Classical writers such as Diodorus Siculus,[1] Plutarch,[2] and Polybius,[3] maintained that Euhemerus was a Messenian, but did not specify whether he came from the Peloponnesian or the Sicilian Messene, which was an ancient Greek colony.
According to Diodorus,[5] Euhemerus was a personal friend of Cassander, king of Macedonia (c. 305 – 297 BC) and the most prominent mythographer for the Macedonian court.
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;[11] 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.
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 Hyperboreans, made concrete in the legendary figure of the Scythian philosopher-hero Anacharsis, or the idealized "Meropes" of Theopompus had been recently enriched by contacts with India.
[12] Euhemerus apparently systematized a method of interpreting the popular myths, 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 kings, heroes, and conquerors, or benefactors to the people, who had thus earned a claim to the veneration of their subjects.
[14] Euhemerism is defined in modern academic literature as the theory that myths are distorted accounts of real historical events.