Introduction

Personification is an important phenomenon in Greek religious thought and practice. Anthropomorphism is a fundamental characteristic of the Greek pantheon: in both literature and art the Olympian gods are consistently represented as human in form, with human emotions and character traits. In this context it makes sense that the human form should have served as the standard vehicle for representing anything felt to have the slightest claim to divine power. What is striking is the range of things this includes: celestial phenomena, places, divisions of time, states of the body, emotions, abstract qualities, and political concepts. Personifications of all these types can be found in literature from Homer onwards, and in art they are clearly recognizable from at least the beginning of the sixth century; some make only brief appearances, as one-off creations of poet or painter to suit a particular purpose, but others can be found in a variety of contexts, suggesting that they were widely recognized. The fact that these figures are often represented in the company of Olympian gods, and exercising power over mortals, shows that they were held to embody some level of divine power. In a number of cases, however, we can be quite sure of a personification’s divine status, because we have evidence that she (or he) was in receipt of prayers, dedications, even sacrifices - exactly the same elements which constitute worship of the Olympian gods. This chapter will survey the phenomenon chronologically, starting with archaic epic and the influence that it had on cult, moving on to fifth-century developments, and concluding with the late classical and hellenistic periods; these last are taken together because most ‘‘typically hellenistic’’ personification cults in fact turn out to have earlier roots.

Before we begin, however, it is important to consider some problems of evidence and to establish the criteria by which we might determine a particular personification’s place in Greek religion. From the outset, Greek literature presents us with a fundamental problem because in classical antiquity there was no differentiation between upper - and lower-case letters, so there is no scope for the convention of personifying a concept simply by giving it an initial capital; neither does Greek use gender to differentiate between animate (he or she) and inanimate (it). The only way to distinguish a personification, therefore, is by looking at the context. At one end of the scale this might be something as slight as the presence of a qualifying verb or adjective indicating human action or feeling - ‘‘loving Peace wrapped her arms around him’’ - the kind of statement which may be no more than a poetic flourish. More substantially, a figure may be linked with others by means of a genealogy, as we shall see especially in Hesiod’s Theogony, or even be explicitly labeled as divine -‘‘recognizing one’s friends is a god’’ (Euripides, Helen 560). It will always remain debatable, however, whether a figure given this kind of literary treatment would have been understood as metaphorical or as a fully personalized divine power. The same ‘‘artistic license’’ problem applies to the many personifications found in Greek vasepainting and (to a lesser extent) sculpture. Here there can at least be no doubt that a figure is personified; the question is rather how we can recognize individual personifications. The practice of representing personifications with attributes which are expressive of the concept’s meaning only becomes standard in the hellenistic period. Before this the great majority of personifications in Greek art are represented in the form of idealized young women, indistinguishable one from another and only identifiable if an inscription is present. They may even masquerade as another kind of mythological figure altogether (A. C. Smith 2005): in Figure 4.1, for example, the central female figure is reclining in the company of Dionysus and his satyrs, wearing a Dionysiac ivy wreath and holding a drinking-horn, while the torch resting on her left shoulder indicates the night-time setting of the revels. Without an inscription we would take her to be a maenad, but above her head we can just make out the letters EIRENE, which label her as the personified ‘‘Peace.’’

In short, literature and art present us with a great number of personifications, but leave us uncertain of their status; in order to demonstrate that any figure was recognized as a full-blown deity we need to find evidence for practical cult observance. Very few personifications seem to have been important enough to merit an entire sanctuary of their own, but they might rather share a temple with a major deity, as or simply have an altar. We hear about such locations of worship in the works of writers of the first and second centuries AD such as Plutarch and Pausanias, but only rarely do these provide us with precise information which can be matched up with archaeological evidence from a particular site. More consistently useful is the evidence of inscriptions, which can attest a personification’s cult status unequivocally by recording dedications, financial details relating to a sanctuary’s accounts, regulations for a festival, or the names of cult personnel. Where evidence such as this is available, there can be no doubt that the personification in question was recognized, at least in the particular locality, as a power worth cultivating.