The craft and political relationships between Mycenae and Tiryns in the mid 13th century, as reflected in the redesign, masonry, and building materials of Tiryns’ LH IIIB upper citadel, is the primary focus of this chapter. It also briefly considers the stoneworking influence of Mycenae and Tiryns on other Argolid sites.

This chapter argues that ‘belief’ is neither the only, nor the most appropriate, concept for understanding the mental and experiential dimensions of Greek religion. It argues that the dichotomy between ritualistic and belief-centred conceptions of religion that has long shaped the debate over Greek religion reflects an underlying dualism of mind and body. Under the influence of this dualism, the domain of religion has been divided into categories of ritual, which belongs to the body, and belief, which belongs to the mind. This chapter draws on recent work in anthropology that seeks to collapse this mind–body dualism to propose a concept of skilled perception as the basis of an alternative approach to religion in the lived experience of the Greeks. This approach is developed through a series of studies of normative and divergent acts of religious perceiving, via a close reading of Theophrastus’ ‘Superstitious Man’ (Characters 16) and a selection of episodes of divination and omen-perception in Herodotus and Xenophon. These studies suggest that we might view Greek religion less as a body of beliefs and rituals and more as a skill for living in a dynamic world.

Chapter 4 surveys the ways in which imperial officials were represented in various forms of late ancient Christian literature. In so doing, it acts as an introduction to Part II, which explores how contemporaries conceived of distinctly Christian forms of political service in this period. There is not a straightforward ‘archive’ of sources for this problem. Texts on government by current or former administrators do not tend to discuss the implications of their religious identities. As a result, it is rare that we can reconstruct an officeholder’s own perspective. At the same time—and in sharp contrast to other Christian authority figures (emperors, bishops, ascetics)—there is no single genre of Christian literature which focuses consistently on the careers of imperial or royal officials. This chapter thus considers how the purposes, audiences and generic expectations of letters, sermons, church histories, and saints’ lives shaped (and sometimes demanded) positive portrayals of officials, their religious identities, and their interactions with Christian communities and authority figures.

This chapter considers the role of memory and archaizing traits at Mycenae during the LH IIIA2-IIIB period. Particular attention is paid to poros ashlar masonry, the monumentalization of Grave Circle A, and a visual tie between the Lion Gate relief and the carved shaft grave stelae.

This chapter sets out a taxonomy of late ancient approaches to Christian political service. Historians of the Christianization of the Roman world have tended to take at face value the (oft-repeated) contemporary assertion that a traditional public career was irreconcilable with Christian piety and the true form of service: militia Christi. Yet as ch. 4 shows, this was just one of many ways in which late ancient observers thought through the compatibility (or otherwise) of officeholding and Christian commitment. Drawing inspiration from recent work which has read between the lines of ascetic texts to reconstruct the character of a more moderate ‘respectable’ Christianity, this chapter delineates the ways in which Christian officials could reconcile their careers and religious identities. Through this holistic account, I argue that there were numerous ways for individual officeholders to be presented, perceived—and indeed, to understand themselves—as virtuous political actors, according both to traditional Roman political assumptions, and to the more distinctly Christian norms which appropriated, problematised, and reframed them in late antiquity.

This chapter treats a selection of divine responses to impiety recorded in historiography, oratory, and letters from the late Republic. Considering influential claims for the stability of certain theological tenets regarding divine justice, the chapter examines the question of how and when gods punish individuals rather than communities. In this period, formulaic calls for the gods to punish the guilty individual rather than the state became weaponized. Although such utterances conformed superficially to normative theology, they undermined the traditional perception of the gods as concerned primarily with the welfare of the community as a whole, and as reacting to impiety in a consistent manner. The period of the late Republic thus sees the emergence of perceptions of the gods as being less predictable, stable, or moral than in the traditional scholarly view.

