In the introduction, the editors of this conference volume state their motivation to present ‘novel trends within the more traditional concerns of the religious studies’ and to highlight the work of ‘young scholars’ (p. 10). Although each article contributes something new to Greek religious studies, either in terms of the data discussed or in terms of the questions asked, ‘novel trends’ feature in only a handful of contributions. One distinct ‘trend’ is a renewed interest (considering the earlier work of Jean Rudhardt) in the experiential side of religious life (‘an emphasis on the moment, the experience of participant in cult’, p. 11). This is a shift away from a previously greater emphasis on religious structures. Altogether, the ‘current approaches’ of this collection are a mix of mostly traditional with some novel.
Most contributions (Konaris, W., Mili, Herda, Kavoulaki, Kolotourou and Papalexandrou) illustrate the continued utility of geo-scales (panhellenic, regional, polis) in organising material and asking questions about religious life in ancient Greece. Equally traditional is a search for a better understanding of religious practices and their social contexts through the medium of a single sanctuary or festival: New Year festival at Miletus (Herda), sanctuary of Poseidon at Calauria (Pakkanen), Eleusinian processions (Mitsopoulou), the Athenian Oschophoria (Pilz), votive practices on Delos (Prêtre). The physical space of sanctuaries additionally allows Scott, Mylonopoulos and Papalexandrou to explore experiential dimensions that would be available to visitors in the presence of particular objects: inscribed inventories, barriers in temples, cult and votive statues. Among deities, Apollo continues to attract most attention (four articles), while a lack of interest in historical developments through time is also of note. H.'s piece is the only one actively pursuing the subject.
M. Konaris's piece exemplifies what has recently become a widely established recognition of the need to question paradigmatic opinions that have been prevalent and uncritically used in Classical scholarship for far too long. He offers a historiographic exposition of the long-lasting influence exercised by K.O. Müller's view of Apollo, articulated in Die Dorier, as a European, Dorian and specifically Greek deity, associated with order, clarity and rationalism, a view which tells us more about the early nineteenth-century clash of German romanticism and rationalism than about the ancient Greek god.
W. analyses the language of votive dedications from around the Greek world, in which Apollo and Artemis are attested together, and argues that such coupling is a correlative of their common portrayal as siblings in myths and iconography. Surprisingly, W. does not consider the family triad, mother and children, as informative, although 82 (all from Delos) out of the collected 127 examples address Apollo and Artemis in company with Leto.
A. Herda's ‘How to Run a State Cult: the Organization of the Cult of Apollo Delphinios in Miletos’ is a summative piece highlighting the main conclusions reached in his earlier work on the famous Molpoi Decree. In this thoroughly researched contribution Herda makes a convincing case for multi-functionalism in the province of a single local deity, so that seafaring, colonisation and politics, and not just one or the other, together characterise Apollo Delphinius at Miletus.
M. Mili looks at the juncture of religion and social structures in search for a social meaning of the epithet Kerdoos applied to Apollo and attested only in Thessaly. Expensive statuary offerings and titles of dedicants suggest to Mili that Kerdoos was a deity addressed by nobility who, within the Thessalian milieu, would not have found personal gain (kerdos) contradictory to their social values. While her specific conclusions are not unassailable, Mili's emphasis on the local, counter-panhellenic perspective is to be saluted, although she leaves out the lateral local axis, that is, the place of Kerdoos among other Apollos of Thessaly.
Another regional study is H.'s ‘The Strangeness of Crete: Problems for the Protohistory of Greek Religion’, which asks to what degree the religious aspects of Crete in the historical period resemble the rest of Greece. He notes that relative to the ‘strangeness’ of Crete in the prehistoric period, the level of convergence in the historic period should be seen as surprising and hence deserving of much greater scholarly attention. He particularly critiques the notion of ‘continuity’ as unproductive because it bolsters an artificial (in the case of Crete) division between prehistoric and historic periods, and argues instead in favour of studying ‘consistencies across Greek religion’ over a longer span that ‘encompasses the prehistoric and historic periods’ (p. 103).
