The long-lasting impact of Pheidias, antiquity’s master of religious art, especially his Zeus at Olympia, is considered in the context of the theme of personal religion. The chapter adopts a broad chronological perspective and explores how the great master was perceived during the centuries following his lifetime, with a focus on his chryselephantine masterpiece, which he completed in the later decades of the fifth century BCE. It considers how later generations have conceived of his personal religious life, its relation to his famed artwork, and the position his figure has come to occupy within broader cult practices and devotional experiences. Close analysis of Pausanias’ Description of Greece alongside other evidentiary materials shows that by the second century CE, Pheidias was a figure of religious significance in his own right. Greco-Roman authors ascribed to him the qualities of a visionary endowed with unparallel access to Zeus. He left his detectable trademarks in his masterpiece, and his presence was felt in communal cult practices. Centuries after his departure from Olympia, his artmaking has come to be understood as a form of devotional practice.

The book’s final chapter turns to questions of spolia and converted buildings. Its discussion reorients conventional approaches to these debated topics by exploring architectural reuse through the lens of lived experience. Focusing on evidence for original doorways blocked in later phases of a building’s occupation at a series of repurposed sites, a case is made for studying conspicuous traces of a building’s former use as a window into social and somatic modes of temporality not captured by official commemorative inscriptions or building histories.

Chapter 4 considers the conduct of business within the framework of the law and upper-class ideology in honouring debts and protecting the family name. How were contracts arranged? How did buying and selling and letting and hiring take place? What protection was there for the buyer? How did the legal process assist this? What were the rules for partnerships? Especially important to the government were tax-collecting companies. There were rules for deposits and loans, for which a stipulatio could establish interest. Banks operated with clear rules for interest, and various types of security were available for loans. One man’s business could be conducted on his behalf by others, often by his son or household slave, but in the Roman concept of agency he could be sued to a limited extent by those who had lost out in the business. In the labour market there was very limited protection for employees.

Rites typically labelled Mysteries allowed for some of the most emphatic pursuits of religious conviction in ancient Greece. This chapter explores Mystery cults from the viewpoint of personal religion. It starts from a discussion of the miniature Mystery cult of Lykosoura, which, according to Pausanias, speaks vividly to the dissemination of mysteria in Greece across time and space. Exploring the fascination with the ritual script, the author explains how this particular genre of cult practice invited various affordances. He unravels the embodied excitement of participating in Mysteries: the discussion of evidence from Eleusis allows for an ideal-type recreation of the experience made by initiands into the rites. The third section extends this inquiry, exploring the religious goals participants sought to realize. The Mysteries drew their religious meaning both from sensual cognition and the inaptitude of knowing, rather than a set theology. In conclusion, three areas in which the category of personal religion helps to unlock new perspectives on the Mysteries emerge: individual embodiment, group experience, and the omnipresent force of ritual that lent religious depth to both.

This chapter asks what the main currents in classical Greek philosophy understand by ‘personal religion’. How do they conceive of the beliefs and uplifting they want religious people to display? Do we have the necessary conceptual framework to understand the phenomenon of ‘personal religion’. In the study of ancient Greek religion, philosophers are often revisited to find the clearest analysis of religious concepts, though mainly in terms of the individual integrating norms of civic religion. Yet in many places the philosophers refer to those concepts and virtues in contexts outside civic religion, thus opening a broader understanding of personal religion. In connection with this the chapter also investigates what philosophers mean if they refer to their basic principles as ‘divine’. Do they introduce new divinities? Or are they introducing new ways of dealing with traditional gods? This leads to asking whether philosophical life replaces traditional religion. Very often, this is just assumed to be the case, entailing the corollary point that metaphysics comes to replace religion. Yet a case can be made that philosophers themselves avoided this merging of metaphysics and religion.

Although painters of pottery were heavily influenced by what other painters had painted and by the wishes of their customers, the ways in which they represent scenes reflect their own way of seeing the world, and the way in which they represent scenes involving the gods potentially allows us to say something about their personal religion. This chapter looks at the large pots painted in Apulia by the so-called Underworld Painter and argues that the way in which the Underworld Painter lays out scenes that involve gods’ interventions in the world (as in scenes of Gigantomachy, Melanippe, Dirke, Medea and of the Underworld) and the juxtaposition of those scenes with scenes of men and women offering libations or carrying objects associated with religious cult, allow us to say something about the religious assumptions that he is bringing with him, and in particular about the way in which he sees the gods of myth and the gods of cult as part of the same world.

Chapter 2 considers the state’s legal power in acquiring land and materials for construction and maintenance of public amenities, the management of the built environment in Rome and the activities of its inhabitants, the nature of urban life, and the provision and protection of amenities, such as corn, the water supply, baths, and games. The emperor assumed responsibility for the welfare of his people; this was his duty but was also politically important. The emperor provided for security and control in the city, sponsoring firemen (vigiles), urban cohorts, and praetorian guard under the command of officials with defined legal powers: prefects of the city, of the praetorians, and of the vigiles. Outside Rome: the management and status of communities in Italy, the organization of land and people, facilities including roads and bridges, important institutions in society, such as collegia and alimenta, and the legal jurisdiction of the praetorian prefect within Italy.

Given that we know little about deviations from ritual norms in most cities of Greece, I limit myself to Athens and concentrate on the later fifth century so that we can acquire an idea of the possibilities but also of the religious Handlungsspielraum within a given chronotope. I begin with the individual responsible for the cave of Vari who was clearly an anomaly in terms of the intensity of his religious worship. I then proceed with some private cults and practices that were frowned upon, continue with individuals who were seen, rightly or wrongly, as actually transgressing civic norms, and end with some final considerations, in which I return to the problem of the relationship between personal religion and polis religion. I conclude that it seems that personal religion was still very much part of polis religion at large.