Most modern studies of Athenian religion have focused on festivals, cult
practices, and individual deities. Jon Mikalson turns instead to the
religious beliefs citizens of Athens spoke of and acted upon in everyday
life. He uses evidence only from reliable, mostly contemporary sources
such as the orators Lysias and Demosthenes, the historian Xenophon, and
state decrees, sacred laws, religious dedications, and epitaphs.
"This is in no sense a general history of Athenian religion," Mikalson
writes, "even within the narrow historical boundaries set. It is rather
an investigation of what might be termed the consensus of popular
religious belief, a consensus consisting of those beliefs which an
Athenian citizen thought he could express publicly and for which he
expected fo find general acceptance among his peers."
What emerges in Mikalson's study is a remarkable homogeneity of
religious beliefs at the popular level. The topics discussed at length
in Athenian Popular Religion include the areas of divine intervention
in human life, the gods and human justice, gods and oaths, divination,
death and the afterlife, the nature of the gods, social aspects of
popular religion, and piety and impiety.
Mikalson challenges the common opinion that popular religious belief in
Athens deteriorated significantly from the mid-fifth to the mid-fourth
century B.C. "The error in understanding the development of Athenian
religion has arisen, it seems to me, because scholars have failed to
distinguish properly between the differing natures of the sources for
our knowledge of religious beliefs in the earlier and later periods,"
Mikalson writes. The difference between those sources "is more than
simply one of years. It is a difference between poetry and prose, with
all the factors which that difference implies."
