Greek Religion Scholars

J. Renshaw

[temples] had the double benefit of honouring the gods and flaunting the city's wealth and culture

Parker

It was unusual to pray seriously without making an offering of some kind

Garland

(Priests) we can hardly doubt that their office invested them with a certain venerability

Garland

We should not think… that a sacrifice was merely an excuse for a feast

Chaniotis

Magistrates sometimes conducted religous activities without the assistance of priests

Detienne and Vernant

sacrifice is fundamentally about killing to eat

Naiden

Sacrifice served to maintain and stabilise the relationship between the mortals and gods

Amos & Lang

To us, the Olympics games are a series of sporting events. But for the first thousand years of their history they were part of what was primarily a religious occasion.

Marinatos

Sanctuaries were multidimensional institutions which served the needs of their communities and the Greek city-state as a whole.

Garland

(Delphi) A journey to the earth's navel in order to deepen one’s knowledge and wisdom

Zaidman and Pantel

Apollo's sanctuary at Delphi was a constant hive of activity

Geoffrey Kirk

all sorts of not very heroic qualities are allowed to enter the lives of the gods

Jasper Griffin

Homers epics are full of really impressive gods who deserve the worship they receive

Faraone

no act of Greek religion could be fully private

Faraone

The male householders religious activities essentially replicate a civic cult

Faraone

Magic and the role of women are qualitative differences between civic and household/family religion

Jon D. Mikalson

They would not find in other deme people, deities and priests as familiar to them as those of their own deme

Simon Price

The attic demes were thus integrated into the religious life of the Athenian state while preserving their own individuality

Zaidman

There is an inseparability of festivals from the very definition of Greek civic life

Sourvinou-Inwood

the fact that Greek religion was ritual, that activity took place in groups, must not be taken to entail that it is a ‘group religion’

Sourvinou-Inwood

The individual was without doubt the primary, basic, cultic unit in polis religion

Fred Naiden

The regulation of sacrifice was partly communal, but not entirely so

Kindt

Individuals were motivated by personal belief to join in festivals, it combines aspects of public and private

Green

[the gods] still mattered to thinking people

Parker

Philosophers could not accept the riotous Olympians of mythology…. But they had no wish to dispense with the divine

Matthew Dillon

women priests in were not just the women’s equivalent of male priests

Matthew Dillon

The most important cult of Apollo, the male god of prophecy, at Delphi had women priests

Matthew Dillion

Male priesthoods on the whole were often more prestigious than women’s priesthoods

Walter Burket

Wine Libations have a fixed place in the ritual of animal sacrifice

Zaidman and Pantel

Greek identity could be affirmed through common religious cults as much as through common language

Ekroth

Hero cults originated in the cult of the dead

Zaidman and Pantel

The temple was not an indispensable element of Greek religion

S. Price

People must have had particular reasons for turning to Asclepius

Hornblower

The success of Asclepius was due to his appeal to individuals in a world where their concerns became more and more removed from polis religion

S.Price

Mysteries suggest that the bleak view of the afterlife implied in funerary rituals was accompanied by an alternative

Zaidman and Pantel

A process of internal transformation, founded upon the emotional experience of a direct encounter with the divine

Parker

Gods overflowed like clothes from an overfilled drawer which no one felt obliged to tidy

Garland

Eleisinian Mysteries promised eternal bliss on purely ritualistic grounds

Price

religious involvement from men and women […] resulted not from individual choices but from social expectations

Price

Some individuals had a particularly close relationship to the cults of their own or other cities

Bowden

oracular sanctuaries were places where strangers would meet and tell each other their stories

Bowden

(Dodona) visitors who were more used to visiting sanctuaries in urban settings, it might have been unsettling

Garland

Movement included some of the brightest and most radical thinkers Greece ever produced

Julia Annas

Depicting Socrates as in many ways a weird and inhuman

Julia Annas

Plato would not have been the great philosopher he is if Socrates had not influenced him

Parker

religion is not a special sphere set apart from the rest of life

Parker

their role was not to teach but to supervise the sanctuaries they were attached to (priests)

Parker

the gods were just silhouettes one could fill in the details according to ones own taste

Parker

religous affairs were taken by the organs of the polis, not by a separate body of religious specialists

Price

Herodotus, like almost all other Greeks, accepted that Delphi did work

Harrison

Belief in prophecy was simply something natural, even rational

Silvermintz

he (Socrates) practises a form of sorcery that results in bewitching those with whom he comes in contact