There is one race of men, one race of gods, both have breath of life from a single mother [Gaia, the earth, according to legend]. But sundered power holds us divided, so that the one is nothing, while for the other the brazen sky is established as their sure citadel for ever. Yet we have some likeness, in great intelligence and strength, to the immortals, though we know not what the day may bring, what course after nightfall destiny has written that we must run to the end.
(Pindar, Nemean Ode 6, translation R. Buxton)
Pindar, writing as an aristocrat who eulogized the champions of the Greek athletic world, saw his subjects as coming close to the gods in their moments of victory. It is a reminder that the boundary between human and divine in the Greek world was fluid. The gods had never distanced themselves from humanity through uttering authoritative revelations. There was no central organization on earth, no ‘church’, no sacred book from which dogma could be preached, no priesthood, in the sense of a separate body of men or women who had a vocation and/or authority to interpret what was correct belief or behaviour. Yet the Greeks had a strong sense of the sacred and supernatural that pervaded their lives at many different levels. Each city had its sanctuaries where the rituals of sacrifice were performed for the health of the community. The protecting god or goddess of the city, Athena in Athens, would act for the good of all. ‘For they say that foolish decisions are typical of this city, but the gods turn up for the best whatever mistakes you make, according to the chorus in Aristophanes’ play The Clouds.
Within the Greek world-picture the twelve gods of Mount Olympus take a central place. The origins of the individual gods are varied. Some are named in the Mycenaean Linear B tablets or have even earlier origins. Zeus, the father of the gods, is found in pre-Greek Indo-European cultures. Many other gods and goddesses are superficially similar to those found in the Near East. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, has her equivalents in the Sumerian Inanna and the Semitic Astarte, and probably came to Greece from the Near East via Cyprus. Apollo’s origins also appear to be non-Greek. Others may have had Greek roots but had absorbed attributes from the east. Typically, each god or goddess is a composite one, taking its final form from many different sources.
According to Herodotus, it was Homer and Hesiod, aided by the Muses, who ‘first fixed for the Greeks the genealogy of the gods, gave the gods their titles, divided among them their honours and functions and defined their images’, but the
Process, like most elements of the Homeric world view, must have begun much earlier. In their final form the Olympians became a family of gods, who had a common home on their mountain, were immortal (Zeus, his sister-wife Hera, and Poseidon, god of the sea and earthquakes, might be portrayed as middle aged but no older), and who did not need human food. Zeus was, in most mythologies, assumed to be related to them all. Athena had sprung from his head, Dionysus from his thigh. Artemis, goddess of hunting, and much else, another goddess whose origins lie in the east, becomes incorporated in the family as the daughter of Zeus by Leto, with Apollo as her twin. Aphrodite is another goddess whose original birth story (see p. 140 above) is overlain by a later myth of Zeus as her father through a goddess, Dione (although Dione is also a feminine form of ‘Zeus’).
The formulation of the Olympian gods as an extended family defined their relationships with each other while increasing the likelihood of disagreement and conflict among them. Between them, the Olympian gods oversaw most human experiences, those of the changing weather and elements, harvests, love and sexuality (Aphrodite), craftsmanship (Hephaestus and Athena), war (the god Ares and the goddess Athena), intellectual pursuits (Apollo), and the hearth in the home (Hestia). There was no important sphere of human experience that was not provided for. At the same time the roles of the gods were never frozen. One of the achievements, and functions, of Greek myth was to provide developing story lines so that new religious needs and aspirations could always be catered for. No one cult forbade membership of another, so spiritually this was a fluid world with much scope for individuals to find their own pathways.
