further evidence that all religion was depraved. For others, the “primitive” obser-
vances were signs of primeval virtue, from which contemporary religions, especially
Christianity, had departed to their detriment. But a new kind of evidence was
flooding in from the European explorers and the nascent colonial empires of their
sponsors. The explorers, and missionaries who often accompanied them, found non-
European peoples whose religions offered apparent parallels to what the Greco-Roman
texts seemed to say about religion. If the ancient texts had previously provided a
mighty cudgel for earlier savants, this new evidence inserted metal spikes into the
weapon which should, on their view, make the truth of their conceptions irresistible.
Thus the very beginnings of what might be styled a comparative anthropology
of Greco-Roman religion were pressed into the service of the Enlightenment’s
theological agenda.
A development in the British colonial empire expanded the terms of the debate
once again. Although substantial quantities of Indian religious texts had existed in
the west since the early eighteenth century, full texts and knowledge of Sanskrit did
not achieve intellectual significance until the British conquest of India and the con-
sequent academic activities of Sir William Jones and his followers (Schwab 1984).
Jones amassed ancient Sanskrit texts and translated them, but also he published On
the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India(1799), in which he noted frequent similarities,
principally in what he styled “mythologies,” between those three religions, and others
besides. This provided not only yet more ammunition for the Enlightenment’s
philosophes, but also an unwitting charter for the “scientific” scholarship of the next
century and beyond.
Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth
Century I: Colonialism, Darwin, Universities
The Sanskrit evidence enormously influenced the direction of studies of Greco-Roman
religion. Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier: Ein Beitrag
zur Begründung der Alterthumskunde(1808) combated earlier romanticized views
and sought to provide a scholarly explanation for the kinds of correspondences Jones
had observed. Its emphasis on comparative grammar influenced scholars such as the
classicist Bopp and the Brothers Grimm; it furthered the Enlightenment’s driving
emphasis on logic and comparative material to unravel riddling cultural Streitfragen.
Friedrich Max Müller, who as a student attended Bopp’s Berlin lectures, himself an
Indologist by training and academic appointment, yoked logic and comparativism
to produce his famous and notorious assertion of myth as a “disease of language.”
K. O. Müller’s Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie(1825) narrowed
the focus to Greco-Roman religion; he conceived myth as Hellenic myth, apparently
plausible in light of the Sanskrit connections. This Müller influenced classical studies
and Roman religion far more; as long as Greek and Roman mythologies were con-
sidered identical there had been no problem, but now it appeared that since the Romans
possessed no mythologies as Müller had defined them, they had no mythologies at
all. Thus the title of Ludwig Preller’s Römische Mythologie(1881–3, 3rd edn. H. Jordan)
Approaching Roman Religion 19