Greek Religion
ROBERT PARKER
From J. Boardman et al., The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World (Oxford 1991).
Gods and Men
Greek religion belongs to the class of ancient polytheisms: one can in very general terms compare
the religious of Rome, of Egypt, of the ancient Indo-Iranians, and most of the religions of the
ancient Near East. The gods of such a polytheism have each a defined sphere of influence. The
balanced worshipper does not pick and choose between them but pays some respect to them all.
To neglect one god (Aphrodite, for instance) is to reject in area of human experience. Individual
Greek communities paid special honour to particular gods (put the other way, gods 'took most
delight' in particular sanctuaries), but not to the exclusion of others. Athena, for instance, was the
divine patroness of Athens, and Hera that of Samos; an Athenian decree of 405 B.C. which
celebrates Athenian-Samian co-operation is topped by a relief showing the two goddesses clasping
hands; but Hera was also an honoured goddess in Athens, and vice versa.
The number of principal gods was always quite restricted. Homer shows ten important gods in
action (Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Hermes, Hephaesion, and Ares)
and these, together with Demeter and Dionysus, made up the twelve gods, the conventional total
recognized from the fifth century onwards. Alongside them, there were innumerable lesser figures,
some quite obscure, but others, such as Pan and the Nymphs, just as important in cult as the junior
partners among the twelve, Hephaestus and Ares. Genealogies varied, but the twelve were all often
said to be either siblings or children of Zeus, 'the father of gods and men'. Most of them could be
conceived as living, a sprawling family, in Zeus’ palace on the heavenly mountain Olympus. (At
other times they were imagined as dwelling in their favourite cities.) They were thus the Olympians.
Contrasted to them was a less clearly defined group of chthonians (front chthon, earth), gods of the
earth and the underworld, grouped around Hades, the god of death, and his luckless spouse
Persephone. Since crops spring from the earth, the chthonians were not merely a negative
counterpoise to the gods of heaven, and even the lord of the Olympians had also, as 'Zeus under the
earth', a chthonic aspect.
This restricted cast of principal gods could be made to play an almost infinite number of roles in
cult practice by the addition of specifying epithets. A single cult calendar from Attica prescribes
offerings on different days for Zeus as 'Zeus of the city', 'kindly Zeus', 'Zeus who looks over men',
'Zeus of fulfillment', 'Zeus of boundaries', and 'Zeus of mountain tops'. He had, in fact, several
hundred such epithets. The epithet sometimes indicates the power in virtue of which the worshipper
was appealing to the god: Zeus 'the general' evidently did not have in his gift the same benefits as
Zeus 'of property'. Sometimes it seems that the epithet's main function was merely to introduce
local discriminations within the pantheon common to all Greece. Villagers no doubt took pleasure
in knowing that their Zeus or Athena was not quite the same as the one worshipped in the next
village over the hill.
‘There is never equality between the race of deathless gods and that of men who walk the earth',
says Apollo in Homer. The gods had human form; they were born, and they might have sexual
contacts, but they did not eat human food, and they would not age or die. Pindar tells how the two
races both sprung from Mother Earth but 'are kept apart by a difference of power in everything: the
one is nothing, but for the other the brazen heaven is a fixed habitation forever.' The gods were
‘blessed', ‘best in strength and honour'; men were 'wretched’ 'powerless', ‘creatures of a day'. In
the golden age, men had dined with gods, but the two races were later 'divided'; this division
occurred at the time of the first sacrifice, and each subsequent sacrifice was a reminder to man that
he no longer dined with the gods but made offerings to them from a distance. Again, it was (with
very rare exceptions) only in a greater and more glorious time that gods had visited mortal women
to sire godlike sons.
Alongside men and gods there was a third estate, that of heroes, The term 'hero' had a technical
sense in Greek religion: a hero was a figure less powerful than a god, to whom cult was paid. He
was normally conceived as a mortal who had died, and the typical site of such a cult was a tomb.
But various kinds of minor supernatural figure came to be assimilated to the class and, as in the
case of Heracles, the distinction between a hero and a god could be uncertain. From Attica alone
several hundred heroes are known; some have names and even legends, while others are identified
merely as 'the hero beside the salt-pit' or the like. (In such a case it was presumably the existence of
a conspicuous tomb that evoked the cult.) These heroes of cult were not identical with the heroes
(this is Homer's word) of epic poetry, Achilles, Odysseus, and the rest, but the classes were not
altogether distinct. Many of the poetic heroes did receive cult, and one reason for worshipping
heroes must surly have been the feeling that they had been beings such as Homer described,
stronger and altogether more splendid than the men of today. Large Mycenean tombs, visible
tokens of an ampler past, were often centres of hero-cult. Even historical individuals who displayed
outstanding powers-warriors, athletes, founders of colonies-could become heroes. Above all,
perhaps, it was the restricted and local scope of the heroes that made them popular. The hero
retained the limited and partisan interests of his mortal life. He would help those who lived in the
vicinity of his tomb or who belonged to the tribe of which he himself was the founder. Gods had to
be shared with the world, but a village or a kinship group could have exclusive rights in a hero.
