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 representative 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 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 the Iphigenia in Tauris).
Just to assert, however, that there are links between 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 themselves constitute Greek 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 underestimate 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’s Theogony (but not his Works and Days), Euripides’ Bacchae (but no other Greek tragedy), Andocides on the Mysteries and Lysias 6 Against 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 classic Greek 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).
Texts such as Xenophon’s Anabasis or Herodotus’ Histories - perhaps not so overtly ‘‘religious’’ in content as the Theogony or 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 dromena or 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 time confirms, the centrality of ritual.
World History
