In some respects, my project resembles similar ones attempted by scholars working in adjacent subdisciplines, such as the work by scholar of religion Thomas A. Lewis, who recently pointed out the following concerning the lack of collaboration between scholars of religion and philosophers of religion:

Before proceeding with my exposition, however, I need to justify my admittedly disheartening diagnosis which will be most likely received with skepticism—if not outright pugnacity. When push comes to shove, it is understandably unpleasant for scholars to read that their respective fields might eventually be theoretically and methodologically insufficient or biased to study a topic that is diachronically deemed their “own.” And this is the point where protectionism often becomes the approach par excellence, with stringent disciplinary boundaries and histories—let alone praised “divinized” scholars of the past—functioning as invisible shields of a type of “unique” scholarly work that outsiders cannot fathom nor advance in any constructive manner. In order to justify such a grim portrayal, I am returning to the title of this chapter, but now to its former part. The quoted phrase is partly based on the concluding words of Greta Hawes in her review of my book An Ancient Theory of Religion: Euhemerism from Antiquity to the Present (2017) in the Bryan Mawr Classical Review, the flagship periodical publishing reviews of new works from predominantly the fields of classics and ancient history (Hawes 2017).

I am not of course planning to cunningly use these pages with the intention of countering a negative review. Numerous scholars have had the experience of an unfavorable criticism, and I take no personal offense whatsoever. Being fully aware from the outset that my work balances between disciplines, I had no doubt that some scholars from classics (and, perhaps, ancient history) would react as guardians of their disciplinary cherished principles and theories after the publication of that said volume—as I strongly anticipate to be the case with the current volume as well. In her review, Hawes chose a recognizable counterargumentation strategy, namely responding to tone. By apparently taking offense for criticizing her colleagues and their approaches pertaining to the enigmatic figure of Euhemerus of Messene (c. third century BCE) and his theory, Hawes made the following observation:

There is a lot to be discussed in this excerpt. Instead, however, of replying in defense of my thesis in An Ancient Theory of Religion—which would be of little (if any) interest to the reader of the present volume—I seize here the opportunity to make a more substantial criticism in view of what I am arguing in the book at hand. It is, I reckon, far more appealing to examine Hawes’s points as an indication of scholarly protectionism and a point of contention within an academic debate that exceeds the strict limits of a book under review. In my reading, Hawes’s polemical tone—to the point of ad hominem—does not seem to be about euhemerism; rather, it appears to be about disciplinary methods and theories, and ultimately about who can or should study the religious ideas of the ancient Greeks and Romans. In her attempt to defend her field (O’Sullian, Scullion, and Bowden mentioned in the quoted excerpt are all prominent classicists), Hawes makes elementary mistakes with regard to how scholarly research is conducted and the manner with which theories are formulated. First, claiming that when one agrees with some scholars while undermining others constitutes an indication of wobbly scholarship, one could readily respond that the foundational principle of any academic research is to debate or even eventually dissolve cherished ideas irrespective of who formulated them. As Karl Popper put it in his magisterial The World of Parmenides (1998), theories are guesswork. Functioning as such, they are neither stable nor steadfast principles: “If you ask me, ‘How do you know?’ my reply would be, ‘I don’t; I only propose a guess. If you are interested in my problem, I shall be most happy if you criticize my guess, and if you offer counter-proposals, I in turn will try to criticize them’ ” (Popper 1998: 24). Second, when Hawes argues that one does a disservice to scholarship when criticizing other scholars’ classifications or definitions “in contradiction of his/hers,” she again fails to acknowledge how definitions and other theoretical formulations come about or are being applied. Any classification (of anything) is liable to scrutiny if the one who renders it invalid formulates an alternative. For example, the debate on defining religion has been central and yet unresolved in the field of the academic study of religion for more than a hundred and fifty years, whereas it has remained largely (if not entirely) mute among classicists and historians—a pivotal issue to which I will return in various places throughout this volume. Moreover, as Mary Douglas (1921–2007) taught us many years ago, classifications are not fixed but culture-specific (see Douglas 1984 [1966])—and, in view of Hawes’s protectionism, discipline-specific as well, I would add. Third, by functioning primarily as a custodian of her field and secondarily as a reviewer of a given work and its thesis, Hawes dismisses the book under review with the following closing remark:

