Maurizio Bettini – författare

What ancient polytheistic religions can teach us about building inclusive and equitable futures  At the heart of this book is a simple comparison: monotheistic religions are exclusive, whereas ancient polytheistic religions are inclusive. In this thought-provoking book, Maurizio Bettini, one of today’s foremost classicists, uses the expansiveness of ancient polytheism to shine a bright light on a darker corner of our modern times.  It can be easy to see ancient religions as inferior, less free, and remote from shared visions of an inclusive world. But, as Bettini deftly shows, many ancient practices tended to produce results aligned with contemporary progressive values, like pluralism and diversity. In Praise of Polytheism does not chastise the modern world or blame monotheism for our woes but rather shows in clear, sharp prose how much we can learn from ancient religions, underscoring the limitations of how we view the world and ourselves today.

Oral culture, just because it does not have an inexhaustible memory at its disposal, by nature tends to preserve its cultural inheritance. Written culture forgets nothing: but when everything can be recalled or somehow retrieved, the problem becomes what to remember and what to comprise to oblivion. This provocative book, written with a light touch, rooted in the Classics but ranging over the whole of Western literary culture, addresses many of the major issues that face us at the turn of the millennium. What is our shared cultural curency? What use - good or bad - do we make of it? Why should anyone involve themselves with the Classics? The tyranny of the anniversary and the magpie nature of the anthology, the urge for instant gratification, the attraction of the cultural canon, the way writing encloses or even imprisons - all these themes are brought together in a passionate plea for the Classics as essentially impervious to these vulgar urges of our age - the Age of Indiscretion.

The culmination of a project aimed at showcasing, in a systematic way, the potential of applying anthropological perspectives to classical studies, this volume highlights the fundamental contribution this approach has to make to our understanding of ancient Roman culture. Through the close study of themes such as myth, polytheism, sacrifice, magic, space, kinship, the gift, friendship, economics, animals, plants, riddles, metaphors, and images in Roman society (often in comparison with Greece) - where the texts of ancient culture are allowed to speak in their own terms and where the experience of the natives (rather than the horizon of the observer) is privileged - a rich panorama emerges of the worldview, beliefs, and deep structures that shaped and guided this culture.

This volume offers innovative perspectives that reassess and update so-called Oral Theory, bridging classical scholarship with cutting-edge theoretical contributions, and host a dialogue with cognitive sciences (linguistics and neuroscience), anthropology, and complexity theory. The book propounds theoretical perspectives alongside case-studies ranging from Homer and Athenian literacy to Roman law.