To be or not to be … “popular”. Martin P. Nilsson’s Greek folk religion, its context, and its modern echoes

Martin P. Nilsson’s book Greek popular religion was published in 1940 and republished in 1961 with the slightly modified title of Greek folk religion. This work was deeply rooted in the conviction that many parts of Archaic and Classical Greece, outside the leading urban centres, were still in what Nilsson called “a backward state”. These places were supposed to preserve the way of life that had been common in earlier times, when Greeks were mainly peasants, not very advanced and culturally primitive. According to Nilsson, the simple religion of unlettered peasants was the most persistent form of Greek religion and at the core of what he called “popular” or “folk” religion. After placing this paradigm in the scientific context of its emergence, the present paper examines the paradoxes of Nilsson’s interpretive model and compares his dichotomous view of “popular” vs “high” religion to some current approaches in the study of ancient Greek religion.