Epiphanies and Dreams in Greek Polytheism Textual Genres and ‘Reality’ from Homer to Heliodorus

Lipka, "Epiphanies and Dreams in Greek Polytheism: Textual Genres and ‘Reality’ from Homer to Heliodorus "
English | ISBN: 3110636360 | 2021 | 290 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
While modern students of Greek religion are alert to the occasion-boundedness of epiphanies and divinatory dreams in Greek polytheism, they are curiously indifferent to the generic parameters of the relevant textual representations on which they build their argument. Instead, generic questions are normally left to the literary critic, who in turn is less interested in religion. To evaluate the relation of epiphanies and divinatory dreams to Greek polytheism, the book investigates relevant representations through all major textual genres in pagan antiquity. The evidence of the investigated genres suggests that the ‘epiphany-mindedness’ of the Greeks, postulated by most modern critics, is largely an academic chimaera, a late-comer of Christianizing 19th-century-scholarship. It is primarily founded on a misinterpretation of Homer’s notorious anthropomorphism (in the