London: Routledge, 2018. — 214 p., 21 b/w illus. — (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World series). Hermes redresses the gap in modern English scholarship on this fascinating and complex god, presenting its readers with an introduction to Hermes’ social, religious and political importance through discussions of his myths, iconography and worship. It also brings together in one...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2013. — 248 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 176). Worlds Full of Signs compares Greek divination to divinatory practices in Neo-Assyrian Mesopotamia and Republican Rome. It argues that the character of Greek divination differed fundamentally from that of the two comparanda. Ample attention is given to background and method at first....
De Gruyter, 2013. — 700 p. — (MythosEikonPoiesis). This book contributes to the understanding of Dionysos, the Greek god of wine, dancing, theatre and ecstasy, by putting together 30 studies of classical scholars. They combine the analysis of specific instances of particular dimensions of the god in cult, myth, literature and iconography, with general visions of Dionysos in...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2008. — 392 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 162). Orphic gold tables are key documents for the knowledge of rites and beliefs of Orphics, an atypical group that configured a highly original creed and that influenced powerfully over other Greek writers and thinkers. The recent discovery of some tablets has forced a noteworthy modification of...
Cambridge University Press, 2018. — xvi + 314 p. This is the first integrated study of Greek religion and cults of the Black Sea region, centred upon the Bosporan Kingdom of its northern shores, but with connections and consequences for Greece and much of the Mediterranean world. David Braund explains the cohesive function of key goddesses (Aphrodite Ourania, Artemis Ephesia,...
Oxford University Press, 1994. — 122 p. — (New Surveys in the Classics 24). In this brief but highly informative book Jan Bremmer presents an outline of Greek religion in the classical period. After a survey of its main characteristics, he offers a clear and innovative view of the great gods and heroes as well as their sanctuaries and also the main myths, rituals and mysteries:...
Routledge, 2015. — 183 p. — (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World). Artemis is a literary, iconographic, and archaeological study of the ancient Greek goddess of the hunt, who presided over the transitions and mediations between the wild and the civilized, youth and maturity, life and death. Beginning with a study of the early origins of Artemis and her cult in the Bronze and...
University of California Press, 1983. — 335 p. Blood sacrifice, the ritual slaughter of animals, has been basic to religion through history, so that it survives in spiritualized form even in Christianity. How did this violent phenomenon achieve the status of the sacred? This question is examined in Walter Burkert's famous study. Sacrifice, Hunting, and Funerary Rituals....
Harvard University Press, 1995. — 226 p. The splendid culture of the ancient Greeks has often been described as emerging like a miracle from a genius of its own, owing practically nothing to its neighbors. Walter Burkert offers a decisive argument against that distorted view, pointing toward a balanced picture of the archaic period "in which, under the influence of the Semitic...
Brill Academic Pub, 2005. — 532 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 156) This book deals with the making and the reuses of the divine words which were ascribed to Apollo from the 2nd to the 6th centuries AD and which have now become available in both epigraphical and literary sources. The larger part has been issued by the sanctuaries of Claros and Didyma. This...
Brill, 1983. — 48 p. Sabazios (Ancient Greek: Σαβάζιος) is the horseman and sky father god of the Phrygians and Thracians. In Indo-European languages, such as Phrygian, the -zios element in his name derives from dyeus, the common precursor of Latin deus ('god') and Greek Zeus. Though the Greeks interpreted Phrygian Sabazios as both Zeus and Dionysus, representations of him,...
Brill, 1985. — 119 p. Sabazios (Ancient Greek: Σαβάζιος) is the horseman and sky father god of the Phrygians and Thracians. In Indo-European languages, such as Phrygian, the -zios element in his name derives from dyeus, the common precursor of Latin deus ('god') and Greek Zeus. Though the Greeks interpreted Phrygian Sabazios as both Zeus and Dionysus, representations of him,...
Brill, 1989. — 68 p. Sabazios (Ancient Greek: Σαβάζιος) is the horseman and sky father god of the Phrygians and Thracians. In Indo-European languages, such as Phrygian, the -zios element in his name derives from dyeus, the common precursor of Latin deus ('god') and Greek Zeus. Though the Greeks interpreted Phrygian Sabazios as both Zeus and Dionysus, representations of him,...
Routledge, 2002. — 292 p. Mystery cults represent the spiritual attempts of the ancient Greeks to deal with their mortality. As these cults had to do with the individual’s inner self, privacy was paramount and was secured by an initiation ceremony, a personal ritual that established a close bond between the individual and the gods. Once initiated, the individual was liberated...
