Urban versus Rural Religion

The Athenian state, like our own, was articulated for administrative purposes into smaller groups, including (from larger to smaller) ten tribes, thirty trittyes, and about 139 rural villages, called demes. These groups functioned not only to organize citizens’ participation in the state, but also communities; and part of communal life was religious observance. Demes seem to have engendered a particularly vivid sense of community among their members, and there is substantial evidence for religious practice within them.

Every Greek polis was composed of an urban center and a surrounding countryside, and the tension between the two is manifested by a corresponding tension between central and local religious observance. In the case of Athens, the surrounding countryside was occupied by numerous demes, some of which were of considerable size and antiquity. The settlements were, by the reforms of Cleisthenes (508/7 BC or soon after), integrated and subordinated to the state. These demes offered the environment of small cities to their inhabitants, who often felt greater allegiance to them than to the general state. Thucydides, in his description of the evacuation of the rural population into the protection of the urban center’s walls during the Peloponnesian War, remarks that refugees ‘‘were depressed and took it hard because they were abandoning their houses and the ancestral sanctuaries which they had possessed from the time of the ancient political order [i. e., from times before the Cleisthenic reforms], and because they were about to change their way of life, and each was abandoning nothing other than his own city’’ (2.16). The cults observed in the countryside were of considerable antiquity, some antedating even the establishment of the villages themselves (cf. the description of the rustic rites of Pan at the beginning of Menander’s Dyskolos). The immense variety of rural religious observance can be sampled from the five surviving sacred calendars of demes.

Cleisthenes’ reforms may be seen as a successful response to the regional factions that bedeviled Athens for much of the seventh and sixth centuries. Nevertheless, the continued existence of rural groups such as demes posed a threat to the unity of the state. The local particularism of Attic religious observance was, as the quote from Thucydides suggests, perhaps the most significant force working against the coherence of the population of the state. Certain persistent regional and religious associations of these villages, such as the Marathonian Tetrapolis, were more or less overtly opposed to the Cleisthenic order.

Most of the famous state cults and festivals were celebrated only at the urban center: if residents of distant demes wanted to participate they had to travel. Distance may be seen as either a factor in consolidation (demesmen are integrated because forced to come to Athens) or in fragmentation (demesmen are excluded because they cannot come to Athens). Certain celebrations, however, notably those concerned with women and families, such as the Dionysiac festivals, were recapitulated in city and countryside. This reduplication is difficult to understand as anything but a concession to the limits of the social solidarity of the rural population of the state. Furthermore a host of peculiar divinities were worshiped in the countryside, but not in the city. The divisive effects of rural worship find some confirmation in attempts, notably in the sixth century, associated perhaps with the Pisistratids, as well as at other times, to consolidate religious observance in the city by reduplicating rural sanctuaries in central urban places, or even by moving entire shrines to the city.

Two of the more important religious institutions in ancient Athens were the phratries and gene (singular genos). These may originally have been constituent parts of the political state, analogous to tribes and demes, as Fragment 3 of the Aristotelian Athenaien Politeia evidently suggests. Both groups presented themselves as kinship organizations: the word phratry means ‘‘brotherhood’’ and the term genos (often translated ‘‘clan’’) suggests a group affiliated by birth. In the classical period membership in both was hereditary. It was long thought that these organizations developed out of earlier tribal and familial groupings. Present scholarly consensus, however, holds that these groups were in origin political organizations that promoted an ideology of genetic political affiliation: all Athenians were ‘‘brothers.’’

All Athenians were members of phratries, which served as gatekeepers of citizenship. Admission to a phratry entailed acknowledgment of parentage, and so was tantamount to acceptance into the community of the Athenians. Pericles’ Citizenship Law of 451/0 BC seems to be implemented through the phratries, and in the fourth century phratry membership was commonly used as evidence of disputed civic status. It is significant, then, that phratry religious observance was highly (though not entirely) homogeneous. While phratries might worship gods appropriate to their regional and mythic situations, all seem to have cultivated Zeus Phratrios and Athena Phratria, as well as Apollo Patroos: thus the significance of one of the questions posed to Athenian archons when appointed: ‘‘Where is your shrine of Apollo Patroos?’’ (Athenaion Politeia 55).

Gene, by contrast, did not include all Athenians, and by the classical period and doubtless before membership in a genos was synonymous with being ‘‘well born.’’ Many, if not all, gene had the prerogative of furnishing religious leadership to certain city cults: a given genos typically provided the priest or priestess of a civic cult out of its membership. These cults may or may not originally have been restricted to the genos. So the Eteoboutadai, for example, claimed descent from the legendary kings of Attica and provided the priestess of the cult of Athena Polias and the priest of Poseidon Erechtheus. By contrast, the genos of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the Gephyraioi, evidently kept only private cult and shrines (Herodotus 5.57-61).