Gods overflowed like clothes from an over-filled drawer which no one felt obliged to tidy
(Robert Parker 2005:387)
Matters of religion are central to the things we hold most dear about the culture of the ancient Greek world. So it is with its literature, where we think first of Homer and tragedy, its art, where we think first of the statues of the gods and the mythical scenes of the vases, and its architecture, where we think first of temples. But beyond this, there was no sphere of life (or death) in ancient Greece that was wholly separate or separable from the religious: the family, politics, warfare, sport, knowledge. . . The task of designing a companion volume to Greek religion, even one of the substantial length of this one, is accordingly formidable. Comprehensiveness is impossible. Indeed, it is impossible even to define in an uncontroversial way the ground one might aspire to cover comprehensively. Defending himself for directing Lear for the third time, Jonathan Miller likened the play to a ‘‘vast dark continent’’ that one could never hope to explore fully. All one could do was sail around it, disembark at different points, and make narrow treks through the jungle ahead. The chapters of this volume constitute such narrow treks into the vast continent of Greek religion. They cannot, between them, render the territory fully and minutely mapped, but they may offer the reader an impression of the land’s size, layout, and diversity. They may indicate the areas that call for closer or further investigation. And the notes made of the flora and fauna encountered along the way will certainly intrigue.
The volume’s basic purview is the Greek-speaking world in the archaic, classical, and hellenistic periods (i. e. 776-30 BC), although the ‘‘bookends’’ fall outside these parameters: an initial chapter contextualizes Greek religion within the wider family of Near Eastern religions and there is a final chapter on reception. The selection of topics offered has not been determined by any strong intellectual agenda. Rather, as befits a companion volume, the chapters seek to reflect the subjects and issues generally held to be of importance and interest by contemporary international experts in the field of Greek religion. However, one theme the reader will find to recur in several parts of the volume (and especially Part V) is that of the disaggregation of the term ‘‘Greek religion.’’ Whilst a certain degree of across-the-board generalization is not only unavoidable but actually desirable in a Companion, there has also been some attempt to approach the distinctiveness of the religious experiences of individuals or of local communities within the Greek world.
The subject of myth, whilst not addressed head-on here (see Ken Dowden’s forthcoming Companion to Classical Myth in the same series), nonetheless pervades the volume. It has been felt too restrictive to devote a focal chapter to each of the Olympian pantheon (however defined), but care has been taken to include substantial discussions of many of the major deities. Thus discussions of Zeus can be found in Chapters 3 and 17, Apollo in Chapters 3 and 9, Athena in Chapters 14 and 26, Demeter and Persephone in Chapters 19 and 22, Dionysus in Chapters 19 and 21, Artemis in Chapter 3, Aphrodite in Chapter 20, Hades in Chapter 5, and Asclepius in Chapter 10.
Scott Noegel (Chapter 1) opens the volume with a synoptic study situating Greek religion in the long context of the religions of the ancient Near East. The question of whether, when, and how the various religions of the Near East may have influenced the form and development of Greek religion is fraught with definitional and other methodological complexities. There are prima facie cases for tracing a number of lines of influence between Asiatic myths and Greek ones: the cosmogonies, the myths of world deluge, and those of battle between god and chaos-dragon. However, since the general relationship, if any, between myth and cult in the Near Eastern societies and Greece alike remains obscure, it is impossible to read shared religious practices directly out of such correspondences. A number of vehicles of transmission of religious culture between east and west may be identified, including trade, war, migration, foreign employment, religious festivals, and diplomacy. Already in the Mycenaean period Greeks were in vigorous contact with Crete, Egypt, Syro-Canaan (note that the Philistines are likely to have been Greek settlers) and Anatolia, and peoples from all around the eastern Mediterranean mingled in Cyprus at this time. In the eighth and seventh centuries BC peripatetic religious artisans may have disseminated technologies across the eastern Mediterranean. When the Greeks did borrow an institution, a god, or a rite, and install it in their own religious system, it is seldom clear how they read the role and meaning of the institution borrowed, which, in any case, were inevitably transformed radically in their new context. On what basis did the Greeks decide to equate a particular god from a religious system structured so differently from their own with a familiar figure from their pantheon?
The next group of chapters (Part II) addresses the supernatural personnel of Greek religion, the gods, great and small, and the dead, great and small. Ken Dowden (Chapter 2) asks how the Greeks constructed their suite of Olympian gods in various intersecting contexts and media. For all their anthropomorphism, the gods were characteristically remote and seldom presented themselves to mankind in direct, visible, or scrutable form. They were constructed through the dimensions of local cult worship, of myth and its refractions in poetry and art, and of theological and philosophical reflection (cf. Part YIII). In visiting the great temple of Zeus at Olympia one would experience the god repeatedly through all these dimensions. Poets had probably taken the central role in establishing a common theogony amongst the Greeks in the dark ages. The canonical number of Olympian gods was twelve, but the number of important gods commonly held to dwell on the mountain was significantly larger. Various attempts to define a pantheon of twelve can be traced from the Homeric poems onwards, and it was often conceived of in terms of a series of pairs of gods. The western tradition’s reception of the Olympian gods has inevitably been formed by the great poetical works bequeathed to us from antiquity, such as, Homer apart, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Such works have promoted a simple conception of each of the gods in which they are strongly associated with a primary function (‘‘the god of... ’’) and with a limited range of mythical tales. But when we look at use of the gods on the ground, as it were, complex and diverse histories and profiles emerge for them, at both local and panhellenic level alike, as can be seen from case studies of Apollo and Artemis.
