maintained, is a ‘‘hothouse plant which never did and probably never could exist or
survive in real life’’ (Mikalson 1991:ix). Both the plot and the mythical setting of
most tragedies clearly make it impossible for us to, as it were, read the conditions of
everyday Athenian religion from the pages of Sophocles – and yet it does not follow
that the Athenian audience saw the events of a tragedy as a hermetically sealed
dramatic experience, removed from everyday experience. The gods and heroes of
tragedy are the gods and heroes of contemporary cult and mythology; in many cases,
indeed, tragedies represent the origin of a familiar cult (Sourvinou-Inwood 1997 on
theIphigenia in Tauris).
Just to assert, however, that there arelinksbetween the religion of literature and
that of ‘‘real life’’ is insufficient. As Robert Parker has written, again in the context of
Greek tragedy, though the ‘‘religion of tragedy’’ cannot be related to ‘‘real religion’’
in a ‘‘simple formula,’’ it is not therefore to be treated apart: ‘‘Tragedy is complex and
heterogeneous; ‘real religion’ too is not that simple and (as it were) solid and almost
material thing that one may in unguarded moments suppose, but is itself a jostling
mass of competing beliefs and values and interpretations and uncertainties’’ (Parker
1997:148). One might even go further, jettison the quotation marks, and declare
that the various imaginary worlds of Greek literature themselvesconstituteGreek
religious experience. It is arguable that we focus on the limitations of literary evidence
for Greek religion excessively. Though it is worthwhile to know where any author is
developing or critiquing a general consensus (and worthwhile equally to judge where
the vast majority of authors overlap in their attitudes and presuppositions), if a
sentiment expressed by Xenophon or Herodotus, say, is distinctly Xenophontic or
Herodotean, or if a tragedy is set in a distinctly archaic and mythical world atypical of
contemporary Athens, it is not therefore devalued. As Denis Feeney has put it
succinctly, ‘‘the challenge is to put the right adverb in front of the word ‘literary’:
not ‘merely’ but ‘distinctively’ ’’ (Feeney 1998:41). Moreover we should not under-
estimate the extent of overlap between the religious presuppositions of a variety of
authors.
There is another underlying difficulty here, however: that is, the primacy of ritual
in the modern study of Greek religion. Ritual activity is perceived as the substance
of Greek religious experience; conceptions of the divine as at best secondary
and dependent on ritual. (In the words of Feeney again, ‘‘ritual has become a
kind of trump card: if you can prove that something has reference to cult, you are
proving that it means something’’: 1998:10.) This has had a profound effect on the
body of literature that is usually the object of study. Greek religion, as is frequently
stated, possessed no discrete body of sacred texts (Bremmer 1994:1; Burkert 1985:8;
Price 1998:3). Modern scholars tend, nevertheless, to single out a distinct body of
Greek literature as of particular relevance. So, for example, in his introduction to
Religions of the Greeks, Simon Price includes in a list of sources for the subject
Hesiod’sTheogony(but not hisWorks and Days), Euripides’Bacchae(but no other
Greek tragedy), Andocideson the Mysteries and Lysias 6Against Andocides,as
evidence of ‘‘threats to the civic system’’ (but no other Greek oratory) (Price
1998:184–5) – all this despite his claim to ‘‘look outwards from religion to other
contexts.’’ Walter Burkert, in his classicGreek Religion, declares that he will confine
himself largely to ‘‘sacred texts,’’ admitting at the same time that they are ‘‘scarcely to
be found’’ (1985:4).
374 Thomas Harrison