Lecture 7: Greek And Roman Religions
by Carl Seaquist, Religious Studies 002, Univ. of Pennsylvania
This lecture has two goals: conclude our survey of the religions of the great civilizations of the Ancient West; and provide an introduction to our discussion of Judaism and Christianity, both of which were strongly influenced by Hellenistic culture.
Greek history divides into five periods: Helladic (Bronze Age Mycenaean), Archaic Period (rise of city-states), Hellenic (Classical Greece), Hellenistic (from the death of Alexander), and Roman (when Greek history is part of Roman history). Scholars used to put a Dark Age between Bronze Age and Archaic Period, but now our evidence is better, so this is no longer necessary.
Roman history divides into four periods: Kingdom, Republic, Empire, and Late Antiquity.
A map of the ancient Mediterranean
Chronology of the Ancient World
THE PRE-HISTORY OF GREEK RELIGION
Greeks arrived in mainland Greece during the Bronze Age: we have documents written in proto-Greek dialect (in script called Linear B) c. 1400-1200 B.C., so this gives us a terminus ante quem. Based on similarities of Greek with Latin, Sanskrit, English, Russian, etc., we conclude that the Greeks migrated from elsewhere, though dates are hard to arrive at during the pre-historic period. Greeks are an Indo-European people; this has to do with their language, not their race.
A Linear B document and its translation
We have a little evidence regarding religion of Bronze Age (see Marinatos 1993 and the work of Nilsson); scholars assume many contours of later Greek religion date from this period, but evidence does not allow for strong conclusions. Greek religion was strongly influenced by Western Asian traditions in the Dark Ages and Archaic Period.
The sarcophagus from Hagia Triada (Crete), with a ritual scene painted on it.
Greece also owes a strong debt to the ancient culture of Crete: for one thing, Linear B derives from a script originating in Crete, now called Linear A, which the mainland Greeks probably adopted for their language after they conquered Crete.
The citadel at Mycenae (a modern plan). The Lion Gate. Corridor of east Galleries.
A building from Akrotiri (Thera). Thera is an island near Crete that shared with Crete and mainland Greece in a culture that (to some extent) spanned the Aegean Sea. Thera is the Greek Pompeii: its city was buried by volcanic ash, and thus it presents us with a unique view of life in the Bronze Age.
Influence of Western Asia on all aspects of Greek culture through the Archaic Period was quite substantial; the influence of Egypt was much less, although the ancient Greeks themselves thought that most of their culture came from Egypt. The book Black Athena has brought these issues to the attention of a mass audience over the last decade. For our purposes, many of the literary genres found in Greek mythological texts are imported fromWestern Asia. Most of Hesiod is in this tradition, and some of Homer and the lyric poets.
TRADITIONAL GREEK RELIGIONA general definition of religion in the ancient world:
Religion = Myth + Ritual (things said + things done) (ta legomena + ta pragmata) (Note that I am using looser definitions of myth and ritual than is customary. G. S. Kirk, for example, defines myth as a 'traditional tale', so only stories with a plot count. But my use of the term, which is intended to pick out a notion familar to the Greeks, encompasses also many non-narrative sorts of discourse.)
What's missing here? Theology (i.e., formalized theories about the divine) and belief.
Generally in the ancient world, religion was a social thing and a civic thing. People did not class themselves by religious denomination/affiliation, even though everyone practiced slightly differently. The operative word is more orthopraxy (right action) than orthodoxy (right belief). Often similarity of ritual practice, among other factors, helped to define ethnic affiliation:
"Again, there is the Greek nation --- the community of blood and language, temples (theon hidrumata) and ritual (thusiai); our common way of life; if Athens were to betray all of this, it would not be well done."
-- Herodotus 8.144.2 (de Selincourt)Acropolis at Athens: the high, fortified citadel that formed the heart of the city. Notice the prominence of temples.
It therefore should not be surprising that the greatest factor encouraging religious uniformity was the polis (the city-state, or the local political order). We will see the same phenomenon in Rome (esp. in the Imperial Cult). This shouldn't be surprising, considering the labor needed to produce the great Greek temples --- they were a symbol of civic and national pride and identity, as well as being the dwellings of the gods. (Compare the role of the temple in the creation of Mesopotamian cities.)
