Access Instantly Five Stages Of Greek Religion (Annotated Brief History Of Greek And Roman Literature): Ancient Olympians Gods Through The Homeric Hymns, Platonic And Gnostic Philosophers, Christianity And Paganism Outlined By Gilbert Murray Disseminated As Publication Copy

read, specifically interested in the appended translation of Sallustius' On the Gods and the Universe A classic that repays reading and rereading, The stages: animistic myth, poetic order, reasoned order, consolation, superstition, The drivers of change: polis and philosophy, Excellent book.
Fascinating. Sometimes one immures himself thinking that one knows more than the world around him, It's this attitude of complacency and hubris that I'm currently fighting, because sometimes I admit I do think I know a lot more than most people, which is why I'm glad I came across this book.


I didn't read this book as if I were performing an exegesis: I'm not a Greek scholar and will probably never be one, There were a lot of terms that I failed to understand, because I am unable to read untranslated Greek words, However, I was delighted with this book because it managed to debunk and destroy my preconceptions about some of the Greek philosophies and religions,

For example, one perceives of Epicurus nowadays as merely a pleasureseeker, Mr. Murray reveals that nothing was farther from the truth: 'Epicurus says that pleasure, or "sweetness of life," is the good but he never counsels the direct pursuit of it, Quite the reverse. He says that if you conquer your desires and fears, and live

simply and love those about you, the natural sweetness of life will reveal itself, " p.That doesn't seem to be horrible, In fact, it's Jesus Christ's second commandment: love your neighbor as you love yourself,

The current idea of cynicism is relatively negative: people are driven by their own interests and usually do not hold honorable virtues, The original Cynic, however, was almost its polar opposite: these were the people who only sought virtue and lived like dogs in the sense that all it needed was to be loyal to its master, defend its master from beasts, and provide for himself.
p.The Stoics were slightly different: they believed that life was shit, but man can be virtuous by the force of his own will,

In reading the evolution of Greek religion I also discovered my prejudices against paganism and developed insight regarding that, During the swansong of Pagan religion Paganism was neither bloody nor uncouth: the Pagan Sallustius wrote 'On the Gods and the World' explaining his beliefs, and it was a civilized and intelligent treatise.


I'm grateful for this book for providing me with a bit more knowledge and destroying some of my prejudices, and reminding me that I still have much to learn.


Gilbert Murray has given us an engrossing view of Greek religious and philosophcal thought which covers a period of roughly a thousand years, After reading this you cannot help but be possessed with a desire to explore further the resources which he pulls his information from, The nicest thing about this book comes in the appendix where he provides a translation of Sallustius's "On the gods and the world" which is worth the money for the whole book.
Much of what Sallustius writes is well worth thinking on, Aristotle spoke of the First Cause as unmoved itself while moving all the universe "as the beloved moves the lover, "

"We are so much at the mercy of chance that Chance is our god, "Pliny, Natural History, ii. ,. The author traces the trajectory of Ancient Greek religion from its primitive origins through its eventual demise at the hands of Christianity,

Enjoyable despite the amount of opinion and idiosyncratic style, The authors voice came through much more than I had expected, which I usually find off putting in nonfiction, but I think it made this more engaging, Murray is a beautiful writer I didnt understand the back half of this book and his essays really meander but still a beautiful writer lol, I was Def hoping for more like ethnological study tracing the origins and development alongside the geographic migration across the Peloponnese and there was some of that, Im also interested in how the myths we all know well and love went from true religious belief to like however they were regarded in the late classical to preChristian era.
Remember how the Great God Pan was proclaimed dead in the earliest of early years of Christianity, . like what the hell does that mean lol Gilbert Murray's breadth of knowledge is dazzling, What I got from this tour de force, a personal history of ancient and classical Greek religion, was how much more fluid the beliefs were than I had realized, Murray's own view of it was pretty fluid, too, since this was a lateinlife rewrite of what he originally called Four Stages of Greek Religion, The key point he makes is that the fluidity of the Olympiangodcosmos eventually would have led to something like JudeoChristian monotheism, I think that was his point! He knew so damn much that he can be hard to follow at times, Well, he waswhen he wrote the preface to this third edition of the book that had first been publishedyears before, I'm sure I will know this much when I am, too, And so will you.

I don't know if I were fully persuaded by the case for progression toward Christianity, But here is a tiny sample of Murray's reasoning: he describes a modern Greek peasant, shouting out "Christ is risen!" each Easter, "I hardly realized, when writing the earlier editions of this book, how central, how omnipresent, this complex of ideas was in ancient Greek religion, Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, and the rest of the 'Year Gods' were not eccentric divagations in a religion whose proper worship was given to the immortal Olympians they are different names given in different circumstances to this one being who dies and is born again each year, dies old and polluted with past deaths and sins, and is reborn young and purified.


