/lit/ - Literature

>>16690670
The Slavs are... interesting. We have nothing written directly from them, but we do have a lot of folklore written by Christianized Slavs. We also have the Book of Veles, which is an 18th century forgery intentionally written to sound archaic (the author made a few fuckups). You'd think that would make this garbage, but 1% of all ethnic Russians are polytheists practicing (what they claim) is their ancient ethnic religion. Some of this is just flat out Hinduism, because the Vedas were actually written by Slavs (or so they claim). These guys can be described as "hippies who don't like that the Russian Orthodox Church isn't racist enough for them".

The Romans had the Twelve Tables, which were given to the holy priest-king Numa Pompilius by Zeus and Fides, alongside a huge corpus of technical literature detailing the precise relationships of the Gods, what they wanted, and how they wanted man to act. It's all lost to us, with time and Christianization having destroyed it. The Sybylline Books were a collection of ancient prophetic texts the Roman Senate used to divine the will of the Gods. They were destroyed by Stilicho in 405AD. Why is sort of complicated, the running theory is that the books had a passage that described the invasion of Alaric I as punishment for Christianization and Stilicho's bad governance (ironically, Stilicho's actions would directly lead to the rise of Odoacer, who destroys the WRE).

The Greeks had a similarly large body of literature, ranging from oracular proclamations to wisdom literature to "spiritual technical manuals". At some point the Greeks get the idea that poets and playwrights are divinely inspired. This leads into Homer and Hesiod, whose works were treated like the Ancient Greek Bible (Greek religious practices changed swiftly because of how holy Homer was perceived as). At another point, they get the idea that Philosophers are too. Plato is the shining example of this, with many Greeks considering him to have been a religious prophet of Zeus and other Gods. Homer and Hesiod are THE "Greek Bible".

Someone's going to get upset that I used "Judaeo-Christian" in the previous post, this process of combining Biblical figures to make a singular badguy is being done concurrently by both Jews and Christians, who are taking notes from each other. It's a shared activity.