In looking at Athenian religion, we are given a unique opportunity to trace the development of its cults and beliefs. As Parker points out, ‘‘whereas histories of Greek religion and histories of Greece commonly pursue parallel paths at some distance from one another, an account of Attic religion constantly intersects with ordinary Athenian history’’ (1996:3). This section will examine events in two periods in order to demonstrate the interaction of religion with the history of the city.
The first instance is an audacious act by the ousted tyrant Peisistratos that enabled him to return triumphantly from exile in the 550s BC. He entered the city in a chariot driven by a tall and beautiful young woman called Phye whom he had dressed up in armor, while messengers were sent on ahead to announce that Athena herself was welcoming him home. According to Herodotus, our source for what took place, ‘‘believing that the woman was the goddess herself, the citizens worshiped this person, and welcomed Peisistratos’’ (1.60).
The event lets us take further our discussion above of the place of myth in Athens, even though on face of it, as a historical event, it might seem to lack mythic dimensions. It may seem out of place too in a discussion of ritual. Rituals are, after all, repeated actions that depend for their efficacy upon rites being performed in the correct way, by designated personnel at appropriate locations. This, in contrast, was a one-off event outside the religious calendar. But the reason Peisistratos’ action worked is that it used mythic and ritual elements in such a way as to generate a range of religious responses.
Herodotus expresses astonishment that the Athenians, a people famed for their rationality, should have let themselves be taken in by a ‘‘ridiculous trick.’’ But there is no need to place undue emphasis upon Herodotus’ authorial intervention, for it serves his purposes as a historian to adopt a rationalistic position (see Sinos 1998:86-8). We might just as easily adopt an opposite interpretation of the event, seeing it as exemplifying the Athenians’ dedication to religious phenomena. They were, after all, the people known to be more devoted than any other to ta theia. So we will leave Herodotus to one side, and focus on the messages and allusions conveyed by what Peisistratos did.
Athena was never simply thought of as a figurehead by the Athenians; so intimate was her bond with the city that she was thought to be willing to intervene on its behalf. To an extent what Peisistratos was doing was acting out the sentiments expressed in the poem of Solon we looked at earlier. By riding alongside the ‘‘goddess,’’ he was signaling her approval of himself as the rightful leader of Athens. What he was also doing, however, was evoking Athena’s wider, panhellenic, persona as the patron of heroes. Peisistratos was in effect setting himself up as a new protege of the goddess: an individual who merited her assistance just like the heroes of old. What is more, the fact that the entry to Athens took place on a chariot suggests that he had one particular heroic antecedent in mind above all others: Heracles. A hero with considerable popularity in archaic Athens, Heracles was frequently depicted riding in a chariot driven by Athena (see Boardman 1972). But what was so clever was Peisistratos’ avoidance of specific comparison with the hero because he was not dressed as him. In effect, he was having it both ways. Not only did the chariot ride evoke Heracles’ journey, but he managed to construct his own particular special bond with the goddess.
Also, we have to remember that Peisistratos seems to have been aware of the potential for large-scale communal occasions to unite the people. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the figure that founded the Great Panathenaea was able to use a religious event for his own political ends. From this, I would suggest one further heroic parallel: Erichthonius, the hero specially favored by Athena, and who founded the Panathenaea. We might also interpret Peisistratos in this context as a sort of second Erichthonius - effectively a second founder, or even re-founder, of the festival.
We could go further still and see the Panathenaea, with its great procession in honor of Athena, as a cultic parallel for what took place. But again, straightforward comparison is impossible, because the Panathenaic procession did not include transportation of an image of the goddess. To find a better ritual parallel, we need to look to another of Athena’s festivals, the Plynteria, when the statue of Athena was undressed and conveyed, probably by a procession, to the sea to be bathed. Or for a closer parallel still, we might look beyond the cult of Athena, to festivals such as the Great Dionysia, which involved the transportation of the god’s cult image between various sites: its home on the Acropolis slopes, a temple near the Academy, and the theater. But to seek a single candidate or even group of candidates for the inspiration behind the festival risks missing the genius of what Peisistratos did. His chariot ride was an act packed with religious allusions that produced such a show of communality that he was able to unite the people behind him and regain political supremacy.
We turn now to events that generated a religious outburst during a later period in Athenian history. But whereas Peisistratos inspired the community to respond as a group to the messages conveyed by his actions, these events contributed to an already existing state of political instability and culminated in a major impiety scandal. At this time, Athens was lacking a single strong leader to direct religious feeling. The politician who had come closest to doing this was Pericles, but he had been dead for many years, while the most dominant active politician, Alcibiades, was one of those implicated in the scandal.