"The best starting point is the conception of the series of Old Kings, each, when the due time comes, dethroned and replaced by his son, the Young King, with the help of the Queen Mother for Gaia, or Earth, the eternal Wife and Mother of each in turn, is always ready to renew herself.
The new vegetation God each year is born from the union of the SkyGod and the EarthMother or, as in myth and legend the figures become personified, he is the Son of a God and a mortal princess.
"

Sound familiar at all

I read this book, based on lectures given at Columbia University in, while taking Peter Maxwell's History of Ancient Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago.
It is an excellent survey of the trends of Greek thought from the preSocratics to the rise of Christianity, presenting a cogent thesis as to the dynamics of this development.
This will engage the reader interested in the origins, general nature, and evolution, and cousins of the Greek gods, as seen by the ancient philosophers and poets who attempted to characterize them.
Not a difficult read. I was entertained and enlightened, It touches naturally and lightly on Judaism and Christianity, which share with Greek mythology roots older than the Testaments, Old and New, Murray relates little formal mythology, going instead for deeper understanding,

archiv. org has copies you can read for free, This is an update Murray's "Four Stages of Greek Religion, " A preface explains the difference, The archiv site's search won't find anything misspelled or with subtitles included,

A challenge, since Greeks understood that their gods were metaphors generally for unaccountable forces, mostly associated with fate, Some fine Greek philosophers wanted nothing to do with them, Fascinating! I will try not to repeat this word too many times in my review, but it's really hard, because the work entirely deserves it, I had long been interested in mythology, but the Olympian gods have been kind of boring for a while now, They are too attractive, overrepresented in pop culture, clichéd although this does not mean they are more understood, and reading this book you discover the vast corpus of Greek traditions, rites, sentiments and theology behind them, and how they evolved through the Hellenistic period.
More interestingly, the actual culture and society in each historical stage starts fleshing out through the description of their religion, Now, I can really see the limits of mythology within the range of Greek religion, It's absurd that we only think about myths and heroes represented in the literature of a very narrow time frame,

At first, I was more interested in the gritty first chapter Saturnia Regna, preOlympian religion, but the five chapters were immensely edifying and I became acquainted with a lot of ideas and historical facts for the first time.
I also liked the writing, academic but definitely not dry nor slow, with some warmhearted, sincere and poetic passages,

I first read about this book in Bertrand Russell's references in History of Western Philosophy, and now Gilbert Murray also lead me to other fascinating works, such as Jane Harrison's Prolegomena.

So, yes, I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in religion, history and anthropology, It is always so gratifying, when confronted by some old public domain classic, to find something that far from being dry as dust turns out to be fascinating and uptotheminute.
Such is sitelinkFive Stages of Greek Religion by sitelinkGilbert Murray, What we have here, in somepages, is a history of how Greek Paganism went through a series of stages such that it was ripe for conversion when Christianity came along.


Murray writes so cogently that it seems at time almost an accident that it is dealing with more than just Greek religion, but all religion, The only exception: There are a large number of untranslated Greek phrases and not a few Latin ones, but most are relegated to the footnotes, And there is also what I find to be a very touching personal statement of faith by the author:

There is no royal road in these matters, I confess it seems strange to me as I write here, to reflect that at this moment many of my friends and most of my fellow creatures are, as far as one can judge, quite confident that they possess supernatural knowledge.
As a rule, each individual belongs to some body which has received in writing the results of a divine revelation, I cannot share in any such feeling, The Uncharted surrounds us on every side and we must needs have some relation towards it, a relation which will depend on the general discipline of a man's mind and the bias of his whole character.
As far as knowledge and conscious reason will go, we should follow resolutely their austere guidance, When they cease, as cease they must, we must use as best we can those fainter powers of apprehension and surmise and sensitiveness by which, after all, most high truth has been reached as well as most high art and poetry: careful always really to seek for truth and not for our own emotional satisfaction, careful not to neglect the real needs of men and women through basing our life on dreams and remembering above all to walk gently in a world where the lights are dim and the very wander.

In short, Murray makes Paganism understandable, such that even the Olympian gods of Homer and Hesiod become understandable in the context of the time,

As I mentioned, Five Stages of Greek Religion is in the public domain and can be found in its entirety at sitelinkGutenberg, Org. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is serious about the history of religion, While I definitely found the book interesting, I felt that Murray was too focused on the Christianity looming over the horizon to adequately address the later stages of the Greeks religion.
By far my favorite part of the book was the analysis of the simple rituals that can be glimpsed in the hidden corners of the Olympian rites, His discussion of the figures of the dying God and the fruitful Virgin archetypes was just amazing, Similarly, his discussion of the progression from these archaic rites to the height of the Olympian pantheon was just beautiful and a brilliant example of the evolution of religion as a whole.
However, as soon as he beings to talk about the philosophical schools that dominate the Hellenistic age, he seems to constantly foreshadow the Christian conquest, I found this very distracting because it makes it seem that Christianitys dominance was inevitable rather than acknowledge the historical accidents that led to its dominance, It also undercut his analysis of the later stages of the Greek religion making it seem that there was nothing going on but waiting for Christianity to take over, Nonetheless, the first half of the book is certainly worth reading for anyone interesting in the development of primitive religion, The evolution of Greek religion from the ancient Olympians to the Platonic philosophers, and onward,

In this book the eminent classical scholar Gilbert Murray details the evolution of Greek religion, from a cycle of festivals devoted to the principal Olympian Gods, through the Homeric hymns, Hellenistic philosophy including Platonism and Gnosticism.
Murray traces elements through centuries of Greek spirituality which culminated in Christianity, He includes a translation of the Treatise of Sallustius, which is a credo of later Greek pagan beliefs and philosophy, This book is essential reading for classicists and anyone interested in the evolution of ancient Greek religion,

Saturnia Regna The Olympian conquest The great schools The failure of nerve The last protest Appendix: Translation of the treatise of Sallustius, .