Jennifer Larson (Chapter 3) explains that the concept of‘‘nature deities,’’ which we might casually use, is an unsatisfactory one. But the notion of minor deities resident in and intimately associated with local landscapes was one of huge significance for the people of ancient Greece, its peasantry in particular. It is rewarding to learn that, at least in some cases, the inherent aesthetic beauty of some places, remote spots, or partly wild gardens, has to be considered a factor in their recognition and cultivation as sacred. Such pleasant places were regarded as the abodes of nymphs. Caves of nymphs with their associated gardens were seldom sponsored by cities. More typically, they would be maintained either by individuals ‘‘seized’’ by the nymphs, ‘‘nympholepts,’’ or by families visiting from the immediate environs. Those who worked in the countryside, such as shepherds, would often have a particularly close affinity with the local nymphs. Commonly associated with nymphs was cheerful, noisy Pan, protector of goats and shepherds. He was a temple-based deity in his native Arcadia, but as his cult spread beyond in the fifth century he was put to live with the nymphs in their caves. Similarly, local populations could be devoted to their adjacent rivers, those vital engines of fertility, establish waterside shrines for them, and project them into myth as founding kings of their communities. Those deities based in the natural world but equally accessible to all in the wider Greek world, the Earth, the Sun, the Sea, and the winds, were accordingly more widely worshiped.
Emma Stafford (Chapter 4) offers a review of the developing trends in the personification of abstract entities as humanoid deities. The epic poetry of the archaic period provided a ‘‘basic mythological pedigree’’ for a number of personified figures later destined to achieve full cult status. It is often hard to judge how seriously any given personification should be taken in the ca. seventh-century poetry of Hesiod or Homer. Hesiod gives us a great many ‘‘genealogical’’ personifications (and in this he may well exhibit the influence of the religions of the Near East), but did these personifications enjoy any currency in Greek religious life beyond the poem itself? The Homeric poems often like to exploit the ambiguity between abstraction and personification: just how substantial, how anthropomorphic, is Fear when it (or he) stalks the battlefield? We can be more confident about Sleep, who receives significant attention and elaboration in both poets. In later periods Sleep and Terror alike became the recipients of actual cults. From ca. 600 BC the figure of Youth, wife of Heracles, becomes prominent in art and is associated with the cults of other deities. The sanctuary of Nemesis and Themis (‘‘Righteous Anger’’ and ‘‘Divine Law’’) at Rhamnous, which seems to have originated in the early sixth century, is of particular interest because here we already have a major sanctuary focally dedicated to personified deities. In the classical period personifications (not all of them divine) were frequently given life, character, and substance on the Attic stage, and a broad range of personifications is to be found on Attic pots of the same period. The fifth century witnessed the development of important cults for a number of personifications, but, in contrast with the Rhamnous sanctuary, these were all associated with the cults of established deities. Persuasion was normally associated with Aphrodite, Fair Fame with Artemis, and Health with Asclepius. The fourth century witnessed a significant expansion in the cults of a number of political personifications, such as Peace, Democracy, Good Fortune, and Concord, the spread of whose cult it is possible to document in detail.
D. Felton (Chapter 5) looks at the dead. She notes the great importance that the Greeks in all periods placed upon the honoring of the dead, and the remarkable consistency they displayed in their modes of honoring, despite the widely varying beliefs they entertained about the nature of death and the afterlife. The dead were continually reverenced and appeased at family and state level. The principal Athenian festivals devoted to these matters were the Genesia (reverence) and Anthesteria (appeasement), the beliefs surrounding the latter partly coinciding with those surrounding the modern western Halloween. In their new underworld home the dead encountered a range of deities, some resident in the world below, others moving between it and the world above. The Hades who ruled the underworld was a somewhat evanescent god, with relatively little cult, myth, or iconography of his own. Ideas about the organization and the internal topography of the underworld - and the corresponding eschatological significance of these things - varied greatly, although the notion that a river crucially separated the dead from the living remained enduringly popular. There was, in the Greek imagination, a possibility of travel between the two realms in extreme cases. Exceptional heroes penetrated into and returned from the underworld in life: Heracles, Theseus, and Orpheus managed to do this for different reasons. And the dead could be called back to the realm of the living through necromantic practices, or could return spontaneously, particularly if they had died before their time, or by violence, or if they remained unburied. In these cases they would typically return to exact vengeance from their killer, or to demand due rites of burial. Such themes are addressed in the highly entertaining ghost stories the ancient world has bequeathed to us.
Gunnel Ekroth (Chapter 6) looks at the heroes. These very much constituted an intermediary category between the gods and the dead, sharing important qualities with both alike, and in some senses oscillating between the two. Hero shrines connected to epic or mythic heroes seem to have become prominent in the eighth century BC, and it is in this century too that offerings at Mycenaean tombs seem to have become popular. The rise of the city-state and the establishment of oikist cults by colonists may have been a spur to such activity. Heroes (men, women, or even children) could be produced from a number of sources: from the tales of myth or epic; from former gods or goddesses cut down to size to fit into new religious systems; from historical or quasi-historical figures, particularly those associated with extreme actions, for good or ill, or with extreme or violent deaths, including those in war. It is no longer thought that heroes typically received holocaust-sacrifices. Rather, they typically received sacrifices similar to those given to the gods, with whom they could play a similar role in the religious system. These were thysia-sacrifices in which meat was distributed to the participants, and theoxenia-offerings, tables of vegetable dishes akin to those consumed by the living, and designed to encourage the recipients to come close to their worshipers. Dedications of blood were largely reserved for heroes associated with a martial context. The sites and shrines at which heroes were worshiped were so diverse in their physical types, overlapped to such a degree with other varieties of monument, and were so informed by local conventions that we depend upon literary or epigraphic evidence to identify them securely. Because of the way in which heroes were strongly rooted in local areas, they could function as valuable expressions of local identity, and the possession of the body of a particular hero could advance a community’s claim to precedence over its neighbors. Hence it was not uncommon for a hero’s bones to be transferred between territories, or for their location to be kept secret, to protect them from theft. But sometimes a hero could be appropriated merely through the elaboration of a new version of his myth.
