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Euhemerus (; also spelled Euemeros or Evemerus; Euhēmeros, "happy; prosperous"; late fourth century BC) was a Greek Mythography at the court of Cassander, the king of Macedon. Euhemerus' birthplace is disputed, with Messina in Sicily as the most probable location, while others suggest Chios or Tegea.
The philosophy attributed to and named for Euhemerus, euhemerism, holds that many mythological tales can be attributed to historical persons and events, the accounts of which have become altered and exaggerated over time.
Euhemerus's work combined elements of fiction and political utopianism. Early Christian writers, such as Lactantius, used Euhemerus's belief that the ancient gods were originally human to confirm their inferiority regarding the Christian God.
Diodorus Siculus is one of the very few sources who provide other details about Euhemerus' life. According to Diodorus,Diodorus vi.1.4. Euhemerus was a personal friend of Cassander, king of Macedonia (c. 305 – 297 BC) and the most prominent mythographer for the Macedonian court. Sometime in the early third century BC Euhemerus wrote his main work "Sacred History" ("Hiera Anagraphê").
The sixth book of Diodorus’ Bibliotheca is lost, but Eusebius cites a fragment from it at length in his Praeparatio evangelica.Eusebius Praep. evan. ii.2.59B-61A. The ancient Roman writer Ennius first translated Euhemerus' work into Latin, but this translation also is lost. Lactantius however in the third century AD included substantial references to Ennius' translation in the first book of his Divine Institutes.Lactantius Div. inst. i.11, 13, 14, 17, 22. Various other fragments of importance are also found in the later literature of Augustine of Hippo.Bibliotheca classica: or, A classical dictionary: containing a copious account of the principal proper names mentioned in ancient authors; with the value of coins, weights, and measures, used among the Greeks and Romans; and a chronological table, Volume 1, John Lemprière, G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1833, p. 547. From these extant fragments and references, modern scholars have been able to "compile what is presumably a fairly complete picture of Euhemerus’ work".
Euhemerus' work may have taken the form of a philosophical fictionalized travelogue, universally accepted today as a philosophical Romance, incorporating imagined archaic inscriptions, which his literary persona claimed to have found during his travels. Euhemerus claims to have traveled to a group of islands in the waters off Arabia. One of these, Panchaea, being home to a utopian society made up of a number of different ethnic tribes. His critique of tradition is epitomized in a register of the births and deaths of many of the deities, which his narrator persona discovered inscribed on a golden pillar in a temple of Zeus Triphylius on the invented island of Panchaea;Plutarch noted that no Greek nor barbarian had ever seen such an island. (Fragment noted in Spyridakis 1968:338). he claimed to have reached the island on a voyage down the Red Sea round the coast of Arabia, undertaken at the request of Cassander, according to the Christian historian of the fourth century AD, Eusebius.
Euhemerus refers to a rational island utopia. The ancient Hellenic tradition of a distant Golden Age, of Hesiod's depiction of human happiness before the gift of Pandora, of the mythic convention of idealized , made concrete in the legendary figure of the philosopher-hero Anacharsis, or the idealized "Meropes" of Theopompus had been recently enriched by contacts with India.(Brown 1946:262); compare Plato's Atlantis or the exotic tropical isle described by Iambulus, which was noted in Diodorus 2.55ff. (Spryidakis 1968:338). Euhemerus apparently systematized a method of interpreting the popular mythology, which was consistent with the attempts of Hellenistic culture to explain traditional religious beliefs in terms of a naturalism. Euhemerus asserted that the Greek gods originally had been , heroes, and conquerors, or benefactors to the people, who had thus earned a claim to the veneration of their subjects. According to him, for example, Zeus was a king of Crete, who had been a great conqueror; the tomb of Zeus was shown to visitors near Knossos, perhaps engendering or enhancing among the traditionalists the reputation of Cretans as liars.Sprydakis 1968:340.
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