Studied for many years by scholars with Christianising assumptions, Greek religion has often been said to be quite unlike Christianity: a matter of particular actions (orthopraxy), rather than particular beliefs (orthodoxies). This volume dares to think that, both in and through religious practices and in and through religious thought and literature, the ancient Greeks engaged in a sustained conversation about the nature of the gods and how to represent and worship them. It excavates the attitudes towards the gods implicit in cult practice and analyses the beliefs about the gods embedded in such diverse texts and contexts as comedy, tragedy, rhetoric, philosophy, ancient Greek blood sacrifice, myth and other forms of storytelling. The result is a richer picture of the supernatural in ancient Greece, and a whole series of fresh questions about how views of and relations to the gods changed over time.
This wide-ranging investigation of the theorising about the divine that is implicit and explicit in the religious practices and literary and philosophical texts of the ancient Greeks, shows that Greeks thought hard about what gods must be like and what the appropriate ways to worship them were.
Recenzijos
' the volume as a whole reads very well and clear efforts have been made to cross-reference between contributions while the individual contributions strike a nice balance between discussions of more familiar and unfamiliar subject-matter. Anyone interested in (teaching) Greek religion should consult this book, which has something for everyone.' Gary Vos, Classics For All
Daugiau informacijos
This book does away once and for all with the assumption that only religions of the book think systematically about god(s).
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ix | |
| Notes on contributors |
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xi | |
| Preface |
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xv | |
| Note on spellings and abbreviations |
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xvii | |
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1 Introduction: what might we mean by the theologies of ancient Greek religion? |
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1 | (11) |
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2 The story of theology and the theology of the story |
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12 | (23) |
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3 Theologies of the family in Homer and Hesiod |
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35 | (27) |
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4 Who's afraid of Cypselus? Contested theologies and dynastic dedications |
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62 | (27) |
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5 Heraclitus on Apollo's signs and his own: contemplating oracles and philosophical inquiry |
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89 | (28) |
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6 The `theology' of the Dionysia and Old Comedy |
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117 | (36) |
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153 | (23) |
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8 Gods and men in ancient Greek conceptions of lawgiving |
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176 | (29) |
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9 Popular theologies: the gift of divine envy |
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205 | (28) |
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10 Sacrificial theologies |
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233 | (16) |
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11 Theologies of statues in Classical Greek art |
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249 | (32) |
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12 The gods in the Athenian assembly |
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281 | (20) |
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13 Plato and the secularisation of Greek theology |
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301 | (16) |
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14 Providence and religion in Middle Platonism |
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317 | (22) |
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15 Narratives of continuity and discontinuity |
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339 | (20) |
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| Bibliography |
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359 | (44) |
| Index |
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403 | |
Esther Eidinow is Associate Professor of Ancient Greek History at the University of Nottingham. She has a particular interest in ancient Greek religion and magic. Her publications include Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks (2007, revised edition 2013), Luck, Fate and Fortune: Antiquity and its Legacy (2011) and Envy, Poison and Death: Women on Trial in Ancient Athens (2015). She has co-edited (with Julia Kindt) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion (2015). Julia Kindt is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney. Her publications include Rethinking Greek Religion (Cambridge, 2012) and Revisiting Delphi: Religion and Storytelling in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2016). She has also co-edited (with Esther Eidinow) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion (2015). She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Ancient History and a senior editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Religion. Robin Osborne is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and of the British Academy. His work ranges widely over Greek history, archaeology and art history. His most recent books are Athens and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge, 2010), The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (Cambridge, 2011) and Greek History: The Basics (2014).
