So far we have been considering mainly the more public, group-oriented side of Greek religious practice, for which there is rather more evidence. But religion was not confined to the polis and its subdivisions, nor can ‘private’ cult all be subsumed under the neat-sounding but in practice vague label ‘cults of the oikos’. Certainly, Gods such as Zeus Herkeios were worshipped to safeguard the family enclosure; certainly, each family hearth was sacred, and new family members had to be introduced to it, but much more would depend on individual circumstances and inclination. A house might stand next to a shrine; Apollo Agyieus (‘of the streets’) and Hermes were everywhere, or you might have a ‘neighbour hero’ like Lykos in Wasps or (in one interpretation) Alkmaion to Pindar (Pythian Odes 8.57-60). You might even discover a previously unknown shrine, perhaps a hero’s tomb, on your own land. In such cases, it would be natural to take part in worship - without necessarily going so far as Theophrastos’ ‘Deisidaimon’ (the man who exhibits ‘cowardice with respect to the Gods’), who falls to his knees and anoints the stone at every crossroads. A person might also be a frequent visitor to a favourite sanctuary. Herodotos obviously does not think it particularly strange behaviour for the nurse of a Spartiate girl to take her charge every day to the sanctuary of Helen at Therapne (Hdt. 6.61), and Aristotle recommends for pregnant women a daily walk to a temple (Politics 1335b).
Sacrifice, we have seen, was not a daily occurrence, so what form did this worship take? First, there was the address to the deity. It was standard practice to speak a greeting to the God even when passing a sanctuary; the same, therefore, would have been done on entering. Prayer proper, the making of a request, may have followed. The Spartan nurse, according to Herodotos, prayed in front of the cult statue. But whereas elsewhere - in an emergency, say, or on the battlefield - prayer would have to be just prayer, accompanied perhaps by a hasty promise to give something later if spared, in a cult place some cult action would be the natural accompaniment. This could be the burning of a few grains of incense, the offering of a garland, the pouring of a libation or a gift of sweetmeats - all actions which accompanied animal sacrifice but were peripheral to it, now occupying centre stage. The simple piety evinced in such actions was sometimes thought to be particularly pleasing to the Gods. Of course, individuals might decide to offer a sacrifice too, if circumstances seemed to demand it. Thus in Menander’s Dyskolos, the mother of Sostratos sees Pan in a dream, and following this a family party goes out to the appropriate country shrine with a sheep to sacrifice. Sometimes worshippers commemorated their sacrifices on stone, as countless votive reliefs testify from all over the Greek world; most sanctuaries must have been full of these. The dream, too, is amply confirmed by epigraphic testimony: ‘So-and-so dedicated this having seen a dream’ is a common formula from the fourth century onwards (see for instance Hesperia 29 (1960) 123-5). Comparative studies suggest, unsurprisingly, that where the divine is a part of ‘everyday’ life, dreams about God or Gods are indeed common. The waking vision was rarer, but more reliable. Both were important but unpredictable channels of individual communication with the divine.
Dreams and visions are God-initiated (in Menander, it is part of Pan’s design to appear in Sostratos’ mother’s dream). Help, advice and instruction could also be solicited by humans, either as a simple request, or, particularly where the best course of action was not clear, through divination. Various signs could be used to discern the Gods’ purpose, if only the interpreter had sufficient skill; omens from sacrifice and the flight of birds were common, but a sneeze or even an apparently chance word spoken could have mantic significance. For Aischylos, or whoever wrote Prometheus Bound, the art of mantike was the highest human achievement (lines 484ff.). Although a few sceptical voices are found, we might very roughly compare attitudes to weather forecasting today: in Britain at least, we see that the forecasts are very often inaccurate, yet hardly anyone will argue seriously that the predictions are not founded on a ‘true’ basis. That other kinds of prediction are possible follows fairly easily from the assumptions that the Gods have a connection with ‘fate’, what will happen, and that they are usually well-disposed towards their worshippers.
The oracular shrine was a much more elaborate development of the same idea. Beginning no doubt with the simple observation that a particular place was good for receiving signs, perhaps simultaneously with the idea that a God was specially present there, oracles developed into an important and characteristically Greek phenomenon; the Lydian Kroisos, in Herodotos’ well-known account (1.46-52), made trial of all the well-known Greek oracles in order to find the most reliable source of knowledge about the future. Many more oracles must have existed than we can know about: Pausanias records some local ones in the second century ce, in which the God’s answer was given by a mirror, or by the first words heard on leaving the agora (Pausanias 7.21.12, 22.2-3). The best-known oracle, of course, was that of Apollo at Delphi, closely followed by the more ancient oracle of Zeus at Dodona in northern Greece. Oracles of this level of repute did not confine themselves to the pressing concerns of individuals (though we have some individual queries from Dodona, on matters of theft, paternity, and so on), but were consulted as a matter of course on important state decisions. Hence Delphi in particular can be seen as playing a part in inter-state politics; a lot has been said about its apparent ‘medizing’ stance in the Persian Wars, much less about how the mechanics of such a position might have worked. Greeks recognized that responses might not always be accurate; human error or, not seldom, corruption might creep in, but the central process continued to carry conviction.
Consulting an oracle was indeed a very potent form of the encounter with divinity, hedged about with elaborate preliminaries and only possible in a restricted range of circumstances. What happened next might be far removed from everyday experience. It is a plausible assumption that the Delphic Pythia gave her prophecies in a state of altered consciousness. The mystical-sounding experiences which Plutarch relates of those who consulted the Boiotian oracle of Trophonios (Plutarch Moralia 590A-592E) may be anachronistic for his fifth-century setting, but already in the fifth century it was well known that ‘going down to Trophonios’ (it was an underground oracle) was a frightening experience (Aristophanes Clouds 506-8). Although oracular responses were often clear and simple (at Dodona, for instance, divination by lots was used in at least some cases), there is no reason to discard the pervasive and well-attested tradition of oracular ambiguity. As Herakleitos said (22 B 93 Diels-Kranz), perhaps comparing his own writings: ‘The Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign (semainei).’ It is up to the inquirer then to complete the process by working out the correct meaning.
An analogous process in some ways was the visit to a sanctuary to request healing. Indeed, some oracles, like that of Amphiaraos at Oropos on the Boiotian-Attic border, were primarily concerned with healing. The usual procedure, treated humorously in Aristophanes’ Wealthy was for the worshipper after purification and sacrifice to sleep in the sanctuary, in the hope that the God would either effect a cure then and there or reveal in a dream the procedure to be followed. The Asklepieion at Epi-dauros, a major healing sanctuary, has yielded long inscriptions listing miraculous cures. Healing must be a matter of universal interest, but the fifth century seems to have seen a surge in the popularity of specialized healing-shrines. This was the time when Asklepios’ cult spread rapidly from its centres at Epidauros in the Argolid and Trikka in Thessaly to establish places of worship all over the Greek world. In Athens also we have testimony of very many more local cults, mostly of heroes, which specialized in healing; the same may well have been true of other cities. Once again it is likely to have been the personal encounter with the deity which underlay the appeal of the cult and gave the experience conviction.
World History
