Deity
the Twelve
The Olympians were the principal gods of the Greeks, the divine family that, after overthrowing the elder Titans, ruled the ordered world from the heights of Mount Olympus. The canonical twelve are usually counted as Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes, and Hestia — with Dionysus often taking a place among them.
Unlike the remote powers of many traditions, the Olympians were vividly anthropomorphic: they quarreled, loved, schemed, and feasted, deathless and ageless yet moved by very human passions. Each governed a province of nature and of life, was honored with temples and festivals, and could be approached through prayer and sacrifice. Homer and Hesiod, the Greeks said, gave the gods their names, forms, and offices.
From early on, thinkers were troubled by the gods' all-too-human conduct: Heraclitus and Xenophanes mocked the poets' tales, and Plato's Republic would banish the slanders told of the gods. Yet the Platonist tradition did not reject the gods but reinterpreted them — reading the Olympians as symbols of eternal principles, names under which the one divine power is refracted through the orders of being. To this allegorical reading the whole later theology of the divine orders is heir.
PLATO SCROLL