[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
When I began studying Classics in 1962, Martin P. Nilsson (1874-1967) was a household name. In fact, he dominated the study of Greek religion in the mid-twentieth century. Nowadays, however, his name is largely forgotten, and the erudite, sizeable second volume of his history of Greek religion, which also covers the Roman Empire, is not even mentioned in a recent collective volume on religion in the Roman Empire.[1] Therefore, it was a good idea of the Swedish institute in Athens to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Nilsson’s death (1967) with an, admittedly, fairly slim volume, of which the contributions focus on his major works. In the somewhat disappointing introduction, Jesper Svenbro has missed the opportunity to shed light on the personality of Nilsson, his career and his influence in Sweden. Instead, he concentrates on Nilsson’s anti-Nazi stance, which indeed is well documented. But he also unsuccessfully attempts to exonerate Nilsson from the charge of racism, although the latter’s views in this respect are much better illuminated by Michael Konaris (below).
The real content begins with Jon Mikalson’s discussion of Nilsson’s Geschichte der griechischen Religion I, of which the second edition was reprinted in 1967 and included twenty pages of addenda. Mikalson traces the genesis of the book and notes that it was intended as a reference work. He focuses on a few key ideas in the book, such as that Greek religion should be studied historically, although Nilsson’s idea that Greek religion declined during the Classical period seems rather odd. Although Nilsson believed ritual to be the basis of Greek religion, it is not wholly accurate, as Mikalson (28) suggests, that he avoided statements of ‘belief’ or ‘Greek beliefs’.[2] Nilsson’s rather sober analyses of rituals clearly appeal to Mikalson, as he considers many modern interpretations ‘highly speculative’ (29), but this may also be one of the reasons why Nilsson’s book no longer appeals to most readers. Nilsson also argued that Greek poetry and philosophy reflected little influence from practised Greek religion and did not influence it, but this overlooks the fact that unbelief, if not atheism, would be unimaginable without the philosophical critiques of religious ideas and practices.[3] Given his priority to ritual, it is not surprising that Nilsson rejected mythology as a source for Greek religion,[4] although myths have much to tell about the gods. However, as Mikalson shows, Nilsson’s perception of the gods, particularly his view of Apollo as the most important one, was generally misguided. In this respect, he should have noted that in Nilsson’s handbook gods only appear surprisingly late, only at p. 385! Another of Nilsson’s outdated ideas was that mysticism or ecstaticism was a feature of pre-Greek religion that was largely suppressed in early Greek religion. Still, Mikalson rightly concludes that we owe to Nilsson the historical approach and periodisation of Greek religion as well as the extensive application of epigraphical and archaeological evidence. Mikalson briefly compares Nilsson with Walter Burkert (1931-2015), whose handbook essentially replaced Nilsson (33).[5] He evidently prefers Nilsson, and it is true that Burkert does not compare as a handbook. Yet his book is much more readable, more up to date in many respects as well as being much more imaginative. Nilsson, on the other hand, as we may add, had little or no sympathy for his more imaginative contemporaries, such as Karl Meuli (1891-1968) on sacrifice and shamanism,[6] Henri Jeanmaire (1884-1960) on initiation,[7] and Eric R. Dodds (1893-1997) on the irrational aspects of Greek religion, except for Dodds’ views on Hellenistic religion and theurgy.[8]
The first part of Nilsson’s second volume on Greek religion, which concerns the Hellenistic era, is discussed by Eftychia Stavrianopoulou. She notes that Nilsson opposed the emphasis on syncretism placed by many scholars in his time,[9] and tried to locate religious changes within the larger framework of social, cultural and political changes. However, as in the first volume, Nilsson saw ‘real religion’ only in the lower classes. Furthermore, he believed that the new situation fostered feelings of uncertainty and detachment, stimulating interest in magic and astrology, the ruler cults, mystery religions and the formation of new religious communities. His rather gloomy picture of Hellenistic religion as an age of anxiety has long been refuted, and much of traditional Greek religion endured well into the Roman Empire, despite these new aspects. As we know little or nothing of beliefs in the classical period, we should also be reticent for later periods. Undoubtedly, Hellenistic festivals had often a clearer political purpose than a religious one, but this does not help us in determining the religious feelings of the participants, about which we rarely, if ever, are informed. However this may be, Nilsson’s leading idea that the decline of traditional classical religion coincided with new developments in science and philosophy that made way for new religious needs is still worth considering.
