Theologies of Ancient Greek Religion

Esther Eidinow, Julia Kindt, Robin Osborne

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781107153479
• eBook ISBN: 9781316715772
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Note on spellings and abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The story of theology and the theology of the story
• 3 Theologies of the family in Homer and Hesiod
• 4 Who’s afraid of Cypselus?
• 5 Heraclitus on Apollo’s signs and his own
• 6 The ‘theology’ of the Dionysia and Old Comedy
• 7 Polytheism and tragedy
• 8 Gods and men in ancient Greek conceptions of lawgiving
• 9 Popular theologies
• 10 Sacrificial theologies
• 11 Theologies of statues in Classical Greek art
• 12 The gods in the Athenian assembly
• 13 Plato and the secularisation of Greek theology
• 14 Providence and religion in Middle Platonism
• 15 Narratives of continuity and discontinuity
• Bibliography
• Index