In the summer of 415 BC, the city was in the midst of preparations for a massive naval attack on Sicily. While the fleet was getting ready to depart, the city experienced, in the words of one of our sources, ‘‘a number of inauspicious signs and portents’’ (Plutarch, Alcibiades 18.2). Of these, one that generated a particularly heightened response was the celebration of the Adonia:
In many places in the city, images of the god were being laid out for burial and funeral rites were being held for them, accompanied by the wailing cries of the women, so that all those who cared for things such as these were troubled, fearing that the mighty expedition, equipped with such brilliance and vitality, might wither away in its prime and come to nothing. (Plutarch, Nicias 13.7; cf. Alcibiades 18.2-3)
This reaction involved an extraordinary inversion of the status of Adonis. As a foreign deity worshiped in a curious manner, he was normally a marginal figure, perhaps even the most marginalized of all the beings worshiped in the city. Yet in the summer of 415 the women’s lamentations over this youth, who died in his prime, contributed to the sense of unease over the fate of the fleet.
These feelings were compounded by an audacious act of impiety ( asebema) that stunned the city. Such was its impact that it was interpreted not only as a bad omen for the expedition, but as a conspiracy against the entire democratic system. One morning, close to the time when the fleet was due to depart, the people woke up to find that most of their herms had been vandalized. Damaging any statue would be an act of impiety, but these mutilations were especially sacrilegious. As we have seen, the statues were found in porches, where they served the purpose of protecting temples and houses. What the perpetrators did was to attack the deity who protected the places where gods and people dwelt.
The seriousness of the act becomes further apparent when we consider Hermes’ divine roles. He was the mediator who presided over boundaries, including two that were especially inauspicious in the circumstances: the passage of souls from this world to the underworld, and travel in general. To compound matters, he was the messenger of the gods who was thought to intervene between the human and divine worlds, and thereby help maintain a healthy relationship with the gods. In other words, the vandalism had ramifications for the whole channel of communication with the gods that Athenian religion provided. As Grote wrote, an equivalent would be a Spanish or Italian town having all its images of the Virgin defaced: in effect leaving the town ‘‘godless’’ (1855:168).
There was an immediate and extreme response to the sacrilege. The demos offered financial rewards and immunity from prosecution for anyone who could supply details about any other acts of impiety. And they found one in particular when information was received that groups of aristocrats, among them Alcibiades and another prominent citizen, Andocides, had been conducting performances of the Eleusinian Mysteries in private houses. These were, in the words of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, ‘‘the awful mysteries that are not to be transgressed, pried into, or divulged, for reverence for the gods checks the voice’’ (478-9). Yet, as set out in one of the speeches of Lysias (probably written for a prosecution of Andocides in 400 or 399 BC for a separate offence):
This man put on a ceremonial robe. He mimicked the sacred rites and revealed them to those who were not initiates. He gave voice to words that must not be spoken. This was why priests and priestesses stood facing the west and cursed him, shaking out their purple robes according to ancient and ancestral custom. (Lysias 6.51 (trans. Todd); cf. Plutarch, Alcibiades 22.3, on the curses against Alcibiades)
In a sense, what these men did was even more serious than the mutilation of the herms. That vandalism constituted an overt act of impiety. What is striking about the performances of the Mysteries is that they at once showed contempt for the cult yet adhered in certain respects to proper cult practice - appropriate clothing was worn, ritual language was spoken, and ritual acts were performed. But the perpetrators also did something that defied proper religious practice by performing the rites in the wrong place before the wrong people. This would be inappropriate in any cultic context, but as the rites were the Eleusinian Mysteries, their actions took on an even greater degree of gravity. Indeed, their actions emphasize by contrast what was so clever about Peisistratos’ ceremonial procession with ‘‘Athena.’’ The tyrant’s act evoked a number of cultic and mythic parallels without emulating any single one of them; these men in contrast performed a specific sacred rite in such a way as to subvert the main tenets of polis religion.
The response to the profanations was extreme. There were summary arrests and executions, ultimately leading to the exile of Alcibiades and Andocides. Indeed, the desire to discover the perpetrators led to the closest thing in ancient Greece to a religious persecution. What took place has implications for our understanding of the nature and extent of religious tolerance in the city. Athenian religion was nondogmatic and receptive to foreign influences and new beliefs. Added to this, it was non-credal in that it lacked a central authority or set of directives setting out what people should believe, or not believe. But its religion was an open system only so long as traditional practices and gods were not seen to be disrespected.
World History