(Heracles with his Panhellenic scope was a rare exception.) Thus hero-cults were the best focus for
particular loyalties; and heroes were in general the great local helpers, particularly in battle, their
natural sphere.
Greek religion had no single origin. The Greeks were all Indo-European people who settled in
the non-Indo-European Aegean basin; they thus came into contact with the many advanced
civilizations of the ancient Near East. Elements from all these sources contributed to the amalgam.
Only one god bears a name that can be interpreted with certainty: Zeus pater ('father') is the
equivalent of Roman Diespiter (Juppiter) and Indian Dyaus pitar, all descended from the
Indo-European god of heaven. Similarities, not of name, but of attribute, suggest the Indo-European
origin of certain lesser figures, Still, Dawn, and above all the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, who
strikingly recall another pair of heavenly twins particularly associated with horsemanship, the Asvin
of early Indian poetry. The closest equivalents to Aphrodite, on the other hand, are found in the love
goddesses of the Near East, the Sumerian Inanni and the Semitic Astarte/ Ishtar. This may mean,
though, that Aphrodite has acquired oriental traits rather than that she is wholly oriental by origin:
the individual gods often appear to be composite no less than the pantheon as a whole. Artemis too
belongs in part to a Near Eastern type, that of the 'Mistress of Animals', while there are
non-Indo-European trails in Apollo and Hephaestus. And the 'Kingship in Heaven' myth told by
Hesiod is a particularly clear case of borrowing from the Near East in mythology.
Thanks to the decipherment of the Linear B script in 1952, we can give some account of the state of
Greek religion in the period 1400-1200 B.C.. The Linear B tablets reveal that the pantheon of this
Minoan-Mycenaean civilization was already to a large extent that of classical Greece. Of great gods,
Zeus, Hera, and Poseidon are certainly attested, and also, with varying degrees of probability,
Artemis, Hermes, Ares, and Dionyus. A Lady of Athana is doubtless a precursor of Athena, and
several lesser figures appear-Eileithyia, the goddess of birth, Enyalios, a god of war who declined
into in epithet of Ares, and Paiaon, a healer who was similarly absorbed by Apollo. Aphrodite,
Apollo, and (except very questionably) Demeter are so far unattested, but they were not necessarily
unknown. There is also, certainly, much that is unfamiliar, both among the gods (who is 'Drimios
son of Zeus'?) and in cult practice and organization. The impression that the art of the period
conveys, of a religion still dominated by pre-Greek goddesses of nature, is perhaps partly
confirmed by a series of anonymous divine 'Ladies' who appear in the texts; but in general the
Minoan-Mycenaean divine world now seems much more Greek than it did when only the artistic
evidence was available.
With the fall of the Mycenaean civilization around 1200, Greece relapsed into illiteracy. When
writing revived with the introduction of the Phoenician script in the ninth or eighth century, the
crucial transition from Mycenaean to Greek religion had already occurred. The new script was used
to record the poems of Homer and Hesiod, the earliest documents of true Greek religion, but for the
preceding centuries we have only the fragmentary and ambiguous evidence of archaeology. Very
few Mycenaean holy places continued to be used for cult throughout the Dark Ages. There is a
growing body of evidence for oriental influence during the period, perhaps transmitted first through
Cyprus and later through the trading post of Al Mina in Syria. From the eighth century, for
instance, a typical religious site consisted of a free-standing temple, a cult image inside it, and a
fire-altar in front of it; there are Near Eastern, but not, it seems, Mycenaean, antecedents for such a
complex. Apollo and Zeus could be portrayed in the eighth century in the guise of the
Hittite-Syrian war god. It was perhaps not until early in the Dark Ages that the cult of Aphrodite
was introduced from the East (or took on eastern characteristics) and not till the end of them that
the Kingship in heaven myth was translated into Grreek. It was almost certainly in this period that
two foreign gods won a place on the fringe of Greek religion, Adonis the lover of Aphrodite
(compare the Semitic word adon, 'lord') and the mountain mother Kybele (Kubaba is known as an
Anatolian goddess). There is also a striking 'hymn to Hecate in Hesiod's Theogony. Hecate seems
to be a goddess of Asia Minor by origin, and Hesiod's hymn perhaps reflects the propaganda of a
cult that was newly entering Greece. (Greek religion never lost his openness to foreign gods: at the
end of the fifth century, for instance, two new gods arrived in Athens, Sabazius front Phrygia and
Bendis from Thrace, and, though the cult of Sabazius was confined to private associations, Bendis
found a place in public religion.) On the more important theme of religion's internal development in
the period in response to social change we can say little. The cult of heroes seems to have had its
origin in these centuries, beginning possibly in the tenth century and becoming more widely
diffused (perhaps under the influence of epic poetry) in the eighth. To judge from epic,
communities of this period were heavily dependent for their defence on individual
warriors such as Homer's Hector, who ‘alone kept Troy safe'. This prominence of the aristocratic
champion in life may well have helped to foster the cult of heroes who continued to guard their
people from the grave. But the archaeological evidence alters at the moment from year to year, and
theories to explain the innovation (if such indeed it was) proliferate.
