The Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

Description

Which dimensions of the religious experience of the ancient Greeks become tangible only if we foreground its local horizons? This book explores the manifold ways in which Greek religious beliefs and practices are encoded in and communicate with various local environments. Its individual chapters explore 'the local' in its different forms and formulations. Besides the polis perspective, they include numerous other places and locations above and below the polis-level as well as those fully or largely independent of the city-state. Overall, the local emerges as a relational concept that changes together with our understanding of the general or universal forces as they shape ancient Greek religion. The unity and diversity of ancient Greek religion becomes tangible in the manifold ways in which localizing and generalizing forces interact with each other at different times and in different places across the ancient Greek world.

HANS BECK is Professor and Chair of Greek History at Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Arts at McGill University, Montreal. He has published widely on the history and culture of ancient Greece, including Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State (2020), Federalism in Greek Antiquity (jointly edited with P. Funke, Cambridge, 2015) and A Companion to Ancient Greek Government (edited, 2013). He is the co-editor of Hermes and Hermes Einzelschriften, and of the series Antiquity in Global Context (Cambridge). Among other distinctions, Hans Beck is the recipient of the German Humboldt Foundation's Anneliese Maier Research Prize, an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute. JULIA KINDT is Professor of Ancient History in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney, and a Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council (2018-22). Her publications include Rethinking Greek Religion (Cambridge, 2012), Revisiting Delphi. Religion and Storytelling in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2016), Animals in Ancient Greek Religion (2020, edited), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion (2015, jointly edited with E. Eidinow), and Theologies of Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge, 2016, jointly edited with R. Osborne and E. Eidinow). She is an elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and member of the editorial board of the Journal of Ancient History and Antichthon, and Senior Editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religions (ORE).