CUP (2016) h/b 423pp £74.99 (ISBN 9781107153479)
Greek religion (perhaps profiting from the upsurge of interest in mythology) has never been so popular. Religious ‘theologies’ in particular have made a comeback in recent years. In a religion that never established any kind of dogma nor was organised around a central sacred text, does it make sense to speak of a theology, even in the plural? The answer, of course, is yes: just as Greek mythology is not a monolithic system, but rather consists of various interlocking stories which have been systematised differently across space and time, so too religious practice and thinking is not always and everywhere consistent but that does not preclude logic or some set of beliefs. Precisely for that reason it makes sense to collect and compare various practices of, and theorizations about, religious worship, in short: to talk theologies.
The fifteen contributions in this collection (including the Introduction), all written by leading experts, do an excellent job of isolating and charting such, often implicit, narratives in many of ancient Greece’s main areas of life. The contributions are organized more or less chronologically. I give a brief resumé, knowing that in merely mentioning their contents, I commit a grave injustice to the nuance and breadth of the contributions. After the Introduction (Eidinow, Kindt, Osborne, Tor), Julia Kindt offers a valuable piece of metascholarship that looks at the history of ‘theology’ among students of Greek religion which could double as a short history of the field as a whole. We then move on to Homer and Hesiod (Graziosi), conflict engendered by offerings by Cypselus at Olympia and Croesus at Delphi (Gagné), the interplay between philosophy and oracles in Heraclitus and at Delphi (Tor), theological considerations underlying the Dionysia and (Old) Comedy (Csapo), a piece of Gelehrtengeschichte (Goldhill) that neatly explores the intricacies of aligning old and modern theologies in Greek tragedy, the agency of gods and/versus men in nomothesia or lawgiving (Willey), phthonos or ‘divine envy’ as a form of popular theology (Eidinow), theological concerns behind animal sacrifice in two calendars from Cos and Mykonos (Osborne) and, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, in Greek art (Gaifman), to the role of the gods in the Athenian assembly (Martin), Plato’s ambivalent attitude towards the gods (Benitez) and its afterlives, especially regarding providence, among the Neo-Platonists (Boys-Stones), and, finally, to pagan and Christian reactions (continuations of or departures from such theologies) in Late Antiquity (Van Nuffelen).
Perhaps not coincidentally, the figure of Plato looms large (naturally in the contributions of Benitez and Boys-Stones, but also in the Introduction and the pieces by Willey and Eidinow). In his Republic (379a5), Plato coined the term theologia in the famous discussion of how poets such represent the divine in the education of the guards. Some scholars have balked at the modern application of such an idiosyncratic term – one, moreover, which now has definite Judaeo-Christian connotations – as this might impose an ahistorical framework upon the object of study (the same might be said of the word ‘religion’ itself: naturally, the Greeks did not have one form of religion). The Introduction and the individual contributions do a good job of disabusing people of such notions. As the individual contributions show, the topics under discussion clearly betray some form of logic or belief, whether explicit or implicit, clearly articulated or not, and so it makes sense to look at them in terms of religion and theology.
Despite its heterogeneous contents, the volume as a whole reads very well and clear efforts have been made to cross-reference between contributions while the individual contributions strike a nice balance between discussions of more familiar and unfamiliar subject-matter. The book concludes with a forty-page Bibliography and an extensive Index. Despite the occasional typo (in the Bibliography, read: Luraghi, N. (2008-9), ‘The importance of being λογίο[ς]’) and some exciting typographical innovations which are most clearly observed in the Bibliography and naturally recur in many footnotes also (letters with a diaeresis or an acute are often, but not always, in a lower case, meaning the letters with accents are as high as letters without, while for some reason à, with the grave accent, whether as one word or as part of a word, often becomes Greek ὰ), the book is very well edited. Anyone interested in (teaching) Greek religion should consult this book, which has something for everyone.
Gary Vos