Religion in Practice

Herodotus goes to Egypt and writes down everything: why the Nile floods, how a body is embalmed and what each grade of embalming costs, what the priests would and would not tell him, and a king-list running back ten thousand years. The founding document of curiosity about other people.

An Athenian farmer is being eaten alive by the debts his horse-mad son runs up, and he has heard there is a school next door where they teach you to argue your way out of anything. He enrolls, fails — he is too old and cannot hold a thought — and sends the son instead. The son learns beautifully. He comes home, wins an argument that beating your father is just, and offers to prove that beating your mother follows. The father burns the school down. The head of the school, hanging in a basket studying the sun and denying that Zeus exists, is a man named Socrates, who was in his forties, alive in the city, and had another twenty-four years to live.

Lucian's account of how to manufacture a god. Alexander of Abonoteichus planted a goose egg containing a baby snake in the foundations of a temple under construction, dug it up before a crowd, and announced the rebirth of Asclepius; within weeks he had a full-grown tame snake with a painted linen head worked by horsehair, an oracle answering sealed questions, and a stream of money from across the empire. The narrative follows the mechanics — how seals were opened and re-closed, how ambiguous answers were filed, how mysteries with torchlight were instituted, how a Roman governor was cultivated. Two groups saw through it and Alexander named them from the pulpit: Christians and Epicureans. At section 47 he takes a copy of the Principal Doctrines — also on this site — into the marketplace and burns it.

An Athenian jury of five hundred is asked to decide whether a man has been corrupting the young and importing new gods. He answers by cross-examining his accuser, telling them the god at Delphi put him up to it, and warning them that killing him will damage them more than it damages him. Convicted, and invited to propose his own penalty, he proposes free dinners for life at public expense.

Paul is shipped to Rome under guard and the vessel is lost off Malta. The most technically detailed account of ancient seafaring that survives: the sailing season, the soundings, the decision to run before the wind, and the moment the crew pass ropes under the hull to hold the ship together.

Lucian looks at what people do when someone dies — the wailing, the coin for the ferryman, the expensive funeral, the food left at the tomb — and asks what any of them believe they are accomplishing. Then he lets a corpse sit up and answer his own father back. Written around 170 CE and still the sharpest thing anyone wrote about funeral custom.