We turn then, in Part III, to the mechanisms of communicating with the divine, moving from regular verbal communication by means of prayer and hymn, through symbolic and ritualized communication by means of sacrifice, to the more focused and interactive variety of communication found in divination. William D. Furley (Chapter 7) discusses prayers and hymns, the means by which the Greeks attempted to communicate with the divine through the voice. The silent, meditative variety of prayer familiar from contemporary Christian practice was unknown to the Greeks, for whom prayer more typically took place in the context of public performance. Indeed, it is possible to conceptualize sacrificial procedure as constituting a ritual framework for a multi-media prayer. Greek prayers traditionally had a tripartite structure of invocation-argument-prayer (proper). The argument sections, which sought to persuade the god that the petitioner deserved his help, often reminded the god of sacrifices he had previously made, or used an ‘‘advent myth’’ of the god’s arrival to crystallize the notion of his current attendance in the mind of worshipers. Prayers could also be classified on the basis of the standing the petitioner perceived himself to be in with the god: if one had already deserved well of the god, one used a euchl; if one had no existing claim to his favor, one used a hiketeia, or ‘‘supplication.’’ For the most part prayers were spoken and hymns were sung, but hymns were also designed to please and entertain the god with their artistic beauty, and formed part of a reciprocal charis between man and god. Within the types of hymn a broad distinction may be made between dactylic-hexameter prooimia, third-person narratives of the god’s deeds, which could be used to introduce performances, and lyric, second-person addresses to the god, used in cultic contexts.
Jan N. Bremmer (Chapter 8) looks at sacrifice. He begins by outlining the details of the normative process as laid out by Homer, and then contextualizes these against later evidence, especially that from classical Athens, in which the various aspects of sacrificial practice were more heavily dramatized. The most popular sacrificial victims were adult sheep and goats, cheaper than full-grown cows or pigs. Sometimes the age, sex, and color of the victim could be significant, and perfection of form always was. The kill itself was accompanied by a tension-breaking cry of joy from the women present. The dead animal was carved up, and attention was directed first to the parts to be given to the god, the thigh-bones wrapped in fat, or parts of the innards. Then meat was distributed, after cooking, to the mortals present: the notion that all human participants shared in the meat equally was honored more at the ideological level than at the practical one. The principal modern interpretations of ancient sacrifice are critiqued: Meuli’s view that sacrifice was essentially ritual slaughter, Burkert’s that the shared aggression of sacrificial killing bonded communities, and Vernant’s that sacrifice was killing to eat. All have merits, but are ultimately too reductive in their treatment of this polyvalent ritual at the center of Greek society. The significance that, above all, should not be omitted from our understanding of the institution is that which the Greeks themselves gave to it: communication with the gods. In origin, it seems, the Greeks had imagined the gods to be literally sharing in the postsacrificial banquet with them. Their explicit remarks and implicit indications make it clear that for them sacrifice served the tripartite purpose of honoring the gods, expressing gratitude to them, and appealing to them for things needed. The myths of Prometheus and Deucalion show that for the Greeks sacrifice ordered the correct relationship between man and his gods.
Pierre Bonnechere (Chapter 9) investigates the complex subject of divination. He sets the practice against the context of the pervasive contact and communication the Greeks felt that they had with the gods in all aspects of their lives. It cannot be doubted that the Greeks did in general believe in the power of their oracles, but they had three obstacles to contend with. The first was ambiguity: oracles had to be held to be ambiguous to bridge the gap between the assumption of divine infallibility and ostensible errors made. An interesting outgrowth of oracular ambiguity was the refinement of indirect forms of question by the consulters in order to parry it. The second obstacle was the problem of charlatanism: where did the credibility of the form of divination one happened to be employing lie, on the scale that stretched from the great oracle ofDelphi to the unimpressive and hucksterish itinerant diviners? And the third was the vigorous manufacture of false, largely post eventum oracles, which, however, remain interesting for us for what they can tell us about the way in which the oracular sanctuaries were projected. The major distinction between ‘‘inductive divination’’ and ‘‘inspired divination’’ is explained. In inductive divination, properly the preserve of the mantis, messages from the gods are read out of the world around, in the form of such things as prodigies, celestial phenomena, the behavior of birds, the involuntary spasms of the human body, double entendres, and the inspection of sacrificial innards. In inspired divination the gods speak directly to or through individuals, and this type of divination is principally associated with the sanctuaries and prophets. Much inspirational divination took the form of dreams, whether spontaneous or sought out in an incubation sanctuary, such as that of a healing hero. It could also take the form of ‘‘enthusiasm,’’ in which a medium or sometimes the consulter himself gained access to the god through a modified state of consciousness, to which he had been helped by some preliminary ordeals. The inspiration-led sanctuaries included Delphi, Dodona, Claros, Didyma, and that of Trophonius, and we know quite a lot about the elaborate consultation rituals used at some of these.
The next group of chapters (Part IV) charts the continuum from sacred space to sacred time, moving from fixed sanctuaries and the more mobile notion of pollution through to the festivals that were defined by space and time, and on to the sacred significance of time itself. Beate Dignas (Chapter 10) recreates a day in the life of a Greek sanctuary, a surprisingly difficult task, since sanctuaries were generally more interested in recording regulations for special festival days rather than for the daily routine. Many smaller sanctuaries will have been closed most of the year, or at any rate will seldom have had their priest on site, a local caretaker supervising them at other times and, as appropriate, making arrangements for occasional visitors to pray, sacrifice, offer votives, or just ‘‘share in the beauty and awe of the sacred place.’’ The best-documented sanctuaries, although not necessarily the most typical, are the big healing sanctuaries dedicated to Asclepius and his avatars. This is not simply a function of their importance but also of the fact that they had to devote so much attention to the supervision of their visitors and the management of their needs. A significant record of the most important aspect of the ‘‘daily life’’ that unfolded in the healing sanctuaries is afforded by the many surviving votives, which were displayed either in the temple, in its treasury, or in the open. These most typically consisted of models of the body-part healed, but reliefs and verbal accounts, both of which can be highly vivid, are also found. Inscribed regulations make it clear that sanctuaries could often become embarrassingly cluttered with the votives, which, once given, could not leave the sanctuary. Sometimes their accumulation could even obscure the cult image from view. Older ones could be buried, and metal ones melted down for reuse. The priests had the ultimate say over the organization of the displays of votives, and sometimes liked to group together those given in their own term of office. The experience of being a visitor to one of these sanctuaries is perhaps most immediately conveyed by Herodas’ poetic description of a visit to an Asclepieion by two women. We hear how they progress through the sanctuary, which is seemingly open to all visitors, make their offering, admire the displayed votives, and have a friendly chat with the caretaker. Some larger sanctuaries could be the principal source of employment, direct or indirect, in their local community, as Pausanias observed. Sick people and their attendants, who might lodge in the sanctuaries for an extended period, would need all the provisions of the market, and these would come to them, with some sanctuaries even leasing out shops within their precincts.
