Greek Religion in the Iliad

In working on course content and lecture material for my upcoming graduate seminar "Worship in the New Testament," I have been focusing on the cultural matrix of early Christian worship practices. After cataloguing important aspects of Greek and Roman religious practices (with due acknowledgment of the problems inherent in the differences between contemporary meanings of the term "religion" as opposed to ancient conceptions), I have been looking for primary texts that illustrate the phenomena I am discussing.

At the same time (but for unrelated reasons) I have begun reading the Iliad. Reading it with eyes and ears attuned to the people, practices, prayers, and perspectives of Greek religion, I was quite pleased to find displayed before my eyes a fine sampling of the staples of Greek and (later) Roman religion. Within just the first three hundred lines of the Iliad, are references to prayers, sacrifices, vows, and offerings to the gods. We meet a priest (Chryses) as well as an augur (Calchas), with references to the flights of birds, knowledge of the past, present, future, and other tools of divination. In addition, there is the narration of the gods answering prayers, the belief that honoring the will of the gods may lead to their responding favorably to human wishes, the recognition that Zeus grants authority to rulers, and the understanding that the gods assign humans their place in life (they gifted Achilles and made a spearman of him). There is the clear belief that calamity comes from the gods for a variety of reasons including human negligence in fulfilling vows to the gods. In addition, there is the confidence that a diviner can discern the reason for the gods’ wrath and identify the appropriate way to appease them. There is direct communication to humans by the gods who come to humans directly (e.g. the visit of Athena to Achilles) or by means of dreams (which are understood to come from Zeus). The human-like personalities of the gods is in full play as Apollo becomes furious at Agamemnon’s disregard of Chryses the priest. The affairs of humans and gods are thus fully intertwined through a network of connections and relationships.

In these first few pages alone I found quick confirmation of N. T. Wright's claim in Paul and the Faithfulness of God that the people of Greco-Roman antiquity lived in a "myth-soaked culture" (255) in which "the gods were everywhere" (274). Like Wright, I'm convinced that a richer understanding of the practices by which the ancients interacted with their gods can lead to a fuller appreciation of the cultural matrix in which early Christian worship took its shape. And this can lead to a better grasp of the significance of the earliest Christian worship practices. Looking forward to exploring these ancient texts with my students next spring.