To understand the place of religion in Greek society we must think away the central religious
institution of our own experience, the Church. In Greece power in religious matters lay with those
who had secular power: in the household with the father, in early communities with the king, in
developed city-states with the magistrates or even with the citizen assembly. At Athens it was a
magistrate who impersonated the god Dionysus in an important ritual of 'sacred marriage', and
decisions about the use of sacred moneys or land were taken by the democratic assembly. (As a
result the gods found themselves willy-nilly financing Athenian efforts in the Peloponnesian War.)
Individual gods had their priests, but to hold a priesthood was a part-time activity which normally
required no special qualification or training. There was no institutional framework to unite the
priests into a class with interests of its own. The only true religious professionals in Greece were
the seers. They were important figures, because omens were taken before many public activities,
such as dispatching a colony, beginning a military campaign, or joining battle. As interpreters of the
divine will, seers could come into conflict with generals and politicians and their secular plans.
There are several reflections in literature of this tense relationship (Hector and Poulydamos,
Agamemnon and Calchas in the Iliad; Teiresias and various kings in tragedy). These were not,
however, disputes about the rival claims of piety and patriotism, since there could be no conflict of
interest between the good of the city and of the 'city-keeping' gods, but about the best means to
secure the agreed end of the city's welfare. And such turbulent seers had no actual powers behind
which to take their stand. In high literature the seer is always right (for 'the mind of Zeus is ever
superior to that of men'), but the theme has tragic potential precisely because he cannot enforce his
view. The seer knows, but the ruler decides. In life a layman could even challenge and defeat the
experts on their own ground. When the Delphic oracle in 480 BC advised the Athenians to 'put
trust in their wooden walls' against the Persian threat, the professional interpreters understood this
as a warning to remain within the city walls. The politician Themistocles argued against them that
the god was referring to the fleet. Themistocles’ interpretation prevailed because the final decision
lay not with the seers, but with the citizen assembly.
There was, therefore, no religious organization that could spread moral teaching, develop doctrine,
or impose an orthodoxy. In such a context a creed would have been unthinkable. In a famous
passage Herodotus casts two poets as the theologians of Greece:
Not till the day before yesterday, so to speak, did the Greeks know the origin of each of the gods, or whether they
had all existed always, and what they were like in appearance.... It was Homer and Hesiod who created a theogony
for the Greeks, gave the gods their epithets, divided out offices and functions among them, and described their
appearance. (2. 53)
It is, no doubt, true that the prestige of Homer's and Hesiod's poetry did much to stabilize the
Greeks' conceptions of their gods. But everyone knew that the Muses who inspired epic poets told
lies as well as truth, and in many details of divine genealogy Homer's and Hesiod's accounts were
in fact contradictory. Such discrepancies caused no anxiety, and there was no need to question
one's conscience before doubting or disputing a traditional myth. There were no heretics because
there was no Church. The only religious crimes were acts or attitudes that caused general public
resentment. The most obvious was sacrilege in all its forms (including, for instance, the profanation
of Mysteries). Another was the crime that Socrates was charged with, 'not recognizing the gods that
tile city recognizes'. This was to put oneself outside the norms of society in a way that might be
found intolerable. Both the flexibility and the sticking point can be seen in Euripides' Bacchae.
King Pentheus is here urged by his advisers to recognize Dionysus, and they offer the god to him
in a variety of guises: if Pentheus doesn't believe the myths about Dionysus, can't he think of him
as the divine principle in wine? And if not that, wouldn't he at least like people to believe that his
aunt Semele had given birth to a god? But Pentheus refuses accommodation on any terms, and so
he is destroyed by the god.
