reading list, roman and ancient greek religion

update from an earlier post on Roman religion primary sources plus some contemporary academicky secondary sources. i have, at last count, 977 books and articles on everything from this stuff to geology to the EZLN and islamic anarchism, and i have not been reading them with the enthusiasm that i download them with! 

oh hey. something on [achaemenid iran/globular star clusters/early modern city-states/feline palaeontology/arabic calligraphy] that i absolutely want to read. let me download it and put it in the appropriate folder and not look at it again for months.

while i cannot read everything, i do read a lot when i give myself a reading list and some goals. the new goal is get up to speed on religion among pre-christian greeks and romans enough to teach introductory classes on it. to that end, the titles infra are not themselves a reading list, not something i could reasonably absorb while also working and parenting and gardening etc., but more of a reading ecology.


from U Colorado's MA program in Roman religion and myth!


26 october '22 additions:

Roger beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconqured Sun

Chatrles King, The Ancient Roman Afterlife: Di Manes, Belief, and the Cult of the Dead

Amber Gartrell, The Cult of Castor and Pollux in Ancient Roman Myth, Ritual, and Society

Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity

Temples, Religion, and Politics in the Roman Republic

Religions of the Hellenistic Roman Age

One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire

George Dumezil, Archaic Roman Religion

Remus, a Roman Myth

The Religions of the Roman Empire

A Critical History of Rome from Prehistory to the First Punic War


and who'da thunk it, the same institution has a greek myth and religion curriculum.

II. Primary Sources

  • Aeschylus, Oresteia, Prometheus Bound
  • Apollodorus, Library
  • Euripides, Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, Iphigenia in Tauris, Bacchae
  • Hesiod, Theogony
  • Homer, Iliad, Odyssey
  • Homeric Hymns to Apollo, Demeter, Hermes, Aphrodite
  • Pindar, Olympian 1, Pythian 4, Pythian 8, Nemean 6, Isthmian 8
  • Plutarch, Theseus
  • Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, Ajax, Electra

II. Introduction: Mythology

  • Graf, Fritz, Greek Mythology (Johns Hopkins 1993).
  • Bremmer, Jan, Interpretations of Greek Mythology (Totawa, NJ 1986).
  • Csapo, Eric, Theories of Mythology (Oxford 2005).
  • Edmunds, Lowell, ed., Approaches to Greek Myth (Johns Hopkins 1990).

III. Religious Overvieux

  • Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion (Harvard 1985).
  • Mikalson, Jon, Religion in Hellenistic Athens (Berkeley 1998).
  • Ogden, Daniel, ed., A Companion to Greek Religion (Oxford 2007).
  • Parker, Robert, Athenian Religion: A History (Oxford 1996).
  • Parker, Robert, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford 2005).

IV. Cults, Forms of Worship, and Issues

  • Bowden, Hugh, Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle: Divination and Democracy (Cambridge 2005).
  • Burkert, Walter, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley 1983).
  • Burkert, Walter, Ancient Mystery Cults (Harvard 1987) and George Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries (Princeton 1961).
  • Cole, Susan G., Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience (Berkeley 2004).
  • Connelly, Joan B., Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Princeton 2007).
  • Detienne, Marcel, and Jean-Pierre Vernant, eds., The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago 1989).
  • Foley, Helene, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays (Princeton 1994).
  • Goff, Barbara, Citizen Bacchae: Women’s Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece(Berkeley 2004).
  • Johnston, Sarah I., Ancient Greek Divination (Oxford 2008).
  • Kearns, Emily, The Heroes of Attica (Oxford 1989).
  • Kurtz, Donna and John Boardman, Greek Burial Customs (Cornell 1971).
  • Neils, Jennifer, Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens(Princeton 1992) and Jennifer Neils, ed., Worshipping Athena: Panathenaia and Parthenon (Madison 1996).
  • Otto, Walter, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Indiana 1965) and Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher A. Faraone, eds., Masks of Dionysus (Cornell 1993).
  • Parke, H.W., Festivals of the Athenians (Cornell 1977) and Erika Simon, Festivals of Attica: An Archaeological Commentary (Wisconsin 1983).
  • Parker, Robert, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford 1983).

V. Myth and Religion in Greek Literature

  • Bowie, A.M., Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy (Cambridge 1993).
  • Clauss, James J. and Sarah Iles Johnston, eds., Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art (Princeton 1997).
  • Clay, Jenny S., The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric Hymns (Princeton 1989).
  • March, Jennifer, The Creative Poet: Studies on the Treatment of Myths in Greek Poetry (London 1987).
  • Mikalson, Jon, Honor Thy Gods: Popular Religion in Greek Tragedy (Chapel Hill 1991).
  • Nagy, Gregory, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Johns Hopkins 1979).
  • Segal, Charles, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides1 Bacchae (Princeton 1982).

VI. Landmark books

  • Burkert, Walter, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley 1979).
  • Buxton, Richard, Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology (Cambridge 1994).
  • Buxton, Richard, Forms of Astonishment: Greek Myths of Metamorphosis (Oxford 2009).
  • Dodds, E.R., The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley 1951).
  • Gordon, R.L., ed., Myth, Religion and Society: Structuralist Essays by M. Detienne, L. Gernet, J.-P. Vernant, and P. Vidal-Naquet (Cambridge 1981).
  • Lloyd-Jones, H., The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley 1971).
  • Nietzsche, F., The Birth of Tragedy, along with M.S. Silk and J.P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge 1981).
  • Nilsson, Martin, The Mycenean Origins of Greek Mythology (Cambridge 1932).
  • Seaford, Richard, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (Oxford 1994).

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