After his magnum opus, we proceed with some smaller works. Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge discusses Nilsson’s Greek Folk Religion (1961, originally published in 1940 as Greek Popular Religion: 67-85).[10] After a brief sketch of the developments in the study of religion, in which she highlights evolutionism and the notion of irrationality, Pirenne-Delforge notes that Nilsson was greatly influenced by the work of Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831-1880),[11] although she overlooked the fact that Nilsson himself was a farmer’s son, who proudly mentions that his family had lived on the same farm since the eighteenth century.[12] Nilsson saw agricultural and pastoral life of the countryside as the foundation of Greek religion, which meant that he opposed both the Cambridge myth and ritual school, with its focus on the primitive aspects of Greek religion, and Walter F. Otto’s (1874-1958) attempts to proclaim the objective reality of the Greek gods. This is why he focussed on cult rather than belief. As Pirenne-Delforge notes, this preference for agriculture led him to incorporate discussions of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Panathenaia, and the Dionysia (although the latter two hardly conform to his agricultural premise) and to view the cult of saints as the immediate successor to that of heroes — an untenable idea.[13] Subsequently, she persuasively contests Jon Mikalson’s usage of the term popular in his studies of Greek religion. To illustrate the problems of the term ‘popular’, Pirenne-Delforge briefly discusses Nilsson’s analysis of the nympholept Archedemos of the famous cave in Vari. According to Nilsson, he was a poor man and his cult an example of ‘popular’ religion. However, Pirenne-Delforge rightly argues that he was probably not poor nor a worshipper beyond ‘polis religion’. Ultimately, she argues, we should avoid applying notions constructed from dichotomies such as ‘popular religion’ or ‘personal belief’ to the ancient evidence.
From peasants, we turn to the prehistory of Greek religion with Matthew Haysom’s informed discussion of Nilsson’s well-known book on Minoan-Mycenaean religion (1927, 19502). Haysom begins by noting that for Nilsson the Minoan-Mycenaean religion was polytheistic, in contrast to the ideas of Minoan monotheism proposed by Arthur Evans (1851–1941) and others. However, Nilsson avoided mentioning priests, which, as Haysom also notes, was indicative of Nilsson’s methodology in strictly distinguishing between presenting and interpreting evidence. Basically, Nilsson was mainly interested in the continuity with Classical religion. Here, Haysom presents a balanced view of Nilsson’s insights, some of which were clearly wrong, such as the claimed prominence of female divine figures (an idea he shared with his contemporaries) or the presence of only domestic shrines. Nevertheless, as Haysom shows, Nilsson’s idea of continuity had a significant impact on Burkert’s portrayal of pre-historic religion and, to a certain extent, on that of Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood (1945-2007). However, continuing excavations have shown that instead of a world of continuity, there was, in fact, a world of different societies with different world views, the nature of which kept changing over time. We have moved today from Nilsson’s fairly static view to a very dynamic view of the ‘the millennium and a half between the first cities on Crete and Herodotos’ (110).
The book concludes with Michael Konaris’ discussion of Greek Piety (1948), which is arguably the most interesting chapter in the book. In this work, Nilsson aimed to demonstrate the changes in Greek religion with the changes of the time. Of particular importance is Nilsson’s emphasis on the communal nature of Greek religion, which goes against modern trends of individual agency. One might have thought that in this respect he was influenced by Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), but he was not and even sharply polemicised against him (Geschichte I, 63-64). Notable too, as Konaris (125) observes, is Nilsson’s insistence that rituals were not merely routine but also expressions of devotion to the gods.
Nilsson began his book with an unlikely picture of the Archaic age as being full of maenads, wandering seers and collectors of oracles, combined with the infectious cults of Orphism and Dionysos, whose dancing frenzies he compared to those of the medieval dance epidemics. However, these trends were countered by what he called ‘legalism’, the desire for justice, for rendering to the gods what was the gods (1948, 30-31), as exemplified by Hesiod’s Works and Days. In the next chapter, Nilsson argued that the successful outcome of the war against the Persians strengthened the aspect of ‘legalism’ and caused mysticism to retreat. However, although also strengthening the rational side of Greek religion, the victory promoted the intertwining of religion with patriotism, which ‘robbed religion of its proper and indwelling value’ (1948, 69). Philosophy gradually took over, but ‘religious feeling was never lower than when the Hellenistic period began’ (1948, 91).
In the last chapter, Nilsson discussed the disintegration of Greek religion and the emergence of new elements on which Christianity would build. One of these new elements were men with non-Hellenic blood. Differently from Svenbro (above), Konaris demonstrates that such ideas rooted in race biology permeated Nilsson’s work from the early 1920s to at least the 1950s, if not beyond. The religious ferment of the Hellenistic and later periods presented possibilities taken up by Christianity, which, as Nilsson, hardly convincingly, argued (1948, 116), could build on monotheistic tendencies in Greek philosophy. However, this was only one of the reasons for Christianity’s expansion. For Nilsson, the main reason was that Christianity was the healthiest religion in antiquity because it opposed mysticism and occultism as well as keeping away from cosmology—clearly a reflection of Nilsson’s own religious views, and not a particularly persuasive argument in the light of recent discussions.[14]
Ultimately, as Konaris argues, despite ideological problems and his own religious convictions, Nilsson’s view of Greek religion as a dynamic entity, responding to changes in its historical and social context remains valuable. Clearly, nobody since Nilsson’s time has mastered the same encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient religion from Homer to late antiquity. Ultimately, we are dwarves standing on the shoulders of this giant.