Andreas Bendlin (Chapter 11) investigates the - for us - slippery notions of purity and pollution in ancient Greece. Purity and pollution were not simple opposites of each other, but rather they were both alike opposites of a condition of normality. Purity was a quality of the sacred realm. Pollution occurred beyond its boundaries in the realm of men. Ancient ideas of ritual pollution only coincided with ancient ideas of pathogenic pollution to a very limited degree. The usual sources of ritual pollution included childbirth, miscarriage, abortion, menstruation, sex (licit or illicit), the eating of some animal products, corpses, and killing. It resulted, accordingly, from abnormal human actions and normal, unavoidable ones alike. The regulations for managing such pollution varied widely from region to region and city to city. The old structuralist belief that ideas of purity and pollution acted as a mechanism of social control leaves much unexplained: it does not, for example, account particularly well for the management of relations between the sexes. It may account rather better for the management of killing: it is obviously desirable that murderers be excluded from their communities. And since the concept of pollution happily entailed also the concept of purification, it offered the possibility of the making of amends and the sometimes useful prospect of the killer’s eventual reintegration into his community. One of the most challenging aspects of ancient ideas of pollution for us to come to terms with is the seemingly casual, arbitrary, and unsystematic fashion in which this kind of thinking could be invoked and then abandoned. Few ancients are likely to have gone about their business in a constant state of dread about incurring pollution. More often, a source of pollution, perhaps indirect, would be identified after the fact - after, that is, something had gone awry. A murderer was not ipso facto polluted by the deed of murder: it was only when public proclamation of his pollutedness was made that this condition came into existence. Indeed, it is almost a premise of the Greek cities’ annual purifying scapegoat rituals that a city should accumulate numerous overlooked acts of pollution in the course of a year.
Local festivals would be held at a more or less fixed time within the year; they would draw in people from far around, and their central event was normally a sacrifice with an ensuing feast. Scott Scullion (Chapter 12) deploys three case studies to illustrate the difficulties ancient, medieval, and modern scholars alike have had in trying to divine the meanings of festivals, and suggests that, so far as the majority of ancient participants was concerned, we may all have been looking for their meaning in the wrong place. The case of the Athenian Diasia, the festival of Zeus Meilichios, illustrates, amongst other things, the way our dossier of fragmentary evidence for a festival can be compromised by the misunderstandings and anachronistic inferences of the later commentators and lexicographers of the classical tradition, upon whom we depend for much of the evidence’s preservation. The case of the Spartan Karneia illustrates how modern conceptions of the significance of festivals have changed repeatedly over the last century, as different methodological approaches have come into and gone out of fashion, each one emphasizing those parts of the catalog of evidence for each festival with a resonance for their own theories. Was the Karneia an expression of guilt and atonement? Was it an initiation rite? Or something else again? The case of the Athenian Oschophoria illustrates the aetiological approach typically taken by the poets and scholars of antiquity to the explanation of their festivals. They tended to conceptualize festivals as commemorative of key events in the mythical past and to develop elaborate - but not necessarily stable - narratives about these events. These ‘‘commemorative’’ aetiologies typically focus on those elements of a festival’s rituals that are most unsettling, such as transvestism in the case of the Oschophoria, and attempt to explain them away. However, it is unlikely that much of the aetio-logical material that survives had any official status at the festivals themselves, and it is also unlikely that many of the participants in the festivals had any strong grasp of it. It is more illuminating to ask, rather, what, for the average participant, the festival experience was all about. Ancient descriptions of the popular experience of participation in festivals focus on the themes of ‘‘relaxation, jollification, and entertainment,’’ the latter provided by parades and competitions of drama, singing, and dancing. The light-hearted Aristophanes and the grimmer Thucydides agree on this. For most participants the significance of a festival will not have lain in its unique and arcane features, but rather in the features that it shared with all other festivals.
James Davidson (Chapter 13) investigates the way in which ancient Greek religion was deeply structured and informed by processes, sequences, and series: in short, by time. Cycles of the moon were critically important in determining the timing of festivals, which were kept at the appropriate point of the solar year by careful intercalation. The different cities all had their own calendars, but, despite their independent spirits and rivalries, they contrived to keep their calendars remarkably well synchronized, and this fact constitutes one of our strongest licenses to speak of an ‘‘ancient Greek religion.’’ Although the Sun (Helios) was a marginal deity in the Greek religious systems, he was one of the most ancient ones, and a deity the other gods were reluctant to meddle with. Star myths (‘‘asterisms’’) linked heroes and heroines to fixed points within the solar year. The apparent disappearance of stars
Beneath the earth in the course of their cycles, and their clear reflection in the still lagoons associated with underworld entrances, led to a paradoxical association between stars and the underworld. In the Odyssey Orion is already found in the world below. In this way, stars formed perfect avatars for heroes and heroines, caught between the worlds of immortality and mortality, and allowed them to make spectacular, natural appearances or disappearances at the appropriate times. The numbering of days in the month reflected the moon’s waxing and waning structure. Religious activities tended to be concentrated in the earlier part of the month, with the first day being held particularly important. The earlier dates of the month also tended to be sacred to individual gods. These dates inevitably tended to attract their annual festivals, and the date number could structure or reflect the structure of other aspects of their representation and the mythology associated with them. The Greeks sometimes mapped their ritual processes onto imagined mythistorical narratives. Thus the ban on bread on the first day of the Spartan Hyacinthia ceremonially evoked a primordial time when bread had not yet been invented. Myths of Dionysus’ arrival project onto the historical level an essential quality of his divine personality, that of being the adventitious god. The Greeks imagined the reign of Zeus not as an unchanging, eternal given, but as a midpoint in a narrative: before Zeus there had been Cronus, and in the future there would be another regime again, headed by a figure akin to Achilles. The Greek cities were age-class societies, and human progression through the age-classes could be mapped onto other varieties of time and process, such as the yearly cycle. In Athens the year sets of adults aged between 18 and 60 each carried a patron hero, with the ‘‘retiring’’ set relinquishing its hero to the newest. The tombs of these (largely obscure) heroes may have formed a sort of ‘‘generational clock’’ around the circuit of the city wall. The 42-year ‘‘generation’’ period structured some important events in Athenian history, such as the reincarnation of the Acropolis.
