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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Pre-Christian European & Mediterranean religions
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Athenian Popular Religion (Paperback, New edition)
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Athenian Popular Religion (Paperback, New edition)
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Most modern studies of Athenian religion have focused on festivals,
cult practices, and individual deities. Jon Mikalson turns instead
to the religious beliefs citizens of Athens spoke of and acted upon
in everyday life. He uses evidence only from reliable, mostly
contemporary sources such as the orators Lysias and Demosthenes,
the historian Xenophon, and state decrees, sacred laws, religious
dedications, and epitaphs.
"This is in no sense a general history of Athenian religion,"
Mikalson writes, "even within the narrow historical boundaries set.
It is rather an investigation of what might be termed the consensus
of popular religious belief, a consensus consisting of those
beliefs which an Athenian citizen thought he could express publicly
and for which he expected fo find general acceptance among his
peers."
What emerges in Mikalson's study is a remarkable homogeneity of
religious beliefs at the popular level. The topics discussed at
length in "Athenian Popular Religion" include the areas of divine
intervention in human life, the gods and human justice, gods and
oaths, divination, death and the afterlife, the nature of the gods,
social aspects of popular religion, and piety and impiety.
Mikalson challenges the common opinion that popular religious
belief in Athens deteriorated significantly from the mid-fifth to
the mid-fourth century B.C. "The error in understanding the
development of Athenian religion has arisen, it seems to me,
because scholars have failed to distinguish properly between the
differing natures of the sources for our knowledge of religious
beliefs in the earlier and later periods," Mikalson writes. The
difference between those sources "is more than simply one of years.
It is a difference between poetry and prose, with all the factors
which that difference implies."
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