GR - Scholarship

• John Gould - Greek religion is an open not a closed system
• Louise Zaidman - polytheism as a system may thus be thought as resembling a nest of Russian dolls
• Jon Mikalson - honour rather than love...like a subject owes his king
• Robert Parker - religion was not a matter of innerness or intense private communication with the god
• Robert Parker - piety was literally a matter of respect, not love
• Mary Emerson - the assembling of Greeks from every level of society and from all over the Greek world offered an important opportunity for social display
• Louise Zaidman - religion did more than just put a divine gloss on civic life. It impregnates each and every civic activity
• Simon Price - practice not belief is key
• Julia Kindt - all Greek religion is personal religion is polis religion
• Jon Bremmer - Greek religion was embedded; it was public and communal rather than private and individual
• Simon Price - the connection of religion and politics was so close that to attack one was automatically to undermine the other
• Waterfield - piety was conformity
• Jon Mikalson - hero cults are the intermediary figures between gods and humans
• Louise Zaidman - hero cults are not mere intermediaries between the human and divine worlds but rather completely independent divinities in their own right
• Robert Parker - gods had to be shared with the world, but a village could have exclusive rights in a hero
• Edward Gibbon - the emphasis of the Eleusinian rites was on individual participation and salvation
• Jon Mikalson - the parthenon was more a building for storage than for worship
• Mary Emerson - just to be at Delphi feels like a spiritual experience where the mind grows sharper
• Simon Price - Delphi was regarded as a source of authority but was not consulted to lead
• Moses Finley - there was no special training, no sense of a vocation. Greek priests, in sum, were not holy men
• Gibbon - 'it was truly Panathenaic. the festival gave Athenians a powerful sense of the magnificence and power of their city
• Jon Mikalson - a greek sacrifice would unify the community and reassert its sense of solidarity
• Robert Parker - the real psychological significance of do ut des was not the hope of bribery, but the fact it allowed the worshipper to feel that he had established an ordered, continuing, two-sided relation with the god
• Jon Mikalson - votive offerings and dedications are tangible evidence of a deity's existence, power and range of that power
• Waterfield - religion was largely ritualistic
• James Renshaw - Xenophanes was no atheist. He just believed that the traditional view of gods was misplaced and short sighted
• Juraj Franek - presocratic tradition broke the spell of epic poetry
• Julia Annas - the charges of Socrates are strikingly vague and prejudicial, and it has always been suspected that the real agenda was political