Few deities distinctive to Arcadia were worshiped throughout the region as a whole. However, the following are sufficiently distinctive to merit attention: Pan, Zeus Lykaios, and, in all probability, Despoina.
When Evander settled at Rome with his Arcadian followers, he began by founding a cult of Pan, ‘‘The most ancient and the most worshiped among the gods of the Arcadians’’ (Dionysius of Halicarnassus 1.32.3). Pan, born in Arcadia, was, according to Pausanias (8.26.2) an indigenous god (epichoirios) for the Arcadians and he was one of the First Gods at Megalopolis (8.31.3). At the time of the creation of the Arcadian League in the fourth century, he was, alongside Zeus Lykaios, the symbol of national unity on the coinage (Jost 1985:184). Beyond Arcadia he had the same reputation: Pindar qualified him as ‘‘ruler of Arcadia’’ (fr. 95 Snell-Maehler) and Lucian also has
The god say ‘‘I reign over all Arcadia’’ (Dialogues of the Gods 22.3). Besides, it was in his role as an Arcadian god that the Athenians installed him on the slopes of the Acropolis after the battle of Marathon. He had appeared on Mount Parthenion near Tegea to Philippides, the runner the Athenians had sent to ask the Spartans for help, and he had offered his help the Athenians (Herodotus 6.105).
Although he could intervene in war (Borgeaud 1979:137-56), the god was above all the protector of shepherds and their animals, and so too of hunters, and his appearance symbolized the symbiosis between man and animal. He was half-man and half-goat. From the animal, he took his head, legs, genitals, his little tail, and his hair. From man he borrowed his upright stance, his chest, and his hands. On many votive statuettes the animal elements are accentuated. In addition to these representations there was, from the fifth century onwards, a ‘‘humanized’’ type in which his animality was manifest only in the form of two little horns, and the coinage of the Arcadian League in the fourth century offered the most idealized image of the god. However, it was not until the Roman era that the god abandoned his connection with the animal world (Jost 1987-8:219-24 and plates 28-30, figures 1-12). His animality was considered normal. Rare and late are the authors who, like Lucian (Dialogues of the Gods 22.2), feel the need to justify this appearance (Hermes had approached Penelope in the form of a goat). No local logos was felt to be necessary to explain this, as was the case for Poseidon Hippios. Thus Pan presented the hybrid form typical of Arcadia. His attributes were the lagobolon (a stick for killing hares), a shepherd’s crook, and the syrinx, made from reeds glued together with wax, which he had invented in Arcadia (it was in the Melpeian mountains, as it was told, that ‘‘Pan invented the melody of the syrinx’’: Pausanias 8.38.11).
The god was omnipresent in Arcadia. Instead of living on Olympus, he was present in the places frequented by the shepherds and their flocks, and he moved with them. In the Phigalian logos of Demeter Melaina, when the goddess retired into a cave in her anger, Pan took on the role of mediator with Zeus: ‘‘Pan, who traversed Arcadia and who hunted now on one mountain and then on another, arrived in due course, we are told, on Mount Elaion. He saw Demeter’s condition... ’’ (Pausanias 8.42.3). As a shepherd himself, he was skopietas, ‘‘he who watches from the mountain-tops’’ (Palatine Anthology 6.109 line 9) and prokathegetes, ‘‘Conductor [of flocks]’’ (IG v.2, 93). He accompanied shepherds in their transhumance.
The locations of Pan’s cult in Arcadia were often diffuse, reflecting the mobile character of the god. In addition to his delimited and humble sanctuaries in town and country, entire mountains were sacred to him: thus Mount Lampeia (Pausanias 8.24.4) and Mount Maenalus (Pausanias 8.36.8), where ‘‘the locals claim actually to hear Pan playing the syrinx.’’ The Nomian mountains, derived their name, according to Pausanias (8.38.11) ‘‘from the pasturages [nomoi] of Pan.’’ The frequent occurrence of the god is to be explained by the preponderance in Arcadia of the pastoral economy (Roy 1999:328-36). A series of bronze ex-votos from a sanctuary of Pan near Berekla on the slopes of Lykaion demonstrate that the god’s clientele was recruited chiefly from the world of breeders and minor shepherds. Particularly noteworthy are the figurines of shepherds wearing the pilos and dressed in heavy cloaks, into which they huddle against the cold (Hubinger 1992, 1993). Pan was not merely a symbol of pastoral life in Arcadia, and tutelary deity of the Arcadian League: he was also considered to be the supreme god of Arcadia, if we may believe
Stephanus of Byzantium’s gloss (s. v. Arkadia), according to which Pania was an alternative name for Arcadia.
On the right of the Arcadian League coins that display Pan one finds Zeus Lykaios, another symbol of the League (Jost 1985: plate 63, figure 4). He also had a role as a national god in Arcadia. During the expedition of the Ten Thousand, the Arcadians on the campaign celebrated the Lykaia sacrifice at Peltae and set up games (Xenophon, Anabasis 1.2.10). For these soldiers, remote from their home, he was the Arcadian god par excellence. His influence across the Greek world is attested by the lists of victors at the games on Mount Lykaion and by the sanctuaries that Zeus Lykaios was given at Cyrene and in Triphylia (Jost 1985:268-9). But many facets of his cult had a specifically Arcadian character.
