Abstract
Modern ideas of salvation are inevitably mediated by the two great worldviews of late antiquity, with their objective and absolute notions of salvation : the Salus publica of the Roman Empire, which represented the security and prosperity of the state, and the transcendent salus/soteria of Christian, Gnostic and Neoplatonic metaphysical systems. Yet in ancient Greece, salvation was not generally a fixed, reified concept, either in the political or religious spheres. Projecting modern categories, or simply looking for precedents, is often wrong. For the Greeks, every possible situation of salvation derives rather from a concrete narrative, where a specific danger(e.g. shipwreck, war, disease), the saving action, the individuals or groups saved, or the saving agents (divine or human) are far more central than the abstract or generalizing concept of soteria.
Different literary genres (from epic to tragedy, from second-hand peans to philosophical protreptics), exploit possible narratives of salvation in different ways, and use them to confront important issues about the human and the divine : e.g. human dependence on gods who save, the possibility of finding salvation in men themselves, the relationship between individual and collective salvation - all questions that were addressed with a wide variety of possible solutions by authors such as Homer, Sappho, Herodotus and Plato, by classical and Hellenistic politicians, as much as in the local cults and individual concerns to which inscriptions bear witness. The vast range of concrete possibilities is not incompatible with a common terminology and images. It is against this backdrop that we need to assess the various attempts, in the fields of philosophy, religion and politics, to propose ways of finding a general salvation in Ancient Greece ; attempts which, however, failed, until the end of Antiquity, to impose a univocal narrative.
