ABSTRACT
Is it possible to find any unifying strands which will make sense of the vast diversity in the statements of the Greeks about their religion? What did Greeks see when they looked at the complex of practice and belief which surrounded their gods? The difficulties in such questions are manifold. Attempts to reach a large synthesis have inevitably a high degree of subjectivity; methodologies may be called into question, the range of material selected may seem to others untypical, while many less tangible, personal factors will influence the discussion in ways less easy to determine. Further, in tackling an approach which depends on investigating apparent attitudes as well as behaviour, we run the risk of privileging the articulate and so getting a distorted picture of society as a whole. Explicit statements about the gods and about religion are likely to be all in some way exceptional. They may be the product of people who have stopped to think hard about the subject, and so may not represent the more typical beliefs of others-or indeed of their own authors in more careless moments; or else they may be slanted by the need for a particular effect, say in the context of comedy or oratory. No less than ourselves, looking from the outside, the Greeks could have had different ways of looking at their religion from the inside. There is a danger, too, of trying to impose a greater unity than is justified on a body of evidence stretching over many centuries, geographical locations, and types of
society. Yet Greekness, and Greek religion, were recognized as such by the ancients themselves, albeit with somewhat blurred edges; and the whole question of a people’s conscious and unconscious expectations of their religion, the place which they assign it in their society, is such an important one that there is almost a duty to try to answer it, even if every answer must be flawed and incomplete. The present essay, then, can be regarded as a provisional attempt to trace some strands in Greek patterns of religious thought and (which is not quite the same thing) thought about religion.
