Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion

A prevalent view in the current scholarship on ancient religions holds that state religion was primarily performed and transmitted in oral forms, whereas writing came to be associated with secret, private and marginal cults, especially in the Greek world. In Roman times, religions would have become more and more bookish, starting with the Sibylline books and the Annales Maximi of the Roman priests and culminating in the canonical gospels of the Christians. It is the aim of this volume to modify this view or, at least, to challenge it. Surveying the variety of ways in which different types of texts and oral discourse were involved in ancient Greek and Roman religions, the contributions to this volume show that oral and written forms were in use for both Greek and Roman state and private religions.

André P.M.H. Lardinois (Princeton Ph.D. 1995) is Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. His main interests center on Greek lyric poetry and Greek drama.

Josine H. Blok is Professor of Ancient History and Classical Culture at Utrecht University and has published widely on the cultural, political and social history of archaic and classical Greece and nineteenth-century classical scholarship.

Marc van der Poel is Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen. He has published on various aspects of the history of rhetoric from antiquity to the Renaissance, and on Latin literature, especially in the Renaissance.

Contributors: Crystal Addey, Mark Alonge, Vanessa Berger, Josine Blok, Bé Breij, Christopher Faraone, Franco Ferrari, Michael Gagarin, Sarah Hitch, Fiona Hobden, Vincent Hunink, Akio Ito, Andromache Karanika, André Lardinois, Elizabeth Minchin, James Morrison, Maria Pavlou, Marc van der Poel, Ana Rodriguez-Mayorgas, Ruth Scodel, Niall W. Slater, Roslaind Thomas and Evelyn van 't Wout.