ABSTRACT
Greek gods, everyone agrees, possess rounded, complex, and full-blooded personalities, not unlike the humans who worshipped them, Pericles or Sappho or Alexander the Great. There are many books on Alexander and not a few on Sappho or Pericles; but when one looks for books on one of the Olympians, one finds far fewer books than one would have thought. Certainly, Karl Kerényi’s monographs on Zeus and Hera, Demeter, or Dionysus have found a wide readership, but the author’s interests are shaped and limited by the underlying Jungian psychoanalysis that reduced the gods to concretizations of an archetype; the same is true for the few books that take their inspiration from Sigmund Freud. These books aside, especially English-speaking scholars have been hesitant to devote a monograph to a single god. The single volumes of Lewis Richard Farnell’s The Cults of the Greek States use the gods as an ordering principle for information on cults, and Arthur Bernhard Cook’s Zeus is far from being a monograph on the father of the gods; it is a compendium of rare and strange rituals. Since the days of Sir James Frazer and Jane Ellen Harrison, scholars on Greek religion have always been much more interested in rituals than in the divine recipients; myths – which would have narrated divine biographies – were thought as somehow being generated by ritual, and thus of secondary interest only.