The gods were linked to the origins of the staples of everyday life. The Titan Prometheus gave fire to mankind, grain was the gift of Demeter, and wine that of Dionysus. Such myths were well known. They were woven into Greek literature and rhetoric, from Homer’s epics, known by any educated man, to the tragic dramas of fifth-century Athens. There are many variants on the myths, and these were developed without hesitation in the service of local needs. They would act as the filters through which the public activities of most cities and communities could be explained. So the oracle at Delphi claimed its origins as the place where the god Apollo killed a serpent, the Python. The Athenians wove the story of Theseus, the founder of their democracy, into their city’s history and in 476 Bc his bones were ‘discovered’ on the island of Skyros and brought back to Athens for burial. There was a festival in Athens known as the Oschophoria where young men dressed as women in commemoration of two men who had disguised themselves among the virgins that Theseus took to sacrifice in Crete. Often the mythology was intricate. Only the most erudite would have been able to identify all the gods, giants, heroes, and events depicted on the massive frieze on the great altar of Pergamum (second century Bc), now in Berlin.
The Olympians were not alone. Hesiod had portrayed an earlier divine race, the Titans, overthrown by Zeus, the son of their leader Cronos, and other gods from this lost epoch include Gaia, the earth mother, Uranus (Heaven), and Chaos (the Void). The daughters of Gaia were the Furies, who mercilessly avenged murders within a family. There were gods of the earth, the chthonic gods (chthonios, ‘beneath the earth’), such as Hades, god of the underworld, darker, more morbid divinities when compared with the immortals of the mountain tops and approached by very different forms of rituals and sacrifice. A god who wavered in his membership of the Olympian Pantheon was Dionysus, the god of wine and the patron of wild abandon in drink and sex. Both the drama festivals in Athens were held in his honour.
Between the gods and men were the heroes, some of them half-human and halfdivine figures, others humans whose exploits had earned them special honour and whose shrines were the object of reverence. (Alexander the Great began his campaign in Persia at Troy with sacrifices to the supposed tombs of Achilles and Ajax.) One of the most prominent of the semi-divine was Heracles (the Romans Hercules). The son of Zeus, by the beautiful mortal Alcmene, the legends of his strength soon accumulated and culminated in the myth of the Twelve Labours, undertaken in expiation by Heracles after he had killed his own children. Many of them are associated with particular sites so at Nemea, in the Peloponnese, where Heracles killed a ferocious lion, there were biennial memorial games held in honour of his father Zeus. The Labours are beautifully displayed on the metopes from the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Their successful achievement earned Heracles full divinity and there are images of his ascending to Mount Olympus.
The welfare of human beings was not the predominant concern of the gods. Their own quarrels and activities usually took precedence. While they could act as protectors of the human race or their favoured cities, they could equally be actively hostile. Euripides is the playwright who exploits this contrariness most fully. In his play The Trojan Women, the gods actively take part in either side of the conflict. In Hippolytus, Hippolytus is cursed by Theseus, his father, who believes, wrongly, that Hippolytus has seduced his second wife Phaedra. The curse activates Poseidon to send a sea monster to terrorize Hippolytus’ horses who drag him to his death. Many Homeric heroes die when the gods turn against them. The efforts of one god to protect a favourite mortal or city could be frustrated by another. (So in the Iliad Hera wears Zeus out by abandoned love-making so that she can put her plans in action behind his back.) The gods could not always control each other. In Aeschylus’ Orest-eia Athena and Apollo are hard put to it to restrain the awesome power of the Furies determined on revenge on Orestes for the murder of his mother.
Yet while the Greeks never believed that the gods were preoccupied with the behaviour of the human race, there was a consensus that they would support correct behaviour and revenge bad. ‘But if any man comes striding, high and mighty in all he says and does, no fear of justice, no reverence for the temples of the gods, let a rough doom strike him down. . . Can such a man, so desperate, still boast he can save his life from the flashing bolts of god?’ as the chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus puts it. There were specific virtues and vices that aroused the particular concern of the gods. Hubris was offensive behaviour through which one attempted to win more honour for oneself by humiliating others, treating a free person as if they were a slave (compare Xerxes’ whipping of the Hellespont), or claiming divinity for oneself. Ate was headstrong behaviour, often induced by the gods, indulged in with no thought of its consequences. The gods were believed to punish behaviour against parents, guests and hosts, suppliants, and the dead, with oath-breaking being the object of particular fury. On a more positive side, the gods supported arete, virtue, excellence, and charis, the giving of favours and the taking on of obligations. In Hesiod Zeus is seen as the upholder of dike, ‘justice/righteousness, and Solon invokes Athena in support of his reforms. There was a sense that offerings made with appropriate ritual and piety deserved a return.
