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Ian Rutherford. State Pilgrims and Sacred Observers in Ancient Greece: A Study of Theoria and Theoroi. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xxvii, 534. $120.00. ISBN 978-1-107-03822-6.
For the Pump Room at Bath, where the heroine of Northanger Abbey goes eagerly to meet Mr. Tilney, the object of her growing affections, substitute the festival on Delos where, according to a story preserved in Callimachus' Aetia, Acontius from Keos first set eyes on and fell instantly in love with the Naxian Cydippe; both had traveled to the island for the annual celebration of the Delia. Ian Rutherford cites this, among other examples, in his innovatory and insight-packed study of the institution of theoria, broadly defined as participation in a sacred delegation or sacred travel. Through the course of twenty-one chapters that present, explore, and synthesize the often fragmentary evidence, much of it from recently discovered epigraphic sources, the author moves from our earliest known instance of a theoros or "god-watcher"-one Bronze Age Sumerian king by the name of Gudea who visited the sanctuary of the goddess Nanshe in the city Nina-through to the final known instance, at Antioch in A.D. 507.
The opening chapter confronts the question of how to organize the mass of heterogeneous material and lays out the structure of the book. Following a survey of approaches...