Nilsson writes about the popular religious observances of the Greeks - the agricultural festivals and customs, the rituals of family and social life. Himself a descendant of generations of peasant farmers, he has almost by instinct grasped the meaning and significance if these rites and customs for the Greek. Whether rural or urbanized. The earthy and often orgiastic folk religions of Greece that underlay and continually erupted into the more elevated Olympian mythology of Homer and Hesiod are explained in detail by the foremost authority on the subject.