EUHEMERUS. - Greek philosopher. Almost nothing is known of his life: a native of Messene (it is doubtful whether of that in Sicily or that in the Peloponnese), he was a friend of King Cassander (317-298 B.C.) and published his principal work, the Ἱερὰ ἀναγραφή, around 280, as may be inferred from Callimachus.
Of this writing few and reworked Greek fragments have survived; others in Latin handed down by Christian authors - above all Lactantius - who certainly drew on the translation (and reworking) of E.'s work made in the 3rd century B.C. by the poet Ennius.
In this "description" E. recounts (cf. Diodorus, V, 41-46; VI, 11, 4 ff.) that during a voyage from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean he had encountered a group of islands. Having landed on one of these (Panchaea) he described in minute detail its customs: the division of the population into three social classes (priests-artisans, farmers, soldiers), the exclusive political pre-eminence of the priests, the equitable distribution among all of the island's produce, etc. He further related that he had visited the temple of Zeus Triphylius, where Zeus himself, while still alive, had wished to hand down to the priests, by engraving it on a stele, the memory of the most famous deeds of his ancestors, beginning with Uranus, the first king on earth, and ending with the age of his own happy reign.
All the mythology was thus reduced by E. from the divine plane to the human one. The Ἱερὰ ἀναγραφή was not, however, original in its theoretical premises, whether social or religious. For while the former were inspired by those communistic utopias so common in the 4th century, which had as their shining example above all the Platonic Republic, the latter, rationalistic in that they denied an objective value to mythology by holding the ancient gods to be rulers who had risen to the rank of divinities in consequence of their benefactions to mankind, had very distant precedents - even if, perhaps, not fully formulated: Hecataeus of Miletus, Herodotus, Hecataeus of Eraclea, etc. But besides these E. had had a more immediate precursor in Hecataeus of Teos of the age of Ptolemy (323-285 B.C.), who had arrived at the conclusion that the Greek gods, like those of the Egyptians, were nothing other than benefactors of mankind held in honour.
Nevertheless, despite so many supporters, this theory, whether because E. had formulated it better or because his work was better known and appreciated, the fact remains that it remained bound to his name and was called Euhemerism.
In Greece Euhemerism, apart from a few late and minor followers (Leon of Pella, Dionysius Scytobrachion), was clearly repudiated and E.'s account regarded as a falsification (Callimachus, Eratosthenes, Strabo, Plutarch): to the fervid Hellenic imagination, in fact, so flat a theory must have been too repugnant.
In Rome, on the other hand, Euhemerism met with favour: Ennius had in fact deemed E.'s work worthy of translation (entitling it: Eubemerus, sive Sacra historia), in order to popularize, perhaps, those principles that almost justified the crude religious rationalism of the Roman world, where, for example, the most archaic divinities of Latium, such as Janus, Saturn, Picus, Faunus, etc., were regarded as ancient native kings and famous myths, such as those of Romulus, Horatius Cocles, Cloelia, etc., had become authentic facts of the earliest history of Rome.
E.'s theories, through Ennius's translation, were known to and accepted by the Christian apologists and judges, who made use of this convenient weapon, offered by their very adversaries, to demonstrate to the pagans the falsity of their religion.
Bibliography5 works
Cesare d'Onofrio
EVENZIO E TEODULO, saints, martyrs: v. ALESSANDRO, EVENZIO e TEODULO, saints, martyrs.