Scholarship on ancient Greek prayer has almost always focused on its public instantiations: in sacrifice, oratory, sanctuary contexts, etc. This chapter explores the evidence for ancient Greek prayer in the liminal space where public and private clash, coalesce, and collapse. I argue that the prayers of ancient polytheists, though rarely – if ever – strictly private, routinely operated across and between different spheres such as the public and the private, the polis and the oikos, the intimate and the communal. I approach the study of ancient prayer afresh, not as a site of opposition between the individual and the polis, nor as a space in which the distinctions between these realms of praxis are erased or effaced. Rather, prayer here features as an occasion to reflect on the spectrum of possible intersections between personal piety (individual feelings towards and actions in service of the divine) and the wider superstructures of religion, politics, society, and culture within which its practitioners were imbricated and to which they sought to respond.

Herodotus’ Historiesare filled with instances of personal engagement with the supernatural. If we consider that phenomenon in the specific terms of ‘personal religion’, new patterns and questions emerge. This chapter demonstrates not only that personal religion in Herodotus tends to resolve itself in the political, but that this reinforces the point that there was no strict boundary between personal and polis religion. Most of the people whose experiences Herodotus relates remain ‘public figures’, and Herodotus’ historical narrative, by its nature, devotes significant attention to political affairs. Many episodes from the Histories involve atypical individuals. But their experiences with the divine nevertheless fit into common categories, and the concerns which lead these individuals to approach the divine are mostly nothing out of the ordinary. Herodotus’ stories reveal elements of personal religious practice which might otherwise be difficult to find in surviving sources. By considering both personal and civic aspects of Greek religious thought and practice in Herodotus’ work, we see the continuous presence of the gods in the lived experience of individuals.

This chapter investigates instances of personal divination in the ancient Greek world. This includes the use of oracles, omens, forms of technical divination and the occurrence of prophetic dreams in personal matters that do not articulate the concerns of the polis. The chapter explores what personal issues warranted a consultation of the gods, as well as the scope and limits for individuals to use the divinatory system to their advantage. The chapter shows that consultation with the gods about questions of personal concern (about health, travel and questions of everyday life) was not merely available to the upper classes and those in power, but conducted by everyday people, including women, metics and slaves. Throughout, the chapter carefully distinguishes between what we know about actual personal oracle consultations on the one hand, and their representation in works of literature on the other. At the same time, the chapter presents several themes that run through different kinds of evidence and explores what they reveal about the use and abuse of divine knowledge (and the actions it is made to sanction) in the ancient Greek world.

Old Comedy was performed at polis festivals by a citizen chorus but depicted non-elite individuals pursuing their personal goals by personal means, including their personal interactions with the divine. Since its characters are individual community members, comedy is uniquely suited to reflecting and exploring the relationship between polis and personal religion. Although many of the personal religious practices in comedy can be interpreted as comically incongruous, this is part of the genre’s characteristic transformation of lofty to low and civic to personal. The chapter shows that comedy does not merely depict but enacts personal religion. It glances briefly at oikos religion, philosophical religion, and foreign/non-established cults before focusing on personal divination, sacrifice, prayer, and religious practices relating to love and sex. A final section examines how comedy sometimes elevates personal religion to a polis level and sometimes reduces polis religion to a personal level. In all cases, a complex interrelationship of polis and personal religion becomes evident, but never one in which the latter is merely a subset of the former.

Unlike any other ancient author, the philosopher and priest of Apollo at Delphi discussed all aspects of religious tradition, praxis, and even personal piety. He talks about religion more or less in all parts of his oeuvre, either in connection with philosophy, history, music and the household, or with myths, symbols, and rituals. He deals with personal religion both as a historian and from the perspective of the experiences of personal life – as a biographer of illustrious Greeks and Romans, as a priest and initiate, and as a husband and father. Several of the speakers in his dialogues talk about religious matters on a personal level, and the author also expresses his views on the importance of religion for the individual in his own voice in works such as On Isis and Osiris, That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible, or the Consolation to His Wife. Once the religious perspective is recognized not only as a general trait of Plutarch’s thought, but also as an aspect of his philosophy as an ars vitae, it becomes visible across the whole of his oeuvre.

