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Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians

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Dale B. Martin (Author)
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4 out of 5 stars 1 customer review
ISBN-13: 978-0674024076
ISBN-10: 0674024079
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 1, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0674024079
  • ISBN-13: 978-0674024076
  • Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.9 x 7.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,653,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 starsOne arbitrary belief replaces another
By M. A. Plus on May 14, 2012
Format: Paperback
Dale B. Martin argues that the ancient Greeks and Romans lacked the concept of "the supernatural," and they instead held a more monistic view of the world where people believed that, for example, if you went into a forest, you could just as easily encounter a superhuman entity called a "daimon" as you could see a deer. As a result, the common people attributed all kinds of activities to daimons, and to their superiors, the gods, including the infliction of gratuitous diseases or harm on people for not worshipping them, just as people often treated each other harshly in response to disrespect. This idea offended the sensibilities of higher status Greek men of an intellectual turn who felt contempt for vulgarians and didn't want to believe that the daimons, a concept which included the Greek gods more familiar to us, behaved like the rabble they had to put up with as neighbors. They argued, arbitrarily, that in fact the daimons didn't behave that way because their superior power over humans also made them ethically superior, just as the high status men in the Greek city-state ideally displayed ethical superiority over the vulgarians. The traditional beliefs which attributed diseases and disasters to the daimons they characterized as "deisidaimonia"; depending on the context the word could mean either proper piety or superstition, but as time went on it assumed more of the latter meaning. As Martin points out, they just invented this view of the daimons out of their own unexamined prejudices, not because they had made new empirical discoveries about how the daimons operate.Read more ›
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