ABSTRACT
When Homer says that ‘prayers are the daughters of great Zeus, and they are lame of their feet, and wrinkled, and cast their eyes sidelong’ he is exercising the prerogative of a poet when describing a datum of history. 1 In this present volume, our working definition of prayer is rather more prosaic: ‘an address to or celebration of a deity’. 2 The prayers collected here represent only a small sample of the available prayer texts of the period 325 bce to 325 ce. 3 The period from Alexander to Constantine covered by this volume, some 650 years, may be put in perspective by remembering that 650 years ago, thinkers such as Averroes, Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas had only just begun to lead the way in grappling with the implications of the (for some) newly recovered thought of Aristotle, Alexander's tutor. A lot of water flows under a bridge in 650 years. What can one expect to find in the study of a prayer corpus spanning such a length of time? In this brief introduction, I should like to point out three matrices within which these prayers may be understood: their shared characteristics across ideological lines; some of the most striking of their relations to Hellenistic culture; and some of the avenues which connect them to contemporary concerns.