Temples of Artemis at Ephesus and Apollo at Didyma
Problem of Belief. Two trials for atheism in classical Athens: Anaxagoras and Socrates. These indicate a shift in Greek views of religion, in large part influenced by philosophical thought about the gods. (See Jaeger, Veyne, and Gill/Wiseman.) In proposing that the traditional stories about the gods were incorrect, and substituting rationalizing accounts in their place, the philosophers introduced the idea that it was possible to disbelieve in the gods of tradition; before this, no Greek would have thought that belief in the gods was valuable, because it would not have occurred to him that anyone might not believe in the gods. So in a sense rationality bred intolerance.
"[Anaxagoras] began to be a philosopher at Athens in the archonship of Callias (456/5), at the age of twenty, as Demetrius Phalereus tells us in his Register of Archons, and they say he spent thirty years there. . . . There are different accounts of his trial. Sotion, in his Succession of Philosophers, says that he was prosecuted by Cleon for impiety, because he maintained that the sun was a red-hot mass of metal, and that after Pericles, his pupil, had made a speech in his defence, he was fined five talents and exiled."
-- Diogenes Laertius II, 7 (D-K 59A1), trans. KRSGeneral comment on polytheism: Polytheism, ceteris paribus, is a more tolerant position than monotheism, because the polytheist can more easily include someone else's gods into his own worldview. Another factor relevant in the ancient world, however, was syncretism, or the practice of identifying other people's gods with one's own. Int his way, the Romans identified the gods of the Greeks with their own indigenous gods, whenever possible (e.g., they took Zeus to be another name for Jupiter). They later did the same thing with the German gods (thus they identified the German ruler of the gods, Wotan, with the god Mercury, since both were psychopomps --- they led dead souls to the afterlife).
The one thing Roman polytheism was intolerant of was monotheism --- see below.
My definition of ancient religion made no reference to the divine or to gods. What was the traditional view of the gods? Well, Archilochus (fl. c. 700-650 on Paros and Thasos, islands in the Aegean) wrote:
"All things are easy for the gods. Often out of misfortunes they set men upright who have been laid low on the black earth; often they trip even those who are standing firm and roll them onto their backs, and then many troubles come to them, and a man wanders in want of livelihood, unhinged in mind."
-- Miller trans. #27 (fr. 130)Similarly in the Iliad:
"Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals, that we live in unhappiness, but the gods themselves have no sorrows."
-- Homer, Iliad 24.525-6 (Lattimore)This view of the gods was tied to a certain understanding of the human condition. Solon's alleged reply to King Croseus of Lydia illustrates a common view, that men can only be truly happy in death:
"I know God is envious of human prosperity and likes to trouble us; and you question me about the life of man. . . . You can see from this, Croesus, what a chancy thing life is. You are very rich, and you rule a prosperous people; but the question you ask me I will not answer, until I know that you have died happily. . . . until he is dead, keep the word 'happy' in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, but only lucky."
-- Herodotus (de Selincourt) 1.32In sum, the traditional view was that the gods are like mortals, but better. They live longer (forever, actually), they're more beautiful (or at least some of them are), they have more power --- in a word, life is easy for the gods.
THE DEATH OF TRADITIONAL GREEK RELIGION
Greek philosophy was sceptical of many aspects of traditional religion in a very upfront and confrontational way. The best example is Xenophanes:
"Both Homer and Hesiod acribed to the gods all things that evoke reproach and blame among human beings, theft and adultery and mutual deception."
-- Miller trans. #5 (D-K fr. 11)
"But if oxen and horses and lions had hands and so could draw and make works of art like men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and they would make their bodies in accordance with the form that they themselves severally possess."
-- Miller trans. #7 (D-K fr. 15)
"Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black; Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair."
-- Miller trans. #8 (D-K fr. 16)Of course, Plato explicitly address the nature of the gods, public worship vs. private piety, etc., and these become themes that reoccur throughout later Greek philosophy.
TRADITIONAL ROMAN RELIGION
We know virtually nothing about it. The Romans got writing about the same time as the Greeks (eighth century B.C.), but they did not start writing serious literature until after they became heavily influenced by the Greek colonists in southern Italy --- and when they did start writing literature, it was verse in Greek meters, translations of Greek plays, etc. that they wrote. The few literary works that would be most useful to the historian of religion were lost (not recopied by the medievals) or exist only in fragments. Therefore, what we do know about traditional Roman religion is highly fragmentary, and cannot easily be summarized. The two best textbooks on the subject take different approaches: Dumezil concentrates on the early evidence, and his work is thus fairly difficult reading; Beard/North/Price is more accessible, but it treats traditional religion very little, concentrating instead on what we know a lot about, namely Roman religion under Greek influence and in the Empire.Religious terminology: religio, whence ModEng 'religion', has four major senses: 1) reverence for or fear of the gods, as the attitude that results in proper ritual action, 2) reverence for or fear of the gods, used to refer to the inner quality that accounts for such actions; 3) holiness, sacredness, sanctity inhering in any object (a deity, temple, utensils, etc.); 4) an object of religious veneration, a sacred place or thing. Note that (except in later, Christian Latin) religio never means a system of religious belief.