There were no inhibitions about portraying the gods in statues or vase paintings, although it was seen as a major breach of convention in the fourth century bc when Praxiteles sculpted a life-size statue of Aphrodite nude—a statue that then inspired thousands of other nude Aphrodites in various poses. The gods were housed in their temples, and here their statues aroused special reverence. In the ancient Athenian Erechtheum on the Acropolis, the wooden cult statue of Athena Polias was said to have fallen from heaven. The enormous creations of the sculptor Phidias, the chryselephantine statue of Athena in the Parthenon and that of Zeus in Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, were the most famous of these, applauded throughout the Greek world.
These temples were embellished with the finest sculpture and so were symbols of the pride of a city. Some, such as the Parthenon and the temples along the ridge at Acragas (Agrigento) in Sicily, were in magnificent settings, others less prominent within the city, and some altogether remote. Those lucky enough to see the limestone temple of Apollo Epikourios, Apollo as ‘helper, at Bassae in the Peloponnese before it was enveloped in its protective covering will not easily forget the impact of a building isolated against dramatic mountain scenery. Temples were sometimes used as boundary markers. The city of Mantineia in the central Peloponnese, which was surrounded by other city-states, had a ring of sanctuaries on its borders.
Temples were presided over by priests and priestesses, usually, but not always, according to the sex of the deity. Priests would oversee the general good order of the sanctuary and the running of ceremonies. Some temples appointed their priests from a designated family, others only required that their family be of some status. While a priest was not expected to be an expert on religious affairs in general, priests may have been drawn to the post through their own interest in sacred things. The biographer and philosopher Plutarch was a priest at Delphi. (Specifically on priestesses, see Joan Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece, Princeton and London, 2009.)
While anyone could offer a private prayer when passing a sanctuary, priests often took the initiative. A celebrated example of prayer comes from the start of the Iliad. Chryses, priest of Apollo, seeks revenge from the god for the humiliation put on him by Agamemnon. The god’s titles are recited and reminders given of the sacrifices that Chryses has offered.
Hear me, lord of the silver bow who set your power above Chryses and Killa, the sacrosanct, who are lord in strength over Tenedos, Simintheus, if ever it pleased your heart that I built your temple, if ever it pleased you that I burnt all the rich thigh pieces of bulls, of goats, then bring to pass this wish I pray for: let your arrows make the Danaans [Greeks] pay for my tears shed.
The practice which defined the Greeks’ relationships with their gods more than any other was that of sacrifice, an offering of wine, water, or a burnt offering to gods above or those divinities or heroes in the earth below. As could be expected, sacrifices were normally carried out according to strict rituals. In the case of animal sacrifices the victim would be a domesticated sheep, goat, or ox. A noisy procession led it to the altar followed by a ritual that created the impression that it met its death with joy, possibly involving the seeking of forgiveness for the act of killing animals that had been taken into the care of man. The process of slaughter followed convention: barley grains were thrown at the victim, a sacred knife was used, a few hairs were taken first from the animal’s forehead before the throat was cut. Once the animal was dead it was divided and burnt. The splanchna, the heart, lungs, and kidneys, the sources of love and hatred, were passed round for all to taste while the lean meat provided a more substantial feast. It was only the smell of the burning that ascended upwards to the gods.
Sacrifices were incorporated within the rituals of the major festivals. At the festival of the Panathenaea, founded in the sixth century and held every year in Athens (with a Greater Panathenaea every fourth year), Athens flaunted itself before rival cities. The rituals focused on a majestic procession through the Agora up towards the Acropolis followed by the presentation of a specially woven peplos, the normal dress of women, for the statue of Athena Polias, Athena as protector of the city, in the Erechtheum. Details from the procession appear on the Parthenon frieze (see below, p. 258). There are horsemen and chariots and then those on foot, elders, musicians, and men with water jugs with the sacrificial oxen in front of them. Maidens carried offerings and incense burners and so the frieze runs round to the eastern fa9ade where mythology rules. Here the founding heroes of the ten tribes of Cleisthenes stood alongside the seated Olympian gods. In the centre of the fa9ade the peplos is being folded by a young girl and a man.
