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I'm only on chapter 15.
The thing that strikes me most sharply is the similarities between their gods and Christianity. Zeus is "Father" Zeus. Athena is a virgin goddess. And the gods keep meddling in human affairs the way I've heard Christians say their god to behaves, the gods often act in arbitrary and unpredictable ways. They act on caprice because someone worshipped them or someone else didn't, or they help someone against another person because that other man worshipped a different god. It seems like petty vanity, the behavior of psychopaths.
I'm reminded of something I heard from a modern pagan who writes that when a god appears in human form he or she is an exemplar of some human characteristic and is not a god like the creator of heaven and earth. They don't seem to have an abstracted creator at all.
Still, the parallels with Christianity keep popping up. Curious.
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