Abstract
This paper tackles the issue of women and religion through a particular looking glass: religious utterances such as curses, supplication, and prayer, as reflected in some passages from ancient Greek epic and tragedy—pivotal literary genres in the ideological discourse of the Greek polis.
Highlights
This paper tackles the issue of women and religion through a particular looking glass: religious utterances such as curses, supplication, and prayer, as reflected in some passages from ancient Greek epic and tragedy—pivotal literary genres in the ideological discourse of the Greek polis
As Scheid [4] has shown for the “civic life of Roman gods”, in ancient Greece we would better speak of a community of performers rather than a community of believers
The expression of painful emotions and fear and the foreboding of slavery, defeat and death contained in the supplication to the gods and in lamenting prayers have the effect of ‘demoralizing the troops’ by making visible the risks and consequences of warfare
Summary
This paper tackles the issue of women and religion through a particular looking glass: religious utterances such as curses, supplication, and prayer, as reflected in some passages from ancient Greek epic and tragedy—pivotal literary genres in the ideological discourse of the Greek polis. In Greek terms, ‘literature’ is a far wider encompassing category than our own; as far as epic and tragedy are concerned, we would better speak of social institutions rather than literary genres, it is in literary texts that we may find the elements to reconstruct authoritative religious models. As for epic, this is explicitly stated by Herodotus (2.53): “but whence each of the gods came into being, or whether they had all for ever existed, and what outward forms they had, the Greeks knew not till (so to say) a very little while ago; for I suppose that the time of Hesiod and. In the Athenian context, tragedy joins and replaces to a certain extent epic poetry in its educational function, readapting heroic narratives to the specific reality of Athens, as shown by Havelock [10] and Goldhill [11]
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