As author and historical personality Xenophon is a fascinating case study for personal religion. He never wrote any programmatic treatises on Greek religion yet religion is omnipresent in his work. This chapter focuses on his Anabasis. The story of the Ten Thousand is one of the few autobiographical texts to survive from Classical Greece. Accordingly, it promises exceptional insights into personal religion. In this text, we encounter Xenophon in three roles. First of all, he is the author, who writes in the third person and pre-structures a field of religious assumptions and alleged self-evident facts. Second, he is the authoritative anonymous narrator who comments on the religious elements of the plot. Third, he stages himself as the protagonist ‘Xenophon’, whose individual religious beliefs and actions during the March of the Ten Thousand are described, commented on, and contextualised in detail. The extent to which these religious self-attributions can be regarded as historical facts is difficult to determine. In any case, the Anabasisis a testimony to the religious options that the author believes are available to the individual and from which individuals can make their choice.

The personal rather than the social or civic side of sacrifice appears throughout the evidence for this important rite. For all their many biases, Greek sources do not share any general bias in favor of personal as opposed to communal sacrifice; nor do they not share a bias in favor of animal as opposed to vegetal sacrifice, as ample epigraphic, unproblematic evidence demonstrates. This chapter also notices problematic examples found in Homer, Old and New Comedy, and tragedy, and ends with a contrast between Greek and Hebrew evidence for personal sacrifice, the Hebrew evidence being the place of origin for this scholarly subject.

Ancient audiences ascribed personal religious views to individual playwrights – a fact that confirms ‘personal religion’ as a meaningful category in the study of ancient Greek society in general and the theatre in particular. Aeschylus was especially devoted to Demeter; Sophocles was exceptionally pious; Euripides was hell-bent to show that there were no gods. The oeuvres of these playwrights inspired such inferences, to be sure, but other factors mattered too. Comedies staged the tragic poets as characters and ascribed various religious views to them. Face-to-face encounters with the playwrights gave rise to anecdotes and recollections, which no doubt circulated orally but were also occasionally written down. All this meant that the playwrights could build on their public personae and assume that audiences would recognize characteristic concerns in their plays. We uncover a dynamic set of interactions in which the poet shaped his plays but was also shaped by how audiences received them. We show that we should not construct an opposition between personal and polis religion: The religious views ascribed to the tragedians were personal and communally owned.

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.

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.

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.

Ch. 1 The secular “immanent frame,” of Western cultures requires a corresponding “transcendent frame” equipped with a “soft” Metaphysics, so that moral arguments and the religious life can be supported.