Approaching Greek Religion

It is hard to get into the mind-set of the Ancient Greeks. Unlike the minority of people in today’s western civilisation that devote themselves to their religion, the ancient Greeks constantly had religion in the back of their minds. Always wondering if they were living a pious life or not. Unlike the modern Christian religions that the majority of people claim to follow in our western society, the Ancient Greeks did not have any evidence of scriptural creed. This forced them to judge their own fortune on how well or unwell they were worshipping their gods, resulting in religion becoming their lives. The main aspects of Greek religion are foreign to our understanding of religion, this is summarized by L. B. Zaidman and P.S. Pantel in their book ‘Religion in the Ancient Greek City’ (1992: p3) when they say that ‘Greek society was fundamentally different from our own, and the concepts that we employ to describe contemporary religious phenomena are necessarily ill adapted to the analysis of what the Greeks regarded as a divine sphere’. Therefore in order to begin to understand the deeper meanings of terms like sacred, purity, pollution, piety and impiety we have to set aside our preconceptions of contemporary religious belief.