Routledge, 2003. — 292 p. — ISBN: 0415248736. Written by an international team of acknowledged experts, this excellent book studies a wide range of contributions and showcases new research on the archaeology, ritual and history of Greek mystery cults. With a lack of written evidence that exists for the mysteries, archaeology has proved central to explaining their significance...
Routledge, 2010. — 176 p. — (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World). Aphrodite explores the many myths and meanings of the Greek goddess of love, sex and beauty. One of the most widely worshipped and popular deities in Greek antiquity, Aphrodite emerges from the imaginations of the ancient Greek writers and artists as a multifaceted, powerful and charismatic figure. This volume...
Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World Pages: 194 Publisher: Routledge (This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.) Quality: good: PDF A survey of one of the most enduringly popular of ancient deities, this book introduces Athena's myth, cult and reception, while directing the reader to a detailed discussion. It assesses the various representations and...
Routledge, 2003. — 448 p. It has often been thought that participation in fertility rituals was women's most important religious activity in classical Greece. Matthew Dillon's wide-ranging study makes it clear that women engaged in numerous other rites and cults, and that their role in Greek religion was actually more important than that of men. Women invoked the gods' help in...
Routledge, 2013. — 294 p. Scholars of classical history and literature have for more than a century accepted `initiation' as a tool for understanding a variety of obscure rituals and myths, ranging from the ancient Greek wedding and adolescent haircutting rituals to initiatory motifs or structures in Greek myth, comedy and tragedy. In this books an international group of...
Oxford University Press, 2001. — 256 p. The Raft of Odysseus looks at the fascinating intersection of traditional myth with an enthnographically-viewed Homeric world. Carol Dougherty argues that the resourcefulness of Odysseus as an adventurer on perilous seas served as an example to Homer's society which also had to adjust in inventive ways to turbulent conditions. The...
Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World Pages: 177 Publisher: Routledge (This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.) Quality: good: PDF Myths and legends of this rebellious god, who defied Zeus to steal fire for mankind, thrive in art and literature from ancient Greece to the present day. Prometheus' gifts to mortals of the raw materials of culture and...
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019. — XVIII, 482 p. What did magic mean to the people of ancient Greece and Rome? How did Greeks and Romans not only imagine what magic could do, but also use it to try to influence the world around them? In Drawing Down the Moon, Radcliffe Edmonds, one of the foremost experts on magic, religion, and the occult in the ancient world,...
Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World Pages: 201 Publisher: Routledge (This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.) Quality: good: PDF An guide to the myth of Oedipus this book is the first to analyze its long and varied history from ancient times to the modern day, and presented with an authoritative survey that considers Oedipus in art and music as well as...
Oxford University Press, 2015. - 2057 p. This handbook sets out to offer both students and teachers of ancient Greek religion a comprehensive overview of the current state of the field. It aims both to present key information about the subject, and to explore the ways in which this information is gathered, and the different approaches that have shaped the subject. Overall, we...
Oxford University Press, 2015. — 730 p. — ISBN 978–0–19–964203–8. This handbook offers both students and teachers of ancient Greek religion a comprehensive overview of the current state of scholarship on ancient Greek religion from the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods. Each chapter provides not only key information about its subject but also reflection on the...
Oxford University Press, 2007. — 534 p. In this book, question tablets from the Oracle at Dodona are set side-by-side with curse tablets (katadesmoi or defixiones) from across the Ancient Greek world (for the period 6th-1st centuries BCE). It explores what these texts reveal about perceptions of and responses to the uncertain future, and the nature of risk among ordinary Greek...
Brill Academic Pub, 2004. — 449 p. — (Supplements to Novum Testamentum 111). This well-researched and inspiring collection of ten essays by leading American and European scholars challenges the tendency among scholars of Greek religion to ignore what have traditionally been called "magical" practices in ancient Greece. Disputing the preconceived notion that a clear dichotomy...
Routledge, 2007. — 257 p. Fascinating texts written on small gold tablets that were deposited in graves provide a unique source of information about what some Greeks and Romans believed regarding the fate that awaited them after death, and how they could influence it. These texts, dating from the late fifth century BCE to the second century CE, have been part of the scholarly...
Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World Pages: 179 Publisher: Routledge (This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.) Quality: good: PDF From his first attestations in Homer, to the opposition between Apollo and Dionysos in nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking, Graf examines Greek religion and myth to provide a full account of Apollo in the ancient world....
