The Frontiers Of Graeco-Roman Religions

Ancient Greeks seemed to be very concerned about who was Greek and who was not. At least, this is what we can infer from the great number of literary sources which dealt with the topic in one way or another. From Herodotus' Histories to, say, Tatian's Address to the Greeks (to give just one example of extremely opposite genres and aims), the frontier of Greekness was an important issue not only to the Greek mind, but also to the minds of other intellectuals from all over the oikoumne. However, Greekness was rarely systematically defined. The features of Greekness could be found in all forms of art, and covered areas from descent and language to more general ways of life. 1 In this general picture religion played a key role, or, to be more precise, some religious aspects did. In the fifth century bc Herodotus wrote "so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvellous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory" (.). His approach to these two large groups, "Hellenes" and "barbarians", set a kind of agenda for those intending to describe new peoples. Among the categories that could be explored when dealing with a foreign people, religion occupied a privileged position. Herodotus focused on a handful of religious aspects to explain the distance between they-barbarians and we-Greeks. The result was not a clear picture of what Greek religion actually was, nor even of what religion meant for Herodotus. It was more a way of establishing the limits of Greek religion with respect to non-Greek peoples, in order to make the intellectual frontiers of the Greek world explicit

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