After the sacrifice of a hundred oxen on the Acropolis, officials of the city, the generals and participants in the procession dined in special rooms while the remaining meat was distributed among Athenian citizens according to the numbers their deme (see earlier, p. 182) had provided for the procession. Then there were games. The prizes were amphorae of olive oil, 1,400 awarded for each games, with 140 alone for the winner of the four-horse chariot race. These amphorae were highly prized; some 300 survive, many in tombs, often treasured enough to be mended rather than discarded when broken. (See Jenifer Neils (ed.), Goddess and Polls: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens, Princeton and London, 1992, for details of this famous festival. For Athenian religion in general see Robert Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens, New York and Oxford, 2007.)
As was customary with sacrificed meat, the gods were left with what appeared to be the remnants, the thighbones, and tail. A myth explains this. It told how Prometheus had made the first sacrifice but tried to deceive Zeus by concealing the best meat in entrails and the more revolting parts of the animal and offering Zeus just the bones concealed in fat. Zeus was not taken in. He took the bones but caused Hephaestus to create a woman, Pandora, who brought to earth with her a storage jar (pithos). She was forbidden to open it but when her curiosity got the better of her, she released all manner of evils and diseases from which the human race had hitherto been immune. Only Hope remained at the bottom of the jar. From then on sacrificers could keep their meat but suffer a life of toil in return.
The most widespread festival of all in the Greek world was the Thesmophoria, originally held in honour of Demeter, the goddess of crops and the fertility of animals. Most festivals had their roots in the countryside and were closely connected with the rhythms of the agricultural year. The harvest was rejoiced in, all the more because its successful gathering allowed a period of leisure. The city could create or develop a festival to celebrate its own identity. In Athens the festival known as Apa-touria was marked by a gathering of the phratries (see earlier, p. 181), the admission to them of new-born infants, and the introduction of boys who had reached the age of 16. This was the festival as a celebration of a rite of passage. The festivals of Dionysus or the Thesmophoria appear concerned with the overturning of conventions through drunkenness, sexual abandon, or the reversal of the subordinate roles of women. It was as if, when rebellion was sanctioned within defined limits and times, it made it all the more controllable for the rest of the year.
The most solemn festival of the Athenian year, after 464, was the annual burial of the war dead. The cremated bones of those whose bodies had been recovered were carried through the streets in procession, while an empty bier commemorated those lost abroad. In a speech made probably on behalf of those who died fighting on Samos in 439 bc, Pericles compared the loss of young life with ‘the spring being taken from the year. This was the day when the city reflected on its achievements and consolidated its own pride in being the leading city of Greece. Pericles’ oration at the festival in 431 (see p. 268) is the greatest of all celebrations of Athens’s achievement.
If the intentions of the gods were always uncertain, it made sense to use an oracle to test out whether a planned action was likely to bring retribution. The oracle’s response might not provide a clear answer, but at least a neutral or positive answer could reassure or bring confidence. Many enterprises must have been brought to success largely through the belief that the gods favoured them.
The oracle of Apollo at Delphi, where the god had overthrown the Python, is the most celebrated example. The sanctuary was believed to be the centre of the world. It stood high on the mountain of Parnassus overlooking the gulf of Corinth. Suppliants, who came from all over the Greek world and beyond, made their way up the mountainside from the sea. (The modern road deprives the visitor of the sense of the height and remoteness of the site. It is worth walking down the mountainside on the path from the modern village to be able to look back up at the sanctuary and catch some sense of its isolated splendour.) The messages of Apollo were interpreted and relayed to supplicants by a priestess, the Pythia, who sat on a tripod above the hole in an inner sanctum of Apollo’s temple on the site. Above the clutter of the complex was a stadium where the Pythian Games were held every four years.
Delphi was under the control of no single city but an association of states of central Greece and the northern Peloponnese.
