Kenneth Yu

This paper examines the intersection of Greek religion and postcolonial theory by uncovering the ethical and political investments of the dominant paradigms and theoretical frameworks in the study of Greek religion. I focus on three important approaches that raise the problem of the application of modern categories to ancient contexts: the anthropological approach to Greek religion; the application of the 'lived religion' model to ancient religions; and the ontological turn in Classics. I argue that the use of anachronistic concepts for the study of Greek religion is inevitable and that attention to the disjuncture of our terms and the terms of the ancients in fact encourages us to interrogate our own scholarly positions.

This article uncovers the knowledge practices undergirding ancient Greek paradoxography, focusing on the ps.-Aristotelian On Marvelous Things Heard. Paradoxographers reconfigured time-honoured myth traditions—a powerful form of collective wisdom—into scientific data that could subsequently be scrutinized, classified, and refashioned for various purposes. Despite this classificatory ethos, paradoxographers attempted to retain the marvelous aspects of these ancient traditions. What ultimately defines paradoxographical discourse is the concurrence of Aristotelian and Homeric impulses: that is, the scholarly aim of gathering and systematizing myriad local myths and customs, on the one hand, and the preservation and continued fascination of marvels, on the other. I compare Greek paradoxography to the Chinese Shan hai jing (a coeval compendium of marvels) in order to highlight the evidentiary limitations of the Greek materials as well as the specific status of wonders in Greek paradoxography.

Over the course of the Hellenistic and Imperial periods, descriptions of wonders and marvels developed into a discrete branch of literature known as paradoxography. Fragments of paradoxographical collections in both Greek
and Latin reveal an abiding interest in natural wonders, but marvellous phenomena related to physiology, botany, zoology, and culture also frequently appear. Paradoxography shares thematic concerns with several
historiographical, philosophical, and scientific genres, leading classicists of previous generations to spurn these texts as derivative of more serious, especially Aristotelian, scholarship. More recently, however, scholars have
begun to appreciate the stylistic and expository features of paradoxography according to its own logic and principles. Nevertheless, how paradoxographical compendia were read and used in antiquity and in what scholarly or popular contexts they circulated remain difficult issues.

This article offers a new account of oracles in Aristophanes’ Knights. Situating the play in its historical context, I show how Aristophanes highlights Cleon’s transgression of political power by linking him to tyrants whose use of divination diverged from standard practices in late fifth-century Athens. I then examine the play’s analogies to the Contest of Calchas and Mopsus and argue that Aristophanes interlaces contemporary historical events and mythological material from the Cyclic Epic for the plot structure and the particularly eristic quality of Knights.

" The Rules of the Game, " expounded in ten remarkably bold theses, can easily be read as a synthetic retrospective or introduction to the formidable oeuvre of Arnaldo Momigliano. Indeed, this piece served as the opening chapter to his Introduzione bibliografica alla storia greca fino a Socrate (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975), and its subsequent reprints as an independent essay in several Italian journals and anthologies signal its importance for Momigliano. In this provocative and occasionally brilliantly witty essay, Momigliano sets forth his programmatic views on the ethos of the historian, as well as on the historical method and its applications in the study of ancient history. Here, as elsewhere, Momigliano is interested in detailing the link between ancient documents and their historical interpretations in later millennia. Ancient sources, he cautions, do not capture ancient realities transparently or completely, but are mediated documents whose historical value hinges, within certain limits, on the historian's analytical questions, inflected as they inevitably are by different ideological commitments. For this reason, he places special emphasis on the comparative method, stressing difference rather than similarity, and advises that historians with various areas of expertise collaborate, a point underscored throughout the essay. What is more, the essay contains the salutary reminder that the historian ought to attend not only to the surviving documents but also to the conspicuous silences and lacunae in the evidence.

This article begins with a remark by Jean-Pierre Vernant in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France about the inadequacy of Max Weber’s historical sociology for the study of ancient religions. Despite posing shared research questions and often reaching similar conclusions, Vernant, one of the most influential twentieth-century ancient historians, neither engaged nor acknowledged Weber and thereby secured his absence in the field of ancient religions generally. Vernant’s narrative of the historical emergence of Greek rationality is at direct odds with Weber’s views on the matter in Sociology of Religion and elsewhere, and I argue that, beyond methodological concerns, Vernant’s fundamentally Durkheimian position inherits early twentieth- century polemics between French and German sociologists. Vernant’s relationships with Marcel Mauss, Ignace Meyerson, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and his participation in the French Resistance, moreover, reaffirmed his Durkheimian views about society and committed him to a long tradition of anti-German scholarship. I conclude with a brief coda on the historiographical implications of these observations for the study of religion and its relation to social life.