Epiphanies and Dreams in Greek Polytheism : Textual Genres and Reality from Homer to Heliodorus

by: Lipka, M.

While modern students of Greek religion are alert to the occasion-boundedness of epiphanies and divinatory dreams in Greek polytheism, they are curiously indifferent to the generic parameters of the relevant textual representations on which they build their argument. Instead, generic questions are normally left to the literary critic, who in turn is less interested in religion. To evaluate the relation of epiphanies and divinatory dreams to Greek polytheism, the book investigates relevant representations through all major textual genres in pagan antiquity. The evidence of the investigated genres suggests that the ?epiphany-mindedness? of the Greeks, postulated by most modern critics, is largely an academic chimaera, a late-comer of Christianizing 19th-century-scholarship. It is primarily founded on a misinterpretation of Homer?s notorious anthropomorphism (in the Iliad and Odyssey but also in the Homeric Hymns). This anthropomorphism, which is keenly absorbed by Greek drama and figural art, has very little to do with the religious lifeworld experience of the ancient Greeks, as it appears in other genres. By contrast, throughout all textual genres investigated here, divinatory dreams are represented as an ordinary and real part of the ancient Greeks' lifeworld experience.

Frontmatter
Foreword and Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
Epic
Narrative Hymns
Didactic Poetry
Sappho?s Lyric
Drama
Historiography
Historical Biography
Periegesis
Autobiography
Epigraphic Genres
Erotic Novel
Medical and Philosophical Treatises on Dreams
Neoplatonic Treatises
Magical Recipes
Conclusions
Bibliography
General Index
Index of Ancient Sources
 

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