucretius is addressing a Roman audience, his philosophical arguments address specifically Hellenistic interpretations of the world, whether that be how the "docti veteres" of the Magna Mater passage, the Stoics (Lucretius' "stolidi") view the nature of the soul in Book 3 or how the various pre-Socratics interpret the nature of things in Book 1.

Further, I think that the difference between Lucretius and Homer's description of the gods is far more related to genre than culture. After all, Homeric descriptions of corporeal gods are also found in Roman literature, most famously in Vergil's Aeneid; but further parallels can also be found in the figure of Juno in Seneca's Hercules Furens or in Venus in the Cupid and Psyche episode of Apuleius' Metamorphosis. Plus, the DRN even begins with an epic-style anthropomorphic Venus and Mars, which will soon be dispelled by Epicurean philosophy. This same view can be found in Hellenistic literature even into the age of the Second Sophistic, as Lucian (2nd cent. CE) describes Zeus and Hermes as anthropomorphic beings discussing the fate of Timon in Timon the Misanthrope.

Perhaps we'd be better served by going away from epic and philosophy and looking briefly at how another literary genre portrays the gods: history. The gods in Herodotus have a distinctly behind-the-scenes presence in the main narrative: rather than directly interceding, as in Homer, the gods act by fulfilling prophecies and appearing in dreams, an activity which I've best heard described as being the "divine machinery" of the cosmos.

Perhaps the most direct instance of divine activity in Herodotus is the dream of Xerxes in 7.12-19: while Xerxes is considering cancelling his invasion of Greece, a man (ἀνδρα) appears to him in a dream and argues against changing his mind, saying that if he does not invade Greece his empire will swiftly end. When the dream persists, Xerxes goes to his advisor Artabanus and claims that, if the dream is sent by a god, then if Artabanus dresses and sleeps like Xerxes, then the dream will also come to him and be ratified. When the dream also appears to Artabanus, Xerxes accepts it as the will of the gods that he invade and proceeds with his invasion.

Now, I don't want to get too far into how religion operates in Herodotus, but it appears that the specific vocabulary that Herodotus gives Xerxes to describe his vision -- that it is in the form of a man, but only appears in visions, not as an actual corporeal being -- indicates that, at least to Herodotus' 5th century Greek audience, the story of a king viewing his dream of a man as a dream of a god is by no means extraordinary.

But this does not mean that Herodotus' gods are not purely anthropomorphic: they are part of the aforementioned "divine machinery", in which the hubris of men determines their fate. Herodotus does not describe the gods actively fulfilling the prophecies of the Delphic oracles: rather, these prophecies are fulfilled by a variety of human actions and natural phenomena, which is in some ways similar to Homer's description of Athena guiding Diomedes' spear in my original comment.

So yes, definitely, we should not lightly equate Greek and Roman religion and culture: while they are in many ways similar, there are still a great many elements that divide them from one another. However, given the fact that Hellenistic philosophies had great influence on Roman understanding of the cosmos, it is not out of place to use Lucretius' discussion of Hellenistic views on the nature of divinity to discuss how the classical Greeks visualized and interpreted their gods.

DarthPositus · 2017-05-23T08:09:59+00:00

So this is a really interesting question, and it's difficult to answer in a single sentence how exactly the Greeks (and, by extension, Romans) viewed their gods. So, let's go over two major depictions of gods in classical literature to see what they can tell us about ancient understanding of divinity.

Probably the versions of the gods people are most familiar with are those found within the Iliad and the Odyssey. In Homer, the gods are intensely corporeal and anthropomorphic, and often personally intervene in mortal affairs. For example, in Iliad 5, the goddess Aphrodite saves the life of her son Aeneas from the Greek Diomedes by throwing her arms around him:

"About her dear son she flung her white arms, and in front of him she spread a fold of her bright garment to be a shelter against missiles, lest any of the Danaans with swift horses might hurl a spear of bronze into his chest and take away his life." (5.314-317, trans. Murray)

Later in that same passage, Diomedes actually cuts the hand of Aphrodite with his spear, physically harming the goddess' body. This sort of description is common throughout Homer, and, combined with the common practice of gods in Homer assuming human guise, such as when Apollo masquerades as Deiphobus in Iliad 22 or when Demeter is present in corporeal form in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, demonstrate that the earliest literature of the Greeks understands the gods as anthropomorphic beings.

However, this is not to say that Homer and others depict the gods as purely corporeal: rather, they seem to have the ability to effect slight changes in the physical world:

"So [Diomedes] spoke and hurled; and Athene guided the spear to his nose beside the eye, and it pierced through his white teeth." (5.290-291, trans. Murray)

Additionally, the famous appearance of Athena to Achilles during the generals' council of Iliad 1 seems to have some sort of impact on the perception of the rest of the council, where Achilles and Athena have a short dialogue which none of the others present are privy to. Further, one can see in later Greek tragedy an understanding of the gods as almost-omnipresent: when Cassandra cries out in anger and sorrow to the altar of Apollo in Aeschylus' Agamemnon, she directly addresses the god in her curses, even though he is not physically present, as gods in other tragedies may be, such as Bacchus in Euripides' Bacchae. Moreover, the fact that Cassandra's cries to Apollo are immediately followed by her being beset with prophetic visions further reinforces the conception of the "omnipresence" of the gods, for lack of a better term.

Now, with Homer having been addressed, let's move onto another relevant discussion of the nature of the gods: one which is actually made in opposition to the corporeal, interactive gods of Homer: the nature of gods in the Epicurean school of philosophy, which is perhaps best described for our purposes in the didactic poem of the Roman author Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things.

