The Complexity of Religious Discourse in Literary Sources and its Importance

What are the consequences of this broader literary perspective on Greek religion? Arguably, it opens up (or reopens) a new dimension of Greek religious experience: a body of religious thought which - like ritual itself, but often independently - operates, in the words of John Gould, as ‘‘a framework of explanation for human experience’’ (1985:7).

These areas have, of course, been the subject of significant study. In general, however, such work has been marginal in the study of Greek religion. (So, for example, the subject-matter of Parker’s splendid series of studies of ‘‘literary religion,’’ e. g. 1997, 1998, 1999, 2004, finds little place in his two major studies of Athenian religion: 1996, 2005.). At the same time, however, it should be pointed out that even those major studies that most loudly proclaim the centrality of ritual cannot exclude this dimension of religious experience entirely. ‘‘[H]owever much the Greeks may hope that good things will flow from pious acts, they are nevertheless aware that fulfilment is not guaranteed, but lies in the lap of the gods’’ (Burkert 1985:7). ‘‘Only an atheist will demand statistical proof that pious action is successful’’ in protecting the seafarer from storms (Burkert 1985:55; cf. 268). Here, at least implicitly, is the acknowledgment in condensed form that the proposition that gods intervene in ordinary life (through storms, or through the answering of human sacrifice) requires the existence of ‘‘blocks to falsifiability,’’ or ‘‘let-out clauses,’’ in order to be maintained. Similarly, for example, in what might be described as the taxonomical approach to Greek religion - in other words, the classification of deities and their attributes (see the comments of Bruit Zaidman and Schmitt Pantel 1992:183; Burkert 1985:216) - the description of a god’s attributes necessarily implies an assumption in the possibility of divine intervention. ‘‘A direct epiphany of Zeus is lightning’’ (Burkert 1985:126). The storm is the epiphany of the sea-god Poseidon, ‘‘always to be reckoned with by seafarer and fisherman’’ (Burkert 1985:137).

What is the status of such characterizations? For whom does Poseidon reveal himself through storms? The available literary evidence allows for the enormous elaboration of these areas of‘‘belief.’’ That voyages by sea required the propitiation of the gods, or that safe crossings demanded thank offerings, is reflected in a wide range of sources, but this evidence presents us with more than simply an ordering of natural phenomena in a static grid of divinities (cf. Bremmer 1994:6). Rather, the assumption that Poseidon, or the gods in general, are responsible for storms or earthquakes is marshaled in a whole range of ways in different contexts. So, for example, the defendant in the trial On the Murder of Herodes, introduces the fact that no fellow-traveler on a sea voyage had been involved in disaster, and that all sacrifices on board ship in his presence had gone smoothly, as evidence of his innocence (Antiphon 5.81-4). What to do with Andocides, however, accused of the charge of profaning the Mysteries, but clearly the survivor of numerous sea voyages? His prosecutors argued (but he denied) that the gods had preserved him from punishment at sea precisely so that he might undergo trial in Athens (Andocides 1.137-9; Lysias 6.19-20, 31-2). In part, this variety can be put down to rhetorical convenience. (Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, and the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum blew the lid off all the seemingly sincere protestations of forensic oratory by providing a guide to how to play the game of oaths, offering sophistic arguments to suit every eventuality: Aristotle Rhetoric 1377a12; [Aristotle] Rhetorica ad Alexandrum 1432a34-b4; cf. Demosthenes 54.38-41; Isocrates, Demonicus 23.) It is also, however, testament to the malleability of such religious beliefs, to the presence of a live religious discourse that can be adapted to different, conflicting ends. In the subsequent recitation of Andocides’ miseries, we glimpse also the way in which such beliefs are reinforced through repetitive moralizing: no man should become ‘‘less considerate of the gods’’ (atheoterous) through seeing Andocides saved from death, for a long life lived in distress is worse than a short one without pain (cf. Harrison 2000:247).

The appreciation of the complexity of the Greek religious discourse preserved in literary sources also leads to a very different understanding of historical change in Greek religion. Xenophon’s Anabasis, his account of the journey to safety of the ‘‘Ten Thousand’’ Greek mercenaries stranded in the heart of the Persian empire, has been exploited largely as evidence of how widespread was the practice of seeking divine guidance, through consultation at Delphi, through dreams, or through the examination of the entrails of sacrificial victims (Price 1998:1-3; contrast Parker 2004). Instances in which the outcome of divination is disputed or even questioned as fraudulent reflect, we are told for example, a ‘‘defensiveness’’ in Xenophon’s attitude to divination - as if such doubts simply qualified the widespread practice of divination; as if, that is, only two discrete stances were possible towards divination: credulity (Xenophon’s own stance) or skepticism (one which lapped about him). As Edward Evans-Pritchard famously demonstrated of the Azande, however (1937), and as others have, in fact, demonstrated of the Greeks (especially Parker 1985), the possibility of fraudulence may actually serve as one of a number of supports to the belief in divination: fraudulence provides a way of dismissing inconvenient advice, or of explaining the non-fulfillment of a prophecy. The failure to appreciate the relationship of different propositions concerning divination - that is, how together they operate to reinforce confidence - leads to the underestimation of the resilience of that confidence, and to a false impression of change: Xenophon’s acknowledgment of fraudulence in divination (or his ‘‘defensiveness’’) may be interpreted as a reflection of Greek doubts concerning the validity of divination, rather than, in fact, as a symptom of its life (see also here Bowden 2005).

Another consequence of the failure to appreciate the complexity of Greek religious attitudes is the excessive prominence given to views apparently critical of traditional religion. The expression of criticism of any single aspect of religious practice or ideology (divination, say, or the unjust man going unpunished) is commonly taken as a criticism of Greek religion as a whole; if however, we cease thinking of Greek religious thought as a single inflexible whole, one dent to which is fatally destructive, such criticism of a single aspect becomes transformed from an ‘‘anti-religious’’ act to a religious one (see Harrison 2000:13-14). As Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood has underlined repeatedly, ‘‘ ‘exploring’ must not be confused with ‘criticizing’ ’’ (1997:185, 2003; cf. Kearns 1996:513-14); she has consequently declared the tragedians’ ‘‘alleged challenge to the religious discourse of the polis’’ to be a ‘‘modern mirage’’ (1998b:55; see now especially 2003:291-458). With the evidence of non-philosophical literature for Greek conceptions of the divine largely elided, philosophical literature also tends to stand out artificially. So, for example, a common emphasis on the lack of contact between philosophical developments, or more broadly ‘‘religious thought,’’ on the one hand, and ‘‘lived religion’’ (i. e., myth and ritual action) on the other: ‘‘the picture of religion as practised changes hardly at all, in spite of the deeds of all the intellectual heroes’’ (Burkert 1985:305, cf. 317; Price 1998:126; Bremmer 1982; contrast Humphreys 2004:51-76). It is only, however, by setting philosophical developments against pre-existing conceptions of the divine that we can begin to ask (in Parker’s words, of the sophistic movement) ‘‘what in all this was truly threatening or ‘impious’; what constituted an attack from without rather than from within the traditional religious framework, that loose and accommodating structure within which certain forms of doubt, criticism, and revision were, in fact, traditional’’ (1996:210; cf. C. Osborne 1997).