Euhēmerus of Messene

Euhēmerus, of Messene (Euēmeros, of Messene), author c.300 BC of a fantasy travel novel in Greek, Sacred Scripture (Hiera anagraphē), now surviving only in fragments, but influential in its day. In it he describes an imaginary voyage to an island Panchaia in the Indian Ocean where he found documentary evidence that the gods of mythology were originally great kings, deified by their grateful people, a theory known to the modern world as ‘euhemerism’. The idea was very relevant to the contemporary Hellenistic world where rulers might demand worship from their subjects, and where a rationalizing atheism was part of the new view of life. Ennius wrote in Latin a prose work based on the Sacred Scripture, impugning the majesty of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. That likewise has not survived but it is quoted extensively by the Christian apologist Lactantius, who used it as evidence of the fraudulent nature of the Greek gods.