Since 2017, Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge has held the Chair in Religion, History and Society in the Ancient Greek World. The various terms in this title designate the constituent elements of the chair's teaching and the research on which it is based. Using proven historical-philological methods and drawing on the contributions of historical anthropology, we are able to grasp the close interweaving of what we call " religion " with the various aspects of social, political, cultural and even economic life in the Greek world. The latter is envisaged in the broad sense of all the places where the Greeks settled, through the founding of cities.

Greek religion is polytheistic, which immediately evokes a multiplicity of divine figures. But the plurality expressed by the term does not only concern the superhuman entities to which the Greeks paid homage for almost a millennium. All the components of their religion, from representations to practices, fall within a wide range of possibilities, not based on dogma or revelation, but on culturally determined norms and narrative traditions. In order to understand such an abundance of gods and rituals, it is necessary to carefully reconstruct their contexts, and to acknowledge the complexity of a culture whose apparent familiarity is a deceptive heritage. The aim of the research carried out by this Chair is precisely to give an account of the lines of force that structure the imaginary of the Greeks, as well as the practices that it induces and that constitute it.