About the Book

The Greek gods are still very much present in modern consciousness. Although Apollo and Dionysos, Artemis and Aphrodite, Zeus and Hermes are household names, it is much less clear what these divinities meant and stood for in ancient Greece. In fact, they have been very much neglected in modern scholarship. This book brings together a team of international scholars with the aim of remedying this situation and generating new approaches to the nature and development of the Greek gods in the period from Homer until Late Antiquity. The book looks at individual gods, but also asks to what extent cult, myth and literary genre determine the nature of a divinity. How do the Greek gods function in a polytheistic pantheon and what is their connection to the heroes? What is the influence of philosophy? What does archaeology tell us about the gods? In what way do the gods in Late Antiquity differ from those in classical Greece? This book presents a synchronic and diachronic view of the gods as they functioned in Greek culture until the triumph of Christianity.

Table of Contents:
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.