One cannot approach the work of P. without being awed by his command of the evidence for Greek religion and the care with which he handles this body of disparate and at times refractory material. His masterful two-volume treatment of religion in Athens (Athenian Religion [1996] and Polytheism and Society at Athens [2005]) demonstrates all that is both compelling and occasionally frustrating about his approach. The first volume is a meticulous compendium of details that at times threaten to swallow the narrative, while the second, building on these details, offers a thoughtful account of the ways that religious observance both structures and is structured by the institutions of the Athenian polis, from the family and oikos to the various fictive kin groups (phratries and genê), to the city as a whole in its relations with Attic, Panhellenic and ‘foreign’ cults. A reader familiar with this body of work can be forgiven for turning to the present volume, which originated in the 2008 Townshend lectures delivered at Cornell University, in the hope of finding a summa or distillation of P.'s views on Greek religion. These hopes are not to be fulfilled, although an abundance of insights, enriched by apposite quotations from figures as disparate as Ibn Khaldun, T.S. Eliot and John Maynard Keynes, ensures that the reader will not go away empty-handed.

Instead, P. has given us a meticulous discussion of some important methodological problems in the study of Greek religion. Anyone working in this field is likely to be sympathetic to the questions he raises and to his awareness of the unknowable nature of the answers. And yet, P.'s unwillingness to commit himself becomes self-limiting. So aware is he of the pitfalls of any theoretical commitment that, although he says that we need ‘theory’ (pp. viii–ix), he qualifies this by defining it as ‘a discussion shared by archaeologists, literary scholars, and historians’. This impoverished definition, together with the injunction to give priority to the ‘best evidence’, is the sum total of his stated methodology, which is unfortunate since an extremely careful scholar like P. would perform a great service by providing a more illuminating discussion of his own practices. Not only does one look in vain for a clear methodological statement, but, despite the call for ‘theory’, the book is almost completely innocent of anything recognisable as such. Instead, he assumes the position of an objective referee critiquing the theoretical approaches of others. These accounts are not unsympathetic, and are generally fair. See, for example, the elegant summary of J.-P. Vernant's treatment of the goddess Artemis (p. 91), embedded in a useful critical consideration of structuralism's value for the study of Greek religion. None the less, it is hard not to wish that he were willing to take a few more risks.

In his preface (p. xiii), P. advises the reader that the book lacks a ‘sequential plot’, and that the chapters may be read in any order. In several other ways, the book is somewhat hard to get a handle on, unmoored as it is from the sense of place that distinguishes the two volumes on Athenian religion. Instead it is marked by a series of (announced) absences, beginning with those discussed in the first two chapters, each of which focusses on something that is lacking in Greek religion. Chapter 1 asks, ‘Why Believe without Revelation?’ and the second is entitled ‘Religion without a Church: Religious Authority in Greece’. This way of posing the problem – although not without heuristic value for an audience of undergraduates whose only notion of religion may be what they have encountered on Sunday mornings – owes too much to an idea of a normative Christianity as a model for all religions to be entirely helpful. (This problem is discussed in detail in J.Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine.) To be fair, P. is aware of the limitations of this approach and states them clearly.

The remaining chapters, dealing with heroes, gods, sacrifice, festivals and ‘The Varieties of Greek Religious Experience’, provide many useful observations supported by a wide range of evidence from all over the Greek world. Five appendices address particular problems, such as the much-debated nature of chthonic sacrifice and the deification of mortals. Chapter 3, ‘Analyzing Greek Gods’, begins with the question, ‘What is a Greek God?’ P. considers the tension in Greek thinking between an undifferentiated conception of ‘the gods’ as ‘the uncontrollable and inevitable element shaping and constraining human life and human lives’ (p. 67) and the highly individualised and specialised figures of myth and cult. This is territory that was brilliantly covered many years ago (although in less detail) by the great Swiss historian, J. Rudhardt (Notions fondamentales de la pensée religieuse et actes constitutifs du culte dans la Grèce classique [1958]). This chapter explores a number of issues central to an understanding of the Greek concept of divinity: the ways in which specific cults simultaneously refine and fragment divine identity, the tension between the worship of local divinities and Panhellenic ones, the tendency of locally favoured gods to expand to fill functions outside their usual jurisdictions, and the deification of abstractions and natural forces. He then goes on to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the Structuralist approach, which characterises the various functions of the gods as explicable in terms of ‘modes of action’.

In the chapter on heroes, P. similarly attempts to pin down the nature of this religious category, although here, as all too often, heroines receive short shrift. The discussion is marked by an attempt to discount several widespread notions about the ideological uses of hero cult. For example, he argues (pp. 109–10) that the worshippers who offered thousands of votives to a hero like Agamemnon were not motivated by the past but by his powers as a helper in the present. And yet, was it not the prestige of the (mythical) past that conferred these powers? Likewise, he uses evidence of cults of enemy heroes to argue against the idea that hero cult could be a device of legitimation. ‘One does not acquire legitimacy … by worshipping an enemy’ (p. 118). Perhaps so, but no one – as far as I am aware – has ever claimed that all hero cult was used as a means to political legitimacy or that this was its only or even its main function. It is odd that P., who generally advances highly nuanced interpretations of religious phenomena, would attempt to force the ideas of others into this sort of straitjacket. The deployment of these straw men hints at ideological commitments that are never clearly spelled out.

In Chapter 5 P. discusses sacrifice as both the occasion for a communal feast and as a means of communication with the gods. At the same time, the chapter acts as a survey of theories of sacrifice from Meuli's ‘Comedies of Innocence’ to Vernant and Detienne's ‘Cuisine of Sacrifice’, judiciously weighing each theory in turn and carefully pointing out its strengths and weaknesses. Chapter 6 takes a novel approach to festivals, considering them in terms of ‘plots’, which he labels ‘the god arrives’, ‘the god dies or disappears’, ‘the city celebrates itself’ and so on. Chapter 7, ‘The Varieties of Greek Religious Experience’, is something of a grab-bag, containing discussions of place, social position, gender and other factors that influenced the ways in which Greeks experienced their rituals, as well as magic and mysteries, and hopes for the afterlife.

While generally sensitive to the nuances of Greek culture, P. occasionally surprises with an ethnocentric remark, as when he refers to the ‘largely tabooed and highly embarrassing topic of sexuality’ (p. 208), a turn of phrase that seems oddly inappropriate to the generally frank and at times even festive attitudes towards sexuality found in so many ancient Greek sources.

The heavy emphasis on the difficulties of extracting certainty from a patchy historical record raises the question of audience. Any professional scholar working in the field of Greek religion will be familiar with these difficulties, while most undergraduates will find the tentativeness of P.'s approach frustrating. Those who will gain the most from this aspect of the work are graduate students, and anyone embarking for the first time on research in the field of ancient religion. That said, the attention of the professional scholar will be repaid by the many intriguing and challenging observations scattered throughout the pages of this elegantly written but at times frustrating book.