The ancient world did not  ended with a Greek miracle that anticipated the Enlightenment by breaking with myth, tradition, and  superstition to achieve a critical view of religion. In fact  Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Socrates have  often been  singled out in this respect and accorded particular credit. Closer reading, however, makes clear that these thinkers were hardly critics of religion as such, but only critics of specific forms. Thus, for all that Xenophanes chided Homer and Hesiod for telling scandalous tales about the gods, and notwithstanding his sly suggestion that cattle imagined gods in bovine form, he also maintained, apropos of proper etiquette at drinking parties: "It is fitting, above all, for men of good cheer to hymn the god with well-spoken mythoi and pure logoi, having poured libations and prayed to be able to accomplish just things" (Xenophanes, DK 21B11 and 21B112, 21B15, cf, 21B16; 21BI, II. 13-16). He made clear in the same passage, which represents the longest excerpt we have of his work, his concern that religion should promote decorum, well-being, grace, and har­mony. As a negative complement, he did maintain "there is nothing useful" in beliefs that promote violent disorders (stasias sphedanas), but this is hardly a critique of religion per se (II. 21-23).

Similarly, Socrates claimed to have grounded his incessant critical activity on an oracle received from the Delphic Pythia, and he took pains to assure the jury that tried him for impiety (asebéia) that he was incapable of this offense, since a personal daimôn supervised his conduct and he always heeded this deity's advice (Plato, Apology 20e-23c, 40a-c). Plato's valuation of reasoned knowledge (episteme) over faith (pistis) and opinion (doxa) also involved less criticism of religion than is normally supposed. Thus, he maintained that the philosophical disposition which makes it possible for a very small elite to ac­quire such knowledge is itself the product of postmortem experiences before the soul's reincarnation. In that heavenly realm, ultimate reality is revealed to all, but its true nature is remembered only by those who have cultivated ex­ceptional powers of self-control by their prior training and askésis (Plato, Phaedrus 246d-249d, Republic 614b-621d). Ultimately, Plato's epistemology is inseparable from his theory of the soul and its fate (psychology in the most literal sense and eschatology), also his metaphysics and soteriology.

In a word, his philosophy incorporates and depends on religion, albeit a form of religion that eschews civic cult, while drawing on dissident strains of speculation current among Orphics, Pythagoreans, and others.

"The ancient" does break down, of course, but it does so gradually, not through anything exceptional. . There are  a set of examples that gestured toward medicine (the Babylonian toothache charm), warfare (Roman divination before battle), law (Greek oaths), and diplomacy (Persian use of genealogies to court potential allies). Change, however, can be seen in all these domains, as when epilepsy ("the sacred disease") is said to derive from natural causes and when generals repeat divinatory consultations until they get the results they want or proceed in defiance of the readings (Hippocratic corpus, On the Sacred Disease; Cicero, On Divination). The same shift toward a "post-ancient" less thoroughly encompassed by religion can be perceived when statements are secured by signing a contract, rather than swearing an oath; or when threats and bribes, rather than invocations of shared ancestors, are used to enlist allies (Thucydides 5.89).

Such changes come piecemeal, however, so that antiquity ends-if the model we are currently entertaining permits us to conclude that it ends at all-only in fits and starts. Indeed, the model allows the view that "the ancient" reasserts itself (or simply persists) whenever oaths are sworn in a court of law, wherever prayers are said for the sick or for soldiers in battle, and whenever nations make common cause on the basis of shared beliefs.

In fact the most authoritative discourses of antiquity tended to be acts of speech that understood-and represented-themselves to be inspired. Mantic, oracular, and prophetic speech regularly enjoyed such status, as did royal proclamations and poetic performance. Poetry was extraordinarily important, and the reasons for this must be assessed from two complementary perspectives, technological and ideological. Prior to the emergence of alphabetic script and the consequent spread of literacy, poetry was the most effective technique of memory. Any proposition or narrative that could be put in poetic language was thereby rendered more memorable than in any other linguistic form and therefore more likely to be transmitted across space and time.

