Myth & Literature

A Reader’s Path Through Greek Religion: Building a Core Library

By Thomas Ainsley Croft, Contributing Editor - Myth & Literature · 15 November 2015

“Where do I start?” is the question we are asked most often, and it is a good one. Greek religion has no single scripture, no founder, no creed. It survives in scattered texts, inscriptions, images and the stones of sanctuaries. Reading your way in therefore means assembling a small library and learning to make its parts talk to one another. Here is the path we recommend; the full list lives on our reading schedule.

Start with a map of the whole

Begin with a good single-volume overview. Richard Buxton’s The Complete World of Greek Mythology gives you the figures and stories; Jon Mikalson’s Ancient Greek Religion gives you the religion itself - gods, worship, festivals, the relationship between city and cult. Read them side by side and you have your bearings.

Then go to the sources

Handbooks tell you what scholars think; the sources let you think for yourself. The indispensable companion here is Rice & Stambaugh’s Sources for the Study of Greek Religion, which gathers, in translation, the texts and inscriptions on which everything else rests. Keep it open beside the handbooks: every general statement you read should send you back to a primary passage.

Walk the sanctuaries with Pausanias - and Pedley

Greek religion happened in places. John Pedley’s Sanctuaries and the Sacred in the Ancient Greek World explains how sacred space worked; the second-century traveller Pausanias, in his Guide to Greece, takes you there in person, cult by cult and statue by statue. Learn to use his indices - they are a finding-aid to half the religion.

Read the plays

Finally, read the tragedies, above all Euripides. The Bacchae is the single most searching ancient meditation on what it means for a god - Dionysus - to enter a city that refuses him. Hippolytus and Ion stage the collision of mortal and divine with equal force. Here myth, literature and religion are one thing.

How to hold it together

Read cumulatively, not once. Visit a topic, then revisit it as later reading throws new light back on it.
Follow your own interests. If a sanctuary or a god grabs you - the herms, say, or Despoina at Lycosura - chase it through every book on the shelf.
Use the prompts. Our aphormai are jumping-off points into exactly this kind of cross-reading.

Build the library, learn to move between its parts, and Greek religion stops being a list of gods and becomes something you can actually understand.

Thomas Ainsley Croft - Contributing Editor - Myth & Literature

Thomas reads Greek tragedy and the travel-writer Pausanias for a living. He writes about the places where myth and religion meet in the texts, and keeps the reading lists current.