IMPERIAL ROMAN RELIGION AND THE NEW RELIGIONS
Under the Republic, Rome was ruled by a semi-hereditary aristocracy in combination with certain forms of direct democracy, but the ruling class perpetuated a strong anti-authoritarian ideology contrasting the freedoms of the Republic with the domination under the Kingdom. When the Republic had self-destructed and Rome was ruled by Emperors, they introduced the notion that the Emperor was divine, and should be sacrificed to in the same way as other gods. Probably few people believed the Emperor was a god like Jupiter or Minerva (after all, the Romans were the heirs to the Greek philosophical tradition), but almost everyone participated in the imperial cult when it was appropriate.Even under the Republic, there are stories of many people who disbelieved in the traditional gods, and our sources roundly criticize such people as being disloyal to the state and nation. In the Empire things work the same: people could believe whatever they wanted at home, but they should nevertheless practice the same as everyone else in public. The Roman persecution of Jews and Christians had its source here, since as monotheists they were unwilling to perform the rituals that most people did when they had to, perhaps with little or no devotion or faith. We again see that ancient religion is not concerned with belief, but is defined by civic practice.
Foreign religions became popular at all periods of Roman religion. Minerva is possibly imported from Etruria (north Italy) during the kingdom, and the worship of the Greek god Bacchus entered Rome during the Republic. But the cults of Isis (an Egyptian goddess) and Mithras (the name at least is borrowed from the Indo-Aryan Mithra/Mitra) are perhaps the best known, Isis thanks to Apuleius' Golden Ass and Mithras thanks to his adoption by many Roman legionaires.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION IN THE CLASSICAL WORLD
Presocratic Background
Some Presocratic thinkers have already been mentioned: Xenophanes and Anaxagoras. Philosophical thought in Greece began in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), perhaps under influence from Mesopotamia, but then quickly flowered in Greek (Southern) Italy as well. Philosophers came to Athens in the fifth century because Athenians were great patrons, but Socrates was the first Athenian philosopher of any prominence.
In Asia Minor, Tales, Anaximander and Anaximenes formed an early school of philosophy (sixth century), the so-called 'Ionians'. Heraclitus of Ephesus flourished around 500 BCE. The dominant Italian philosophers were Parmenides and Empedocles (fifth century). Forerunners of the Presocratics can be taken to include both Homer and Hesiod, as well as Pherecydes of Syros (fl. c. 550 BCE).
There is a debate whether Greece's two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were written by one author or two, but the name Homer is used for the author of both in any case. The contents of both epics are clearly old, and parts of both epics date probably to the late Stone Age (Neolithic). They both are the heirs of a long oral tradition, and were probably put in their current form around 800-700 BCE.
Hesiod: fl. c. 800-700. Wrote two surviving works, the Theogony (the generation of the gods) and the Works and Days (which on the surface is a sort of farmer's almanac). Both contain serious treatments of Greek mythology, and both are heavily influenced in content and form by Western Asian models.
The Socratics
Socrates was a highly charismatic, public intellectual who taught his fellow citizens for free in public places like city streets or gymnasia. His philosophy focused on ethics and political thought relevant to life in a Greek city-state.
Plato was a student of Socrates, and his early dialogues are viewed as the best evidence for the views of Socrates, who wrote nothing. His later dialogues show strongly the influence of mystical traditions of philosophy originating in Greek Italy, which go loosely by the names of Pythagorianism and Orphism. Plato founded a fee-paying college and established an entire school of thought (the 'Academy').
Most important for our purposes is Plato's conception of the divine: he speaks often of 'God', or 'the god', in the singular (Greek didn't distinguish upper and lower case letters) in a way that was to be very similar to the phrasing that Christians would later adopt to speak of their monotheistic god: therefore, he was prime material for adaption in Christian theology. Plato's god was a philosophical god, not a god of cultic worship, and thus was shorn of many of the anthropomorphic traits criticized by Xenophanes. Instead, this philosophical god was depicted as ruler of the cosmos, infinite in extent and somewhat remote from the phenomenal world --- again, all these traits would make him popular with Christian and Jewish thinkers. Plato's Timaeus presents an account of the creation of the phenomenal world that was deeply influential.
