to approach the distinctiveness of the religious experiences of individuals or of local
communities within the Greek world.
The subject of myth, whilst not addressed head-on here (see Ken Dowden’s
forthcomingCompanion to Classical Mythin the same series), nonetheless pervades
the volume. It has been felt too restrictive to devote a focal chapter to each of the
Olympian pantheon (however defined), but care has been taken to include substantial
discussions of many of the major deities. Thus discussions of Zeus can be found in
Chapters 3 and 17, Apollo in Chapters 3 and 9, Athena in Chapters 14 and 26,
Demeter and Persephone in Chapters 19 and 22, Dionysus in Chapters 19 and 21,
Artemis in Chapter 3, Aphrodite in Chapter 20, Hades in Chapter 5, and Asclepius in
Chapter 10.
Scott Noegel(Chapter 1) opens the volume with a synoptic study situating Greek
religion in the long context of the religions of the ancient Near East. The question of
whether, when, and how the various religions of the Near East may have influenced
the form and development of Greek religion is fraught with definitional and other
methodological complexities. There are prima facie cases for tracing a number of lines
of influence between Asiatic myths and Greek ones: the cosmogonies, the myths of
world deluge, and those of battle between god and chaos-dragon. However, since the
general relationship, if any, between myth and cult in the Near Eastern societies and
Greece alike remains obscure, it is impossible to read shared religious practices
directly out of such correspondences. A number of vehicles of transmission of
religious culture between east and west may be identified, including trade, war,
migration, foreign employment, religious festivals, and diplomacy. Already in the
Mycenaean period Greeks were in vigorous contact with Crete, Egypt, Syro-Canaan
(note that the Philistines are likely to have been Greek settlers) and Anatolia, and
peoples from all around the eastern Mediterranean mingled in Cyprus at this time. In
the eighth and seventh centuries BC peripatetic religious artisans may have dissem-
inated technologies across the eastern Mediterranean. When the Greeks did borrow
an institution, a god, or a rite, and install it in their own religious system, it is seldom
clear how they read the role and meaning of the institution borrowed, which, in any
case, were inevitably transformed radically in their new context. On what basis did the
Greeks decide to equate a particular god from a religious system structured so
differently from their own with a familiar figure from their pantheon?
The next group of chapters (Part II) addresses the supernatural personnel of Greek
religion, the gods, great and small, and the dead, great and small.Ken Dowden
(Chapter 2) asks how the Greeks constructed their suite of Olympian gods in various
intersecting contexts and media. For all their anthropomorphism, the gods were
characteristically remote and seldom presented themselves to mankind in direct,
visible, or scrutable form. They were constructed through the dimensions of local
cult worship, of myth and its refractions in poetry and art, and of theological and
philosophical reflection (cf. Part VIII). In visiting the great temple of Zeus at
Olympia one would experience the god repeatedly through all these dimensions.
Poets had probably taken the central role in establishing a common theogony
amongst the Greeks in the dark ages. The canonical number of Olympian gods was
twelve, but the number of important gods commonly held to dwell on the mountain
was significantly larger. Various attempts to define a pantheon of twelve can be traced
from the Homeric poems onwards, and it was often conceived of in terms of a series
2 Daniel Ogden