Such encoding was reserved for those cultural contents that were (or better: were judged and became, as a result of this judgment) most important. As Hesiod put it, the very breath with which he spoke-the material substance of his speech-was placed in his lungs by the Muses themselves, who were daughters of Zeus and Memory  (Hesiod, Theogony). The Delphic Pythia, by contrast, gave oracles only in trance, when possessed by Apollo. The proof that the god spoke through her came not only from the state of her body and visage, but also because she spoke in perfect hexameters (Plutarch, On the Obsolescence of Oracles). Similar constructions of poetic discourse as sacred and of poets as "masters of truth"  are to be found among the Hebrew prophets, Vedic seers, Roman sibyls, and the hymns attributed to Zarathustra.

With the spread of literacy and alphabetic script, written prose gradually displaced oral poetry as the most effective mnemonic technique, and widespread cultural changes followed. In the realm of religion, sacred books came to enjoy higher status than did inspired utterances.

Growing awareness that the latter might not be what they claimed and were open to manipulation by their human agents also served to undercut their authority. This authority might be preserved, however, when the utterances in question were textualized and reconstituted as revealed scripture, as in the case of the biblical prophets and the Sibylline books.

So bibliocentric (initially in the broad, and later in the narrow sense) did religious discourse become that the danger emerged of excess production and oversupply. To control this danger, priestly bodies assumed the power to impose limits through canon formation and the closure of prophecy, sometimes with the backing of state power, as when Augustus had the Sibylline Books collected, purged of suspicious content, and placed in the temple of his patron deity, where they were kept under lock and key, accessible only to authorized priests (Suetonius, Augustus 31.1). Similar processes, if less dramatic and under less direct state control, elsewhere produced restricted bodies of scripture that were invested with authoritative status. Energies were directed toward the interpretation of these texts rather than the production of new ones. Reading rather than speaking became the privileged moment of religious discourse, and innovation no longer came through the claim of inspiration, but through the practice of shrewd hermeneutics. To put it in slightly different terms, as Jeremiah yielded to the rabbis, John the Baptist to the Church Fathers, Muhammad to the qadis and ulama, one can see not only Weber's routinization of charisma, but also the historic shift from a prophetic ethos associated with orality to the scholarly ethos of the text.

Religious practices also changed significantly from the ancient to the post-ancient. Two sorts of practice fell into relative desuetude, both of which pur­ported to mediate between the sacred and profane in direct, material fashion. The first of these was a whole complex of behaviors involving the statues of de­ities. Most commonly, the presence of such statues in temples constituted the sanctuaries as the site of a god's residence on earth, thereby cementing the relation of a specific city and people to a specific deity. Thus, to cite but one example, the statue of Marduk in the temple Esagila at Babylon marked the city as this god's special domain and the god as this city's patron, also as the dominant member of the pantheon when the city's power expanded. For as was true with other Mesopotamian cities, when the Babylonians were victorious in warfare, they often captured (the statues of) other cities' deities as tokens of subordination and risked similar capture of their own god should they in turn be conquered. The priests of this temple were charged with the care, feeding, decoration, and worship of Marduk's resident statue, which is to say his virtual, palpable presence. This was not mere servitude, however, since deity and peo­ple were engaged in an ongoing mutually beneficial exchange. The flow of benefits to humanity was particularly dramatized at the Akitu (New Year) festival, when the king clasped the hands of Marduk's image and thereby had his legitimacy and power renewed by the god himself, with consequences for the prosperity of the land and people:

[Marduk], exalted among the gods,[Who dwells in the temple Esag]il, who creates the laws, [Who ...] to the great gods, [...] I praise your heroism.[May] your heart [be sympathetic] to whoever seizes your hands.( A. Sachs, in Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, p. 3 34)

Other peoples developed different practices. Sometimes access to the statues was restricted to the priesthood or its high-ranking members. Sometimes worshippers were permitted to make contact by entering an inner sanctum of the temple where the statue/deity was housed. In other cases, images were brought forth to outer chambers on festal occasions or even paraded through the streets of the city. Some of the statues represented benevolent, nurturing deities who brought blessings to their people; others were demanding and jealous figures, who threatened those they found inadequately devoted or attentive. But in all instances, these blocks of material substance were the site where relations between the human and the divine were transacted, the point of conjuncture be­tween sacred and profane.

