THE NATURE OF THE GODS 145
and God Within. The authors do the same for the archetype of the female divinity
in Goddess: Myths of the Female Divine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Luck, Georg, ed. Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. A collection of ancient texts, translated
and annotated.
Marinatos, Nanno, and Robin Hagg, eds. Greek Sanctuaries: New Approaches. New York:
Routledge, 1995. Deals with origins, historical developments, and social functions of
sanctuaries and particular cults in Archaic and Classical Greece.
Mikalson, Jon D. Athenian Popular Religion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1983. Subjects include divine intervention and divination, the gods and hu-
man justice, the afterlife, and piety and impiety.
Nilsson, M. P. A History of Greek Religion. 2d ed. New York: Norton, 1963. Still the fun-
damental scholarly introduction.
. The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology. New York: Norton, 1963 [1932].
Parker, Robert. Athenian Religion, A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Price, Simon. Religions of the Ancient Greeks. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
A survey of the religious life of ancient Greece from archaic times to the fifth cen-
tury A.D., drawn from literary, inscriptional, and archaeological evidence.
Rice, David G., and John E. Stambaugh. Sources for the Study of Greek Religion. Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1979. Translations of texts and inscriptions dealing with "The
Olympian Gods," "Heroes," "Public Religion," "Private Religion," "Mystery Cults,"
and "Death and Afterlife."
Sissa, Giulia, and Marcel Détienne. The Daily Life of the Greek Gods. Translated by Janet
Lloyd. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000 (1989).
See also the Select Bibliography at the end of Chapter 1 for related Comparative Studies.
NOTES- Nymphs are sometimes classified as follows: the spirits of waters, springs, lakes, and
rivers are called Naiads; Potamiads are specifically the nymphs of rivers; tree-nymphs
are generally called Dryads or Hamadryads, although their name means "spirits of
oak trees" in particular; Meliae are the nymphs of ash trees. - The mortal parent may bask in the grand aura of the great mythological age of saga
and boast of a genealogy that in the not too distant past included at least one divine
ancestor. - Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), especially pp. 397-408.
- Her name was Cydippe and she was a priestess of Hera, hence the necessity for her
presence at the festival. The temple would be the Argive Heraeum. - Herodotus here uses the masculine article with the Greek word for god (not god-
dess), ho theos. He seems to be thinking of one supreme god or more abstractly of a
divine power. Significantly she does not refer to Hera specifically, although subse-
quently it is to the goddess Hera that the mother prays on behalf of her sons. - These statues have been excavated and do much to tantalize in the quest for precise
distinctions between myth and history in Herodotus' account. - That is, human beings are entirely at the mercy of what befalls them.
- The ritual entailed, at least partly, the slaying of a suckling pig and the pouring of
the blood over the hands of the guilty murderer, who sat in silence at the hearth while
Zeus was invoked as the Purifier.