It has become something of an orthodoxy that the fundamental framework in which Greek religion functioned was the polis. Every polis, it is argued, had its own system of cults and rituals and possessed its own sacred calendar. Several poleis - notably Athens but also Cos - were placed under the tutelage of Zeus Polieus and Athena Polias; at Sparta, the pre-eminent deity was Athena Polioukhos (“Athena who protects the polis”). Priests might often be prominent civic officials as in the case of the Molpoi, a board of officials who administered the cult of Apollo Delphinios at Miletus and whose leader, according to some scholars, served as aisymnetes - the eponymous magistrate of the city (Milet I.3 122). Xenoi, or “outsiders,” were often denied permission to enter civic sanctuaries: in the 490s, the priest of the Argive Heraion apparently attempted to prevent the Spartan king Cleomenes from sacrificing on the grounds that he was a xenos (Herodotus 6.81), and fourth-century inscriptions from the islands of Delos (ID 68) and Amorgos (IG XII.7 2) specify that access to the sanctuary is prohibited to xenoi. At the great “Panhellenic” sanctuaries such as Olympia and Delphi or at those interregional shrines that served as foci for “amphiction-ies” or religious leagues, it was supposedly the polis that mediated the participation of its citizens in ritual activity.
It is not that this picture of the polis as anchoring, legitimating, and mediating all religious activity is entirely inaccurate. But it is somewhat misleading - even for the better-documented Classical period. The Amphictyony which administered Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi (Figure 4.3) was organized according to ethne, not poleis (Aeschines, On the Embassy 116), and ethne such as the Thessalians, Boeotians, Dorians, and Ionians comprised several poleis which cannot all have had an equal deliberative voice even if they were all guaranteed protection. As for xenoi, it is not always certain that it was affiliation with a specific polis that guaranteed exclusion. A mid-fifth century inscription from Paros (IG XII.5 225) stipulated that it is Dorian xenoi who are to be excluded from the sanctuary of Kore, and when Cleomenes is also denied access to the sanctuary of Athena Polias on the acropolis at Athens it is not because he is a Spartan but because he is a Dorian (Herodotus 5.72.3). In other cases - notably the Thesmophoria festival celebrated by married women in honor of Demeter - it is clear that the grounds for exclusion were based on gender rather than civic
Thessalians
Boeotians
Dorians (Dorion; Kytenion; Sparta) lonians (Athens; Eretria; Priene) Perrhaebi Magnesians Dolopes Locrians Aenianes/Oitaioi Phthiotid Achaeans Malians Phocians
Figure 4.3 The members of the Delphic Amphictyony. Source: after Hall 2002, 135-9 affiliation. If we move further back in time, however, it is not at all patent that the polis constituted the primary or basic level of ritual activity.
A great deal of attention has been given in recent scholarship to the emergence of sanctuaries and the construction of monumental temples. Every Greek polis, it is reasoned, was a community of cult, presided over by a patron deity (often, though not always, female). A crucial element in such an official cult was a hallowed space where the cultic community could come together and sacrifice, and the initial establishment of cult can be identified by the date of the earliest dedications made to the patron deity. At many sanctuaries, it is the eighth century that witnesses a sharp increase in - if not the actual commencement of - offerings and, from this period, metal dedications in particular gradually begin to be deposited in the more public domain of the sanctuary rather than in individual graves, as had been the practice in the preceding centuries. An altar and a demarcated space were the sine qua non for religious activity in the ancient Greek world. A temple, whose function was normally to house an image of the deity, was not indispensable but the construction of monumental cult buildings has often been taken to indicate a confident self-assertion, not to say mutual rivalry, on the part of nascent political communities. The temple, it is argued, testifies not only that the state has assumed responsibility for the cult of its presiding deity but also that it can command the loyalty of its citizen community. The two examples normally cited are the temple of Hera on Samos and the temple of Apollo Daphnephoros at Eretria. On Samos, the first Heraion, situated eight kilometers southwest of the modern town of Pithagorio, probably dates to the early part of the eighth century. One hundred feet in length (hek-atompedon) and rectangular in plan, it had mud-brick walls standing on a stone socle (wall base) and a central row of columns supporting a roof that was almost certainly thatched; shortly after its construction, it was encircled by a wooden peristyle (colonnade). The temple at Eretria, dated to ca. 725, is also a hek-atompedon of similar construction though it has an apsidal plan and lacks a peristyle. Both buildings are taken as an indication, along with the evidence of dedications, for the emergence of the polis in the eighth century.
The problem with this hypothesis is that, while the eighth century undoubtedly witnesses an intensification of ritual activity, it is by no means certain that this is the formative period for the cultic practices with which we are more familiar in later periods. We have already seen (pp. 61-2) that many sanctuaries were already hosting ritual activity in the Dark Age - i. e. prior to the date conventionally assigned to the rise of the polis. In some instances - for example, Kom-bothekra and Olympia in Elis or Mount Lykaion in southwest Arcadia - cultic activity is attested in areas where urban settlement does not appear until much later. Kalapodhi in Phocis is another good example. Ritual activity here began shortly before 1200 and, to judge from floral and faunal analysis, involved the consumption of meat - especially deer and tortoise - and cereals. In the middle of the tenth century the sacred precinct was extended by means of terracing while a hearth altar was erected in the eighth century, followed by two mud-brick temples towards the end of the sixth century. In the Classical period, the shrine at Kalapodhi was controlled by the polis of Hyampolis but there is at present little evidence to suggest that Phocis was organized by poleis prior to this and the archaeological material from Kalapodhi hints at close associations in the earlier period with Ithaca, Thessaly, Euboea, and especially East Locris.