At least equal in importance was the practice of sacrifice, the most common and also the most significant form of ritual among virtually all ancient peoples. Countless theories of sacrifice have been offered  and the practice itself could be infinitely varied in its performance. Ordinarily, it involved the immolation of an animal or vegetable offering (much more rarely a human victim), the spiritual portion of which was believed to pass to the divine, while the material portion became the basis of a feast enjoyed by the human performers, with the gods as their hon­ored guests, thereby restoring a commensality lost in the mythic primordium.

All details of the performance could be invested with symbolic content-for instance, the division of the victim's body might provide analysis of the categoric distinctions between divine, human, and animal levels of existence-or the ritual might replicate events recounted in cosmogonic myth that homologize the body to the world as microcosm to macrocosm. Sacrifice also provided a means to invest bloody and violent acts with sacral significance and avoid the charge that one killed just to obtain food. Rather, one assumed the burden and awesome re­sponsibility of caring for the gods and the cosmos, which meant performing each minute part of the action in perfectly controlled, symbolically appropriate fashion. Preparation of the feast and disposal of the remains, no less than actual dispatch of the victim, were subject to the same regulation and scrutiny, since all aspects of sacrificial ritual were "good to think" and therefore subject to symbolic elaboration.

Destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE made it impossible for the priests of Israel to continue their performance of sacrifice. The resulting reorganization of cult and thought led to the emergence of that which we know as Judaism(s). In other traditions, no such dramatic events were responsible, but over time sacrifice and the use of statues ceased to form the center of ritual practice, and material mediations of every sort diminished in their import. They were displaced-although never completely-by practices that relocated the prime site of interest and action inside the human subject. Prayer; the cultivation of certain valorized dispositions, sentiments, and states of being; the habit of monitoring one's progress toward these ethical and existential ideals; and reporting flaws and slips to spiritual advisors, while submitting to their guidance and discipline, became privileged aspects of religious practice with the move toward the post-ancient.

Clearly, these developments correlated with shifts in the nature of religious community. In the ancient, religion was a shared concern of groups existing at familial, civic, ethnic, and national levels of integration. The collective identity of such groups was strongly overdetermined, being based simultaneously on territory, language, polity, kinship, and laws, as well as the religion that members held in common and that, in turn, held them. One's neighbors were thus one's fellow citizens and also one's co-religionists, who spoke the same lan­guage, shared the same norms, celebrated the same festivals, and worshiped at the same altars, seeking favor of the same gods for the group of which they were all a part. The post-ancient, by contrast, saw the emergence of communities based primarily-and also most explicitly and emphatically-on religious considerations, integrating persons who might be divided by geography, language, culture, or citizenship.

This development had begun as early as the 6th century BCE with the Pythagoreans. Among its contributing factors was the formation of great empires that brought disparate populations into a single political entity and tax structure, but left subject peoples only very imperfectly integrated by religion and culture. At the same time, expanded trade and improved communications permitted relatively wide circulation of religious tenets, texts, and teachers, all of which gradually refashioned themselves in broader, less localized idioms as they engaged-and absorbed feedback from-a disparate international audience. At times, imperial powers sought to introduce aspects of their native religion to the provinces, or at least to the elite strata therein (e.g., Seleucid policy at the time of the Maccabean revolt).

At other times, the imperial center imported religious forms from the periphery as a conscious policy (e.g., the Roman evocatio ritual that appropriated gods of conquered enemies); as a means to indulge growing taste for the exotic (e.g., the introduction of Isis and Cybele at Rome); or as part of the backwash that inevitably accompanies conquest (e.g., Mithraism). The diaspora of various groups (such as the Magi and the Jews) and the proselytizing activities of others (the missions recounted in the Acts of the Apostles and related apocrypha) also contrib­uted to the de-territorialization of religious community characteristic of the post-ancient.

In contrast to older groups focused on a specific temple, city, cult place, or sacred locale, which they served and from which they took their identity, the increasingly international, multiethnic, and geographically dispersed population of post-ancient religious communities was held together not only by shared symbols, beliefs, and practices, but also by itinerant leaders and mobile texts such as the epistles of the New Testament, the polemic exchanges among Church Fathers, the corpora assembled at Qumran and Nag Hammadi, or the rabbinic responsa.

