Deploying an intriguing combination of old-fashioned and inventive approaches to the classical world and its reception, Barbara Graziosi here breaks new ground in the interpretation of the major Greek gods.

Around the middle of the 20th century, the gods fell out of scholarly fashion, ceding their place to such topics as divination, sacrifice and polis cults – all of which involved them, but without privileging them as subjects of enquiry. Where the deities’ reputation for fascination and charisma endured was in the realm of coffee-table books aimed at audiences beyond the academy, whose authors might likewise come from outside its confines. In recent years, however, the study of the gods has gradually returned from the scholarly margins, as part of the investigation of a range of interacting features of ancient Greek religion, culture and society. Graziosi’s book not only describes the Olympians as the majestic figures beloved of all those coffee-table volumes – Zeus, “cow-eyed” Hera, “earth-shaker” Poseidon, the huntress Artemis, violent Ares and the rest – but at the same time contributes to the quest to determine why and how the gods matter.

Graziosi paints the Olympians as in some respects beautifully easy to understand, and in others elusive of any attempt to be reduced to a particular meaning. She outlines these divergent ways to approach the deities at the book’s outset when she recounts a story told by Cicero about the poet Simonides, who was tasked by the tyrant of Syracuse with answering the question: “What is a god?” At first, Simonides thought the task would be simple enough, but he kept finding it necessary to request more time because the more he thought about the question, the less he found he was able to answer it.

Simplifying the gods and showing the impossibility of such a task is in line with Graziosi’s reading of how they have ever been perceived

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In places, Graziosi presents the Olympians in accordance with Simonides’ initial assumption that the gods make sense: as a family of distinct individuals, each with his or her clearly defined roles, powers and characters. Zeus is the patriarch who prefers “the negotiations of family life to the loneliness of absolute power”. His siblings and children respond in various ways to his rule: “Little Hermes”, for example, “made him laugh no matter how disobedient he was.” A glossary towards the end of the book continues this tendency to depict the gods as distinct, clear-cut individuals. Thus, for example, “Aphrodite is the goddess of love and sex, especially sex with women…” This approach matches the array of such definitions in traditional handbooks and dictionaries of mythology, where, for example, Artemis is the virgin huntress and Hephaestus the lame blacksmith, and where the Roman “equivalents” of the Greek gods – Diana, Vulcan et al – are tagged on as though that is all that need be said about them. As the entry on Minerva in a recent mythological dictionary puts it: “see Athena”.

In other respects, however, Graziosi sees the gods as rather more than individualised personages that can be easily described and conveniently pigeonholed. She surveys how Homer and Hesiod – credited by Herodotus with setting out what the gods looked like, what their names were, how they came into being and how each was honoured – were also attesting to the gods’ essential unknowability. The tension between the desire to explain them and the objective of showing them to be intangible was evident even in Augustine’s attempt to provide an “all-encompassing” (and hostile) account in his City of God Against the Pagans. Even then, Graziosi observes, “the gods were never quite tamed into a coherent theory”. From antiquity onwards, individuals have tried to understand the Olympians while becoming frustrated by their elusiveness. Graziosi’s slippage between simplifying the gods and showing the impossibility of such a task is therefore in line with her reading of how the Olympians have ever been perceived.

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When I first saw the title of this book, I was intrigued to find out how a scholar might write “A History” of the Olympians and what sort of work would result. In one respect, this is cutting-edge history, which reads Western culture through its unfolding engagement with the Olympian gods and which considers varying ways to read this past as both distant and as something that “we” own today. In another, we are given an old-fashioned style of seeing gods as the “great men” of history: a family of charismatic, clever individuals whose “disturbing behaviour impelled history onwards, into the Renaissance and towards modernity”. These deities are described in terms of various leadership roles, as councillors or as politicians “deeply involved in the developments of the classical period”. Graziosi tempers the “great man” approach with decidedly post 18th-century notions of individuals as victims of history.

In this respect, the gods’ position can be seen to change from leaders to migrants. Having left their homeland, they shifted shape to fit in with their new surroundings: as Alexander the Great’s ancestors and as strolling players in a Renaissance Pope’s military victory parade; as the heavenly bodies studied by Muslim astronomers and as the echoes seen by conquistadors in the faces of Inca gods; and as dramatis personae in the writing of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Nietzsche, Hölderlin and Borges. And yet, all the while, as Graziosi notes, such “far-flung travels did not make [them] forget their Mediterranean roots”.

In showing how the ancients individualised and humanised the Olympians while never being able to know for sure what the gods were, Graziosi sheds light on why the Greek deities retain their mystery and their appeal. This book has appeared at a time when some of those gods are being given new meanings and addressed to new audiences – for example, Lady Gaga opting to present herself as Venus, updating the ancient deity via Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, which itself drew on classical images of Venus and Aphrodite. The resulting package is exotic, foreign, hybridised but also a fresh product of American popular culture.

The Gods of Olympus weighs up how the myths matter to us as they allow us to draw from the past while reflecting the question of who owns that past. This is emphasised above all via the contribution Graziosi makes, at the start of the book, to the debate over the “Elgin Marbles” on display in the British Museum. Her reading is that behind the political controversy over the Parthenon frieze lies a “deeper truth”: namely, that centuries of transformation have made the gods at home in London as well as in Athens – and “in many other places as well”. Such is Graziosi’s take on the nuances of what happens when the ancient world is received – when reception is never passive, and as it adapts, it transforms and updates the past. The Olympians may be the products of a long-gone culture, but they refuse to go away. And, from Graziosi’s 21st-century vantage point, they “seem set for immortality as I write this”.