Routledge, 2006. — 147 p. — (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World). 'Medea' is a comprehensive guide to sources that paint a vivid portrait of the Greek sorceress famed in myth for the murder of her children after she is banished from her home and replaced by a new wife. Abstract: Paints a vivid portrait of the Greek sorceress Medea, famed in myth for the murder of her...
Brill Academic Pub, 2002. — 242 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 142) A collection of papers with new insights on ancient religion, read at a colloquium in honour of Professor H.S. Versnel ("Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion"). The contributions, presented by nine leading scholars in the field, cover many areas of the religious experience of the Greeks and...
Oxford University Press, 2004. — 400 p. The Strangeness of Gods combines studies of changes in modern interpretations of Greek religion with studies of changes in Athenian ritual. The combination is necessary in order to combat influential stereotypes: that Greek religion consisted of ritual without theological speculation, that ritual is inherently conservative. To re-examine...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2007. — 383 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 160). For the Greek, Dionysos was a very important god: for individuals as well as for the community as a whole. As there are only a few written sources dating from before the 5th Century BC the many images of Dionysos on Greek vases may well offer a genuine approach to the meaning given by the...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2015. — 290 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 181). Dionysos, with his following of satyrs and women, was a major theme in a big part of the figure painted pottery in 500-300 B.C. Athens. As an original testimonial of their time, the imagery on these vases convey what this god meant to his worshippers. It becomes clear that - contrary to what...
Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. — 205 p. The first English-language survey of ancient Greek divinatory methods, Ancient Greek Divination offers a broad yet detailed treatment of the earliest attempts by ancient Greeks to seek the counsel of the gods. Offers in-depth discussions of oracles, wandering diviners, do-it-yourself methods of foretelling the future, magical divinatory...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2008. — 415 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 164). A 'Near Eastern religion', along the lines of 'Greek religion' or 'Roman religion', is hard to distinguish for the Classical period, since the religious cultures of the many cities, villages and regions that constituted the Near East in the Hellenistic and Roman periods were, despite some...
Cambridge University Press. 2012. — 250 p. Who marched in religious processions and why? How were blood sacrifice and communal feasting related to identities in the ancient Greek city? With questions such as these, current scholarship aims to demonstrate the ways in which religion maps on to the socio-political structures of the Greek polis ('polis religion'). In this book Dr...
Leiden/Boston/Köln: Brill, 2002. – 226 p. – (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 149) This volume deals with the figure of Attis. The work aims to reconsider the mythical and cultic information about this character, trying to provide proof of the processes of "construction" and "reconstruction" that have contributed to the moulding of the different forms of Attis that developed...
Brill Academic Publishers, 1996. — 456 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 131). This volume brings together articles on the cult of the mother-goddess Cybele and her consort Attis, from the emergence of the religion in Anatolia through its expansion into Greece and Italy to the latest times of the Roman Empire and its farthest extent west, the Iberian Peninsula. It...
Routledge, 2007. — 305 p. — ISBN: 0-203-35698-5. Using archaeological, epigraphic, and literary sources; and incorporating current scholarly theories, this volume will serve as an excellent companion to any introduction to Greek mythology, showing a side of the Greek gods to which most students are rarely exposed. Detailed enough to be used as a quick reference tool or text,...
Routledge, 2016. — 430 p. Understanding Greek Religion is one of the first attempts to fully examine any religion from a cognitivist perspective, applying methods and findings from the cognitive science of religion to the ancient Greek world. In this book, Jennifer Larson shows that many of the fundamentals of Greek religion, such as anthropomorphic gods, divinatory procedures,...
Routledge, 2016. — 430 p. Understanding Greek Religion is one of the first attempts to fully examine any religion from a cognitivist perspective, applying methods and findings from the cognitive science of religion to the ancient Greek world. In this book, Jennifer Larson shows that many of the fundamentals of Greek religion, such as anthropomorphic gods, divinatory procedures,...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2009. — 537 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 152). This work contains two parts. Part I constitutes a guide to the corpus of Greek sacred law and its contents. A discussion of the history of the corpus and the principles governing its composition is followed by a detailed review of its contents, in which the evidence is classified according...
University of South Carolina Press, 1993. — 410 p. Comprehensive study of Minoan religion combining archaeological evidence and iconography with theories derived from the anthropology of religion, art history, structuralism, and the social sciences, this new synthesis interprets ritual as an integral part of social organization, hierarchy of power, and religious belief.
