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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Greek Religion and Literature

Thomas Harrison

The Use of Literary Texts in the Study

of Greek Religion

The title of this chapter might suggest that literature is marginal to the subject of
‘‘religion’’ in the Greek world, that its role is primarily or exclusively as an imperfect
source of evidence for ‘‘lived’’ religious experience – in other words for ritual. It is
probably best at the outset to confront such ideas head-on.
Of course, it is difficult to reconstruct the experience of reading or hearing (or
indeed performing) an ancient work of literature; we can have no unmediated access –
but then no more can we to other forms of evidence, or other forms of religious
experience (if we take the example of the Panathenaea, even the celebrant’s view of
the Parthenon frieze requires painstaking reconstruction: R. Osborne 1987). Of
course also, different works throw up different issues of genre and context. It is for
this reason that most studies of ‘‘literary religion’’ have focused on particular works
or genres (or have sought to compare two genres: Parker 1997; see further the Guide
to Further Reading below), precisely to foreground the distinct aspects of those
genres, and to avoid appearing to claim that any single author or work is represen-
tative of ‘‘Greek religion’’ more broadly. As a result of this, different ancient genres
(tragedy, oratory, or historiography) have all, in one way or another, been argued
to be divorced from the real world of lived religion. Even in the case of historical
writers – one might suppose, less problematic – attempts to uncover a given author’s
(or more broadly to extrapolate common Greek) religious attitudes are vulnerable to
the charge of confusing the narrator and the author, or of underestimating the
author’s distinct ‘‘take’’ on his material (how is one to distinguish between the
‘‘base’’ of cultural commonplace and presupposition and an author’s variations on it?).
The difficulties are perhaps greatest in the case of Greek tragedy, a particular focus
for discussion of these methodological problems. The religion of tragedy, it has been