This piece offers a survey of the history of scholarship on Greek religion in Germany, Britain and France from the foundation of its study as a modern academic discipline in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries to the twenty first century. From nineteenth-century romanticism and historicism, Indo-European Comparative Mythology and anthropology to structuralism and polis-religion, we look at different interpretive traditions in the history of the field and their impact. In addition, we discuss how specific issues have been approached in the history of the discipline including the question of Greek monotheism, the role of belief in Greek religion, the relation between myth and ritual, the questions of origins and foreign influences, periodization, and others, and link them to current debates. Particular attention is given to how such factors as the Christian background of nineteenth century scholars, gender, the idealization of the Greeks and Orientalising attitudes affected past accounts of Greek religion and how subsequent generations of scholars have been responding to these aspects of the work of their predecessors.

Julia Kindt, Rethinking Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xiii + 235. ISBN 978-0-521-12773-8 (paperback). Julia Kindt's point of departure is the study of Greek religion as an interpretive rather than just a descriptive practice. Recognizing the importance of the focus of the past decades on the institutional and official aspects of Greek religion, Kindt follows those who since the 1990s have critically asked what the concept of polis religion omits and does not see. Thus, her aim is to explore Greek religion " beyond the polis " , focusing on aspects below the polis level concerning belief and personal experience, and above the polis level, concerning ethnic identity. Common for these aspects is that they were for a long time considered impossible to discuss on a scientifically sound level. Chapter 1 looks at the model of polis religion, developed in the vein of Durkheim's 1 concept of religion as linked to the collective and social. One advantage of the model is that it is historical and made it possible for the study of Greek religion to break out of the structuralist, a-historical perspective. Whereas the model has helped highlighting many aspects of Greek religion that had previously been hidden, it is now time to look at those aspects left out or overseen by it. These are both personal and private aspects, such as the consultation of oracles, and ethnic aspects, such as religious identity on a larger scale than the level of the polis. Whereas polis religion is indeed to be seen as crucial for Greek religion, it makes up only part of a whole. Yet, the solution is not to set a division between polis religion on the one hand and " the rest " on the other hand; instead, Kindt sees progress in those studies that focus on the relationship between the city and the " unauthorized " or local religious beliefs and practices (p.24). The model of polis religion has the advantage of providing a structure to the study of Greek religion which as such lacks structure in the form of, e.g., creed. Yet, the danger for this model, as for any model, is that deviants from the model may be seen as exceptions or deviations from a more or less homogeneous picture, rather than extensions of the model (p.35). Chapter 2 deals with the " religious gaze " which is discussed on the basis of the variety of Greek cult statues and divine representations, as they come in iconic and an-iconic types, from precious and elaborate chryselephantine statues to crude xoana made of wood or metal. The concrete source material is the story of Parmeniscus who learns to laugh again, as his expectations of seeing the statue of Leto in an anthropomorphic form are disappointed because her statue at Delos was in fact a primitive xoana. The theoretical material making up the basis for the discussion is on the one hand Elsner's 2 definition of the religious gaze as not being concerned with aesthetics but oriented towards the ritual function of material artefacts, such as cult statues (p.40). On the other hand it is Guthrie's 3 cognitive theory of religion according to which humans (and primates) have a natural inclination for making sense of unknown things, sounds, and phenomena. Elsner points to the important

This is the introduction to the first modern study of the gods of the ancient Greeks in antiquity. The contents of the book are: List of illustrations; Notes on Contributors; Abbreviations; Preface; Introduction: The Greek Gods in the Twentieth Century, Jan N. Bremmer; 1. What is a Greek God?, Albert Henrichs; Systematic Aspects: 2. Canonizing the Pantheon: the Dodekatheon in Greek Religion and its Origins, Ian Rutherford; 3. Gods in Greek Inscriptions: Some Methodological Questions, Fritz Graf; 4. Metamorphoses of Gods into Animals and Humans, Richard Buxton; 5. Sacrificing to the Gods: Ancient Evidence and Modern Interpretations, Stella Georgoudi; 6. Getting in Contact: Concepts of Human/Divine Encounter in Classical Greek Art, Anja Klöckner; 7. New Statues for Old Gods, Kenneth Lapatin; Individual Divinities and Heroes: 8. Zeus at Olympia, Judith M. Barringer; 9. Zeus in Aeschylus: the Factor of Monetisation, Richard Seaford; 10. Hephaistos Sweats or How to Construct an Ambivalent God, Jan N. Bremmer; 11. Transforming Artemis - From the Goddess of the Outdoors to City-Goddess, Ivana Petrovic; 12. Herakles between Gods and Heroes, Emma Stafford; 13. Identities of Gods and Heroes: Athenian Garden Sanctuaries and Gendered Rites of Passage, Claude Calame; Diachronic Aspects: 14. Early Greek Theology: God as Nature and Natural Gods, Simon Trépanier; 15. Gods in Early Greek Historiography, Robert L. Fowler; 16. Gods in Apulia, Tom H. Carpenter; 17. Lucian's Gods: Lucian's Understanding of the Divine, Matthew W. Dickie; 18. The Gods in the Greek Novel, Ken Dowden; 19. Reading Pausanias: Cults of the Gods and Representation of the Divine, Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge; 20. Kronos and the Titans as Powerful Ancestors: A Case Study of the Greek Gods in Later Magical Spells, Christopher A. Faraone; 21. Homo fictor deorum est: Envisioning the Divine in Late Antique Divinatory Spells, Sarah Iles Johnston; 22. The Gods in Later Orphism, Alberto Bernabé; 23. Christian Apologists and Greek Gods, Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta; 24. The Materiality of God's Image: Olympian Zeus and Ancient Christology, Christoph Auffarth; Historiography: 25. The Greek Gods in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century German and British Scholarship, Michael Konaris; Epilogue, Andrew Erskine; Index of names, subjects and important passages.

From the publisher: In this wide-ranging work on Greek religion and mythology, Jan N. Bremmer brings together his stimulating and innovative articles, which have all been updated and revised where necessary. In three thematic sections, he analyses central aspects of Greek religion, beginning with the gods and heroes and paying special attention to the unity of the divine nature and the emergence of the category 'hero'. The second section begins with a discussion of the nature of polis religion, continues with various facets, such as seers, secrecy and the soul, and concludes with the influence of the Ancient Near East. The third section studies human sacrifice and offers the most recent analysis of the ideal animal sacrifice, combining literature, epigraphy, iconography, and zooarchaeology. Regarding human sacrifice, it concentrates on the famous cases of Iphigeneia and the werewolves of Mount Lykaion. The fourth and final section investigates key elements of Greek mythology, such as the definition of myth and its relationship to ritual, and ends with a brief history of the study of Greek mythology. The multi-disciplinary approach and rich footnotes make this work a must for anybody interested in Greek religion and mythology.