University of South Carolina Press, 1993. — 310 p. — ISBN: 9780872497443, 0872497445. Comprehensive study of Minoan religion combining archaeological evidence and iconography with theories derived from the anthropology of religion, art history, structuralism, and the social sciences, this new synthesis interprets ritual as an integral part of social organization, hierarchy of...
Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016. — 347 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World; Vol. 183). — ISBN: 978-90-04-31918-9. Jon D. Mikalson offers for classical and Hellenistic Athens a study of the terminology and contexts of praises of religious actions and artefacts and an investigation of the various authorities in religious activities. The terms of approbation apply to priests,...
University of California Press, 1998. - 331 p. - (Hellenistic culture and society 29). Until now, there has been no comprehensive study of religion in Athens from the end of the classical period to the time of Rome's domination of the city. Jon D. Mikalson provides a chronological approach to religion in Hellenistic Athens, disproving the widely held belief that Hellenistic...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2001. — 374 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 143 ). The book is a study of the Orphic Hymns, a collection of 87 Greek texts in hexameter addressed to various deities. These hymns are closely related to one another and seem to originate in Asia Minor during the first centuries of the Christian era. The great originality of this corpus is that...
New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. — 448 p. — ISBN: 978-0-19-991640-5. Animal sacrifice has been critical to the study of ancient Mediterranean religions since the nineteenth century. Recently, two theories have dominated the subject of sacrifice: the psychological and ethological approach of Walter Burkert and the sociological and cultural approach of Jean-Pierre Vernant...
Wiley-Blackwell, 2007. — 521 p. This major addition to Blackwell’s Companions to the Ancient World series covers all aspects of religion in the ancient Greek world from the archaic, through the classical and into the Hellenistic period. Written by a panel of international experts Focuses on religious life as it was experienced by Greek men and women at different times and in...
Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World Pages: 219 Publisher: Routledge (This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.) Quality: good: PDF The son of Zeus, Perseus belongs in the first rank of Greek heroes. Indeed to some he was a greater hero even than Heracles. With the help of Hermes and Athena he slew the Gorgon Medusa, conquered a mighty sea monster and won...
Clarendon Press, 1996. — 432 p. Anyone who has sampled even a few of the most commonly read Greek texts will have encountered pollution. The pollution of bloodshed is a frequent theme of tragedy: Orestes is driven mad; Oedipus brings plague upon all Thebes. In historical texts we find cities intervening in the internalaffairs of others to `drive out the pollution', or making...
Cornell University Press, 2011. — 328 p. In On Greek Religion , Robert Parker offers a provocative and wide-ranging entrée into the world of ancient Greek religion, focusing especially on the interpretive challenge of studying a religious system that in many ways remains desperately alien from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. One of the world's leading authorities...
Brill Academic Pub, 2013. — 690 p. This book provides the first comprehensive and detailed study of the deities and cults of the important Greek island-state of Aigina from the Geometric to Classical periods (800-400 BCE). It rests on a thorough first-hand reconsideration of the archaeological, epigraphic and literary evidence. The development of the local cults is...
Brill Academic Pub, 2005. — 737 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 154). — ISBN10: 9004142363; ISBN13: 9789004142367. This volume documents the development of Cretan sanctuaries and associated cults from the end of the Late Bronze Age into the Archaic Period (c.1200–600 BC). The book supplies up-to-date site catalogues and discusses recurring types of sanctuaries, the...
Oxford University Press, 2010. — 427 p. — (American Classical Studies 54). Two Greek cities which in their time were leading states in the Mediterranean world, Selinus in Sicily and Cyrene in Libya, set up inscriptions of the kind called sacred laws, but regulating worship on a larger scale than elsewhere - Selinus in the mid fifth century B.C., Cyrene in the late fourth. In...
Yale University Press, 2013. - 528 p. - (Synkrisis). Little is known about the early childhood of Jesus Christ. But in the decades after his death, stories began circulating about his origins. One collection of such tales was the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, known in antiquity as the Paidika or Childhood Deeds” of Jesus. In it, Jesus not only performs miracles while at...
London, 1925. — 626 p. "This book offers an account of the opinions held by the Greeks about the life of the human soul after death, and is thus intended as a contribution to the history of Greek religion". Part I Beliefs about the Soul and Cult of Souls in Homeric Poems Islands of the Blest Cave Deities. Subterranean Heroes The Cult of Souls The Eleusinian Mysteries Ideals of...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2001. — 186 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 139 ). This book addresses cult and religion in the city of Corinth from the 4th to 7th centuries of our era. The work incorporates and synthesizes all available evidence, literary, archaeological and other. The interaction and conflict between Christian and non-Christian activity is placed into...
