Volume 46, Number 20 · December 16, 1999
Varieties of Polytheistic Experience
By Garth Fowden
Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
by Ramsay MacMullen
Yale University Press, 282 pp., $16.00 (paper)
Once upon a time, perhaps toward the end of the eighteenth century, at any rate when Greece was still part of the Ottoman Empire, Athens was suffering from a long drought. The Turks went to their mosques and prayed to Allah, to no avail. The Greeks gathered in their churches and sought help from the Prophet Elijah, yet the Attic skies stayed blue for months on end. Last and—in the eyes of the others—very much least, the 'Arabs' or 'Ethiopians,' the Turks' black slaves, gathered at their open-air mosque amid the pillars of the old temple of Olympian Zeus, near the base of the Acropolis. With their women and children all together, they prostrated themselves on the ground. Then three times they cried out to God, beating their breasts and pinching their children till they howled. After the first cry, a few small clouds peeped out from behind Mount Hymettus. After the second, the sky became thoroughly overcast. During the third, sheets of rain swept across the little town's houses, its mosques, and its churches.[1]
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