Despite the importance of the household in Greek societies, ‘household religion’ has often dropped out of sight in the traditional scholarly dichotomy dividing religious activities into ‘civic’ and ‘individual’. Drawing upon material cultural and textual evidence, this chapter investigates personal religious activities performed by households and by individuals on their behalf. The chapter shows that much personalised household religious activity took place in community sanctuaries. Votive objects dedicated in sanctuaries provide key evidence for religious acts performed by households and individuals on behalf of households and families. Ritual activity in the form of ‘saucer pyres’ in Athens and Attica, often in areas of industrial, craft or commercial activities which were associated with house space, also demonstrates a wide range of personalisation and variety which may be aimed at protecting household-based groups from malevolent supernatural forces. Exploring the large and varied source of evidence for household religious activity reveals that households and families, as key social units, constructed their own personalized religious activities beyond ‘civic’ or ‘individual’.

The notion that curse tablets were used to cause harm whereas amulets were used to provide protection is a misleading oversimplification. Curse tablets have often been removed from the category of religion and consigned to the illusive one of magic. However, the existence of those tablets designated as prayers for justice illustrates that the desires which drove curse tablet creation were varied. To ascertain to what extent the use of curse tablets and amulets fitted in with polis religion, different aspects of them are examined, such as the ritualistic nature of their creation, their use of formulaic inscriptions and evidence for their use, or lack of use, of reciprocity. Examples of amulets and curse tablets are presented from the fourth century BCE through to the second century CE and from a large geographical scope. Examples from across the Greek world illustrate a paradoxical unity and sense of religious community amongst those who engaged in these practices. The incredibly personal nature of the inscriptions on curse tablets and the wearing of amulets provides an insight into Greek religious practice at an individual level.

This chapter explores personal religion in some of Plato’s dialogues. First, focusing on the Apology and Euthyphro, it considers Socrates’ daimonic sign and how far Socrates expresses religious attitudes independent from, in line with, or opposed to those foregrounded or sanctioned in Athens. Second, it turns to Plato’s Laws and examines the Stranger’s vision for civic religion in the imagined city of Magnesia and his prohibitions of private worship. Finally, it considers how philosophical inquiry can itself constitute personal religion. Overall, it argues that Plato does not evince a single attitude towards all the phenomena we might classify as personal religion. That the Stranger outlaws some central aspects of personal religion does not mean that he proscribes all others; we should resist the old idea that Socrates would have fallen afoul of Magnesia’s laws. While the Stranger excludes a culture of free speech of which the Socrates of the early dialogues avails himself, Magnesia is not Athens. For Plato, how far expressions of personal religion should be countenanced, regulated, or proscribed by the city turns on the nature of the city in which that question is raised.

This chapter highlights the dual function of theōria– the practice of travelling to witness extraordinary spectacles – as a communal activity and a deeply personal religious experience. Using the festival of the Theoxenia as a case study, this chapter explores the personal and shared experiences of the performers of Pindar’s Sixth Paean; these include awe, belonging, and cooperation – emotions vital to the festival’s success and born of rigorous training in complex choreographic routines. Furthermore, this chapter posits that choral poetry and performance are intrinsically linked, as the structure of poetry supports dancers’ coordination and learning. The resulting profound awe among performers and spectators is not only a testament to human collaboration but also prepares participants for divine encounters. Ultimately, the personal experiences in these festivals underscore the importance of individual emotional journeys in achieving successful communal rites. These individual accounts reveal how personal examination and preparation for divine interaction enhance the collective experience and highlight the transformative power of theōria on those who learn to dance together.

This chapter explores the personal dimension of Greek religion through the archaeological evidence for votives in Archaic and Classical Greece. Dedications serve as a prime example of how ancient worship could simultaneously be personal, civic, individual and collective. They point to how these aspects can and should be studied together to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of how people communicated with the gods. Traditionally, small dedications have been more closely associated with the individual, while large dedications (e.g. statues) are frequently studied as civic monuments. Through two case studies – textile dedications at Brauron and korai on the Acropolis – the chapter breaks down these divides. We consider the varying ways in which we can define ‘personal’ in relation to different types of dedications and in relation to different aspects of the dedicatory act. Using a combination of embodied, sensorial, emotional, theological and experiential perspectives, the chapter shows how worshippers used dedications to negotiate the relationship between personal engagement with the divine and their understanding of the communal aspects of religion.

