Preface

Summary

I have written the sort of book that I myself would have found useful when I started to work on this subject. Rather than treating religion as an abstract and self-contained system, I have examined the interplay between local and Panhellenic practices and ideas: the plural ‘religions’ of my title is designed to suggest the resulting variety, in both space and time. I have also tried to look outwards from religion to other contexts. I have tried to avoid the pigeon-holing which places Attic tragedies in ‘literature’, archaic statues from the Athenian Akropolis in ‘art’, and Socrates in ‘philosophy’, and I have therefore tried to draw connections between material that is too often treated separately. In writing about the archaic and classical periods I have focused on evidence from these periods. Because this book goes right down to the Roman period, I have cited Pausanias (for example) not as evidence for the classical period, but as evidence for his own day. I have also included explicit discussion in the last chapter of the reactions of Romans, Jews and Christians to Greek religions

I am most grateful to the editors of this series, Paul Cartledge and Peter Garnsey for commissioning this book, and then helping me to bring it forth. I was lucky to be able to write the first draft in the Ward Chipman Library of the University of New Brunswick at Saint John, where the staff were indulgent of my demands on the system.