Religion

Although many of the gods were shared, it is possible that there was a fundamental difference separating the Greeks from the Romans on the matter of the will of the gods. Naturally, both sought out the support of the gods and rewarded them for their support in war, and also sought out knowledge about the will and intentions of the gods.

However, whereas the Romans stressed the importance of reading and understanding signs as a guide for behaviour in auspicious circumstances, the Greeks may have been more concerned about propitiating them and understanding their will independent of human action. Thus, the Romans stressed ritual divination whereas the Greeks understood oracles as playing a similar role. For the Greeks, rituals were related to practice, for the Romans part of the work of divination. For both, however, the temples and the gods within them were central to their lives.

Yet the temples of Greece are a mere background for the gods in the daily life of the Greeks. For the Greeks, the gods were visible in the form of statues, but also in the paintings on the Attic vases - and more so as the sponsors of festivals and games. The literature of myth exploded in the mid-first millennium BCE, and the tales of the gods multiplied as different authors and vase painters sought to reconcile or develop diverging versions. Central to the Greek way of thought was that the gods represented a means of expressing concepts - loyalty, wealth, the world, and so on - and resolving conflicts.

However, beyond the gods and their temples lay a philosophical debate about the nature of the human. In Greece, this debate was expressed using the terminology of that distant day, and thus appears to us to be a form of religion. Peculiarly, in the case of Greece, we can see that the religion and the philosophy developed in parallel with the gods and their temples in the first millennium BCE, and thus to understand this distant world, we must combine the art and architecture with the philosophy to understand the metaphors of philosophy and the reality of religious practice.

The imagery and the sculptures aimed at conveying messages. Today, however, those messages are as disputed as are the details of the texts, and this was already the case before scholars began debating in Plato’s academy and in Hellenistic Alexandria. Yet those debates cannot be traced back to long before Homer and Hesiod early in the first millennium BCE. Some gods, attributes and rites may have been inherited from the Bronze Age, but the temples, the concepts and the myths were not.

By contrast, the religion of the Romans may have been quite different. For the Romans, moral codes were familiar and philosophy a superfluous luxury. As far as the Romans were concerned, the Greeks had solved many problems of epistemology, morals and mathematics but they had failed to develop a practical method of political activity. Thus, as they understood it, the role of the Romans was to use the conceptual systems of the Greeks to impose their will and values on others. In this sense the Roman religion was probably quite different from that of archaic Greece. Some aspects of Roman popular and elite practice, such as the cults of Isis and Mithras, developed on conceptual systems borrowed from Hellenistic and Oriental cults. These were generally marginal to the mainstream state religion, but were significant because of the large geographical region where Roman law prevailed and retired legionaries could settle. Some of these practices were probably far closer to our own conceptions of what religion implies than to what the Roman ruling classes viewed as religious practice. This situation obviously offered an opening to Christianity as a popular new form of religion which satisfied popular perceptions of needs which were not accommodated within conventional Roman practice.

Yet for both the Greeks and the Romans, the gods and their temples were a fundamental part of the landscape and it was only towards late antiquity that the philosophical scepticism of the Greek-speaking critics will have had an impact on the understanding of the gods.

Obviously, this was the era of the confrontation of Christianity with the pagan religions, and was a decisive era for those interested in the phenomenon of religion and the origins of Christianity. Most of this debate - for pagan and Christian alike - was presented in written form, and the material religion could be neglected. This has led to a peculiar situation whereby the study of religion has generally followed a route which is based on texts and seeking philosophical meanings in the texts whereas archaeology has tended to stress the buildings, attributes, domains and names of the gods.

Thus, basic books on the gods of Greeks differ depending upon whether they were written by philologists (such as Otto 1947 who sought values, order and structures) or archaeologists following the methods of Art History (like Simon 1985 who studies material and iconography and relates these to the myths). There are occasional authors (such as Nilsson 1927) who combined archaeology and philology in a synthetic fashion, but the approach seems to find more interest among archaeologists. In the case of the Greeks, a good deal is available and thus all these avenues are possible, but they are usually pursued by neglecting material where texts are available.

In general, the study of religion tends to focus on structural features (and to develop these beyond what is done by the philologists) where texts are sufficiently abundant (as for the Greeks and Romans), but to fall back to the basics, such as identifying objects and gods, where less information is available (as in the case of the Germanic tribes and the Celts). The studies in this volume reveal both tendencies.

One issue of fundamental importance is whether or not the deeper meanings frequently ascribed to religious practice or observance were invariably present, or whether this was exceptionally the case with the Greeks. The philosophical discussions of the Greeks are expressed in terms referring to the gods, but the Greek philosophical traditions clearly took leave of the popular forms of religion, with Epicurus (341-270 BCE) specifically dismissing the popular impressions of the gods as “impious” (Otto 1963: 33-4).

In this sense, the Parthenon (and not the philosophy) is a unifying point where the values of the people, the state and the philosophers met - and where each approach could see its own interpretation vindicated.

NOTE

1. A megaron is a rectangular room with a single entrance where the two side walls perpendicular to the wall with the entrance extend beyond the doorway to form a kind of porch. A temple in antis is a megaron-type building, frequently with two columns in front of the entrance, closing the porch.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Dr B. Kündiger provided the photos, which were drawn from Evans’s work.

Religion

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