Our next chapters (Part V) explore the very different shapes into which ‘‘Greek religion’’ could be configured through discrete analyses of the contrasting religious systems of four separate places. The cities of Athens, Sparta, and Alexandria are chosen for their general importance and for the manifest and extreme differences in their social organization and development. Arcadia is chosen for a fourth study as a religious environment functioning outside the framework of the polis. Susan Deacy (Chapter 14) takes on the difficult task of analyzing Athens, and asks how the Athenians balanced the notion that they managed a stable religious system with constant innovation. As a massive city by classical Greek standards, Athens had a massive pantheon of its own to match, consisting of the familiar Olympians, personified abstractions, and heroes and heroines. The patron Athena held a presiding place in the complex religious life of the city. She was literally central to it, her major sanctuary towering over the city centre, as opposed to being located at an external site as was often the case with ancient Greek poleis, and she was symbolic too of the supposedly Thesean synoecism of Attica. The tendency to centralize the religion of the polis under Athena is clearly seen in her appropriation of the ‘‘sacred things’’ of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which had once been controlled by the independent polis of Eleusis. The ‘‘Athenian foundation myth,’’ enshrined in the topography of the Acropolis, established Athena’s presiding relationship over the other gods and heroes there and represented her as the chosen mother of the Athenian people. The
Erechtheum, anomalously by the standards of Greek temples, drew together a diversity of cults under Athena’s patronage. It was above all in the context of Athena’s great civic festival, the Panathenaea, that the Athenians celebrated their communality. But as Athens rose to power in the Greek world it was through Athena’s great festival above all that the city projected its image to that world. Major events in the city’s history were symbolically incorporated into the festival - a trireme after Salamis, and the participation of the ‘‘allies’’ as Athens established her empire. And major events in Athenian political historical typically implicated the goddess, as in the tyrant Pisistra-tus’ triumphant return: he was able to unite the people of Athens behind him through the conceit that he was being escorted back by the goddess in person.
Nicolas Richer (Chapter 15) looks at the religious system of Sparta, a city renowned in antiquity for its scrupulous devotion to the gods. There the gods presided over human life in its entirety: they helped in the rearing of children, male and female, and they managed transitions to adulthood, in the context of both the brutal initiation ceremonies in the sanctuary of Orthia and initiatory homosexual relationships. Amongst the city’s cults the oldest seem to have belonged to Zeus, Athene, and Apollo, all of whom are mentioned in the Great Rhetra. The kings owed their special position and privileges not least to their role as mediators between gods and the community, in peace and especially during war, when they presided over a sophisticated religious technology of warfare on the army’s behalf. The Spartans led their lives emmeshed in religious structures of both spatial and temporal dimensions. The central city itself and the wider territory of Laconia alike were protected by rings of shrines and tombs, with key gods often occupying sanctuaries both at the center and at the periphery. The religious calendar ordered the Spartans’ lives with both regular and movable feasts. Religion was heavily exploited in the inculcation of the discipline for which Spartan society was famous: the bodily passions that had to be kept under control were abstracted and sacralized. Spartan beliefs in this area may have exercised a significant influence over Plato’s thinking on the passions. Living Spartans were, furthermore, protected and encouraged by the dead, who were meticulously stratified into categories and ranked in accordance with the benefits, martial and other, they had conferred upon Sparta during life or could continue to confer in death. Richer appropriately concludes that the great awe the Spartans displayed towards their gods seems to have been a motor of their history.
Francoise Dunand (Chapter 16) reviews the religious system of Alexandria. For all this city’s greatness and importance, evidence for religious life there is scarce: only a tiny amount of the city’s literature survives by comparison with that of the heydays of Athens or Rome; its archaeology has been destroyed by two millennia of continuous occupation; and the papyri are less helpful than they are for other Greco-Egyptian topics. And so it is difficult to chart the progress of the city’s religious system from blank piece of paper upon foundation in 331 BC to the ‘‘palimpsest’’ it had become in late antiquity. Most cults will have been started spontaneously by groups of Greek immigrants. Amongst the cults of the traditional Greek gods those that came to particular prominence were the ones belonging to Zeus, to Demeter (Eleusinian Mysteries may even have been performed for her), to Dionysus (whose image the kings liked to appropriate), and to Aphrodite (a favorite of the queens). Egyptian gods were repackaged for the city’s Greek masters. Isis was already known in mainland Greece before Alexander’s campaign, and it may indeed have been he that founded her cult in the city, where her temples soon proliferated. New imagery and attributes were developed for her interaction with her new Greek consumers, amongst whom women may have predominated. Sarapis too, despite the elaborate myths of his origin, was a native Egyptian god, Osiris-Apis, and his existence is attested prior to Alexander’s arrival. But he was appropriated from Memphis by Ptolemy Soter and radically redesigned for a role in the new city: a religious innovation of enormous success, given its artificiality. He was brought to serve as Alexandria’s protector-god (all Greek cities had to have one), but he was identified, appropriately, with Hades and, a little less appropriately, with Asclepius. Ptolemy III built him the magnificent Sarapieion, the dramatic destruction of which, in AD 392, came to symbolize the end of paganism in Egypt, and indeed further afield. As a pair Sarapis and Isis came to serve as a divine projection of the royal couple, with whom they were often associated. Alexandria was distinguished from the other cities considered here not least by its dynastic cult, which grew by increments out of a cult for Alexander, whose body Ptolemy I had secured for the city, and into which dead Ptolemies were soon incorporated. In the midst of all this Alexandria’s important Jewish population seems to have been left to practice its religion in freedom, and possibly even with a degree of moral support from the throne. It was the Ptolemies, after all, who commissioned the Septuagint and who, in Alexandria, presided over the rapprochement between Jewish and Greek culture that permitted the emergence of Christianity.