Any reader has the right to claim or suggest that a book is to be dismissed or celebrated. However, “incivility” or “mean-spiritedness” could be rather unfortunate descriptions of an author’s motivations or style—as if such features could be precisely measured in any adequate manner (hence Hawes’s formulation: “cast a pall of mean-spiritedness” [my emphasis])—that have, I think, little value in scholarly debates. However, what one could take from Hawes’s criticism is the broader picture she painted, and which has little to do with my thesis on euhemerism in the said volume. The issue, if my reading and hunch are correct, touches upon more important problems pertaining to the way scholars of the study of religion approach the religions of antiquity, as well as the clash between their methods and theories and the ones formulated and argued about by their colleagues in Departments of Classics and/or Ancient History.

Hawes’s tacit protectionism, however, is neither peculiar nor shocking. Lately the field of classics (and, often, ancient history) has received fierce criticisms and not merely for its academic methods and theories. Rather, like many (if not all) other fields under the broader umbrella of the humanities, the current (largely postmodern) critique related to identity politics and power balances has increasingly dealt with the humanities as a cluster of academic fields that, anchored to previously hegemonic ideas, support, tolerate, or even propagate ideologies that conceal strong racial, misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ+, and other sentiments and ideas of inequality and oppression. The ensuing result of such criticisms has recently led the humanities in general into a period of introspection and possible restructuring from the bottom-up. Classics (and ancient history) as well as the study of religion have not evaded such a critique—although the former has lately received harsher attacks. For example, the controversy over Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987) still in many respects haunts the discipline as Denise Eileen McCoskey recently opined (2018). The issue of systemic racism within classics, as was reported, tormented the 2019 Society of Classical Studies at its annual meeting in San Diego (Bond 2019). The result was a series of online posts presumably unveiling not merely the alleged embedded racist ideology surrounding classics as a discipline, but also an inherent exceptionalism that classicists feel and perhaps occasionally maintain about their field. As Donna Zuckerberg puts it, “I believe that classicists are particularly in thrall to the notion that our discipline is objectively more important—and, relatedly, more difficult—than other humanities disciplines” (Zuckerberg 2018; emphasis in original). Moreover, the field has been severely criticized for espousing and nurturing an ideal of “Western triumphalism,” with new generation scholars aiming at not only acknowledging such a problem, but, more importantly as it is put, “further exposing … the damage done by the old hardline on Classics and ‘Western civilization’ ” (Hanink 2017; cf. Appiah 2016; Dhindsa 2020).

Concurrently, there are many alarming messages coming from voices within the discipline of classics regarding low student enrollments, threats of defunding, or occasionally dismantling whole departments, as well as the “uselessness” of classical education to persons of the twenty-first century—all leading to but also feeding from a popular catchphrase: the humanities are in crisis.³ It is by no accident thus that a heated discussion recently erupted online following a proposal by the Faculty of Classics of Oxford University to remove Homer and Virgil from the compulsory first-year classics syllabus in response to a diversity gap (Turner and Kavanagh 2020; Badhe 2020)⁴—or another debate at the other side of the Atlantic after Princeton University’s decision to alter the structure of its classics undergraduate program in connection with the teaching of Greek and Latin, as well as similar decisions elsewhere in the country (including the shrinking or even closure of departments of Classical Studies).⁵

I must here, however, turn my attention to my own field as well, that is, the study of religion, since the volume at hand is not an attack on classicists—although it will be most likely be seen as such; rather, it is an investigation of the reasons the two disciplines, classics and the study of religion, have failed or avoided to productively collaborate (and, as it seems, continue to do so) when studying the religion(s) of the Greeks and the Romans. A feeling of exceptionalism is likewise apparent among scholars of religion when it comes to their field; but the “invisible enemy” is not the nonspecialist or outsider in general but rather a specific cognate field: theology.⁶ Ever s...