The Greek guide to swearing an oath

A lawyer who wished to serve on a jury but was no Christian was given permission to swear his oath in the name of a local river. He saw it as ‘his god’, as people did in the past, when the association between nature and divinity was widely taken for granted.

Consider, for example, the ancient Greek understanding of the natural world. The farmer poet Hesiod (c. 700 bc), often drawing on Hittite and Babylonian myths, provided the West with its first account of how the world was made. First there was khaos, he said (that meant, ‘emptiness, void’, cf. ‘chasm’). Then there appeared Earth, Underworld and Eros (without which nothing could be generated), Night and Day. Earth bore Heaven, Mountains, their Nymphs, and Sea; and then bedded with Heaven, bearing Kronos, first of a range of often monstrous god(desse)s. Hesiod named some 300 of them, with Zeus eventually fighting his way to emerge as top god.