San Antonio College Library

Inadequately documented, ancient Greek religion can all too easily be reduced to the dry analysis of archaeological remains and so-called `ritual objects'. This authoritative new work attempts to bridge the gap that usually divides Greek religion from Greek history, setting it firmly in the thick of contemporary events and politics. How did people actually worship the gods? Was Socrates's trial a crisis for religion or the state, or both? These are...

Conford traces the remarkable burst of abstract speculation among pre-Socratic thinkers of the sixth century B.C. from the religious thought of the preceding era in Greece. Combining deep classical scholarship with anthropological and sociological insights, he examines the mythic precursors of enduring metaphysical concepts such as destiny, God, the soul, substance, nature, and immortality. His original and engaging explorations profile the rise of...

"Greek religion is a subject of absorbing interest, essential for the understanding of history and culture, but often puzzling and elusive. This collection of essays ranges over many aspects of Greek civil life, looking at the ways in which religion manifested itself in institutions, art and literature, and tracing the attitudes that lay behind the manifold cults and customs. It is not meant as an exhaustive introduction to the subject, but as a series...

The foremost historian of Greek religion provides the first comprehensive, comparative study of a little-known aspect of ancient religious beliefs and practices. Secret mystery cults flourished within the larger culture of the public religion of Greece and Rome for roughly a thousand years. This book is neither a history nor a survey but a comparative phenomenology concentrating on five major cults. In defining the mysteries and describing their rituals,...

"How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first...

"This volume presents a case for how and why people in archaic and classical Greece worshipped Underworld gods. These gods are often portrayed as malevolent and transgressive, giving an impression that ancient worshipers derived little or no benefits from developing ongoing relationships with them. In this book, the first book-length study that focuses on Underworld gods as an integral part of the religious landscape of the period, Mackin Roberts...