On Greek Religion

Robert C.T. Parker

• Éditeur: Cornell University Press
• Année: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801462016
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Greek Ancient History

"There is something of a paradox about our access to ancient Greek religion. We know too much, and too little. The materials that bear on it far outreach an individual's capacity to assimilate: so many casual allusions in so many literary texts over more than a millennium, so many direct or indirect references in so many inscriptions from so many places in the Greek world, such an overwhelming abundance of physical remains. But genuinely revealing evidence does not often cluster coherently enough to create a vivid sense of the religious realities of a particular time and place. Amid a vast archipelago of scattered islets of information, only a few are of a size to be habitable."—from the Preface

In On Greek Religion, Robert Parker offers a provocative and wide-ranging entrée into the world of ancient Greek religion, focusing especially on the interpretive challenge of studying a religious system that in many ways remains desperately alien from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. One of the world's leading authorities on ancient Greek religion, Parker raises fundamental methodological questions about the study of this vast subject. Given the abundance of evidence we now have about the nature and practice of religion among the ancient Greeks—including literary, historical, and archaeological sources—how can we best exploit that evidence and agree on the central underlying issues? Is it possible to develop a larger, "unified" theoretical framework that allows for coherent discussions among archaeologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, and historians?

In seven thematic chapters, Parker focuses on key themes in Greek religion: the epistemological basis of Greek religion; the relation of ritual to belief; theories of sacrifice; the nature of gods and heroes; the meaning of rituals, festivals, and feasts; and the absence of religious authority. Ranging across the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods, he draws on multiple disciplines both within and outside classical studies. He also remains sensitive to varieties of Greek religious experience. Also included are five appendixes in which Parker applies his innovative methodological approach to particular cases, such as the acceptance of new gods and the consultation of oracles. On Greek Religion will stir debate for its bold questioning of disciplinary norms and for offering scholars and students new points of departure for future research.

Chapter 1

Why Believe without Revelation?

The Evidences of Greek Religion

The great fourteenth-century philosopher of history Ibn Khaldûn, arguing against the view of “the philosophers” that prophecy is a natural human quality, observed that “people who have a (divinely revealed) book and who follow the prophets are few in number in comparison with the Magians [i.e., pagans] who have none.”1 The Greeks, it is a commonplace to observe, were among the many peoples who lacked a book and prophets in Ibn Khaldûn’s sense. The Greeks will not have perceived this “lack” as anything of the kind, and to that extent the negative characterization is a bad starting point. But it can be taken as a stepping-stone toward investigating those positive features of their religious system on account of which there was, indeed, no lack. Three questions naturally arise. First, if the basis for sacrifice, dedications, processions, festivals, and all the other apparatus of Greek worship2 was not a book or prophecy, then what was it? What reason had the Greeks, unenlightened by revelation, to believe in their gods? The second question follows closely from the first. Given, again, the absence of revelation, how could the Greeks know what was pious or impious, what pleasing or unpleasing to the gods? And third, if Greek religion was not a religion of the book, then what was the role of all those texts that, beginning as Herodotus noted (2.53) with Homer and Hesiod, evidently played some part in it, without which indeed we moderns could scarcely approach the subject at all?

This chapter will treat those three questions in turn. I will then address two further issues that follow from them. The Greeks lacked sacred books, but they certainly did not lack myths; the role of those myths in religious life needs to be considered. Second, myths imply certain conceptions of the gods’ capacities and attitudes, what we might be tempted to term “beliefs” about the gods, were “belief” not a term that has often been declared inapplicable to ritual-centered ancient religions. Yet surely even a ritual is performed in the belief that there is some purpose in doing so…. Some way needs to be found of reconciling the evident truths that, on the one hand, the fixed and regulated elements of Greek religion were ritual acts, and on the other that volumes could be filled with Greek stories about the gods, speculations about them, appeals to them, criticisms of them. One way of mediating between those for whom Greek religion is a matter of things done at or near an altar, and those for whom it is rather the sum of the stories, speculations, and appeals just mentioned, is to argue that, though beliefs were held, only acts were subject to control. That mediating proposal, however, calls for two footnotes or riders: philosophers laid claim not to mere belief but to sure knowledge about the divine, on the basis of a priori postulates as to what a god should be like; and a few incidents, chief among them the prosecution of Socrates, may bring into doubt the notion that thought was free and only action policed. The chapter will therefore move a considerable distance from its starting point. But all the topics discussed are consequences, or qualifications, of the central absence noted by Ibn Khaldûn.