This chapter examines epiphany and its place in personal religion by focusing on narratives that feature Athena as the epiphanic deity across different periods, locales, and media. In all cases, Athena is construed as engaging closely with personal requests and concerns of particularly diverse nature from military excellence and political dominance to enhancement of socio-religious capital, and, perhaps more surprisingly, health. Athena’s epiphanies have thus been identified as particularly pertinent for our purposes, as they highlight the grey area that oscillates between personal and poliadic spheres of religious action, thus allowing us to witness the close and complex correlations between the two. Even if the two spheres draw from a common stock of religious schemata and behaviours, contrasting them reveals a wealth of useful information about how personal religious appropriation and innovation are situated in relation to more established forms or expressions of poliadic religious action. Above all, this contrast shows how even groundbreaking religious innovations needed to be anchored properly in easily recognisable, time-tested, and well-established religious schemata.

Ancient views of magic were extremely diverse. In order to examine the issue of personal religion this chapter sets out to bracket the over-familiar negative discourse, which sought to represent magic as the opposite of (true) religion, and shift the discussion to include the perspectives of actual practitioners. Of the many different types of historical practitioner, three are selected for longer discussion: ‘wise folk’, specifically ‘rootcutters’ (rhizotomists); the Hellenistic ‘Magian’ tradition ascribed to pseudonymous authors such as Persian Zoroaster; and the so-called magical papyri from Roman Egypt. Rhizotomists used ritualisation as their primary means of empowerment, with a clear sense of the divine origin of the potency of herbs. Drawing on this tradition, the Magian writers linked it to the materials made available through translation of the knowledge stored in Babylonian and Egyptian temples to create a sense of the inexhaustible powers of divine Nature. Ritual expertise and theological knowledge are most evidently in play in the hundreds of procedures included in the surviving Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri, exemplified here by the case of PGM IV 1496–1595.

As author and historical personality Xenophon is a fascinating case study for personal religion. He never wrote any programmatic treatises on Greek religion yet religion is omnipresent in his work. This chapter focuses on his Anabasis. The story of the Ten Thousand is one of the few autobiographical texts to survive from Classical Greece. Accordingly, it promises exceptional insights into personal religion. In this text, we encounter Xenophon in three roles. First of all, he is the author, who writes in the third person and pre-structures a field of religious assumptions and alleged self-evident facts. Second, he is the authoritative anonymous narrator who comments on the religious elements of the plot. Third, he stages himself as the protagonist ‘Xenophon’, whose individual religious beliefs and actions during the March of the Ten Thousand are described, commented on, and contextualised in detail. The extent to which these religious self-attributions can be regarded as historical facts is difficult to determine. In any case, the Anabasisis a testimony to the religious options that the author believes are available to the individual and from which individuals can make their choice.

The personal rather than the social or civic side of sacrifice appears throughout the evidence for this important rite. For all their many biases, Greek sources do not share any general bias in favor of personal as opposed to communal sacrifice; nor do they not share a bias in favor of animal as opposed to vegetal sacrifice, as ample epigraphic, unproblematic evidence demonstrates. This chapter also notices problematic examples found in Homer, Old and New Comedy, and tragedy, and ends with a contrast between Greek and Hebrew evidence for personal sacrifice, the Hebrew evidence being the place of origin for this scholarly subject.

Ancient audiences ascribed personal religious views to individual playwrights – a fact that confirms ‘personal religion’ as a meaningful category in the study of ancient Greek society in general and the theatre in particular. Aeschylus was especially devoted to Demeter; Sophocles was exceptionally pious; Euripides was hell-bent to show that there were no gods. The oeuvres of these playwrights inspired such inferences, to be sure, but other factors mattered too. Comedies staged the tragic poets as characters and ascribed various religious views to them. Face-to-face encounters with the playwrights gave rise to anecdotes and recollections, which no doubt circulated orally but were also occasionally written down. All this meant that the playwrights could build on their public personae and assume that audiences would recognize characteristic concerns in their plays. We uncover a dynamic set of interactions in which the poet shaped his plays but was also shaped by how audiences received them. We show that we should not construct an opposition between personal and polis religion: The religious views ascribed to the tragedians were personal and communally owned.

