Conclusion

Time is a richly and variously elaborated field in Greek religion, and it may seem quixotic to attempt to summarize its peculiar characteristics. But if we compare it with the time of neighboring and successor religions we notice certain emphases and may begin to get some feeling for its distinctive shape. Most obviously there is no single great founder, a Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, Jesus, or Zoroaster marking a radical break with the past in historical time - though initiates into Mystery religions, which looked back to a first teacher of holy secrets, may have felt less different in this respect. And although a sense of the past and of origins is central and important in Greek religion, although there is even evidence for belief in a ‘‘fall’’ from that closer intimacy with the gods enjoyed by mortals in the Golden Age of Cronus, this ‘‘fall’’ is narrated differently by different poets and in different places. Importantly, there is almost no sense of a future reconciliation, let alone an Apocalypse, Last Days, Second Coming. The present is it.

More positively, Greek religion, its myths and practices, constructs a vivid sense of ongoing process and sequence. This movement is materialized in the passing of the sun from dawn to setting, of the moon from new moon to full moon to waning moon, of the stars from first rising to first setting to vanishing, in the passing of mortals from birth to the land of the shades, via blooming hebe, marriage, and old age. And it is dramatized and allegorized in the processing of particular material products, wine, bread, cloth, from ‘‘raw’’ to consumable, in the processing of a sacrificial victim from slaughter to butchery to roasting to boiling to consumption. In many cases these processes are projected onto history, so that production recapitulates invention. This makes of the present a culmination or a confluence of a whole series of processes and discoveries, and of the past an unmade, incomplete present. This sense of time as accumulative might also be vividly represented in the literal piling up in temples and treasure houses of offerings made during previous festivals and recorded in temple accounts. Centuries later you could still see the dedications of Nicias at Delos, of the long-lost Sybarites at Olympia, of Croesus at Delphi, the chest of Cypselus, the three wooden images of Aphrodite carved from the prows of Cadmus’ ships and dedicated by his wife Harmonia, the tomb of Pelops, the place where Poseidon’s trident struck the rock of the Acropolis. The prime example of such accumulative deposits was the altar of Zeus at Olympia, the most material illustration of centuries of pious offerings, and of the continual burning of the sacred flame in the sacred hearth.

Timefulness, was a critical element in the Greek conception of what differentiated mortals from immortals and the basis of all intercourse between them. The gods were not merely deathless but ageless, beyond time, beyond change. And exchanges with the gods were specifically of the here and now, each gift looking both backwards and forwards, as thanks for past favors and in hope of future favors. For charis - ‘‘grace,’’ ‘‘favor,’’ ‘‘thanks’’ - which is the characteristic of all forms of cult, is a characteristic of necessarily ongoing relationships, gifts freely given which might oblige but never obligate the gods to return them, which they might return in a manner and at a time of their own choosing and often in quite surprising ways. Each gift, each favor was never paid back in full, but always left an imbalance, a further obligation, a further debt (Parker 1998).

This sense of charis, of freedom in exchanges, of mystery in the way gifts to the gods might be returned, of enigma in the way an oracle might be fulfilled, is one crucial factor in separating piety from the more mechanical exchanges and constraints associated with magic and witchcraft. Certainly these necessarily ongoing exchanges could never be finally tallied up at some future Day of Judgment, for the prospect of such a tally would undermine charis. At the same time, the Age of Zeus, unlike the Age of Allah or Yahweh, was constructed as contingent, an epoch which had been established at some point, before which there had been no Zeus, and the succession to Zeus was a possibility that had had to be deferred on at least two famous occasions in the past, when the threatened succession, of the offspring of Metis and Thetis respectively, was thwarted. The gods were not beyond time, but situated beyond time, not simply immortal and ageless but maintained as immortal and ageless through regular application of nectar and ambrosia, which was sometimes seen as embodied in the smoky essence of the parts of the victim which were burned for the gods on the altar. Sacrifice therefore not only marked distance, it helped to maintain distance, to keep the gods gods, an exchange which did not just take place in an ongoing present, but helped to maintain that present, to sustain the ongoing Age of Zeus.

Alongside the sense of processing is the sense of continuity, of regular repetition. This is made vivid not only in the regular repetition of festivals - monthly, yearly, quadrennial, etc. - but also in institutions such as the forty-two Athenian year-heroes and the year sets with which they are identified, each new set of ‘‘18 year olds’’ representing the reincarnation, at the level of the social, of the retiring set of‘‘60 year olds,’’ creating a sense of ‘‘continual movement while standing still,’’ a metastatic cycle. The wheel is not smooth however, but represents a series of climaxes, for each cycle, each moon, each man, reaches a peak, an akmc, followed by a waning or diminishing. The best way to reconcile these three characteristic features, these three types of time, accumulative, repetitive and climactic, is perhaps to think of layers of silt left by a recurring tide.