Description: Which dimensions of the religious experience of the ancient Greeks become tangible only if we foreground its local horizons? This book explores the manifold ways in which Greek religious beliefs and practices are encoded in and communicate with various local environments. Its individual chapters explore 'the local' in its different forms and formulations. Besides the polis perspective, they include numerous other places and locations above and below the polis-level as well as those fully or largely independent of the city-state. Overall, the local emerges as a relational concept that changes together with our understanding of the general or universal forces as they shape ancient Greek religion. The unity and diversity of ancient Greek religion becomes tangible in the manifold ways in which localizing and generalizing forces interact with each other at different times and in different places across the ancient Greek world.
Brief description: HANS BECK is Professor and Chair of Greek History at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Arts at McGill University, Montréal. He has published widely on the history and culture of ancient Greece, including Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State (2020), Federalism in Greek Antiquity (jointly edited with P. Funke, Cambridge, 2015) and A Companion to Ancient Greek Government (edited, 2013). He is the co-editor of Hermes and Hermes Einzelschriften, and of the series Antiquity in Global Context (Cambridge). Among other distinctions, Hans Beck is the recipient of the German Humboldt Foundation's Anneliese Maier Research Prize, an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute.
Review Quotes: '... one of the strengths of this impressive volume is its emphasis on the diversity of ancient Greek religious belief, practice, and experience. The volume certainly accomplishes its stated goals, set out in its brief preface, of elevating 'the local' to an ontological domain of meaning, illustrating the various ways in which religion is embedded in environment, and teasing out complex interplay between the local and general spheres. The emergence of 'the local' as a relational concept ensures its wide-ranging utility and establishes it as a productive approach in the study of Greek religion.' Ranjani Atur, Bryn Mawr Classical Review