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This chapter discusses Murray's writing on Greek religion between 1907 and 1915, showing how he saw in it as imaginative ideal which reflected was his in own mixture of rationalism and aspirational agnosticism. The following works — A History of Ancient Greek Literature, The Rise of the Greek Epic, and Four Stages in Greek Religion — are analysed.

Focusing on a distinction between two modes of ancient Mediterranean religion, the religion of everyday social exchange, in which the main focus was on plant and animal offerings, and the religion of literate cultural producers, which relies upon the former but re-defines practice as a product of the mind, Stanley Stowers argues that ancient cultural producers textualized sacrificial practice, turning sacrifice into a matter of truths and meanings and overlooking the function of sacrifice as a strategic, practical system of reciprocity between gods and human beings. Modern studies of sacrifice too often depend upon these ancient textual performances, privileging theologies of sacrifice over the underlying and un-theorized practical system of sacrificial exchange in their own attempts to extract meaning. Stowers encourages a renewed focus on sacrifice as a strategy of daily living that avoids the obfuscating fascination with beliefs and discursive rationales common to ancient and modern discourses alike.

The Greeks were polytheists who believed in a multitude of gods. In the modern discussion of Greek religion the gods take second place to ritual, and the study of individual gods is privileged over attempts to define their general characteristics qua gods. While studies of the functions and personalities of gods like Apollo, Demeter, Dionysos or Herakles abound, no comprehensive treatment of the generic properties of the Greek gods exists. The question “What is Greek god?” is considered too ‘theological’ and therefore shunned. This chapter examines four divine qualities that are shared by all the Greek gods—their immortality, anthropomorphism, foreknowledge, and finally their power.

The main part of this chapter reviews the role of texts and writing within the practice of ancient Greek religion, and seeks to modify the common view that oral tradition provided most Greek ritual knowledge. True, most information from inscribed ‘sacred laws’ is administrative and financial: written information — which exists in quantity, especially with the so-called ‘calendars of sacrifices’ — tends to specify exceptions and innovations or to provide precise detail in response to unusual needs. Documentation from the Aegean (Kos) and Asia Minor (Miletos) is cited to illustrate the former, while inscriptions from Sicily (Selinous) and N. Africa (Kyrene) are quoted to show that rituals of purification could occasionally require ‘how to’ instructions.

Jan Bremmer explores the historiography of the Greek gods over the past century or so. He begins with the Indo-European and Mycenean prehistory of the Greek gods, pointing out that no modern history of Greek religion contained such an overview until Walter Burkert’s history was published in 1977. He then examines in turn the contributions to the study of the Greek gods made by four of the best histories of Greek religion from the twentieth century, namely those of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Louis Gernet, Martin Nilsson and Burkert himself.

Chapter one sets up the cultural context for the study of early Christian texts by examining traditions in which the living helped the dead in Greek religion, Roman religion, and ancient Judaism. The archaeology of burial sites, epitaphs, other inscriptions, and textual sources are adduced as evidence for this purpose. The chapter concludes with a discussion of salvation after death in the Greek religious movement called Orphism, as well as in the Jewish texts 2 Maccabees and 4 Ezra.

This chapter traces the nexus of religion, philosophy, politics, and tragedy, concentrating on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin in their years after the Stift. The Tübingen Stift was both a religious and a political institution, ensuring clerical orthodoxy while binding educated citizens to the rulers—an especially important role in an age of changing ideas of authority. Both Hegel and Hölderlin understand Greek tragedy through the lens of theology, and see Sophocles' works as the representation of a moment of transition within Greek religion. In broad terms, their theories differ from Schelling's and Schiller's in seeing Greek tragedy as a historical and progressive art form: tragedy does not just exist within temporality, but is itself a historical force, which reflects and contributes to changes in ancient Greek theology. Moreover, both conceive religion as a central element of social existence, and not as a sphere separated from political life.

The Getae have a particularly cunning way of discovering the disposition of their god Salmoxis (4. 94. 3). They select a man by lot to send as messenger to Salmoxis; then, holding him by the hands and feet, they swing him onto the points of three javelins. If he should die, the god is deemed to be favourable towards them; if the survives, he is said to be wicked and another man is tried. Similar mental tricks are used to justify and maintain Greek belief in divination. What is different about many of the beliefs and practices projected onto foreign peoples by the Greeks is that they are clearly unworkable. This story illustrates just how remote Herodotus—the ‘Father of the History of Religions’ as well as of History, Anthropology, and Lies—may be from the reality of foreign religious experiences. This chapter focuses on Greek religion as it is reflected in Herodotus' accounts of foreign peoples.

This chapter turns from physical stone stelai, and their replications in relief, to representations of similar monuments on vase paintings of the classical period. Although the images seen here incorporate elements from ancient actuality, they are not direct reflections of lost realities; they are visual constructs that operate under the regime of pictorial representation. These depictions are statements in their own right that offer ancient testaments of the nature of aniconism conveyed visually rather than in texts, and are particularly instructive for understanding of the place of the aniconic in Greek religion and visual culture. These vase paintings present standing stelai that marked the presence of a divinity as liminal in their essence.

This chapter examines how the historiography of Greek religion renewed itself between 1920 and 1950. This period invested a great deal of effort in the answers that could be sought from the celebrated old sources. As the former certainties were battered from all sides, the revered voices from the past often resonated with the intensity of a battle call for renewal. Greek religion, one of the most contested domains in the reception of ancient culture, was to be solicited again and again to help imagine a new future. The chapter then considers the great changes that saw the Belle Époque study of ancient religion thoroughly transformed after the Great War, and the stakes of some of the fundamental disagreements that set influential scholars of the Interwar years against each other. Ultimately, the battle for the Greek Irrational was a search for the new foundations of modernity.

Under the heading “The Religion of Beauty” Hegel treats the polytheism of ancient Greece. The Greek religion shares with Judaism the idea that the divine is a self-conscious entity, and thus both represent religions of spirit. However, for Judaism, God was an object of thought and not of sense, and for this reason there were no images or representations of Jehovah. By contrast, it is, according to Hegel, one of the fundamental aspects of the Greek gods that they are represented in art. The analysis in Chapter 9 focuses on Hegel’s interpretation of how the Olympian gods arose out of an earlier generation of nature gods. This account is reflected in Greek mythology itself in the depiction of the war of the gods given in Hesiod. For Hegel, this represents clear evidence that the conception of the divine starts with natural deities and moves to gods of spirit.

This chapter presents the argument of this book about a basic principle of Greek religion: ‘myth and ritual’ typically interact through performance, perhaps cannot even relate without a performative element. It explains that it is in choral performance that they become closely bound up with one another, and it is through choral performance that myth and ritual become socially effective, for it offers a medium for myth and ritual to come together. It explains that in order to establish the relationship between myth and ritual the workings of each must be taken into account; it is because of their shared strategies and purpose, geared towards correlating, or even merging, past and present, that they form such a powerful and productive ensemble.