Abstract
This lecture summarizes the findings of two years of lectures on religious norms and questions of authority in the Greek world. The theme was vast, and it was from the specific angle of questioning the place of the gods in Greek normative thinking that it was approached. The field of " the law " is one of the places where the so-called Greek miracle crystallized, as in some others where the Greeks gave their gods the boot. On the contrary, the point of view adopted here was to consider polytheism as a possible matrix for this Greek creativity, or at the very least as a framework conducive to its flourishing.
Through an in-depth study of the use of the lexical field of themis and nomos in poetry and prose up to the end of the5th century, and in epigraphic ritual norms, we have uncovered some of the mechanisms at work in representations of the norm: the regulating power of themis, of which Zeus is the guarantor; the reference to an all-encompassing divine nomos , which can be identified with Zeus himself ; the importance of the idea of distribution attached to nomos, and of the devolution of each person's share in the distribution of timai ; the omnipresence of dikē," justice ", to express the framework that accommodates all types of relationships within human societies and between men and gods ; the gradual emergence of the double lexical field of piety, that ofeusebeia and that ofhosion, stemming from the need to refine the expression of a just relationship to the gods.
The importance of nomos in this approach to polytheism through norms (or norms through polytheism !) does not contradict the observation that nomos was not " sacré " in itself, even if a nomos theios can be conceived as the horizon of expectation for the nomoi of the cities. The only occurrences of the expression hieros nomos are either that the decisions in question concerned the hiera (but even this was not systematic) or, perhaps, as Plato writes, that the nomos in question had passed through the direct sanction of the Delphic oracle. The legitimacy of human nomoi, and the righteousness, the dikaion, that goes with them, is rooted in a world order conceived as superior to them. This order is based on principles of appropriate distribution, which communities must grasp, while retaining a wide margin for manoeuvre, negotiation and discussion in the application of such principles. The gods are partners in the world they have ordered by distribution.
