Hans Beck & Julia Kindt, The Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

Localism and regionalism have become very popular of late in the study of ancient Greek history and religion.Alongside an increasing number of monographs on local religious systems, a seven-volume Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World is currently under preparation, which studies ambitiously the history, material culture and religion of some 30 sites, sanctuaries and regions across Archaic Greece.Kindt's and Beck's new volume is a continuation of ongoing discussions about approaches to studying Greek polytheism.rough a wide-ranging series of 13 case studies which explore di erent conceptions of the 'local' using existing data, the volume engages with important questions about theoretical analysis of the Greek gods, the apparent tension between the local and the general, and the choice of interpretative tools by ancient historians.e central contention of this volume-the need to study the 'local' in dynamic interaction with the 'universal'-is not entirely new.Already in the 1970s, Vernant and Detienne called for studying the gods as interrelated powers within a larger pantheon rather than as individualized personalities in isolation.is connectedness concerns not just the divine gures, but can extend to almost all the elements making up Greek polytheism: ritual practices, festivals, cult places, mythical traditions and so on.Building on this structuralist approach, recently Pirenne-Delforge and Pironti have used the imagery of a 'network' to stress the need to study the gods in their multiple aspects (in myth and cult, as powers and personalities), through a variety of sources, in di erent localities and at di erent levels of organization. 1At the level of methodological ideal, therefore, historians should aspire to study Greek polytheism in its di erent manifestations, to take into account the nexus of complex relations between its constituent elements, and to deploy multiple perspectives for understanding the varying levels on which it operated.In reality, however, modern scholarship is inevitably con ned to circumscribed analyses of particular elements, geographical regions, or spheres of life.A er all, how could one ever study in totality a Greek religious world made up of over a thousand poleis?Where more than one aspect come into play, scholarship at times formulates them as separate categories in dichotomies: 'public' and 'private', 'local' and 'universal', 'literary' and 'real' religion.e present volume focuses on the relations between the 'local' and 'Panhellenic', but reacts against the tendency to study them as separate objects of analysis or to privilege one category over the other.Instead, it attempts to bring together the 'local' and 'Panhellenic' to study how they informed, in uenced, and intersected with one another.In the opening chapters Kindt and Beck argue for the need to study how the 'local' interacted vertically with other horizons beyond and

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