Ancient Greek Personal Religion

This paper focuses on the significance of ‘silence’ as a sign of personal contact with god(s) in late antiquity and on its connection with personal and public religious spheres. Effectively, religion was not only based on oral prayers (Pulleyn), but also on silence. Normally requested before a solemn act, dialogue or divine epiphany mirroring a literary topos (e.g. Mesom. H. II 1-6), silence covered also a ritual function echoing mystery code (OC 132 des Places) or becoming a gnostic entity (CH 13.2). Yet, when and why did silence play such an important role?

Xenophon’s Anabasis provides a rare opportunity for the historian of Greek personal religion. It offers the chance to study in some depth the religious activities of a complex individual over a protracted period (see Parker (2004)) or, rather, the ways in which he chose to present those activities to the world.

Ancient Greek divination (manteia) is a topic that has recently been generating some scholarly interest (Stoneman, Johnston, Flower). Traditionally, many studies of Greek prophecy focused on polis-centred divination, the needs of the city as a community being met by state embassies being sent to oracular centres (Delphi, Klaros, Didyma), or officials sleeping in dream sanctuaries (Lindos, Lebadeia, Oropos).

The present paper intends to analyze the religious account contained in col. VI of the Derveni Papyrus in order to shed new light on the peculiar beliefs related to sacrifices described by the author.

I aim to complicate the renewed work and interest in “personal” or “private religion” by emphasizing the neglected role of “domestic religion”, as a tertium quid that is either ignored entirely, or assumed without discussion to be part of “private” cult in contrast to “public”.