There's an EVEN DUMBER Greek God_ - Greek Gods Explained

So I made a video about Epimetheus, who I dubbed the dumbest Greek god. But a lot of commenters seemed curious why I neglected to acknowledge Koalimos, the actual god of stupidity in Greek mythology. In fact, stupidity is literally in his name. And the answer is actually quite simple. I completely forgot about him, which, in my defense, is a very easy mistake to make because there is almost no information about Koalimos. There isn't even Greek art of him. I just based my design on this 16th century Quentin Matsys painting because it's the first thing that shows up on Google and it's beautiful. We only have two classical literary sources mentioning Koalimos by name, one from Aristophanes and one from Plutarch. And they're both just offhand mentions. He never actually shows up or does anything. So if I had remembered Koalimos, I wouldn't have been able to make a very interesting video about him. I've already shown you everything there is to know about the guy and it took me 41 seconds. So if I had to redo the video, instead of replacing Epimetheus with Koalimos as the dumbest Greek god, I'd probably be tempted to contrive an argument for why Koalimos doesn't actually count in order to retroactively justify me forgetting about him. But wouldn't you know it? After digging a little deeper, I think that argument might actually have legs. Looking closer at those two literary references to Koalimos, I'm now not 100% sure he was actually considered a god in ancient Greek tradition. The oldest source mentioning Koalimos was Aristophanes' play The Knights, which was a political satire mainly poking fun at Cleon, an Athenian politician who Aristophanes had a beef with. In an early scene of the play, a character is trying to convince a sausage seller that he is destined to become the ruler of Athens. And that's where we get this quote. Mix and knead together all the state business as you do for your sausages. To win the people, always cook them something savory that pleases them. Besides, you possess all the attributes of a demagogue. A screeching horrible voice, a perverse cross-grain nature, and the language of the marketplace. In you all is united which is needful for governing. The oracles are in your favor, even including that of Delphi. Come, take a chaplet, offer a libation to Koalimos, the god of stupidity, and take care to fight vigorously. Now, the first thing to note here is the obvious absurdity of everything the character is saying. The play is a comedy after all. So it's highly unlikely that the Greeks actually worshipped and gave offerings to Koalimos. But he's still very explicitly referred to as the god of stupidity. So from that, it seems like a pretty closed case that that was his role in Greek tradition. Except, when you look at the quote in the original Ancient Greek, that title is not there. He's referred to simply as Koalimos. By the way, shout out to the folks at the OSP and Mythology Fans Discord servers for helping me decipher that part because I definitely cannot read Ancient Greek. What I think might have happened here is the translator figured an English speaker wouldn't understand the name Koalimos to mean stupid person. So they added in the title god of stupidity to make things more clear. But Koalimos is only serving the function of a god as part of a joke in a comedy play. The same play where a sausage seller becomes the leader of Athens. I don't see why we should take anything going on in the scene as a face value representation of people's beliefs and customs. Then if we look at Plutarch's Life of Simon, we can see that he's not directly referring to a deity, but rather a man who was nicknamed Koalimos for his reputation of being stupid. Similar to how we today might call a dumb person Bozo or an NFT investor. I suppose this nickname could be a reference to a figure actually named Koalimos, but there's no indication from Plutarch of that figure being a god. Based on these two sources, I think Koalimos at best might have been considered a daemon, a lesser divine spirit who basically just served as a personification of the concept of stupidity, but not a fully-fledged god with a multi-faceted personality and tradition of worship attached to him. And that is why I'm gonna stick to my guns and say Epimetheus is the dumbest Greek god and Koalimos doesn't count. Probably. If you have information that proves me wrong, by all means, hit me up. I'd love to make a part three. When I started researching for this video, I thought the lesson was gonna be that I need to be more careful with my research and double-check things before I make any definitive statements on mythology. Like I make a video about the dumbest Greek god, but I forget there's a literal god of stupidity? Come on, this is amateur hour. But now it turns out that me forgetting Koalimos was actually just my deeply ingrained mythological expertise subconsciously pointing me in the right direction. So the real moral of the story is that I am always right about Greek mythology 100% of the time and no one should ever try to correct me.