Economies of Ancient Mediterranean Religion: Symbolic, Communicative and Spatial Terms of Religious Production and Consumption

Abstract

Attempts to analyse the financing of religious institutions and the ‘economy of religion’ in terms of homo economicus and rational choice theory have repeatedly been addressed and criticised. As regards antiquity, the major focus of such studies has been the economic nexus implied by sacrificial consumption, or, to a smaller extent, on exotic requisites for more elaborate rituals such as spectacles. This article briefly reviews these issues, but takes a fundamentally different approach, starting from the issues of religious agency, lived ancient religion and the urban setting of much of what we can represent as religion in the ancient world. I argue that ancient religion involves three different sorts of ‘economy’ that are incompatible with the notion of ‘balance sheet’ and cannot be represented meaningfully in monetary terms, namely the symbolic or political economy of religion, the economy of religious communication and the economy of space.