The Presocratic thinker Prodicus (5th c. BC) explains how men came to believe in gods

What is it about?

Prodicus claimed that primitive men venerated as gods things they found useful to life (such as the sun, the rivers and springs). It is a controversial issue whether he also claimed a second stage, during which inventors of other useful things (like bread and wine etc.) came to be regarded as gods. This paper approaches the problem by carefully analysing the syntax of the text normally adduced as support for the second stage. The paper shows that Prodicus's theory did not comprise such a second stage.

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Why is it important?

Oddly enough, much has been said about the contents of the controversial text but nobody ever cared to scrutinize its syntactic structure methodically. By doing so, the paper demonstrates that the evidence for Prodicus's theory of religion is unambiguous and unanimous. This means that the idea of the gods of Greek cult---even the higher ones (the Olympians)---being divinized mortals of early times (i.e. the alleged second stage of the theory), does not take its start from Prodicus, contrary to what is often claimed by researchers. In other words, Prodicus was not a forerunner of Euhemerus, the Hellenistic writer (around 300 B.C.), after whom the idea is conventionally called euhemerism.