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For the Greeks and Romans, the world was full of gods, but this fundamental aspect of their experience poses major challenges to modern understanding. The concept of belief has been central to meeting those challenges but has itself been hotly debated, and has at times even been rejected as a supposedly Christianising anachronism. Others, meanwhile, have argued that a culture-neutral model of belief is both possible and essential, while the advent of the cognitive science of religion has offered new possibilities for understanding ancient religious worlds. The essays in this volume trace the historical development of the modern concept of belief, examine ancient debates about the nature of human knowledge of the divine, and draw on perspectives from anthropology, cognitive science and early modern history as well as classical studies to explore the nature and role of belief in Greek and Roman religion in ancient literature, society, experience and practice.
List of contents
Introduction: Questioning Belief Ralph Anderson; Part I. Terms and Concepts of Belief in the Study of Ancient Religion: 1. Belief and Praxis in Ancient and Modern Religion John Cottingham; 2. Religion, the Religions, and Propositional Beliefs Peter Harrison; 3. Towards a Psychology of Greek Religious Belief Tom Harrison; Part II. Terms and Concepts of Belief in Antiquity: 4. Belief and Practice in Xenophanes' Criticism of Traditional Religion Shaul Tor; 5. The Alliance between Faith, the Mysteries, and Philosophy in Plutarch's Moralia George van Kooten; 6. A Fragile Synthesis: Philosophy and Traditional Religion in the Post-Hellenic Period Peter Van Nuffelen; Part III. Belief and Experience in Antiquity: 7. Perception as an Alternative to Belief in Greek Religious Experience Ralph Anderson; 8. 'Omen-mindedness' in the So-Called 'Confession Inscriptions' of Asia Minor* Kim Beerden; 9. Is There an Alternative to Belief in Roman Religion? The Case of Mark Antony's Flaminate Jacob Mackey; 10. Testing the Gods: Religious Belief in Roman Imperial Epic Pramit Chaudhuri; 11. Roman Theologies in Crisis: Fluctuation and Diversity in Beliefs about Impiety* Lindsay Driediger-Murphy; Afterword: The Background of 'Belief' and the Foreground of 'Religion' Jason P. Davies. Index.
About the author
Ralph Anderson is a Lecturer in Ancient History in the School of Classics at the University of St Andrews.Pramit Chaudhuri is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry (2014), and co-founder and co-director of the Quantitative Criticism Lab, a cross-disciplinary group developing new approaches to the study of literature.
