tricks’’ that did not necessarily seek to affect the behavior of any individual directly,
were also an important part of the ancient magician’s portfolio. Such things, far from
being buried in secrecy, belonged rather in the realm of flamboyant and theatrical
public performance. Already in the classical period magicians seem to have performed
a sort of shadow puppetry. Snake-handling and various types of illusions involving
statues may have been developed in the hellenistic period. No doubt such public
performances were designed to draw in contracts for more discreet – and lucrative –
private work. Magicians perhaps tended to be itinerant figures on the margins of
society, denizens of the demi-monde. The extent to which they came into conflict
with the law as they went about their trade remains obscure, but the notion that their
rituals attempted to bypass or control the gods may have laid them open to charges of
impiety.
Our final full group of chapters (Part VIII) looks at the dialogue between religion
and some of the media that reflect, refract or constitute it: literature in general,
philosophical literature more particularly, and art.Thomas Harrison(Chapter 24)
asks how we should view the relationship between religion as portrayed in Greek
literary texts and the religion of ‘‘real life.’’ Do the different authors offer a partial
‘‘take’’ on the religion around them, skewed and selected by their personal predilec-
tions and the genre in which they work? Or are the various imaginary worlds of Greek
literature to be regarded as themselves constitutive of Greek religious experience?
With what presuppositions do scholars go about selecting ancient texts (or portions
of texts) through which to study the subject? The common approach to the study of
literary religion, in which utterances on a particular religious theme are stripped out
of an author or a text and used to reconstruct that author’s attitude to it, is
misconceived. In exploiting literary texts for the study of Greek religion we should
pay careful attention, in anthropological fashion, to the wider belief system in which
statements about the divine, especially ostensibly negative ones, participate. Religious
belief was sustained because the Greeks cushioned that belief’s principal propositions
with a series of let-out clauses. Thus a proposition explicit and implicit in a wide range
of classical texts maintains that all unjust acts are punished by divine intervention.
This proposition was sustained against experience by, amongst others, the following
let-out clauses: retribution is rarely direct; gods do not punish every offence
themselves, but can leave other humans to do it; there is not always a one-to-one
relationship between offence and punishment; punishment may be delayed, even
beyond the perpetrator’s lifetime; and (paradoxically) the gods are, for a variety
reasons, not always just. Failure to appreciate the role of such let-out clauses in
sustaining a system of belief leads casual readers of literary pronouncements in the
field of religion to overemphasize views that are apparently critical of traditional
religion. Thus when Xenophon talks of fraud in divination, this should not be read
as an indication of a personal or a wider Greek doubt of the validity of divination, but
as an indication that the general proposition that the gods imparted the truth to
mankind through divination was in fact thriving.
Fritz-Gregor Herrmann(Chapter 25) investigates the philosophical response to
ancient Greek religion, and focuses on the critical moment, namely the theology
offered, or seemingly offered, by Plato. It is possible to offer a relatively coherent
summary of Plato’s theology sewn together from prima facie readings of the relevant
dialogues. In this the immutable is associated with the divine, and the changeable
Introduction 15