Xenophon was also a student of Socrates, although his major works are of contemporary, military history. He wrote four works of philosophy, much less original than the works of Plato.
Aristotle was a student of Plato who founded his own school when Plato died (the 'Peripatos'). His philosophy is highly original; he had strong interests in biology and history in addition to philosophy as we think of it. His version of the philosophical god is even more transcendent than Plato's.
Theophrastus was a student of Aristotle. He wrote a (now lost) history of philosophy that was the source for most of our later sources for early Greek philosophy. Thus, almost all our knowledge of the Presocratics is colored by the concerns of Aristotle and Theophrastus. His works on biology survive.
Hellenistic Philosophy
During the Hellenistic period, Greece was a hotbed of philosophical thought, with no one school predominating. In addition to the Academy and Peripatos, there was a school of professional Sceptics and two new schools, the Stoics and the Epicurians. Hellenistic philosophy was largely ethical in its focus (as Socrates' thought had been, and unlike Ionian thought), with cosmology marshalled to justify ethical doctrines.Eclecticism
Classical philosophy of the Roman period was not known for being very original. The Romans tended to be practical and almost anti-intellectual, but some of them had great respect for Greek thought, and they studied it carefully, even going to Athens to listen to lectures in the various philosophical schools or bringing well-known Greek philosophers to Italy. Their philosophical thought was therefore eclectic: they took bits and pieces of thought from different schools, and tried to fashion a practical philosophy from the pieces, but they added very little of their own. Sometimes Eclecticism is seen as the opposite of Scepticism: the belief that all philosophies have some value --- then the analogy with syncretism in the religious realm is clear. Cicero is the best example.
The Roman period in Greece (corresponding to the Eclectic through Neo-Platonic periods) is also the period of great advances in natural science, which was not then clearly distinguished from philosophy. Ptolemy in astronomy and Galen in medicine are the greatest figures.
Middle Platonism
The dominant figure in this period was Plutarch, a Greek intellectual living under Roman rule. He was an expert scholar of Greek literature, and is most famous for his Parallel Lives, where he contrasts the biographies of famous Greeks with those of famous Romans. He also was a priest at Delphi, the famous oracle to Apollo, and thus can be considered an expert on Greek popular religion during the Roman period. He is also the author of a number of important essays on religio-philosophical themes. Also in this period is Philo.
Neo-Platonism
The thought of the Neo-Platonists is only loosely based on the philosophy of Plato --- perhaps it is better to say that it is inspired by his writings. They particularly liked the mystical, Pythagorian elements of his thought.
In your readings, Ferguson describes this period as representing "the last form of Greek spiritual religion": this illustrates one of the great problems we have in discussing Greek religion and philosophy. By the time of Plotinus, traditional, cultic religion has all but entirely died out in Greece, and among intellectuals religious thoughts are deeply influenced by philosophical speculation. So do Plotinus represent Greek religious thought, or philosophical thought, or some hybrid of the two? From our perspective, he seems as much a religious thinker as a philosopher, perhaps, but is this an anachronistic judgement on our part, since we are in part his intellectual heirs? (Another way out of this bind is to talk about cultic religion and spiritual religion as entirely different things, like koala bears and brown bears.)
There were Neo-Platonic thinkers in every age of history since. Noteworthy are the Cambridge Platonists (BenjaminWhichcote, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and John Smith), who had a strong influence on the intellectual development of Isaac Newton in the early seventeenth century.
FOR FURTHER READING:
Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion, Harvard University Press, 1985. The classic handbook on subject.
Dillon, J.M., and A.A. Long, The Question of 'Eclecticism': Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, University of California Press, 1988.
Gill, Christopher and T.P. Wiseman, eds., Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World, University of Texas Press, 1993.
Jaeger, Werner, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosopers, Oxford University Press, 1947.
KRS: Kirk, G.S., J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, second edition, Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Marinatos, Nanno, Minoan Religion, University of South Carolina Press, 1993.
Nilsson, Martin, The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek Religion, Gleerup, 1927 (second edition 1950).
Veyne, Paul, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, University of Chicago Press, 1988.
West, M. L., Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient, Oxford, 1971.
----, East face of Helicon : west Asiatic elements in Greek poetry and myth, Oxford, 1997.----, The Orphic Poems, Oxford, 1983.
Last Updated: February 1, 1999
