1998:124–5), or the opening words of the archaic poet Theognis, promising
devoted attention to Apollo in return for success in his poetry: ‘‘O lord, son of
Leto, child of Zeus, I will never forget you at the beginning or at the end, but I
will ever sing of you first, last, and in between....’’(Though Aristotle is often
cited on the impossibility of a man loving a god, the passages in question are
taken out of their broader context: see Parker 1998:123–4.) The opposition of
individual and community is again, at least, over-drawn. Greek religion, there
should be no doubt, reflected and reinforced community (at a number of levels:
deme, phratry, tribe, as well as city: see especially Sourvinou-Inwood 1990,
1988b). The repeated insistence in Attic oratory on the need to punish wrong-
doers in order to prevent divine vengeance from falling on the community as a
whole shows that, in religious ideology as well as in ritual, individual and
communal are often inseparable. (This is arguably not very surprising, and
perhaps common to most religions: should we evaluate modern Christianity in
terms only, or primarily, of the individual, immortal soul?) Equally, the pages of
Herodotus’Historiesturn up numerous examples of the religious adventures of
individuals who either transcend or operate outside the constraints of the city.
The Greeks had no text(s) and no Church. ‘‘[Greek religion] was ‘passed down’ by
word of mouth not through written texts... [it] lacked a religious establish-
ment’’ (Bremmer 1994:1); ‘‘There are no sacred books, religious dogma or
orthodoxy, but rather common practices’’ (Price 1998:3; cf. Burkert 1985:8).
The absence in Greek religion of distinct ‘‘scriptures’’ or of an established
priesthood is undeniable. Clearly, as a consequence, religious authority was
configured very differently, but as reflection on Christianity (the assumed point
of contrast to ancient religion) suggests, the difference is a relative rather than an
absolute one. Notwithstanding attempts, alien to Greek religion, to impose
uniformity of doctrine and practice (e.g. the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church
of England, intended so as ‘‘not to suffer unnecessary Disputations, Alterca-
tions, or Questions to be raised’’), both scriptures and an organized church self-
evidently fail to bring with them more than a degree of uniformity in doctrine or
practice. (Evans-Pritchard went so far as to describe sacred texts as ‘‘the least
significant part of religion’’: 1965:119.) Conversely, though in Greek religion
Homer and Hesiod may not quite have constituted a ‘‘Greek bible’’ (as they
have sometimes been termed) it is clear, for example, from Herodotus’ account
of how these authors fixed the characters and attributes of the Greek gods
(2.53), that these authors were seen as possessing a special authority. They
have been seen as ‘‘filling a gap’’ (Gould 1994:104–5; cf. Burkert 1985:120;
Price 1998:67), the gap where creed or scripture might have been, but this
is perhaps too negative a formulation. They provide, rather, one way, out of
many – oral, written, and non-verbal (i.e., through imitation and participation in
ritual: Burkert 1985:95) – of reinforcing continuity, and disguising change, in
ideology and practice (Bremmer 1995). As discussed above, stories of divine
retribution or of prayers miraculously fulfilled imply generalizing morals – that
the gods are ever-present and watchful, that impiety will be punished, and so
forth; they too are the vehicles of religious authority.
What mattered in Greek religion was ritual, not belief or dogma. ‘Greek religion may
then fairly be said to be ritualistic in the sense that it was the opposite of
Greek Religion and Literature 383