Gods and Goddesses

"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport." Shakespeare was not the first bard to point out that interpersonal communications between man and deity have always been a bit dicey; nearly a millennium earlier, Homer's epics The Iliad and The Odyssey chronicled the incessant interference by Zeus and his Mt. Olympus homies in the affairs of men and women, both on the battlefield of the Trojan War and in the human heart as Odysseus struggled to return home (in fact, the petty and often malicious meddling of the gods invariably left a lot of people, in the words of HBO, six feet under). Unfortunately, Gods and Goddesses, a workpersonlike survey of the Greek pantheon, offers a scattershot introduction to the subject, combining interview clips with various scholars intercut with depictions of the gods and goddesses in painting and sculpture. Most effective is the detailed discussion of the early evolution of the gods, tracing--by way of Hesiod's Theogony--those initial Oedipal battles between Cronus and his father Uranus, and later the Cronus-led Titans and the Olympians under the aegis of his son Zeus (even here, however, an Incest Family Tree would have helped viewers keep track of the divine lineage). After presenting a chronological narrative of the early gods and goddesses, however, the program simply trots out the others--Zeus, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, and so on--in helter skelter fashion with a fair amount of repetitive material due to the commercial-break-reiteration formula. Still, thanks to the comments from academics, viewers do get some sense of the rocky relationship between gods and goddesses and men and women--though not nearly as much as they would by reading Homer and Hesiod directly. Optional. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)