The notion of belief is often seen as central to Christianity, whilst ancient religions have been seen as ritualistic in nature. This chapter casts doubt on that dichotomy, by analysing how Roman writing on religion, as well as early Christian texts (exemplified in Augustine) rely on a shared set of assumptions about what religion was. This went back to philosophical expectations about the coherence between religious practice and theology, which Christianity, at least as argued by Augustine, achieved better than Greco-Roman religions. In their own perception, Christians and pagans parted ways not on matters of the conceptualisation of the divine but on that of which deity one had to worship.

This conclusion brings together the main arguments of the book regarding Christian expectations of officials in the fifth and sixth centuries. It draws these together to suggest a holistic picture of late and post-Roman service aristocracies whose practices and self-representation were shaped, in part, by the demands of Christian commitment. It recapitulates the two central strands of argument in the book. Some officials sought to present—and likely understood—their role in governance as linked to their exceptional fulfilment of such requirements on members of the church: church attendance and patronage, adherence to orthodoxy, morality, and even asceticism. At the same time, the changing culture of late ancient political institutions meant that (almost) all those who served imperial and post-imperial regimes were subject to distinctly Christian expectations: from rulers, superiors, colleagues, churchmen, holy people, and—last but not least—their subjects. It concludes by suggesting that the survey conducted here should not be the end of this line of inquiry. The implication of this book is that the peculiar character of the Christianity envisaged and practiced within late ancient states should be the subject of further study.

This chapter approaches the archaic philosopher-poet Xenophanes of Colophon both as a distinctive religious agent and as an instructive interpreter of traditional religious attitudes and practices. Xenophanes develops a category of belief (dokos) and employs it not only to express the status of his own theological and cosmological views but also to conceptualise traditional, panhellenic religious attitudes as a cohesive system of beliefs. This system of beliefs comprises the interrelated and mutually reinforcing views that the gods are fundamentally human-like in biological, physical, cognitive, behavioural, moral, and political respects. The chapter explores Xenophanes’ critique of the different aspects of this system of beliefs, as well as the sources and grounds that underpin it. Finally, the chapter considers how Xenophanes closely relates expectations for veracity, propriety, and socio-political benefit in a way that suggests a requirement for harmony between religious belief and practice and, therefore, a conception of religious practice as theologically loaded. In the final analysis, Xenophanes teaches the modern student of Greek religion that a Greek thinker of the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE had the conceptual and expressive resources to articulate a conception of traditional, panhellenic religious attitudes as, at bottom, a system of beliefs.

This chapter examines a selection of ‘confession inscriptions’ from Asia Minor. These inscriptions attest to a religious hermeneutic or diagnostic practice through which individuals sought to discover which past transgression might have been the cause of divine punishment in the form of a present illness. Even a small childhood incident could set in motion a train of events leading to illness and even death. In retrospect, the initial event needed to be pinpointed: only then could one take part in the ‘juridical procedure’ in which one could atone for one’s transgression and be forgiven by the god(s). The conception of illness in terms of a divinatory sign attests to individuals’ ‘omen-mindedness’, a term denoting a perpetual state of receptiveness to possible supernatural signs. Omen-mindedness implies a set of beliefs in and about the gods. These inscriptions preserve individual accounts of a person’s intimate relationship with the divine – the belief that the gods punished when angered and were forgiving when an individual made amends. The seriously ill interacted with their gods to find a cure; those who were successful recorded the process and thus reveal the character and depth of their belief and the important part of it that was omen-mindedness.

Chapter 1 considers the evolving significance of a putative ideal of religious uniformity for the makeup of political institutions in late antiquity. It suggests that we have the chronology of the Christianisation of late ancient bureaucracies back to front. It was only when those elites became predominantly Christian that religious uniformity within the state became a feasible goal for individual regimes. In that sense, for the Christianisation of the Roman state, the conversion of the Roman aristocracy only represents the beginning of the story. This chapter thus pursues the question of religious uniformity further into late antiquity, by considering the developing understanding of what was required to ensure an appropriately (orthodox) Christian state in the fifth and sixth centuries. It argues that requirements for (orthodox) Christian administrators were not simply an axiomatic assumption of late (and post-)Roman regimes, but a product of shifts in institutional norms and wider cultural assumptions across the fourth to sixth centuries.