A discussion of religion and politics in the ancient Mediterranean faces two large obstacles: the geographical and cultural diversity of the traditions encompassed by this rubric and the very difficulty of defining the terms religion and politics in each culture. None of the societies of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome possessed a word for religion in the modern sense of a system of faith in and worship of a transcendent power. Certainly all of these societies feared the power wielded by higher beings, but religio in Rome, for instance, does not have the same meaning as the modern word religion; it conveys rather the sense of a binding obligation between two parties. To define religion in these societies, one might apply the definition offered by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood ("What Is Polis Religion?," 2000, but cf. the critique by Woolf, "Polis-Religion and...