The long-lasting impact of Pheidias, antiquity’s master of religious art, especially his Zeus at Olympia, is considered in the context of the theme of personal religion. The chapter adopts a broad chronological perspective and explores how the great master was perceived during the centuries following his lifetime, with a focus on his chryselephantine masterpiece, which he completed in the later decades of the fifth century BCE. It considers how later generations have conceived of his personal religious life, its relation to his famed artwork, and the position his figure has come to occupy within broader cult practices and devotional experiences. Close analysis of Pausanias’ Description of Greece alongside other evidentiary materials shows that by the second century CE, Pheidias was a figure of religious significance in his own right. Greco-Roman authors ascribed to him the qualities of a visionary endowed with unparallel access to Zeus. He left his detectable trademarks in his masterpiece, and his presence was felt in communal cult practices. Centuries after his departure from Olympia, his artmaking has come to be understood as a form of devotional practice.

Rites typically labelled Mysteries allowed for some of the most emphatic pursuits of religious conviction in ancient Greece. This chapter explores Mystery cults from the viewpoint of personal religion. It starts from a discussion of the miniature Mystery cult of Lykosoura, which, according to Pausanias, speaks vividly to the dissemination of mysteria in Greece across time and space. Exploring the fascination with the ritual script, the author explains how this particular genre of cult practice invited various affordances. He unravels the embodied excitement of participating in Mysteries: the discussion of evidence from Eleusis allows for an ideal-type recreation of the experience made by initiands into the rites. The third section extends this inquiry, exploring the religious goals participants sought to realize. The Mysteries drew their religious meaning both from sensual cognition and the inaptitude of knowing, rather than a set theology. In conclusion, three areas in which the category of personal religion helps to unlock new perspectives on the Mysteries emerge: individual embodiment, group experience, and the omnipresent force of ritual that lent religious depth to both.

This chapter asks what the main currents in classical Greek philosophy understand by ‘personal religion’. How do they conceive of the beliefs and uplifting they want religious people to display? Do we have the necessary conceptual framework to understand the phenomenon of ‘personal religion’. In the study of ancient Greek religion, philosophers are often revisited to find the clearest analysis of religious concepts, though mainly in terms of the individual integrating norms of civic religion. Yet in many places the philosophers refer to those concepts and virtues in contexts outside civic religion, thus opening a broader understanding of personal religion. In connection with this the chapter also investigates what philosophers mean if they refer to their basic principles as ‘divine’. Do they introduce new divinities? Or are they introducing new ways of dealing with traditional gods? This leads to asking whether philosophical life replaces traditional religion. Very often, this is just assumed to be the case, entailing the corollary point that metaphysics comes to replace religion. Yet a case can be made that philosophers themselves avoided this merging of metaphysics and religion.

Although painters of pottery were heavily influenced by what other painters had painted and by the wishes of their customers, the ways in which they represent scenes reflect their own way of seeing the world, and the way in which they represent scenes involving the gods potentially allows us to say something about their personal religion. This chapter looks at the large pots painted in Apulia by the so-called Underworld Painter and argues that the way in which the Underworld Painter lays out scenes that involve gods’ interventions in the world (as in scenes of Gigantomachy, Melanippe, Dirke, Medea and of the Underworld) and the juxtaposition of those scenes with scenes of men and women offering libations or carrying objects associated with religious cult, allow us to say something about the religious assumptions that he is bringing with him, and in particular about the way in which he sees the gods of myth and the gods of cult as part of the same world.

Given that we know little about deviations from ritual norms in most cities of Greece, I limit myself to Athens and concentrate on the later fifth century so that we can acquire an idea of the possibilities but also of the religious Handlungsspielraum within a given chronotope. I begin with the individual responsible for the cave of Vari who was clearly an anomaly in terms of the intensity of his religious worship. I then proceed with some private cults and practices that were frowned upon, continue with individuals who were seen, rightly or wrongly, as actually transgressing civic norms, and end with some final considerations, in which I return to the problem of the relationship between personal religion and polis religion. I conclude that it seems that personal religion was still very much part of polis religion at large.