Conclusion: Religion and Storytelling in Ancient Greece

Abstract

Ancient Greek religion was, in a fundamental way, a religion of the story. Consider, for example, the significance of the famous narratives about the gods and goddesses told by Homer and Hesiod for later Greek perceptions of divinity; or the multiple roles that individual gods, such as Apollo and Athena, play in ancient Greek tragedy; or, indeed, the ongoing place of the divine throughout that form of storytelling that constitutes the historiographic tradition from Herodotus onwards. Even an apparently ‘enlightened’ author such as Thucydides still had a lot to say about the divine, despite his well-documented efforts to edit the supernatural out of human history as much as possible. And we have not even touched upon several types of representations of the Greek gods and goddesses (e.g. in the form of funerary reliefs, as statues or on pots) which feature their very own modes of storytelling. These examples illustrate a remarkable propensity of ancient Greek views about the supernatural to draw on different kinds of narratives to evolve: storytelling is indeed central to the way ideas about the gods circulated in ancient Greece. Yet, despite the centrality of narrative to ancient Greek views about the supernatural, it is surprising to find that this aspect of ancient Greek religion has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. There are many reasons for this. There is still, for example, a marked tendency in classical scholarship to ‘mine’ literary texts for information on ancient Greek religious beliefs and practices. More frequently than not, this involves divorcing the religious content from its narrative form, with the ultimate goal of describing a reality beyond the text. Some scholars have also trodden a different path and investigated the religious views of individual authors such as Herodotus, Xenophon or Plato – or, indeed, of entire genres, such as ancient Greek oratory, tragedy or historiography. Yet what has largely remained subject to debate is if and how such ‘intellectualist’ or ‘literary’ religions are part of ‘lived’ religious beliefs and practices. Moreover, to investigate the religious views in and of these authors and genres is not the same as enquiring into the principles and practices by which these views are presented to us through narrative.