Description:
Examining the means through which the Athenians established and marketed cults, this handsomely illustrated book is the first to illuminate the full range of motives--political and economic, as well as spiritual--that prompted them to introduce new gods.
Brief description: Robert Garland is Director of the Division of the Humanities and Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor of the Classics at Colgate University.
Review Quotes:
In this book Robert Garland gives us a set of well-researched studies on a subject of importance for ancient Greece and Western civilization. Classical Greece presents a multitude of modestly scaled, sovereign communities, connected by common culture and with religion a salient feature. Each polis possessed cults of pan-Hellenic, Olympian divinities and cults of heroes. The pattern of cults in a given polis was the result of that city's individual history, with all the variety and quirkiness characteristic of historical evolution. Garland describes how one polis, Athens, acquired its constellation of cults.
-- "American Historical Review"