THE RELIGIONS of ancient Greece and Rome are extinct.

[clayhornik]

We picked up a small stack of leather bound classics at an auction a while back and sold nearly all of them to a friend as display books except for the one I kept, volume one of Bulfinch's Mythology- The Age of Fable.

I started it tonight, going to give myself chapter a night before bed. Darned if I didn't learn something right off the bat. Several years of Latin (the only other benefit I've gotten from it is an ease in understanding Russian grammar) gave me a pretty good background in classical mythology, but there are gods mentioned there - like Terminus, god of boundaries, Bellona, goddess of war- that I'd either forgotten or somehow missed.

But what really hit me was the two sentences that started it: The religions of ancient Greece and Rome are extinct. The so-called divinities of Olympus have not a single worshipper among living men.

"... Not a single worshipper"

I'm sure my pagan friends would disagree with this, but I'm sure it was true in 1855 when Bulfinch wrote. The scope of his words sort of gave me pause- great right before bed time- that in less than two thousand years, entire culturally pervasive religions died out and were consigned to the dustbin of history, rediscovered as stories, as fictions.

Kind of makes you wonder what people two thousand years from now will make of our world.

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Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Not too many worshippers of the Norse mythos either. Or the Celtic ones. Both seemed (to me) richer than the Greek and later Roman adopted ones, but things do disappear into the dust of the past. It's a sad thing.