Finally in our review of different religious systems, Madeleine Jost (Chapter 17) analyzes the initially less heavily centralized, wild, and pastoral, but reputedly pious, land of Arcadia. There are, she contends, two ways in which one can speak meaningfully of an ‘‘Arcadian religious system.’’ First, we can look to the existence of distinctively Arcadian deities worshiped throughout the region. In fact there were three ‘‘panArcadian’’ deities that structured the religion of the region as a whole. Two were the goat-god Pan and Zeus Lykaios, who were adopted as federal symbols when the Arcadians formed themselves into a league, the latter despite his associations with human sacrifice. A third was Despoina, whose worshipers celebrated her orgiastic rites in animal costumes, and whose sanctuary at Lykosoura enjoyed an importance that far outstripped that of its local city, receiving honor from all over Arcadia. These deities were distinctively characterized by wildness and animalian aspects. We can also look to the distinctive structuring of the local pantheons of the Arcadian cities, and in particular to the valuable information that can be gleaned from the epithets applied to the gods in these pantheons. These epithets, whilst often familiar from elsewhere in Greece, could sometimes be interpreted in a distinctively Arcadian fashion. Some epithets intriguingly preserve the memories of lost local deities. Others celebrated the preoccupations that chiefly concerned this rustic society, and related to agricultural and pastoral activities. Secondly, we can look to Arcadian mythology for distinctive tales rooted in the land of Arcadia itself. An Arcadian religious identity is proclaimed in particular by the myths of animal transformation, such as that of Lykaon into a wolf, and those of Demeter and Poseidon into horses (myths which should not be taken to document an ‘‘animal phase’’ in the history of Arcadian religion). For gods, such transformations represented their intimate connections with the animal world; for men, they represented the regression to the animal state that ensues when the institutions of civilization are flouted.
The following chapters (Part VI) look at the role of religion in structuring or reflecting the structure of society in ancient Greece, moving from relationships between the largest social groupings through relationships within the family and down to sexual relationships between individuals. But in fact the goddess who presided over sexual cohesion between individuals was also, by analogy, asked to preside over the social cohesion of the wider state. Charles W. Hedrick Jr. asks to what extent religion should be understood to have cohered with, reflected, or reinforced social structure in classical Athens. He concludes that general coherence of religion with the political order was manifest, but that religious observance also provided ample scope for conflict as well. From at least the time of Xenophanes the Greeks had begun to perceive religion as a separable entity, and this notion came to flourish with the Sophists. The isolation of religion allowed men to imagine an area in which people could ‘‘make their world’’ and paved the way to the development of political thought. Despite this, in classical Athens most religious observance was ‘‘civic,’’ that is to say, the constitution of the various worshiping groups often coincided with the organization of the political order, their religious activities encouraging community solidarity. Thus, in the performances of the Dionysia, the audience was seated in accordance with its civic categories. Religious rites of transition articulated the progression of the young through their changing civic statuses. Women could sometimes achieve a degree of autonomy in the religious sphere distinct from their position in the political sphere: cults of goddesses tended to rest in the hands of priestesses, and women could enjoy festivals, such as the Thesmo-phoria, and other varieties of worship, exclusive of men. In the Kronia the distinction in status between free and slave was advertised through the mechanism of its temporary inversion. Whereas classical Athens could legitimately boast to be a classless society from the political perspective, high birth and wealth did continue to offer some religious privileges, with certain priesthoods and roles being reserved for the well born or rich. The different demes of Attica, the basic units of the democratic organization, were all distinguished by their own cults and calendars of festivals, and these could sometimes pose a threat to the unity of the umbrella state, to such an extent that some cults were reduplicated in both the city center and the outlying regions. While citizenship of the Athenian state legally seems to have depended upon deme membership, access to deme membership was effectively controlled by the phratries or ‘‘brotherhoods,’’ which were predominantly religious associations. Family allegiance could always constitute a threat to the political order, and so family-based cults or religious observances could be particularly problematic for the state: hence the state’s particular anxiety about the destructive potential of women’s lamentation at funerals.
Janett Morgan (Chapter 19) investigates the relationships between women, religion, and the home. In classical Athenian ideology citizen men were strongly associated with the open, visible space of the city, whereas their wives were associated with the closed, invisible space of the home, which their presence to some extent defined. The home was normally a place of protection for them and a place that the women themselves sought to protect with their rites. But it could also become a stage for their domestic rituals. A striking example of this is the Adonia festival, the rites of which were performed noisily on the roof of the house. Sexual imagery could identify women with the house in which they lived, and in particular with the hearth that formed the symbolic heart of the house. The hearth became emblematic of the family’s fertility and continuity, with new brides being introduced to it, and new babies being symbolically carried around it. Festivals associated with Demeter and Dionysus drew women out of their houses and brought them into the visible, political space of the city, temporarily dissolving the critical boundary between the city and the home. The traditional order of the city was renewed and restored as the women returned to their houses. Women presided over the harmony-restoring rites associated with disruptive changes to the composition of the family: birth, marriage, and death. But these changes concerned the state too, and so on these occasions the women again had to become visible as they moved out into the public sphere with their rituals. Women’s rites often formed them into protective circles around the vulnerable individuals in the process of transition, the corpse of the dead person on his way to Hades, the newly arriving bride, and the newborn baby.
Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge (Chapter 20) explores the intersection between religion and sex. ‘‘Sexuality’’ is a modern concept that can only be applied anachronistically to ancient society. To circumvent this problem, the study is targeted upon two intimately related Greek terms: aphrodisia and Aphrodite herself. It can be shown that a series of ostensibly unrelated myths of love and sex are structured in accordance with a coherent underlying imagery, notably that of integrative desire, violence, building tension, and calming appeasement. This is found in particular in the Hesio-dic account of her birth from the foam produced when the sky-god’s severed genitals were cast into the sea, a myth which in many ways establishes the extent of her ‘‘honor,’’ that is, of the realm over which she presided. But related imagery may also be found in Hesiod’s account of the production of Pandora, the first woman, the traditional account of the choice of Paris, and the tragic accounts of Hippolytus and the Danaids. Much of this imagery was reflected in various ways in the practices of her cults. Her familiar patronage of sexual relations and of those coming to sexual maturity aside, Aphrodite’s calming integrative function made her a suitable protectress of social cohesion, whilst her capacity to induce madness and inspire vigorous action made her a suitable protectress of military action. She was a protectress of maritime enterprises both because she was a daughter of Sky and Sea, but also because she was held to apply her calming, integrative powers to the elements. A social group particularly dear to Aphrodite was that of the courtesans. The chapter concludes with a special study of the latter-day myth of ‘‘sacred prostitution’’ in Corinth. The only significant source for this notion is Strabo, and it can be demonstrated that he has erroneously projected into the remote Corinthian past a custom familiar to him from his own, Augustan, day and from his home region of Asia Minor, as found in the cult of the goddess Ma at Comana.
We turn then to the varieties of more secretive religious activity, those of mysteries and magic (Part VII), beginning with investigations of the deities of the two principal mystery cults, that of Dionysus and that of Demeter and Kore. Susan Guettel Cole (Chapter 21) analyzes the cults of the ever-mobile and adventitious (though actually already Mycenaean) Dionysus. His willing worshipers experienced him through a positive form of ritual ‘‘madness,’’ which was radically distinguished from the wanton and destructive madness experienced by those who resisted his cult. Wine was originally the primary concern of Dionysiac ritual. The consumption of wine, like Dionysus himself, could lead to a pleasant and harmless madness, when done in orderly and ritual fashion, but it could induce the more dangerous and destructive form of madness when done without order. The increasing importance of Dionysus in the archaic and classical periods reflected the increasing importance of wine and the circumstances of its communal consumption, in symposiums and elsewhere, to the developing Greek state. Dionysus was above all a god of transitions. Dionysiac scenes on Attic vases, particularly those offering distinctive, challenging frontal faces, address the theme of transition to an altered state, be this by means of wine, frenetic dance, sleep, or death. In Dionysiac ritual his worshipers took on the roles of characters from his myths, and the (transitional) donning of costume was integral to and constitutive of his rites; hence his association with masks and the theater. The so-called ‘‘Orphic’’ gold leaves, buried with the dead to guide them through the underworld, are now recognized to be in fact Dionysiac. Death was a final transition over which the god presided, and across the Greek world people had themselves initiated into his rites in preparation for it.
Kevin Clinton (Chapter 22) discusses the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Kore. Despite Mylonas’ despair at ever discovering the secret of the Mysteries, it is indeed possible to reconstruct a great deal of them from diverse evidence. The myste:ria were named for the ‘‘blindfolded’’ mystai, the initiates who were about to see and to undergo an extraordinary experience, the attractiveness of which was enhanced by the secrecy that enveloped it. Literary sources indicate that those who had seen the mysteries hoped for a better afterlife than those who had not. Amongst iconographic sources the Ninnion Tablet and the Regina Vasorum in particular help us to understand the roles of two of the obscurer gods in the Eleusinian myth, the pair of torch-carrying youths Eubouleus and lakchos. They constituted equal and opposite underworld escorts and framed the sacred drama seen by the initiates. lakchos (in the form of a statue carried by a priest) escorted the blindfolded initiates to Demeter (in the form of a hierophantid?) as she sat mourning for her daughter on the Mirthless Rock. This can be identified with a rock seat inside the cave in the cliff within the sanctuary itself. Eubouleus in turn (in the form of a priest?) escorted Kore (in the form of another hierophantid?) out of an ‘‘underworld’’ pit adjacent to the rock, to reunite them. Subsequently, images of the two goddesses were displayed to the new initiates in the Telesterion, in a brilliant light that may have emanated from the torches held by the former initiates, the epoptai. The epoptai themselves were then permitted to witness a further scene, perhaps, if the Christian Hippolytus is to believed, a grain of corn and Demeter’s cornucopia-bearing child Ploutos, the embodiment of agricultural ‘‘prosperity.’’
M. W. Dickie (Chapter 23) looks at magic. He observes that, for all the conceptual issues some have raised about the definition ofmagic in an ancient Greek context, the ancient concept of magic ( mageia, goeteia) was roughly equivalent to our own, which after all derives from it. The ancient concept probably had its roots in the arrival of itinerant Persian fire-priests, magoi, into the Greek world in the later sixth century BC, whose rituals began to mimic those of mystery cults. From the fifth or early fourth centuries BC we find magoi associated with various spell types: curse tablets (too much has been made of the notion that these are products of ancient Greece’s culture of competition), meteorological spells, healing spells, root-cutting spells, divination (with the scrying varieties coming to prominence in the hellenistic period) and necromancy. But wonders and illusions without specific practical end, ‘‘conjuring tricks’’ that did not necessarily seek to affect the behavior of any individual directly, were also an important part of the ancient magician’s portfolio. Such things, far from being buried in secrecy, belonged rather in the realm of flamboyant and theatrical public performance. Already in the classical period magicians seem to have performed a sort of shadow puppetry. Snake-handling and various types of illusions involving statues may have been developed in the hellenistic period. No doubt such public performances were designed to draw in contracts for more discreet - and lucrative - private work. Magicians perhaps tended to be itinerant figures on the margins of society, denizens of the demi-monde. The extent to which they came into conflict with the law as they went about their trade remains obscure, but the notion that their rituals attempted to bypass or control the gods may have laid them open to charges of impiety.
