Explore the vast range of titles available.

The public/private distinction is fundamental to modern theories of the family, religion and religious freedom, and state power, yet it has had different salience, and been understood differently, from place to place and time to time. The volume brings together essays from an international array of experts in law and religion, in order to examine the public/private distinction in comparative perspective. The essays focus on the cultures and religions of the ancient Mediterranean, in the formative periods of Greece and Rome and the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Particular attention is given to the private exercise of religion, the relation between public norms and private life, and the division between public and private space and the place of religion therein.

Abstract This article discusses the challenges facing scholars exploring the nature of belief in ancient Greek religion. While recent scholarship has raised questions about individual religious activities, and work on ritual, the body, and the senses has broadened our methodological palette, the nature and dynamics of generally held \"low intensity\" beliefs still tend to be described simply as \"unquestioned\" or \"embedded\" in society. But examining scholarship on divine personifications suggests that ancient beliefs were - and our perceptions of them are - more complex. This article first explores the example of Tyche (\"Chance\"), in order to highlight some of the problems that surround the use of the term \"belief.\" It then turns to the theories of \"ideology\" of Slavoj Žižek and Robert Pfaller and argues that these can offer provocative insights into the nature and dynamics of ritual and belief in ancient Greek culture.

The two basic conflicting forces throughout Wharton’s tragic novels have a great affinity with the cult of the Apollonian and Dionysian in ancient Greek religion and in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. On the one hand, it is the Apollonian ideal of civilized society and individual restraint, which is a beautiful illusion maintained in a bright appearance. When it encounters Dionysus, it is its defensive social rules, the social restrictions, and oppression it imposes on individuals; on the other hand, it is the awakening of Dionysian primitive passion, which tears off the social and individual protective veil of Apollo and reaches the Dionysian tragic cognition at the root of existence, requiring breaking social barriers and indulging the vitality of primitive nature. In this paper, the cult of the Apollonian and Dionysian in ancient Greek religion and as defined by Nietzsche in his The Birth of Tragedy is used to analyze the inner conflicts in the protagonists of Wharton’s tragic novels and the patterns of tragedy in each of her studied novels. Through such archetypal criticism of religious cults in Wharton’s major works, this paper attempts to refute most of the negative criticism of her novels.

This article investigates the scope and meaning of ancient Greek personal religion as an additional dimension - besides official (polis) religion - in which the ancient Greek religious experience articulates itself. I show how ‘personal religion’ is a rather broad and amorphous scholarly category for a number of religious beliefs and practices that, in reflecting individual engagement with the supernatural, do not fit into our conception of polis religion. At the same time, I argue that personal religion should not be seen simply as that which is not official Greek religion. Nor is personal religion simply ‘private’ religion, oikos religion or the religion of those who had no voice in the sphere of politics (metics, women). Rather, ‘personal religion’ combines aspects of public and private. It is a productive category of scholarly research insofar as it helps us to appreciate the whole spectrum of ways individuals in the ancient Greek city received and (if necessary) altered culturally given religious beliefs and practices. Indeed, the examples discussed in this paper reveal a very Greek conversation about the question of what should count as a religious sign and who was to determine its meaning.

The paper examines doctrinal and political reasons to explain why the Ancient Greek religion did not feature a distinct class of professional priests as suppliers of religious goods. Doctrinal reasons relate to worshiping a multitude of powerful anthropomorphic gods with flawed characters; absence of a founder of religion and of a scripture; lack of religious doctrine and of a code of moral behaviour and piety manifested as mass participation in rituals. These factors denied religious suppliers the opportunity to form a monopoly acting as an autonomous intermediary between humans and gods. Political reasons relate to the supremacy of the demos which watchfully guarded its decision-making powers and prevented other actors like a priestly interest group to challenge its authority.

Ancient Greek descriptions of ecstatic and mystic rituals, here broadly labeled as Bacchantic worship, regularly include elements of moral corruption and dissolution of social unity. Suspicions were mostly directed against unofficial cult groups that exploited Dionysiac experiences in secluded settings. As the introduction of copious new cults attests, Greek religion was receptive to external influences. This basic openness, however, was not synonymous with tolerance, and pious respect for all deities did not automatically include their worshippers. This article reconsiders the current view of ancient religious intolerance by regarding these negative stereotypes as expressions of prejudice and by investigating the social dynamics behind them. Prejudices against private Bacchantic groups are regarded as part of the process of buttressing the religious authority of certain elite quarters in situations where they perceive that their position is being threatened by rival claims. It is suggested that both the accentuation and alleviation of prejudice is best understood in relation to the relative stability of the elite and the religious control it exerted.

