The religious experience of most moderns diverges significantly from that of people in antiquity because it is not intimately tied to one place. For the Greeks, place of birth determined one’s relationships with the gods. Colonists leaving their old homes brought with them fire from the hearth of their mother-city, and the cults of its gods. Yet their children would be nurtured in the new land by its resident powers. Like the nymphs, the river gods were closely associated with human fertility, the care of children, and love of one’s homeland. These minor gods made up for their strictly local influence by their great numbers: ‘‘it is difficult for a mortal to tell the names of all, but those who dwell near them know their own’’ (Hesiod, Theogony 69-70). Babies were often given names evocative of local rivers: Asopodorus, Ismenodorus, Acheloeus. In fifth-century Athens, a man named Cephisodotus co-founded a shrine to the river Cephisus and other gods, including Hermes and the nymphs. The other founder, Xenocratia, made offerings for the welfare of her son. She established an altar for a number of gods concerned with children, including the rivers Cephisus and Achelous; the trio Apollo, Artemis, and Leto; Eileithyia; and the local nymphs. Again, we are reminded of Peleus’ prayers to the river Spercheus for his son’s safety. The offering of a lock of hair to the local river was a widespread custom; in Aeschylus’ Choephoroi (6), Orestes calls this offering to Inachus a threptlrion, a recompense for his upbringing.
Popular taboos and cult regulations protected the purity of rivers and springs against the taint of human dirt, excrement, and other wastes, and rituals such as hand-washing or, in the case of an army, sacrifice before crossing a river are attested (Cole 2004: 30-37). Herodotus (6.76) tells how Cleomenes sacrificed to the river Erasinus at the border of Argolis on his way to attack Argos. When the omens were unfavorable, he said that he honored the river for not betraying his countrymen, but that even so, the Argives would not escape danger. In the Iliad, the cults of river deities are well developed: Scamander has his own priest and Spercheus has an altar and sanctuary (Iliad 5.77, 23.140-51). Animal sacrifice was performed either on an altar in a sanctuary or at the river bank itself so that the blood flowed into the water. Immersion sacrifices are also attested; Homer speaks of live horses cast into the Scamander (Iliad 21.131-2). Excavated counterparts to the literary descriptions are few, but a Swedish team investigated the sanctuary of the river Pamisus, the major waterway of Messenia, in the early twentieth century (Valmin 1938: 417-65). Located at a group of warm - and cold-water springs feeding the stream, it was founded in the archaic period and had a reputation as a place for healing. It included a small Doric temple with an unusual feature, a votive pit incorporated in the temple wall that connected with one of the springs feeding the river. Into this pit were deposited gifts of all sorts, including a number of small bronzes, which can be divided into animal figures (primarily horses, bulls, and goats) and human figures (mainly naked youths of classical date). There are signs that the god’s sanctuary was used in rites of maturation; a number of small lead stars were found, originally attached with wire in wreaths. These are paralleled at Laconian sanctuaries and were apparently dedicated by ephebes. Other metal items include astragaloi, probably dedicated as children’s toys, and models of male genitals deposited in hope of curing ailments or siring offspring. One curious bronze figurine is the bottom half of a boy that was originally cast in two parts and connected by a peg with its top. Since the feet of this figurine appeared deformed, the excavator guessed that the top half was worn by its dedicator as an amulet, while the bottom half was presented to the river-god in hopes of a cure. A ramp led from the temple to an altar, and according to tradition, the kings of Messenia brought annual sacrifices to the river (Pausanias 4.3.10). If accurate, this would place the origins of the cult in the seventh or eighth century.
The only river-god to achieve panhellenic status in cult is Achelous, the longest river in Greece, who shared many sanctuaries with the nymphs by the fifth century (Figure 3.2). No temple of the Achelous, which formed the boundary between Acarnania and Aetolia in northwestern Greece, has so far been uncovered, but he was regularly worshiped from archaic times as a generalized deity of fresh water. The cult was promoted by Zeus’ oracle at Dodona, which often recommended sacrifice to Achelous (Ephorus FGrH 70 F20). Theagenes of Megara dedicated an altar to Achelous when he diverted a stream to his new fountain house, where the Sithnid nymphs were the deities of the local springs (Pausanias 1.41.2). A boundary stone marking a shrine of the nymphs and Achelous was unearthed in Oechalia in Euboea, accompanied by a bronze of the god (ca. 460 BC), shown as a bearded, draped figure holding a cornucopia (Isler 1970:no. 264). The horn of plenty refers both to the river as a source of prosperity and to the myth, depicted in black figured vases, of his combat with Heracles for the hand of Deianira, during which the hero wrenched off one of the god’s horns. In the opening of Sophocles’
Figure 3.2 Votive relief from Eleusis, showing head of Achelous, Pan, and three nymphs. Photo courtesy of National Archaeological Museum, Athens
Trachiniae, Deianira describes her polymorphous suitor, ‘‘who in three shapes was always asking me from my father - coming now as a bull in visible form, now as a serpent, sheeny and coiled, now ox-faced with human trunk, while from his thick-shaded beard wellheads of fountain-water sprayed’’ (lines 9-14, trans. Jebb). The Oechalian bronze is notable for its full anthropomorphism, which seems to be characteristic of fifth-century sculpture. River gods are likewise shown in human form on pediments of the temple of Zeus at Olympia and the Parthenon in Athens, but in other media they are shown as theriomorphic, man-bull hybrids, the bull symbolizing both the terrifying force of a flooding river and the fertilizing potency of its waters. Achelous was also worshiped in the form of a mask (a marble example dating to about 470 BC was found near Marathon) and his bearded, horned face was used as an amulet in jewelry.
In myth, the rivers figured as ancestors and primordial figures, the first kings in the land. Examples include Peneus in Thessaly, Inachus in Argos, Asopus in Phlius, and Scamander in the Troad. This way of thinking about rivers was exported to Greek colonies, where there was a pressing need to establish claims upon the soil and the allimportant water sources, the first priority in choosing the site of a new settlement. All over the Greek world, but notably in well-watered Sicily, river gods were celebrated as emblems on fifth - and fourth-century coins.
World History