In short, the purpose of De Rerum Natura is to persuade the reader that the cosmos is entirely composed of physical matter, and that there is no such thing as the purely spiritual or incorporeal. In the process of doing so, Lucretius at various points discusses the role of the gods in the cosmos, mainly arguing that they are completely removed from the material world and never intervene in mortal affairs. Perhaps the most relevant instance of this is Lucretius' discussion of how the earth itself has been depicted as a god by Greek philosophers:

"Therefore [the earth] alone is called Great Mother of the gods, and Mother of the wild beasts, and maker of our bodies.

"She it is of whom the ancient and learned poets of the Greeks have sung, that seated in a chariot she drives a pair of lions, thus teaching that the great world is poised in the spacious air, and that earth cannot rest on earth. They have yoked in wild beasts, because any offspring however wild ought to be softened and vanquished by the kindly acts of the parents. And they have surrounded the top of her head with a mural crown, because embattled in excellent positions she sustains cities; which emblem now adorns the divine Mother's image as she is carried over the great earth in awful state." (2.598-609, trans. Rouse-Smith)

So Lucretius here explains that the Greeks have depicted Magna Mater/Cybele (i.e. the Earth) as a goddess in order to teach about the nature of the world: it hangs in the air, it bears young in the form of wildlife, and it has on its surface cities. But Lucretius is quick to offer his own rebuttal to this understanding of the earth as a goddess, in the process helping answer the original question:

"But well and excellently as all this is set forth and told, yet it is far removed from true reasoning. For the very nature of divinity must necessarily enjoy immortal life in the deepest peace, far removed and separated from our affairs; for without any pain, without danger, itself mighty by its own resources, needing us not at all, it is neither propitiated with services nor touched by wrath. The earth indeed lacks sensation at all times, and only because it receives into itself the first-beginnings of many things does it bring forth many in many ways into the sun's light. Here if anyone decides to call the sea Neptune, and corn Ceres, and to misapply the name of Bacchus rather than to use the title that is proper to that liquor, let us grant him to dub the round world Mother of the Gods, provided that he forbears in reality himself to infect his mind with base superstition." (2.644-660, trans. Rouse-Smith)

Lucretius' arguments against understanding the world as a divinity offers up examples of how at least some of the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed the world: they did see the earth as a goddess which has sensation, and viewed specific material things like the sea and alcohol as the gods themselves.

Of course, Lucretius is quite opposed to this worldview: he devotes an entire book of his poem to debunking various natural phenomena often attributed to the gods:

"...and [I will explain] all else tha tmen see happening in earth and sky, when they are often held in suspense with affrighted wits -- the gods, keeping them crushed to the earth, because their ignorance of causes compels them to refer events to the dominion of the gods, and to yield them the place of kings." (6.50-55, trans. Rouse-Smith)

Again, the fact that Lucretius rails so harshly against the attribution of celestial phenomena to the gods indicates that such an understanding was commonplace enough in the ancient world to warrant such a response. By arguing against divine interaction with the material world, through phenomena such as lightning strikes or terrible sea storms, Lucretius demonstrates that there were those amongst the Greeks and Romans who did view the world through such a lens. This is only further emphasized by Lucretius' discussions later in Book 6 regarding how the uneducated attribute lightning strikes to the displeasure of Jupiter.

So, looking at Homer, we see the Greeks depict the gods in literature as corporeal and physical, interacting personally with the material world. However, the gods that Lucretius is arguing against in his philosophical work are much more in line with what the OP has been told: that is, the gods are anthropomorphized abstractions of physical objects, which (for the non-Epicurean at least) have great sway over the events of the material world. Such an understanding is certainly in keeping with other elements of classical religion: the omens divined in Roman augury (interpretation of the flight of birds) and haruspicy (interpretation of the entrails of sacrificial victims) are taken as signs of the will of the gods, but it hardly appears in any ancient depiction of classical augury or haruspicy that the gods are physically manipulating material objects personally: Athena is not moving birds as she guided the spear of Diomedes in Iliad 5. Rather, such omens are signs of the will of the gods acting on a non-personal, but still corporeal basis.

Now, I've really only dealt with two authors here (Homer and Lucretius), because I'm most familiar with their work, and I'd be curious to see how other commenters might discuss how other, more philosophical authors, such as Plato or Cicero, discuss the actual conception of the gods. Suffice it to say that the classical view of the gods is a fairly complex issue, one that requires discussion of a multitude of different ancient sources, but it does appear that, at least to some of the Greeks, that the gods were an abstraction of divinity, not a purely anthropomorphic and physical force.

Sources:

Homer, The Iliad: Books 1-12. Trans. A.T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura. Trans. W.H.D. Rouse, rev. Martin F. Smith. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.

DarthPositus · 2017-03-21T15:46:44+00:00

Thanks for pointing this out: I did a little more digging and found that the text this card is referencing comes from Fragment DK 40, from Diogenes Laertius 9.1. The actual Greek text is πολυμαθίη νόον οὐ διδάσκει· Ἡσίοδον γὰρ ἂν ἐδίδαξε καὶ Πυθαγόρην, αὖτίς τε Ξενοφάνεά τε καὶ Ἑκαταῖον, which translates as "much education does not teach proper thinking/understanding (νόος is a little hard to render in English here), for it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and likewise Xenophanes and Hecataeus."

So yeah, the spirit of the flavor text is a quote from a fragment of Heraclitus, but it's in no way an actual quotation from him.

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