Our final full group of chapters (Part VIII) looks at the dialogue between religion and some of the media that reflect, refract or constitute it: literature in general, philosophical literature more particularly, and art. Thomas Harrison (Chapter 24) asks how we should view the relationship between religion as portrayed in Greek literary texts and the religion of ‘‘real life.’’ Do the different authors offer a partial ‘‘take’’ on the religion around them, skewed and selected by their personal predilections and the genre in which they work? Or are the various imaginary worlds of Greek literature to be regarded as themselves constitutive of Greek religious experience? With what presuppositions do scholars go about selecting ancient texts (or portions of texts) through which to study the subject? The common approach to the study of literary religion, in which utterances on a particular religious theme are stripped out of an author or a text and used to reconstruct that author's attitude to it, is misconceived. In exploiting literary texts for the study of Greek religion we should pay careful attention, in anthropological fashion, to the wider belief system in which statements about the divine, especially ostensibly negative ones, participate. Religious belief was sustained because the Greeks cushioned that belief’s principal propositions with a series of let-out clauses. Thus a proposition explicit and implicit in a wide range of classical texts maintains that all unjust acts are punished by divine intervention. This proposition was sustained against experience by, amongst others, the following let-out clauses: retribution is rarely direct; gods do not punish every offence themselves, but can leave other humans to do it; there is not always a one-to-one relationship between offence and punishment; punishment may be delayed, even beyond the perpetrator’s lifetime; and (paradoxically) the gods are, for a variety reasons, not always just. Failure to appreciate the role of such let-out clauses in sustaining a system of belief leads casual readers of literary pronouncements in the field of religion to overemphasize views that are apparently critical of traditional religion. Thus when Xenophon talks of fraud in divination, this should not be read as an indication of a personal or a wider Greek doubt of the validity of divination, but as an indication that the general proposition that the gods imparted the truth to mankind through divination was in fact thriving.
Fritz-Gregor Herrmann (Chapter 25) investigates the philosophical response to ancient Greek religion, and focuses on the critical moment, namely the theology offered, or seemingly offered, by Plato. It is possible to offer a relatively coherent summary of Plato’s theology sewn together from prima facie readings of the relevant dialogues. In this the immutable is associated with the divine, and the changeable with the non-divine. Partial order is imposed on the chaotic world by a demiurge or creator-god, who is good, with reference to that which is immutable. He fashions within his creation the divine and eternal principle of soul, shared to a greater or lesser extent by all that moves, and which is capable of perceiving the immutable. But this sort of construction is quite misleading. First, we are not licensed to read Plato’s dialogues as each shedding light on a different aspect of a coherent and fixed underlying Platonic system of thought. Secondly, such a reading is an unsophisticated and reductive one, comparable to taking Stephen Hawking’s references to God to testify to a personal belief on his part, when it is clear from their context that they are metaphorical or allegorical, or that they are graceful appropriations of the language both of the particular scholars with whom he engages and of the broader tradition within which he writes. Similarly, Plato’s remarks about a creator-god and souls should be regarded as myth, allegory, and appropriation, all with the purpose of persuasion. Careful consideration of Plato’s rational theology shows that the role of the divine is in fact taken by ‘‘the good.’’ However, Plato’s leading characters, Socrates and others, often assert the social necessity oftraditional varieties ofreligious belief in human society. Plato declined to distinguish between his rational enterprise and such social necessity in order to speak to a dual readership, on the one hand an audience that was educated but without philosophical training, and on the other the skilled specialists of the Academy. Plato’s failure to advertise this distinction led to his religious thought being simplistically misunderstood by Peripatetics and Stoics before being taken up into the theology of the early church.
T. H. Carpenter (Chapter 26) shows how material images formed part of the ‘‘complex interweaving of economic, artistic, and political motivations that shaped Athenians’ responses to their gods.’’ Neither ‘‘art’’ nor ‘‘religion’’ are concepts the ancient Greeks would easily have recognized, and the concept of‘‘religious art’’ even less so. As for the multifarious Athenian deployment of material imagery in religious contexts, the Great Panathenaea festival offers a valuable case study. The archaizing amphoras given as prizes are now valued at around half a million dollars each, although at the time of their production they were worth less than the oil they contained. At the heart of the festival was the dedication of a new peplos to the ancient and revered but to us obscure Athene Polias statue, and into this the women of Athens wove every year the story of the Gigantomachy. Indeed, it seems that this story, one of profound metaphorical significance for Athens, was preserved and celebrated rather more in material images than it was in literary narrative. It is striking that no cult was associated with Pericles’ magnificent new temple and Athene-image, the Parthenon and the Parthenos: these were adornments for and celebrations of the city, not the goddess. As for the Athenians’ representation of their religious practices in material images, extant artifacts may be able to tell us much, but they have to be handled with care. Whilst some vases may indeed be readable as useful documents of traditional Athenian ritual practice, the ritual imagery on others may blur misleadingly into mythological narrative, or it may be realigned in accordance with the ritual practices the painter imagined to prevail in the lands to which he hoped to export his vase. White-ground lekythoi, produced only for the home funerary market, evidently carried imagery intended to speak to the Athenians themselves, and the images they chose to carry were gently reassuring ones.
We conclude with an epilogue on the contemporary popular reception of ancient Greek religion. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (Chapter 27) analyzes the silver screen’s response to classical mythological subjects. Mass-market movies often respond to ancient myths in a more vital fashion than does art-house cinema: they are more inclined to appropriate the myths and creatively rework them in the spirit familiar in antiquity itself. The study focuses on the projection of the gods and their differentiation from mortals in two mass-market Ray Harryhausen films, Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans. A basically Homeric Olympus is extended from the tales of Achilles and Odysseus into those of Jason and Perseus. Imagined as a cross between the Acropolis and a nineteenth-century neoclassical fantasy, it is separated from the mortal world by a cloud layer. Here the gods can observe the mortals from whom they live distantly by means of a viewing screen in the form of a pool. The gods are distinguished from mortals by size, by shape-shifting and epiphanic powers, and by dress. They wear white robes that appeal to the image we (misleadingly) derive of them from the marble sculptures antiquity has bequeathed us. But the gods are also differentiated from mortals through the semiotics of casting: gods are played by international stars, mortals by (then) relative unknowns. More subtly, casting is also used to convey the Homeric personalities of the various gods and the relationships between them to an untutored audience in an efficient way. Zeus is taken by the great theatrical lord, Laurence Olivi
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