Introduction
Daniel Ogden
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 directingLearfor 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 an impression of the land’s size, layout, and diversity. They may indicate the
areas that call for closer or further investigation. And the notes made of the flora and
fauna encountered along the way will certainly intrigue.
The volume’s basic purview is the Greek-speaking world in the archaic, classical,
and hellenistic periods (i.e. 776–30 BC), although the ‘‘bookends’’ fall outside these
parameters: an initial chapter contextualizes Greek religion within the wider family of
Near Eastern religions and there is a final chapter on reception. The selection of topics
offered has not been determined by any strong intellectual agenda. Rather, as befits a
companion volume, the chapters seek to reflect the subjects and issues generally held
to be of importance and interest by contemporary international experts in the field of
Greek religion. However, one theme the reader will find to recur in several parts of
the volume (and especially Part V) is that of the disaggregation of the term ‘‘Greek
religion.’’ Whilst a certain degree of across-the-board generalization is not only
unavoidable but actually desirable in a Companion, there has also been some attempt