Authors and titles
Initial remarks, Jenny Wallensten & Gunnel Ekroth
Science, evergreen. An introduction, Jesper Svenbro
Martin P. Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen Religion vol. 1, Jon Mikalson, pp. 23–37,
Hellenistic religion(s). Revisiting Martin P. Nilsson’s Geschichte der griechischen Religion vol. 2. Die hellenistische und römische Zeit, Eftychia Stavrianopoulou
To be or not to be … “popular”. Martin P. Nilsson’s Greek folk religion, its context, and its modern echoes, Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge
Nilsson in the Bronze Age. The place of prehistory in the history of Greek religion. Martin P. Nilsson’s Minoan-Mycenaean religion, Matthew Haysom
A history of changing religious attitudes in Greek antiquity. Martin P. Nilsson’s Greek piety, Michael D. Konaris
Notes
[1] J. Rüpke and G. Woolf (eds.), Religion in the Roman Empire (Stuttgart, 2021).
[2] See M.P. Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen Religion I (Munich, 19411, 19552, 19673) 2, 457, 462, 495; note also Volksglaube (183, 218); Opuscula selecta III (Lund, 1960) 3-10 (‘Kult und Glaube in der altgriechischen Religion’).
[3] See most recently: J.N. Bremmer, ‘Youth, Atheism and (Un)Belief in Late Fifth-Century Athens’, in B. Edelmann-Singer et al. (eds), Sceptic and Believer in Ancient Mediterranean Religions (Tübingen, 2020) 53-68; J.C. Ford, Atheism at the agora: a history of unbelief in ancient Greek polytheism (London and New York, 2023); M.E. Kotwick, ‘Interrogating the Gods’, in J. Billings and Ch. Moore (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists (Cambridge, 2023) 251-76; T. Harrison, ‘Greek Atheism: A Mirage’, G&R 72 (2025) 88-108; R. Soneira-Martínez, Relational Atheism: studying unbelief in ancient Greece (Stuttgart, 2026); J. Henry, ‘Greek Atheism: A Reality’, G&R 73 (2026) forthcoming.
[4] See already his preface to his Griechische Feste von religiöser Bedeutung (Stuttgart, 1906) v-vii.
[5] W. Burkert, Greek Religion (Oxford, 1985). For Burkert, see now the many obituaries, hommages, memoirs, etc. in W. Burkert, Kleine Schriften X.1, ed. Ch. Riedweg (Göttingen, 2025).
[6] Nilsson, Geschichte I, 145, 152 (sacrifice), 164, 860 (shamanism). For Meuli, see now C. Ferrari, La renna di Ercole. Filologia e antropologia nell’opera di Karl Meuli (Rome, 2025).
[7] Nilsson, Geschichte I, 64, but see J.N. Bremmer, Becoming a Man in Ancient Greece and Rome (Tübingen, 2021) xii-xiii.
[8] Nilsson, Geschichte I, 66 mentions Dodds positively, but does not really engage with his ideas. For Dodds, see R. Parker, ‘The Greeks and the Irrational’, in Ch. Stray et al. (eds), Rediscovering E.R. Dodds (Oxford, 2019) 116-27.
[9] Recently, the idea of syncretism is being replaced by that of appropriation, cf. A. Bendlin and J. Dijkstra (eds), Appropriation and Religion in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Cambridge, 2026).
[10] Note also the brief evaluation by J. Kindt, ‘The Individual, Personal Religion and the City’, in Kindt (ed.), Personal Religion in the Ancient Greek World (Cambridge, 2025) 1-24 at 8.
[11] Especially, W. Mannhardt, Wald- und Feldkulte, 2 vols (Berlin, 1875/1877), cf. Th. Perabo: Wilhelm Mannhardt und die Anfänge der Volkskunde: neue Wege der Wissensproduktion im 19. Jahrhundert (Münster, 2022).
[12] Nilsson, Opuscula selecta III, ix.
[13] For this idea, first promoted by Hermann Usener (1834-1905), see J. N. Bremmer, ‘From Heroes to Saints and from Martyrological to Hagiographical Discourse’, in F. Heinzer et al. (eds), Sakralität und Heldentum (Würzburg, 2017) 35-66.
[14] J.N. Bremmer, The Rise of Christianity through the Eyes of Gibbon, Harnack and Rodney Stark (Groningen, 20102); É. Rebillard, The Triumph of Christianity Redescribed (Ithaca and London, 2026); T. Whitmarsh, Rome’s Age of Revolution: Augustus, Empire, and the Making of Christianity (New York, 2026).