Texts such as Xenophon’sAnabasisor Herodotus’Histories– perhaps not so
overtly ‘‘religious’’ in content as the Theogonyor Andocides’ On the Mysteries,
or so religious in context as Attic tragedy with its performance within festivals of
Dionysus – receive attention only rarely and for a limited set of purposes. For Burkert,
the first Greek historians of the fifth century deserve a mention insofar as they
introduce ‘‘customs, the dromenaor rituals... in conjunction with the mythical
narratives’’ (Burkert 1985:5); likewise, Bruit Zaidman and Schmitt Pantel single
out Herodotus, tragedy, comedy, and oratory for their contributions to the ‘‘study
of religious practices’’ (1992:17–18). An alternative approach is to summarize the
literary evidence for, say, the role of divine intervention in Greek historical writing in
so condensed a form as, first, to suggest that any instances are at best isolated, with
little to do with the prevailing attitudes of their societies, and secondly, to give no
sense of how such a view (that divine intervention is possible) might be seriously
sustainable (e.g. Price 1998:131–3; for the sustainability of belief, see further below).
It comes as little surprise to discover the conclusion that such beliefs were rare:
The divine clearly had some role to play, but it was needed as an explanation only in
default of other explanations. In this respect most historians were close to the thought-
world of their contemporaries: though the gods obviously existed, only in exceptional
circumstances would an individual be sure that one of them had intervened in his or her
life. (Price 1998:133)The procedure is essentially self-fulfilling: the marginalization of literary evidence is
both justified by, and at the same timeconfirms, the centrality of ritual.
The Sustainability of the Religious Proposition:
‘‘All unjust acts are punished by divine intervention’’In order to break out of this circle, we need then, first, to include in the study of
religion a broader range of literary sources. Far from there being a distinct and
bounded corpus of relevant texts, the entire Greek literary production should be
taken into account – as it was indeed by scholars of a previous generation, notably
E.R. Dodds (1951), Hugh Lloyd-Jones (1971), or Kenneth Dover (1974; cf. 1972):
oratory, historiography, philosophy, tragedy, and comedy, as well as a miscellany of
more minor or fragmentary works. Even those rare texts, such as Thucydides’History,
which in certain areas appear to eschew common religious attitudes, are relevant –
insofar as they allow us to identify those areas of religious thought that were subject
to criticism or skepticism and those that were not (contrast the perspectives of
Hornblower 1992 and Marinatos 1981). In the words of John Gould, we should
aim to ‘‘take in the whole range of the evidence, liturgical and literary, and to make
sense of it as a whole whose parts are meaningfully related to each other’’ (1985:32).
We also need, secondly, to ask a wider set of questions. The value of such literary texts
does not consist solely in isolated mentions of certain ritual practices, or even in their
evidence of the consequences of fulfillment or non-fulfillment of ritual in Greek
thought (‘‘Every failure of due observance was thought to provoke divine anger
and retribution’’: Bruit Zaidman and Schmitt Pantel 1992:28; cf. R. Osborne
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