The gods are, generally, human in form, and human in character. In ancient philosophy indignant protests were indeed raised against any unworthy conduct or motives being imputed to them, and most lofty views of the purity and righteousness of Deity were put forward; but the common man, to whose imagination we ultimately owe mythology, was not a philosopher, and, then as now, he did not insist on the highest standard of ethics from those he respected. The gods are usually just and merciful, but on occasion, anger at some slight or injury, desire for the satisfaction of their natural passions, or other strong motive, will force them away from the paths of perfect uprightness; and some, such as Hermes, lay no claims to high morality. As to their ordinary life, they do much as men do, residing in houses in heaven or on Mt. Olympos, or in the temples and shrines men prepare for them; like human beings, they eat, but theirs is magical food, nektar and ambrosia, wherefore they have in their veins something other than the blood that flows in ours, and are sustained so that they do not die.
They can, however, be wounded or made insensible. They are not bodiless, nor omnipresent, nor are all of them omniscient; but they can go immense distances in very little time, see things from very far off, hear in heaven prayers made on earth, and even help or harm without being actually present. Their powers, then, are corporeal and finite, but very much less limited than ours; `the gods can do all things’ generally speaking, but here and there a limit even to their power and knowledge is mentioned or implied; thus, none but Zeus and his favourite Apollo has certain foreknowledge of the future, although any god may know something, even a great deal, of what is to take place. It may be supposed that any of them might theoretically know whatever he or she cares to know about the future, as about past or present; but many or most simply are not—their several distinctive, and distinctively different, characters being what they were—in any way interested to know it. One of the peculiar advantages of being a god was, indeed, that one might equally well either know or not know whatever one desired, with no penalty to pay either way. In this they were of course utterly dissimilar from us mortals.
A notable point is that practically every god is somehow connected with at least one animal. The eagle is Zeus’ attendant. Hera is associated with the peacock, and also with the cow; her epithet, from Homer down, is boöpis, which Homer probably took to mean ‘having large round eyes, like a cow’s,’ but which etymologically could be equally well rendered ‘cowfaced,’ and her priestess Io was turned into a heifer. Their son Ares on one occasion at least is said to have turned into a boar, that which killed Adonis. Apollo is associated with the raven and the swan; Artemis with deer and bears; Aphrodite’s birds are the sparrow and the dove; the bestial shapes of Dionysos are prominent in the ‘Homeric’ Hymn to Dionysos. Hermes is often accompanied by a cock; Demeter and Persephone, besides the horse-shape of the former, are associated with swine. Poseidon and Hades are associated with horses, the former also with bulls. Pan and the Satyrs are half-bestial in themselves. Athena’s bird is the owl; the Muses are human in shape (Hesiod), but the Pierides, their rivals, like them in number and musical abilities (Ovid), are turned into daws. Generally, any god may on occasion take the form of some animal.
Are we then to conclude that the Greeks, at an earlier stage of their cultural history than any we know, adored holy bulls, cows, horses and so forth, and that they only later developed the concept of human-shaped or anthropomorphic gods?
The answer is that the evidence does not justify such a conclusion. The earliest mentions we have of many deities, indeed of all, represent them as more or less completely human in shape. We must judge each case on its merits, and if we do so, we find no hint in any early author that Zeus was conceived as being anything other than a glorified man in appearance; Dionysos may have been a bull or a serpent before he took human form, but he is no native Greek and cannot therefore serve as a criterion. Hermes’ cock is certainly younger than himself, for it was introduced into Greece in historical times—long after Homer—and Hermes is a very old god. He holds a fighting cock because the young men whose god he became liked them. Hera may have been a cow-shaped goddess once, but if so, it has left no trace on her cult or imagery, save the one enigmatic epithet and perhaps the story of Io. Artemis probably was adored in bestial shape here and there, for her worshippers at Brauron danced before her in yellow dresses and were called she-bears; but Apollo shows no trace of having a non-human shape, save for a tale or two in which he takes bestial form as a temporary disguise. As a general proposition, then, the statement that all or most Greek gods were once theriomorphic will not stand; it remains merely a more or less likely suggestion for some of them.