Pausanias (8.38.4) gives us a striking description of the rite celebrated at the spring Hagno:
If there is a prolonged drought, and if the seeds in the soil and the trees wither, then the priest of Zeus Lykaios, after making prayers in the direction of the water and making all the prescribed sacrifices, lowers an oak branch to the surface of the spring, without sending it to the depths. When the water has been agitated, a mist-like vapor rises and soon the vapor becomes a cloud and, drawing other clouds to itself, in this way causes rain to fall on the land of Arcadia.
The ceremony was designed to make rain; it did not take place on a fixed occasion, but was used in case of prolonged drought. It was focused upon the spring Hagno (the prayer is made facing the water) and the nymph Hagno could have been the original addressee. But in the time of Pausanias, it was the priest of Zeus Lykaios who officiated and it was to this god that the ritual was addressed, in his role of being responsible for atmospheric phenomena. We know of prayer-texts to Zeus to make rain, and Zeus’ role as ‘‘assembler of clouds’’ goes back to Homer. It is attested by many epithets (Hyetios, ‘‘Rainy’’; Ombrios, ‘‘Producing rain from a storm’’). But the recourse to a magical operation to make rain is much more rare and its association with Zeus is unique in Greece (Jost 1985:251-2).
Amongst the ‘‘curiosities’’ of Mount Lykaion, Pausanias mentions an abaton of Zeus (8.38.6). This sacred enclosure was off limits to every living being. According to Pausanias, anyone who violated the taboo lost his shadow and died within the year; Plutarch ( Greek Questions 39) speaks of execution by stoning or exile for offenders. The tradition of the loss of the shadow is found already in Theopompus ( FGrH 115 fr. 343). This is, it seems, a vivid expression of death (according to Plutarch’s observation, ‘‘The Pythagoreans say that the souls of the dead cast no shadow’’). The punishment of death corresponds with the strength of the interdiction. But this was not exceptional: in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (line 121), when Oedipus mistakenly enters an abaton sacred to the Eumenides, the Chorus wants to stone him.
Above the abaton, on the summit of Lykaion, the altar received human sacrifices offered to Zeus, according to tradition. Plato alludes to it in his Republic (8.565d), where we read that, ‘‘if one has tasted morsels of human entrails amongst those of the other victims, one is inevitably transformed into a wolf.’’ And a fragment of Theophrastus preserved by Porphyry (On Abstinence 2.27.2) tells that, ‘‘Still in our own day in Arcadia, during the Lycaean festival. . . official human sacrifices are performed in which the whole world participates’’ (cf. also Ps.-Plato, Minos 315c). Pausanias (8.38.7) is laconic about the sacrifices on Mount Lykaion: the secrecy that surrounded the ceremony in his time would have prevented him from inquiring into the subject of them and he uses a kind of apotropaic formula (‘‘let them be what they always have been’’) before passing on to another topic. The embarrassment he exhibits indicates that he has some idea about the sacrifices in question and about their unusual and shocking nature (he expresses his repugnance for human sacrifices at 1.22.6, on the subject of Polyxena). If we leave aside the werewolf stories, described as muthoi by Plato, that surrounded the sacrifices on Lykaion, we may inquire into the reality of these human sacrifices, which the ancient sources group amongst barbarian sacrifices, together with those of the Carthaginians.
The reality of these sacrifices had long been agreed upon, despite the negative results of the excavations of K. Kourouniotis (Jost 2002c). But that view is now undergoing revision. There is a general tendency to deny the historicity of almost all human sacrifices mentioned in the texts. The claims of human sacrifice on Mount Lykaion could derive from a confusion between the myth of Lykaon, sacrificer of a child, and the rite itself (Hughes 1991:105-6), or they could even (and this is the most widespread interpretation) reflect a symbolic death in initiation rites for adolescents; the power of suggestion could have supported rumors of a rite of cannibalism (Bonnechere 1994:85-96). In fact, the archaeological argument is not decisive. The outdatedness of the excavation means that new investigations are required. Moreover, the notion of human sacrifice is not wholly divorced from that of the funeral (it can be seen in the case of Polyxena at Euripides, Hecuba 605-14), and the remains of the human victims could have been the object of separate treatment, away from the altar. The ‘‘symbolic’’ interpretation of the rite is not impossible in itself, but its initiatory character is far from assured. Everything rests on a tendentious interpretation of texts describing someone who has consumed human flesh being transformed into a wolf. The traces of a tribal initiation are sought, but the reality of any such initiation remains to be proven (Jost, forthcoming (b)). To turn the human sacrifices into ‘‘a symbol, an image, a mythical exaggeration’’ (as does Bonnechere 1994:314) amounts, in the case of Mount Lykaion, to a denial of the testimonies of Theophrastus and the Minos that remain fundamental. But the reality of human sacrifices is too emphatic in these texts to be swept aside a priori. It is better to leave the question open. The persistence of the tradition and (why not?) the fact of human sacrifices in any case would suit the wild character of Lykaion’s landscape well.
