The Babylonian elements of Greek mythology were easily absorbed into early Greek religion, which, according to The Encyclopedia of Religion, had “no sacred book in which the truth was fixed once and for all . . . It sufficed for a person performing rites to give credence to a vast repertory of stories learned in childhood. Each of these stories existed in many versions, allowing a wide margin of interpretation.”

Typical of such stories were the ones told in the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, the renowned Greek poet probably of the eighth or ninth century B.C.E. His works, highlighting the relations between the mythical gods of Mount Olympus and humans, including intermediate godlike mortals venerated as heroes, became a ready source from which Greek religion could draw. That is why, explains writer G. S. Kirk, “myth and religion overlap.”

Greek religion drew also from other sources. The New Encyclopædia Britannica points out that “the Hellenistic world, which favoured mystery religions with special zeal, adopted [from Egypt] the cults of Osiris, Isis, and Horus.” From there “they were spread over the entire Roman Empire.”

Thus, for about a thousand years, from Homer’s time onward, Greek mythology so strongly influenced the religions of both Greece and Rome that The New Encyclopædia Britannica says: “The importance of Greek mythology in the intellectual, artistic, and emotional history of Western man can hardly be overestimated.” At least religiously speaking, Horace, a Latin poet of the first century B.C.E., was correct when he said: “Captive Greece took Rome captive.”