Walter De Gruyter, 2011. — 754 p. Within modern frameworks of knowledge and representation, Dionysos often appears to be atypical for ancient culture, an exception within the context of ancient polytheism, or even an instance of a difference that anticipates modernism. How can recent research contribute to a more precise understanding of the diverse transformations of the...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2009 — 309 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 169). The polytheistic religious systems of ancient Greece and Rome reveal an imaginative attitude towards the construction of the divine. One of the most important instruments in this process was certainly the visualisation. Images of the gods transformed the divine world into a visually...
Leiden - Boston: Brill, 2009. — 309 p. A proper understanding of the words and and the context in which they occur is fundamental to the study of Greek religion. This volume seeks to make a significant portion of the source material available to present-day students of religions in the Graeco-Roman world. The ancient texts are accompanied by English translations. Revised...
Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World Pages: 177 Publisher: Routledge (This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.) Quality: good: PDF Dionysos is one of the most-studied ancient Greek gods for students and academics. He is popularly known as the god of wine and frenzied abandon, and has great significance for theatre - drama, in fact, originated as part of...
Leipzig: Druck und Verlag von B. G. Teubner, 1890. — 405 S. Vorrede. Begriff und Quellen der Gestikulation. Ausdruck von Gefühlen und Gemütsbewegungen. Der Beifall. Totenklage. Konventionelle Begrüßung. Symbolische Gebärden. Deisidämonie. Rechtssymbolik. Ehrerbietung. Gebärden des Gebetes. Schauspieler und Redner. Zeichensprache. Tanz und Pantomimus. Fingerrechnen. Die Gebärden...
Würzburg: Commisionsverlag der Stahelschen Verlagsanstalt, 1898. — 54 S. Dionysisches Treiben und Dichten. Verzeichnis der Abkürzungen. Der Weingott im Familien- und Fremdeskreise. Dionysisches Festleben. Anhänge: Dionysosbilder. Schematische Bilder. Glossar.
Paris: de Boccard, 1969. — x, 369 p. — (Ecole française d'Athènes, Travaux et mémoires 18). Edition of sacred laws from various Ancient Greek city-states with rich epigraphic, religious and historical commentary.
Routledge, 2012. — 302 p. — (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World). There is more material available on Herakles than any other Greek god or hero. His story has many more episodes than those of other heroes, concerning his life and death as well as his battles with myriad monsters and other opponents. In literature, he appears in our earliest Greek epic and lyric poetry, is...
Brill Academic Publishers, 1995. — 465 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 127 ). This text presents a collection, analysis and interpretation of the representations of animal sacrifice from ancient Greece. Whilst Archaic and Classical material is dealt with comprehensively, later evidence is adduced more selectively for the sake of comparison. Based on a combined study...
New York: J. W. Bouton, S. West, 1891. — 148 p. This is Thomas Taylor's brilliant inquiry into the mysteries that were central to religious life and society of ancient Greece and even Rome. The inner teachings of these Mediterranean mystery religions were lost with the ascent of Christianity, but Taylor found the skeleton key to unlock their secrets and give us insight into...
Brill Academic Publishers, 1998. — 384 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 135). This is the first systematic study of the cults of the Bosporan Kingdom, which existed in South Russia in the first centuries AD. The research is based on a variety of sources: archaeological evidence and inscriptions, largely unknown to the non-Russian readers, as well as historical and...
Brill Academic Publishers, 1996. — 465 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 127). This text presents a collection, analysis and interpretation of the representations of animal sacrifice from ancient Greece. Whilst Archaic and Classical material is dealt with comprehensively, later evidence is adduced more selectively for the sake of comparison. Based on a combined study of...
Brill Academic Pub, 2011. — 609 p. — (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 173). Inspired by a critical reconsideration of current monolithic approaches to the study of Greek religion, this book argues that ancient Greeks displayed a disquieting capacity to validate two (or more) dissonant, if not contradictory, representations of the divine world in a complementary rather than...
Berlin: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959. The last book of the scholar, wherein, In his words, 'he makes an attempt to follow the emergence, the changes and the passing from the faith into the myth and the disappearance of this belief, while the cult remains, through the centuries to the gods of the Hellenes, but only to these."
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