In Hosios: A Semantic Study of Greek Piety Saskia Peels elucidates the semantics of the Ancient Greek adjective hosios and its cognates. Traditionally rendered as 'piety', hosios was a key notion in Classical Greek religion and reflected a core value in Athenian democracy. Since antiquity, its meaning and usage have puzzled many. This study sets out to resolve various scholarly debates on the semantics of hosios by focusing on the idea of lexical competition. It illuminates the semantic relationship between hosios and its near-synonyms eusebês and dikaios, and the connection to the notion of the 'sacred'. Using insights from modern linguistic theory, the book also aims to improve methods for research into the lexical semantics of a dead language.

In classical Greece, different kinds of itinerant purifiers are well known mainly through hostile descriptions (Plato, Demosthenes) and sometimes also through some evidence from inside (Empedocles, Orphic gold tablets). However, both perspectives coincide in showing that such wandering \"priests\" aimed to construe a transportable sacred space, attached to specific people rather than to any specific location. Thus, sacred places could easily turn into metaphorical images for inner states. The main mechanisms of such construction are: creating conceptual boundaries which separate the initiate from the profane; depicting imaginary spaces of purity and impurity at both sides of the boundary; and imagining ways of spatial change from the impure to the pure side, be it as a gradual process (imagined as walking through a path) or as a sudden transportation (imagined as leaping or falling). Sacred space as a metaphor for inner religious experience gained enormous popularity from Plato onwards, and this kind of construction may have been the most immediate antecedent. This approach helps to explain several pieces of evidence of Greek itinerant religion, and, more generally, to understand how the possibility of internalizing sacred spaces may be exploited in specific situations.

The notion of reciprocity in Greek religion has been approached from many angles. One question that has not been treated concerns human discontent at gods' gifts. Given that, in Greek literature, characters conceptualised their relationship with gods as a bond of reciprocal χάρις, did these fictive characters use the same conceptual frame in talking about frustrated expectations of divine reciprocity? When gods did not give in return what had been hoped for, was such disappointment ever constructed as a case of dysfunctional reciprocity? In this paper I argue that the answer is 'no', but a conscious no. Explicit disappointment in divine reciprocity occurs, but exclusively under 'special circumstances'. Such criticism is uttered by characters who are not Greek, for example, who are portrayed as having rather strange views anyway, or who have a very special reciprocal relationship with a god based on divine parenthood of a human child. The distribution and nature of complaints shows that reproaching gods about disappointed reciprocity was consciously considered as very un-Greek.

Rituals that enabled communication between mortals and immortals were critical to the ancient Greeks as a means of improving relations with their seemingly capricious gods. Our study reaches well beyond textual evidence — the traditional bastion of classical scholarship — to recover another way that the Greeks used technology, in this case architectural engineering, to improve communication with the gods. Studies of the acoustics of ancient Greek structures have focused almost entirely on theaters. But before the acoustically stunning theater at Epidauros was constructed, its architect had designed a round marble building encircled by a colonnade (diameter ca. 22m) and placed it in the very center of this same sanctuary. According to building records from Epidauros, this building, called the thymele, was by far the most expensive structure erected there in the fourth century BCE during a major expansion program. Despite its centrality both physically and presumably also ritually, the thymele continues to baffle scholars because its function remains unclear. We argue that one of the functions of this building was an acoustic sound box to amplify music sung to the healing gods Apollo and his son Asklepios, whose sanctuary this was. As we will demonstrate, the design and decoration of the building, its name (thymele), and the textual evidence of the hymns themselves, some of which were inscribed on marble blocks at Epidauros, all indicate that this building was a locus for songs accompanied by a lyre and sung to Apollo and Asklepios to request their assistance with healing individual bodies as well as the body politic. The thymele broadcast these songs to other worshipers in the sanctuary and, more importantly, to the ears of the gods.