Pakkanen, Mitsopoulou and Prêtre each focus on a large cult centre (Calauria, Eleusis and Delos respectively) and using examples of characteristic material evidence found there suggest site-specific interpretations. P. Pakkanen sees the Calaurian sanctuary of Poseidon in the Hellenistic period as accommodating ‘unofficial’ (‘private’) ritual alongside ‘official cult’, a conclusion which in her view exposes limitations of the polis-religion model; at the same time, her methodology of reading archaeological evidence as indicative of either ‘official’ or ‘unofficial’ ritual is anything but explicit. More focused and effective, C. Mitsopoulou, ‘The Eleusinian Procession Cult Vessel: Iconographic Evidence and Interpretation’, and C. Prêtre, ‘Les mots et les choses: De l'offrande d'un bouclier crétois à Délos’, illuminate Eleusinian cult processions and the ‘Delian dedicatory system’ respectively through a skilful combination of linguistic and iconographic analyses.
Two contributions (Papalexandrou and Kolotourou) focus on senses of perception, sight and hearing, and on theories of visuality and mousikê respectively, to explore their roles in religion. In this area, theoretical approaches have not yet made a considerable contribution to the study of Greek religion, and the authors rightly draw attention to this shortcoming. After this point of agreement, there are few elements either of method or of specific interpretation that are likely to escape controversy. N. Papalexandrou draws on theories of vision, universalist in scope, to question the role played by the visual in specifically Greek religious experience in specific historical periods: ‘the Early Iron Age was a period of extremely restricted visuality’, while from the ninth century the increase in material expression at cult places indicates an era of ‘new visuality’ leading to ‘new religious experiences and sentiments’ (pp. 257–8). K. Kolotourou seeks to demonstrate ‘the religious significance of percussive music [in Greece] in the historical period’ (p. 169) on the basis of a theoretical approach that is also universalist: ‘biological and conceptual dimensions of mundane percussive actions establish metaphorical associations that endorse the performance of percussion in Greek ritual’ (p. 182). Whether right or wrong, universal theories (e.g. structuralism) prefigure what meaning one is likely to find in specific historical evidence, so that historians who prefer to start from the evidence and work towards an explanation naturally feel disappointed that the answers are known before one even begins asking. Kolotourou and Papalexandrou have bravely added new powerful strands of theory to the hermeneutic brew that nurtures Greek religious scholarship, but whether these theories yield authoritative methods of interpretation remains to be seen.
The article from which I have learned the most, O. Pilz, ‘The Performative Aspect of Greek Ritual: the Case of the Athenian Oschophoria’, presents an illuminating reinterpretation of the Oschophoria festival. Applying performance theory and speech act theory, Pilz sees the festival as a multivalent occasion, in which various groups of participants enacted different elements of myth(s) and emotionally experienced the festival in different ways. He thereby warns us against a one-sided view of the festival as only initiatory (singular focus on oschophoroi – boys dressed as girls), only ephebic (singular focus on the footrace of ephebes), or only agricultural. The festival in its sequence emerges as a cultic play, with mimetic character, involving temporal identification of some participants with certain mythical protagonists. Presumably, every festival, in which various groups of participants were involved, would have produced a spectrum of experiences, and Pilz's reinterpretation of the Oschophoria prepares us to expect a similarly complex ritual experience in many other Greek festivals.
In a piece that complements Pilz's, A. Kavoulaki offers a nuanced and insightful contribution, combining linguistic examination of the related concepts of prosodos and pompê and a performative analysis of the finale to the Aeshylean Oresteia to highlight the less obvious meaning of pompê as ‘an escort to a destination’. Her remarkable conclusion is that the latter sense presupposes that in processing towards a sanctuary ‘a concrete instance of community’ as it were brings itself as an offering, a gift to the gods (p. 146).
