Archaic and Classical Greek Religion

Abstract

What do we mean by “Greek religion”? First and foremost, the limits of time need some definition. It is traditional in accounts of the ancient Greek world to begin as a sort of preface with a brief treatment of the Bronze Age Aegean (“Minoan-Mycenaean religion”), to proceed to a somewhat agnostic version of the relationship between Homer and the “Dark Ages,” and to take “archaic and classical” and “Hellenistic” as significant dividers in what follows. This may not be the only set of categories we can apply to a diachronic treatment of the subject, but it has two advantages: At least at the upper end, it fits the nature of the evidence as it shifts in the different periods, and it corresponds roughly to far-reaching changes in social and political organization, with which religious expression is intimately connected. Thus it is possible to view the religion of the archaic and classical period as mediated to us to a great extent through contemporary literature and epigraphy, unlike that of earlier periods, and, as we shall see, we can also characterize it as “polis-religion,” corresponding as it does (and not merely chronologically) to the heyday of the polis between the eighth or seventh century and the world of Alexander and his successors. Other ways of dividing up the extent of pre-Christian Greek religion may reveal other characteristics, and it is undeniable that much in Hellenistic religion is continuous or even identical with earlier periods, but it is certainly convenient and frequently helpful to take the archaic and classical period as a unit.