Approaching an oracle was a serious business requiring sacrifices and signs from the god that the enquirer was welcome. The questions brought by suppliants were many and varied. According to Plutarch, ‘people ask if they shall be victorious, if they shall marry, if it is to their advantage to sail, to farm, to go abroad.’ Would-be colonizers sought advice on the best sites. Cities would ask for guidance on political problems, how to deal with disputes with neighbouring cities, or what would happen if they went to war. The answers given were not just gibberish. They were spoken as full sentences or in verse but often they needed interpretation. This could be given in the first instance by professionals within the sanctuary but their solutions could be disregarded. Themistocles famously manipulated Delphi’s advice on the Persian invasion to support his plan of counter-attack. Often misinterpretation was disastrous, as the Spartans found when what they believed was an oracle promising victory against the city of Tegea, proved, in fact, to be predicting their defeat. For those on whom favour had been bestowed, especially through military victory, would donate a treasury or a shrine of their heroes to flaunt their success to their fellow Greeks.
The shrines of the healing god Asclepius also drew in hopeful supplicants from throughout the Greek world. Asclepius was a son of Apollo who had been taught the healing arts by Chiron, a wise centaur, after he had been snatched from his mother’s womb. He was seen as an approachable god and those who sought his help would bed down in a sacred area (the adyton) close to his temple after they had carried out the customary sacrifices. He would then often appear in a dream to give advice. The most prestigious shrines were on the island of Kos and at Epidaurus in the eastern Peloponnese which became a focus for social gatherings as well. The theatre at Epidaurus is the best preserved in Greece and there is an athletics track and rooms for dining and philosophical debate. The messages of the god were supplemented by the prescription of local herbs, and surgical instruments have also been found on the site, suggesting that medical care went beyond simply invoking the god.
For those who were searching a more intense spiritual experience there were mystery cults, notable among them the Eleusinian Mysteries. The myth told how Persephone had been taken by Hades into the Underworld but was allowed to return to her mother, Demeter, the goddess of fertility, in a symbolic rebirth of the year’s crops. The cult was celebrated each September at Eleusis, near Athens, in the mystery rituals. Initiation of new adherents took place through ceremonies within a Hall of Mysteries, in essence a temple, built on a site held sacred for well over a thousand years. While Athens controlled the cult and the ceremonies began with a procession from Athens, initiation was open to outsiders, even to Greek-speaking slaves. Legends told how Heracles had been among the earliest. In the centuries to come, initiation became a status symbol among Romans.
The Greeks did not live in dread of wrath of the gods. They did not assume there to be any restrictions on their right as individuals to find eudaimonia, the flourishing of their rational minds, and they ridiculed those who became too religious. Plutarch, a priest himself, considered it demeaning when a visitor to a shrine indulged in ‘magic charms and spells, rushing about and beating of drums, impure purifications and unclean sanctifications, barbarous and outlandish penances and mortifications at the shrines’ Euripides had warned in his play The Bacchae of the fateful consequences of religious ecstasy—it distorts perceptions of reality and can lead to mindless violence. Some, the Sophists among them (see below, p. 270), were more questioning. When the philosopher Protagoras of Abdera (c.490-420) was asked his opinion on the gods, he replied that ‘I have no means of knowing whether they exist or do not exist, or what they are like in form.’ The problem, he went on, was too obscure and time too short to solve it. Protagoras does not, of course, say that the gods do not exist, but he does show a healthy acceptance of the difficulties in saying much about them. In this he is typical of the rationalists of his time. By the end of the sixth century there is, for the first time, open acceptance that the myths are often absurd. The philosopher Xenophanes (c.570-475) complained that ‘Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and reproach among mortals: stealing, committing adultery and deceiving each other.’ Famously Xenophanes noted that each culture fashioned gods that reflected its own experience (see earlier, p. 199).
Very few in the Greek world would have dared behave as if the gods did not exist or that there was not some form of divine supervision of city life. Plato spoke for the conventional view in his late work The Laws: ‘To engage in sacrifice and commune with the gods continually, by prayers and offerings and devotions of every kind, is a thing most noble and good and helpful towards the happy life, and superlatively fitting also for the good person.’ The Greeks lived easily with the sacred even if they did not always believe that the gods looked benignly upon them.
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