This chapter considers how Plutarch, a Platonic philosopher and priest of Apollo, used the language of pistis (‘faith’) and pisteuein (‘to believe’). It rejects the view that Plutarch was the first to introduce a ‘fideistic’, proto-Christian concept of religious faith as opposed to reason, or that his faith was only a way to inscribe himself into ‘tradition’. Crucial for our understanding of Plutarch’s pistis is his initiation into the Dionysiac mysteries, which prevented him from ‘believing’ the Epicureans’ denial of immortality, as he deemed that the Platonists’ view of the immortality of the soul ‘is harder to disbelieve than to believe’. The chapter emphasises the convergence between Plutarch’s experience of the mysteries and his Platonic philosophy. Plutarch’s notion of faith is not fideistic and anti-philosophical but belongs to the domain of philosophy: unfounded faith must be criticised when it misrepresents the gods and strengthened when it aligns with sound philosophical doctrines. Not only can philosophical doctrines confirm expressions of pistis, but particular philosophical views are also the object of faith and are, conversely, reinforced by initiation into the mysteries. Throughout the chapter, it is intimated that Plutarch’s concept of pistis is not fundamentally different from that of Paul.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, Greek and Roman religion was increasingly characterised as ritualistic and collective, with little role for belief, while belief itself was increasingly associated with Christianity. By the 1990s, the dominant view in classical studies aligned closely with functionalist traditions in the wider study of religion, linking Greek and Roman religion with social cohesion and identity, and rejecting belief as an irrelevance. Since then, fresh arguments have emerged, some drawing on the cognitive science of religion, which reject the association of belief with Christianity and argue that a culturally neutral, purely propositional sense of believing is both possible and necessary. However, work in anthropology and early modern history, particularly on the emergence of ‘propositional religion’ during the Reformation, suggests that the concept of belief continues to carry complex cultural baggage. Despite recent developments, the debate over how best to represent the religious experience of the Greeks and Romans remains open.

Chapter 2 considers how requirements for Christian officials intersected with ongoing debates and disputes over the definition of orthodoxy in East and West. Eastern emperors and post-imperial kings felt the need to establish forms of consensus which might unite potentially opposing churches and church factions amidst new Christological disputes (in the East) and renewed Trinitarian controversies (in the West). This chapter considers how that pursuit of accommodation affected the practical implementation of ideals of a religiously uniform state. What Eastern emperors seem to have sought (and officials provided) was not personal commitment to a particular Christological orthodoxy, but rather, public support of and administrative co-operation with the current imperial line on its definition. Post-imperial kings adopted similar strategies. While the Hasding dynasty eagerly (and self-consciously) deployed the precedents of Theodosian legislation on religious uniformity within the state, these provisions were quietly shelved elsewhere in the West. This tacit acceptance of Christian diversity within the state maps onto the wider attempts of Burgundian and Ostrogothic regimes and their elite subjects to skirt the implications of doctrinal difference as part of wider strategies of accommodation.

This chapter explores stoneworking practices characteristic of the LH IIIB Argolid that are evident also in elite Boeotian stonework. Particular attention is given to the Treasury of Minyas at Orchomenos and the Melathron complex at Gla, as these structures exhibit robust craft ties to Mycenae and Tiryns.

Over the past two decades, historians of ideas have posed searching questions about the relevance of some of the standard categories used in the investigation of past systems of thought and practice. The categories ‘science’, ‘philosophy’, and ‘religion’, in particular, have been subjected to intense scrutiny, and it is now often claimed that in antiquity and the Middle Ages there were no enterprises that can easily be mapped onto these modern categories. This chapter traces the origins of the modern conception of religion – understood as a generic entity characterised by sets of beliefs and practices – with some reference to the parallel emergence of modern notions of philosophy and science. It also offers some preliminary suggestions about how this might be relevant to the study of religion in antiquity.

This chapter examines the discourse of religious belief in Latin epic of the first century CE. The first section advances a methodological case for the value of high-register poetry as evidence for Roman thinking about religious belief. Building on the model of Charles King, the argument highlights the implications of the literary evidence for key theoretical debates about belief. The second section consists of a series of case studies demonstrating Roman imperial epic’s interest in the role of empiricism in shaping beliefs about the divine. Human testing of the gods features especially prominently in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Statius’ Thebaid: how to recognise a deity, whether a mortal can perform the same acts as a god, what qualities distinguish the human from the divine. Using Ovid’s Lycaon and Niobe and Statius’ Capaneus as paradigms of a broader phenomenon, the chapter shows how Latin epic develops both a vocabulary and behavioural code of theological scrutiny, which subjects divinity to rigorous examination by mortals as a method of grounding belief. The motivations for this poetic line of inquiry can be traced not only to philosophical discourse but also to contemporary practices of emperor cult and deification.

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.