Evidences

Two of the most influential books in the nineteenth century, still in print, were William Paley’s A View of the Evidences of Christianity, of 1794, and his Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, of 1802. The first question posed above could be reformulated anachronistically as an attempt to establish what Sophocles’ or Pindar’s “Evidences” might have looked like. In a sense there is a single, simple answer to that question, and one evidence that easily outweighs all others, even if Greeks did not often formulate the matter in quite this way. When Nicomachus was charged in 399 with impiety for altering the traditional sacrificial calendar of Athens, the prosecutor argued: “Our ancestors, who only made the sacrifices prescribed in Solon’s code, bequeathed to us a city which was the greatest and happiest in all Greece; and so we ought to make the same sacrifices as them if for no other reason, for the good luck that they brought.” In the past, when sacrifices were performed more regularly, the weather too was more regular, says Isocrates.3 Every dedication set up by a Greek in fulfillment of a vow is testimony that the prayer accompanying the vow has been fulfilled. The greatest evidence then for the existence of the gods is that piety works: the reward for worshipping the gods in ways hallowed by tradition is prosperity. The converse is that impiety leads to disaster; and, though the piety-prosperity nexus is not often used as a proof of the existence of the gods, the afflictions of the wicked are indeed a much-cited evidence. “Father Zeus, you gods still exist on high Olympus, if the suitors have really paid the penalty for their reckless insolence,” says Laertes in the Odyssey; “The gods exist,” delightedly exclaims the chef in Menander’s Dyskolos when his enemy, whom he regards as impious, falls down a well. We seem to catch here the tones of excited colloquial speech.4

When fair weather and flourishing crops are seen as a reward of piety, the argument rests implicitly on the assumption that the natural environment is under divine control. Here then potentially is another evidence: if every shower of rain comes from Zeus—and “Zeus” or “god” “is raining” was used more or less interchangeably in Greek with an impersonal “it is raining”—then direct contact with divine power is an everyday experience. It surely will not have felt like that, even for the pious: rain for them was rain, part of normality, as it is for us, not an epiphany. But when rain declined to fall, it could be prayed for; thunderbolts were embodiments of “Zeus who descends,” storms could be caused by human pollution, winds could be summoned or averted by sacrifice, an untimely earthquake or eclipse could cause a general to be replaced, military activity to be abandoned or delayed. According to the messenger in Aeschylus’s Persai, when an unseasonable storm froze the Strymon in the face of the retreating Persian army, “people who hitherto paid no regard to the gods (θεοὺς δέ τις / τὸ πρὶν νομίζων οὐδαμοῦ)” then turned to prayers; though ascribed to Persians, the psychology is also perfectly Greek.5

This was the level at which pre-Socratic philosophy, with the premise of a rule-bound natural order, came into conflict with popular religious assumptions; and, for those educated in the philosophical schools, storms and eclipses ceased necessarily to convey any message about the divine. (But there was always the possibility of a both and/or “double determination” explanation, whereby god worked through the natural order.)6 Even for the less educated, such messages were only intermittently audible; this was the religion of crisis situations. Nature was ...

Table des matières

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Why Believe without Revelation?
• 2. Religion without a Church
• 3. Analyzing Greek Gods
• 4. The Power and Nature of Heroes
• 5. Killing, Dining, Communicating
• 6. The Experience of Festivals
• 7. The Varieties of Greek Religious Experience
• 1. Seeking the Advice of the God on Matters of Cult
• 2. Accepting New Gods
• 3. Worshipping Mortals, and the Nature of Gods
• 4. Types of Chthonian Sacrifice?
• 5. The Early History of Hero Cult
• Bibliography