Greek cults can be viewed from the perspective of cultural evolution: the details of each cult are determined not only by the specific god to whom the cult is addressed, but by a plethora of local conditions that change over time. These include the roles of other deities and heroic figures in local and external pantheons, manipulation of cults for the political and social benefit of individuals and groups, and the power of historical events (such as a battle near a sanctuary or a widely reported vision) to capture the popular imagination. In spite of the ancient Greek tendency toward religious conservatism, cults can be said to develop, flower, reach maturity, and wither in a competitive process, for people had only limited resources to devote to worship, and their preferences demonstrably changed over the centuries. Lack of evidence makes it difficult to track short-term changes in most parts of the Greek world (with the possible exception of Athens), but any account of Greek religion should acknowledge that gods and rituals were far from static and unchanging. As in biology, the proper application of the term “evolution” to this process implies no directional development from a “primitive” to an “advanced” state, nor a specific end goal.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, followed by many others, has argued that individual Greek gods have no identity outside the framework of the pantheon and that it is only by virtue of their associations with and oppositions to other gods that they achieve a personality and a functional range.2 Yet there is no such thing as “the” pantheon at the level of individual religious experience as opposed to the artificial synthesis of Panhellenism: pantheons vary by place and time. Therefore, we should speak of a Theban pantheon in the Archaic period, or the Athenian pantheon of the fifth century. Even this formulation is too broad, for within the polis or other political unit, each individual was familiar with a pantheon determined by place of birth, family ancestry, neighborhood of residence, and ethnicity.
Using his recommended method to define Hermes in opposition to Hestia, Vernant achieved a fresh perspective on these deities and the way they concretize Greek habits of thought about space and movement.3 Such structuralist approaches tend to be synchronic and to focus on the relationships to be detected in a set of facts, gathered from different centuries, about a given cult or cultic milieu. The underlying assumption is that cultic systems are predicated on the binary oppositions that are basic to human culture: life/ death, male/female, hot/cold, sterile/fertile, and so on. This method can yield valuable insights, but it may neglect the historical development and local idiosyncrasies of a given cult or deity, and it does not always acknowledge that some aspects of a cult, even quite important ones, may be due more to historical contingencies than to the inner logic of a pantheon. Order and symmetry are not always apparent in systems that have grown and evolved blindly over long periods of time, though we surely have to do with complex systems and not random accretions.
Still, it is certain that the most methodologically sound format for the study of Greek cults is the detailed account of a particular city or region (e. g. Jost 1985, Parker 2005), which permits examination of the interrelationships between the deities and festivals, yet also allows diachronic analysis. One drawback of the organizational format I have chosen (cults grouped by deity) is that it does not place in the foreground the interconnectedness of cults in the same sanctuary, polis pantheon, or region. Mindful of the dangers of studying any god in isolation, I have tried to address this issue by pointing out the special affinities between certain members of the pantheon, for example Poseidon’s regular relations with Demeter, Apollo’s with Artemis, and Zeus’ with Athena. Also, each chapter on the major deities includes discussion of selected minor figures whose cults are closely associated.
Throughout the book, I stress geographic and ethnic distinctiveness. The importance of ethnicity, already noted by Farnell as a crucial variable in Greek religious practice, has recently received new emphasis as scholars investigate the “cultures within Greek culture.” In particular, the work of Irad Malkin and Jonathan M. Hall has demonstrated how different Greek populations defined themselves against others and how the cults of various deities (Poseidon Helikonios, Apollo Karneios, etc.) contributed to this activity.4
World History