Whatever interpretation is to be retained, the idea that Zeus demanded human sacrifices is not incompatible with the image of an Arcadian federal god. Zeus was a wild god (abaton, sacrifice), a god of countrymen to whom the weather matters, but also a god of national unity, who brought the Arcadians together at the time of panhellenic games.
A third original Arcadian deity, Despoina, the ‘‘Mistress,’’ certainly had a panArcadian audience. ‘‘There is no deity that the Arcadians venerate more than this Despoina’’ writes Pausanias (8.37.9). Since we know that the cult at Lykosoura was the only one she received in Arcadia, we must infer that this city’s sanctuary was honored by all the Arcadians. When they refused to move to populate Megalopolis, the inhabitants of Lykosoura were forgiven for this by the Arcadians, not only because of the sanctuary’s right of asylum, but also because the cult it housed (8.27.6) was known to all the Arcadians and its reputation surpassed that of the city of Lykosoura itself. Furthermore, when he describes the sanctuary, Pausanias does not make reference to the inhabitants of Lykosoura in the way in which he usually records local practices and traditions, but rather just to the ‘‘Arcadians.’’ It is the Arcadians who ‘‘bring to the sanctuary the produce of their cultivated trees’’ (8.37.7) and ‘‘who celebrate rites of initiation and sacrifice to Despoina’’ (8.37.8), and ‘‘the legend of Anytos is Arcadian’’ (8.37.6). It should also be noted that the grandeur of the sanctuary’s architectural program and the presence in it of a monumental cult-statue group sculpted by Damophon of Messene are out of all proportion to the modest importance of Lykosoura alone. We must accept the probability that Despoina’s sanctuary was a pan-Arcadian one.
The deity worshiped, Despoina, was the daughter of Demeter, like Kore, and Eleusinian symbols can be seen in the attributes that the goddess’ cult statue held (8.37.4), the torch and the box (kiste), but the goddess’ personality was very different. By her side in the cult group was not just Demeter: Anytos, a strictly Arcadian character, foster-father of Despoina and armed propolos of Demeter, was there too, as was the wild Artemis. The presence of this last goddess, presented as another daughter of Demeter, is to be explained by the affinities she shares with Despoina. Both goddesses are connected with the animal world. In the Lykosoura cult group Artemis was represented as a huntress. As to Despoina, her relationship with the animal world must have been revealed in the course of the mysteries. A series of votive terracotta figurines found in the Megaron represents standing figures, dressed in cloaks (himatia), the heads of which are those of rams or cows. They carry baskets on their heads. These figurines are usually interpreted as representations of devotees undertaking the role of sacred basket-carrier (kanephoria) in a procession during which they wore animal masks (Jost 1985:331-7, 2002a:158-9, figs 6.4, 6.5).
Other sculpted figures that decorate the hem of Despoina’s dress should be compared. There are some fifteen characters, whose heads and, in many cases, extremities belong to the animal world, but who are dressed and who bear themselves like humans. Some play music, whilst others dance: a fox(?) plays the double aulos and a horse plays the trigdnon(?); we then have an equid on the kithara, and a horse blows into a double aulos. The other characters, two pigs, three rams, and an ass, dance along. We must be dealing with humans, no doubt initiates, disguised as animals: they wear masks and their arms and legs are covered with or extended with animal feet. Many of them display a whirling movement, which is expressed by the twisting of the body, the head turned back. The animated dance that the masked figures perform shows that we are in an orgiastic context (Jost 2002a:157-64 and figs 6.7, 6.8).
The rites we glimpse suggest that they belong to the mysteries of a deity of animals, a deity associated not with one particular animal, like Artemis at Brauron, but one that protects diverse domestic species (domestic apart from the fox[?], their predator). The bulls, the rams, and the pigs are linked with the idea of fertility; the presence of equids recalls the fact that Despoina was born from the union of Poseidon in the form of a horse with Demeter in the form of a mare (Pausanias 8.25.5).
The sacrifice performed in the Megaron also belonged in the same environment as the masked dances. The Arcadians, says Pausanias (8.37.8), ‘‘sacrifice victims many and plentiful. Each man sacrifices the kind of animal he possesses; instead of cutting the throat of the victims as in other sacrifices, each man chops off a limb at random from the animal he offers.’’ This fashion of killing the victims recalls the diasparagmos in the orgiastic cult of Dionysus.
In sum, the mysteries of the Megaron probably had almost no point of contact with those of Eleusis. The goddess-daughter, Despoina, is here much more important than Demeter; the sacrifice in which one strikes the animals at random and the masked dances to the sound of flutes or the kithara are suggestive of a much more ‘‘inspired’’ or ‘‘enthusiastic’’ environment, which betokens the distinctive nature of the Lykosoura cult and its goddess Despoina.
The existence of pan-Arcadian deities does not license us, even so, to speak of a unique Arcadian pantheon. There was no single way of assembling the gods in Arcadia. One must also resist the temptation to think in terms of a local groupings of cities. Each city had its pantheon, and there were as many pantheons as cities.
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