Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Gods overflowed like clothes from an over-filled drawer which no one felt obliged to tidy (Robert Parker 2005:387) Matters of religion are central to the things we hold most dear about the culture of the ancient Greek world. So it is with its literature, where we think first of Homer and tragedy, its art, where we think first of the statues of the gods and the mythical scenes of the vases, and its architecture, where we think first of temples. But beyond this, there was no sphere of life (or death) in ancient Greece that was wholly separate or separable from the religious: the family, politics, warfare, sport, knowledge… The task of designing a companion volume to Greek religion, even one of the substantial length of this one, is accordingly formidable. Comprehensiveness is impossible. Indeed, it is impossible even to define in an uncontroversial way the ground one might aspire to cover comprehensively. Defending himself for directing Lear for the third time, Jonathan Miller likened the play to a “vast dark continent” that one could never hope to explore fully. All one could do was sail around it, disembark at different points, and make narrow treks through the jungle ahead. The chapters of this volume constitute such narrow treks into the vast continent of Greek religion. They cannot, between them, render the territory fully and minutely mapped, but they may offer the reader ... log in or subscribe to read full text