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.

By Plutarch's day most of the oracles of Greece had gone quiet, and even Delphi was down to one priestess. A company of travellers sits at Delphi and argues about why. Greece has emptied out and needs fewer prophets; the oracles were run by spirits who can move on or die; a ship's pilot once heard a voice from an island shout that Great Pan was dead; a man just back from the islands off Britain reports what the natives believe. Then Plutarch's brother offers his own answer: prophecy rises from the ground as a vapour, and vapours can run out.

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.

A visitor is being shown round Delphi, and the official guides insist on reading him every inscription. His companions argue as they walk: why the old bronzes have turned blue, why a courtesan's gilded statue stands among the kings' offerings, whether an Epicurean in the party is right that the oracles only ever came true by chance. The question underneath is why the priestess, who used to answer in verse, now answers in plain prose. Plutarch, who was a priest there, gives his answer: the god supplies the inspiration, the woman supplies the words, and people now ask about loans and marriages instead of wars.

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.

Among the offerings at Delphi stood a large letter E, and nobody knew what it meant. Plutarch remembers an evening, years earlier, when his teacher and friends tried: it counts the Seven Sages, who were really five; it is the word 'if', with which every question to the oracle begins; it is the number five, which the young Plutarch shows at some length explains almost everything. Then his teacher gives the last answer. The letter means 'Thou art'. It is what the worshipper says back to the god's 'Know thyself': you are, and we only become.

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.

If the gods really give good things in return for sacrifices, says Lucian, then they are shopkeepers, and the priest who reminds Apollo of the thigh-bones he has burned is a creditor calling in a loan. In fifteen short sections he takes the whole system literally: gods craning out of heaven to sniff the smoke, temples built so they have somewhere to live, and at the altar a priest who forbids anyone to come near with unclean hands while standing up to his elbows in blood.