Chapter 8 considers a radically different version of the dynamic explored in chs 6-7: the relationships between provincial governors and Christian communities across the Mediterranean world. For much of this period, these governors were outsiders with short terms of office, who relied heavily on resident office staffs and local grandees. Recent revisionist work on the Christianization of the Roman world has thus stressed the tendency of provincial appointees to prioritise those local elite interests over the demands of bishops and ascetics in the context of religious conflict. As Brent Shaw has put it, the governor could ‘give rather short shrift to a person whom they thought had no standing to intervene in the running of the state affairs over which they had authority’ (Shaw 2015, 58). In this chapter, I seek to modify this picture by suggesting that membership of the church and relationships with provincial Christian communities, institutions, and authority figures played a more significant role for governors than has been appreciated. In this sense, bishops and ascetics were, in fact, amongst the local interest groups whose collaboration these Christian appointees had to pursue.

Contemporary analytic philosophers of religion have tended to focus attention on epistemological questions about the grounds for religious belief, or on analysing the precise cognitive content of claims about God. But there is reason to suppose that the actual practice of religion depends less on intellectual inquiries of this sort and more on a lived tradition of observance, including participation in various kinds of ritual, and public and private acts of worship. This chapter, drawing on some attitudes manifest in the poetry of Horace, examines what may have been a prevalent approach to religion in the educated Roman world, involving conformity to religious praxis, combined with an ironic or sceptical attitude to the existence of supernatural forces, or the power or influence of the gods, in human affairs. Such an attitude certainly has its counterpart in our own contemporary culture, but it is argued that such a stance inevitably creates a certain psychological dissonance in the religious practitioner. Detached orthopraxy alone cannot satisfy our deepest human needs. The chapter concludes with reflections on the intimate relation between praxis and belief in matters of religion.

An assessment of the metal tools available for working wood and stonework contributes tangible evidence to overarching questions about Mycenaean construction and significantly augments previous publications on Mycenaean tools. Implement patterns raise questions about tool availability, artisan status and mobility, and the administrative oversight of stonework.

The epilogue explores how later Greeks understood the notable Mycenaean remains from the regions under study and probes why, during the post-Bronze Age, Tiryns was much celebrated while Mycenae’s reputation was deliberately suppressed.

The introduction fits the religious identities and entanglements of imperial and royal officials into recent work in critical fields of inquiry in the study of late antiquity. It sets the approaches and arguments of the book in the context of previous work on the conversion of the senatorial aristocracy, the religious identities of pagans and Christians, the development of asceticism and episcopal authority, the prevalence (or otherwise) of religious intolerance and violence, patterns of imperial churchgoing, and forms of Christian observance within the household. It also contextualises and justifies the chronology of the book and the specific definition of the ‘state’ and ‘officials’ used within it.

The introduction highlights geopolitical questions about Mycenaean society and reviews the limited evidence available from textual sources. It considers sociopolitical developments in Mycenae and the Argolid before probing the intersection of power, state-sponsored labor, and the production of stonework.

Vigorous debate about the advantages and disadvantages of using the term ‘belief’ regarding ancient states of mind and cognition has had a profound effect on the field of ancient history (and others, such as anthropology) in recent decades. This chapter considers which of these are still relevant and which are mutual misunderstandings, and which issues have, in effect, been resolved indirectly (such as injunctions to use different words for greater clarity). The opportunities offered by cognitive science of religion (and some limits) are set in a broader context of the study of religion. Behind many of these debates (and misunderstandings), it is argued, secular hegemony intrinsically seeks to ‘contain’ religion (taken pragmatically to be the assertion of the actual existence of divinities). This insoluble tension exerts an unceasing influence on our formulation of questions and answers in history. Recently, we have seen a fruitful greater sympathy for religion and ‘believers’ develop, while an appropriate secular distance from empathy is still maintained, notwithstanding the fact that empathy may contribute to an openness to greater sympathy and understanding: the tension does, and will, persist.

Mycenae’s LH IIIA2-IIIB palatial stonework was spectacular, and attention is given here to the innovative construction processes and specialized stonecutting tools that elicited awe. A fresh look at Mycenae’s final three tholoi illustrates the strategy of conveying power through stonework. The chapter also assesses the semiotics of the site’s architectural sculpture.

This chapter surveys the wide range of definitions of belief in recent scholarship and explores the potential of the cognitive science of religion for generating new approaches. It rejects the assumption that it is possible to talk about the presence or absence of ‘belief’ in Greek religion in a monolithic way, such that the Greeks either believed wholly in their gods or they did not, and challenges the related assumption that beliefs combine to form stable, internally consistent systems. It draws on a range of concepts from cognitive science to explore how contradictions between beliefs and between beliefs and experience might be managed and argues for a dynamic, contextual and plural understanding of Greek religious belief.

The implications of tool distributions and exceptional building projects in the Argolid and Boeotia are discussed. Substantial gaps remain in the story of transregional craft and political ties, but the present study offers new clues about the political makeup of at least part of the Mycenaean world.