Greco-Roman Religions: Introduction

Mikalson’s chapter highlights the different ways that Greek religion affected the government, culture, artistry, and way of life of Classical Greece. There is an emphasis that events that take place during a religious festival, whether or not they are part of the ritual, are religious in base. Many commonalities that religion has with some of the subtopics rely on the fact the Greeks believe that if you invoke a god’s name in an oath then that oath must be fulfilled; otherwise the god’s wrath would come down. The courts required oaths of innocence and oaths of truths from the jurors, if found lying then the guilty party would be expelled from the city or killed to rid the city of the pollution. The telling of tragedies and comedies were performed at festivals honoring Dionysus, it was not until later that those two genres were anything but religious in nature. There is also an emphasis on how little the gods seem to care about anything relate to politics, court trials and the people’s life after death. If a juror took a bribe then the gods would do nothing about it because it was not the god that had been offended, a similar reaction to the gods’ lack of attention when someone died. They are only willing to interfere in people’s lives, not their afterlife. There was a definite and undisputable influence that the gods and the people’s religion held over the everyday lives of the Grecians though there are parts of the people’s lives that existed outside of religion, their secular art for example. Mikalson’s presentation of Greek religion intersects with our impression in class of Greek religion in that both parties acknowledged that there was a god for certain aspects of daily life, that the gods were generally characterized by immorality and that the Greeks absorbed gods into their fold instead of taking over the religions of conquered peoples. There are many points of agreement between the class list and the chapter, there could be some fine tuning on the importance of the festivals and the specific aspects that correlate to each god.