God, Greco-Roman

The study of Greco-Roman divinity encompasses all of the many elements that make up a Greco-Roman god. These include stories told about the gods and stories that incorporate the gods as narrative elements, both of which can appear within narrative and lyric poems, within stage-plays, within speeches composed for the law-courts, and within narrative histories, which we may possess in their original form or in summaries compiled in a later era to engage that era’s debates. The constituent elements of a god also include the gods’ names, which bind together cult and story, and sometimes carry metonymic weight or derive from a preexisting abstract concept, and they include the epithets that are joined to them, which may be geographic or descriptive or reflective of function. The gods were made up of stories and images, and occupied space and reciprocal interactions with their worshippers. Sanctuaries and statues, sacrifices and festivals, prayers and votive offerings, epiphanies (both in dreams and in the waking world), and messages passed through oracles and divinatory experts all contributed to these complex divine constructs. The gods possessed both vivid anthropomorphic personalities and an array of functions: social, political, causal, and narrative. The exact relationship between the god emplaced within a local cultic context, and the many other manifestations of the same divine name, continues to engender debate. The gods permeate our sources for the ancient world: literary and archaeological, epigraphic, and iconographic. This article, therefore, suggests introductory surveys not of particular source-types, but of the scholarship concerning the key constituent elements of Greco-Roman gods. I have favored works published in the early 21st century because they invariably contain comprehensive references to, and often extended critical discussions of, the most influential of the older works.