Inclusion or exclusion in such amorphous communities was not ascribed by birth in a given place, lineage, or social stratum, but was elective. One joined by conversion, that is, by accepting the beliefs, practices, texts, and leadership that constituted the group and were central to their self-understanding. The promise of salvation provided a prime inducement to convert and the conviction that one's faith offered salvation to others (whose contributions would sustain and renew the group) provided a prime motive to proselytize.

Soteriological concerns thus figured prominently in the life of post-ancient religions, whose members sought-and promised others-escape from a world they experienced as hostile, bewildering, and finite to an alternative realm of eternal bliss. Such escape was prefigured by the move from one social group, identity, and set of loyalties to another: abandoning one's family, for instance, to join one's new brothers-and-sisters-in-Christ (Matthew 10.37, Luke 14.26).

This shift further correlates to a change from "locative" worldviews concerned with the proper emplacement of all things and persons (since being-in-place is what renders them sacred) to ‘utopian’ orientations that valorize mobility as transcendence and liberation.

One final point about religious community in the post-ancient context: In groups that made shared beliefs and practices their chief criteria of inclusion, deviation from these had serious consequences and could provoke not only debate and discussion, but also power struggles and schism. Accordingly, issues of heterodoxy and orthodoxy, heteropraxy and orthopraxy, heresy and heresiology all rose to prominence, along with the institutional means to frame and resolve them-and also to enforce the hierarchic elevation of victors over vanquished.

This brings us to institutions. In the ancient, specifically religious institutions, priesthoods, temples, cult sites, and so on-were typically subordinate to institutions of the state, be these civic, national, or imperial, democratic, oligarchic, or royal. Smaller and weaker than their political counterparts, religious institutions served and were dependent on them for protection, financial support, and personnel. As examples, consider Athenian interest in Eleusis, the temples of the Acropolis, and the Panathenaea; the haoma sacrifices at Persepolis ; or the integration of priestly and magisterial offices in the Roman cursus honorum.

Only in a very few cases, where religious institutions possessed extraordinary prestige and authority such that they attracted an international clientele and rich contributions, were they able to sustain themselves and achieve a situation of relative autonomy. Delphi is the paradigmatic case, alongside only a handful of others.

In the post-ancient, some religious institutions such as the rabbinate attained a certain measure of autonomy from the states to which they were subject, but from which they maintained a cautious distance. In other situations-Byzantium and the Islamic caliphate, in particular-religious and political organizations and concerns interpenetrated each other so thoroughly as practically to merge. The most dramatic development, however, occurred in the West, where events beginning with the conversion of Constantine and the Edict of Milan (313 CE) produced a centralized, well-staffed and well-funded, hierarchic religious establishment that became the senior partner in the collaborations of church and state subsequent to the fall of Rome (476 CE).

In all these forms and locales, however, religious bodies secured considerable control over such vital arenas of activity as education (general and professional), social welfare (charity and counseling), record keeping, rites of passage (the crucial moments of subject and family formation), and moral scrutiny and control (through preaching, confession, absolution, and pastoral care). Gradually, they perfected the ability to extract revenue from the faithful through a variety of mechanisms. Thus, in addition to contributions (tithing, zakkat) that were often voluntary in name only, bequests intended to secure salvation were also an important source of income, as was commerce in spiritual goods and services of varied sorts: blessings, indulgences, relics, charms, mystic knowledge, magic formulas, and so forth.

As ancient religion gave way to post-ancient, a discourse based on canonic corpora of sacred texts displaced inspired performances of sacred verse; prac­tices of prayer, contemplation, and self-perfection displaced mediations through sacrifice and statues of the deity; de-territorialized elective communities constructed on the basis of religious adherence displaced multi-stranded groups within which ties of geography, politics, kinship, culture, and religion were all isomorphic and mutually reinforcing; and institutions that, with some exceptions, had better funding, a wider range of activities, and more autonomy from the state displaced their weaker, more localized predecessors.

Although these sweeping generalizations call for extended treatment that would attend to the nuances and particularities of a thousand specific cases, the transition yields Christianity(ies), Judaism(s), and Islam(s), with the westernmost form of Christianity as the extreme case.