Furthermore, undue emphasis on the Samian and Eretrian temples conceals the fact that many of the oldest cult buildings are not in fact found in areas where urban settlements serving as political centers are attested from an early date. At Mende-Poseidi in the Chalcidice, for example, a long apsidal mud-brick temple (Building Xt) has been dated to the tenth century. The double-apsidal hekatompedon with wooden peristyle at Ano Mazaraki-Rakita, located some twenty kilometers south of Aegium in Achaea and perhaps dedicated to Apollo and Artemis, probably dates to the later eighth century, making it one of the first peripteral (colonnaded) temples in the Greek mainland. Roughly contemporary is the recently discovered apsidal temple at Nikoleika, near Achaean Helike, where votive dedications date back to the ninth or even tenth century. Yet poleis are not attested for Achaea until the very end of the sixth or beginning of the fifth century. A similar case may be presented at Thermon in Aetolia - a region where poleis are not attested in literary sources until the fifth or even fourth centuries. Here, there are some indications that a peripteral apsidal temple was, in the course of the eighth century, constructed above the ruins of Megaron B, an Early Iron Age building whose function - if not monu-mentality - may be compared to the Toumba building at Lefkandi (pp. 62-3).
Nor is it entirely clear that the construction of a monumental temple testifies to a collective effort on the part of a neonate citizen community rather than signaling, for example, the ability of a powerful individual to mobilize labor and resources. In the literary tradition, the construction of monumental temples is often attributed to tyrants (pp. 147-9). The observation that the earliest cult buildings are difficult to distinguish from contemporary rulers’ dwellings has suggested that cultic activity during the Dark Age was in the hands of local chieftains. The common belief, however, that the construction of the first temples signaled the termination of the ruler’s authority by the emergent political community is less patent. Although Tiryns, Thermon, and Eleusis are sometimes cited as cases where a ruler’s dwelling was converted into a temple, the archaeological evidence is ambiguous: the so-called “temple” at Tiryns was probably built into the ruins of the Mycenaean palace in the LHIIIC phase. Conversely, as we have seen, the ruler’s dwelling at Eretria appears to have continued in use after the construction of the adjacent hekatompedon and the same may be true at Koukounaries, Prinias, and Lathoureza in Attica. We cannot, in other words, rule out the possibility that the construction of at least some urban temples was an expression of singular authority rather than communal consciousness.
Sanctuary evidence has also been invoked in tracing the emergence of the polis in its territorial aspect. This thesis starts with the observation that the earliest and most important sanctuaries were very often not situated in urban centers but in rural locations some distance from the principal settlement. It is argued that the placement of these “extra-urban” sanctuaries serves, firstly, a symbolic function as a point of mediation between the “civilized” agricultural domain of the polis and the “wilder,” more marginal land beyond the polios’ frontiers (e. g. mountains, marshes, or the sea) and, secondly, a political function in physically marking out the territorial boundaries of the polis. Among the examples that have been suggested are the sanctuaries of Hera at Perachora and Poseidon at Isthmia (Corinth), Apollo Hyacinthius at Amyclae (Sparta), Artemis at Amaryn-thos (Eretria), Apollo at Didyma (Miletus), and Hera on the island of Samos (Samos town). The archetypal example, however, is the sanctuary of Hera, located thirteen kilometers northeast of Argos. For some, the establishment of this sanctuary in the eighth century signals Argos’ claims to possession of the entire Argive plain and the annual procession of armed youths, maidens, and cattle that later authors (e. g. Aeneas Tacticus 17.1; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, RA 1.21) describe as making its way from the urban center to the sanctuary of Hera is deemed to constitute a very physical celebration of that possession.
The thesis is immensely attractive - not least, because there is precious little other evidence that might indicate the territorial extent of the polis in this period. Unfortunately, however, it has not stood up to further testing. The sanctuary at Isthmia, for example, was already functioning in the middle of the eleventh century, some two to three centuries before any urban activity can be recognized at Corinth. Conversely, the urban center of Miletus would seem to predate the sanctuary at Didyma. The Heraion at Perachora is more or less contemporary with developments at Corinth but here around 75 percent of the early metal offerings are of predominantly Levantine origin and the dedication of Egyptian mirrors with hieroglyphic inscriptions to Mut - a goddess whose identification with Hera was certainly known to later authors - suggests a more international rather than exclusively Corinthian constituency. A similar case is presented by the Samian Heraion, where 85 percent of the eighth - and early seventh-century metal artifacts is of non-Greek manufacture. It is, in any case, difficult to comprehend why the Heraion served a boundary-marking function when the island of Samos supported only one polis. Detailed analysis of the literary, archaeological, epigraphic, and mythical evidence suggests that the “Argive” Heraion originally functioned as a shared sanctuary for the various poleis that occupied the Argive plain (Mycenae; Tiryns; Midea) and that it was not until Argos destroyed these neighboring communities in the 460s that it took exclusive possession of both the plain and the sanctuary.
In fact, it now seems that extra-urban sanctuaries acted as arenas in which leaders from various surrounding settlements could compete in the display of pre-eminence. When we combine this conclusion with the fact that, during the eighth century, dedications at Corinthian sanctuaries appear to communicate more visibly gender, wealth, and status roles - that, for example, the martial and athletic character of the weapons, armor, and tripods dedicated at Isthmia contrasts with the more feminine offerings of jewelry and clay koulouria (bread-rings) at Perachora - then some rethinking is evidently required. While there can be little doubt that ritual activity served to demarcate “cultic communities” and that such groups could theoretically be coterminous with the citizen-body, it is also readily apparent that the boundaries of cultic communities often crosscut and intersected with one or several citizen communities. Put another way, the mere emergence of sanctuaries, temples, and ritual practices need not be the unambiguous reflection of the rise of the polis.
World History