Cult
'Recognizing the gods' was principally a matter of observing their cult. Piety was expressed in
behaviour, in acts of respect towards the gods. (A sociologist would be liable to say that the Greeks
valued 'orthopraxy?, right doing, rather than 'orthodoxy'.) Religion was not a matter of innerness or
intense private communion with the god. This does not mean that strong feelings of loyalty,
dependence, and even affection were impossible. Zeus was a 'father' as well is a 'king'; appeals to
'dear’ gods are commonplace, and in literature we often find close and relaxed relationships
between men and particular gods (Odysseus and Athena in the Odyssey, Sappho and Aphrodite,
Ion and Apollo in Euripides' Ion, Hippolytus and Arternis in Euripides' Hippolytus). But piety
(eussebeia) was literally a matter of 'respect', not love, and even the warmest relationship would
quickly have turned sour without observance of the cult. Religion was never personal in the sense
of a means for the individual to express his unique identity. No Greek would ever have thought of
keeping a spiritual diary. Indeed many classes of person had much of their religion done for them
by others: the father sacrificed and besought blessings 'on behalf of' the household, while the
magistrates and priests did the same for 'the people' ('and its wives and children', the Athenians
eventually added). In all of this religion reflected and supported the general ethos of Greek culture.
It discouraged individualism, a preoccupation with inner states and the belief that intentions matter
more than actions; it emphasized the sense of belonging to a community and the need for due
observance of social forms.
What, then, of right conduct? To those used to Christianity Greek religion often seems a
strangely amoral affair. Man was not for Greeks a sinful being in need of redemption; piety was
not a matter of perpetual moral endeavour under the watchful guidance of conscience. The gods
excelled in strength and skill more obviously than in the quieter virtues. Indeed their behaviour in
myth was often scandalous:
There might you see the gods in sundry shapes
Committing heady riots, incest, rapes.
But even these easygoing rulers insisted (Zeus in particular) on certain standards of behaviour
without which life would have dissolved into barbarism. They punished offences against parents,
guests/hosts, suppliants, and the dead. They particularly abhorred oath-breakers, destroying them
'with their whole stock’; such a mam might seem to have escaped, but never did--his children would
suffer, or he himself in the Underworld. Since oaths accompanied almost all of life's most
important transactions (contracts, marriages, and peace-treaties, for instance), Zeus of Oaths was
also inevitably a guardian of social morality. Zeus was in fact often said to care for justice in
general, and it was a basic presumption of popular belief that, at bottom, the gods were on the side
of good men. 'The gods exist', the simple Greek exclaimed when a villain came to a bad end. The
Greek was not in danger of slipping inadvertently into sin, as the rules of conduct were clear. But if
he broke these rules he forfeited 'good hopes' for the future.
All this, however, was a prerequisite for winning divine favour by ritual, not a substitute for it.
Formal cult remained essential. Its most important form was the sacrifice. The typical victim was an
animal, but there were also 'bloodless' or 'pure' sacrifices of corn, cakes, fruit, and the like,
sometimes offered in addition to animals and sometimes in place of them. A Greek religious
calendar was a list of sacrifices; several such survive, indicating what god or hero was to receive
what offering on what day. In the commonest form, the thigh-bones of the slaughtered animal,
wrapped in fat, were burnt on a raised altar for the gods; the meat was then cooked and eaten by the
human participants. Such a sacrifice was a 'gift to the gods'. The gods had to receive their share of
all human goods--first-fruits of harvest, libations at drinking parties, tithes of hunting catches, of
spoils of war, and the like. In this case it was rather a meagre share, since they were given only the
inedible portions of the carcass. Comic poets joked about this unequal division, and it was already a
puzzle to Hesiod, who tells a myth to explain it: when gods and men first divided out the sacrificial
portions, man's helper, Prometheus, tricked Zeus into taking the wrong share. None the less, by a
convenient fiction, these useless parts were deemed an acceptable gift for the gods. Thus a basic
form of human festivity, the communal banquet, was sanctified and became a means of approach to
the gods.
Sacrifice was a theme on which subtle and expressive variations could be played. Sex, age, and
colour of the victim varied with the god or festival concerned; there were rules governing who might
participate and what portion of the meat fell to each. In an important alternative form the animal was
held close to the ground while its throat was cut, so that the blood would drip into the earth. The
carcase was then, it seems, normally burnt whole close to the ground. This ritual was used in
particular in the cult of heroes and of powers of the earth (though they also received sacrifices of
the other form); it probably derived from the cult of the dead. The antithesis between Olympian
sacrifice and this earth-bound form was marked in various ways: on the one side a high altar,
smoke rising to heaven, light-coloured victims, libations of wine (the drink of normal civilized life),
sociable sharing of meat; on the other a low altar or pit, blood (dipping down to 'glut' the powers
below, dark victims, wineless libations, destruction of the victim uneaten. Such wanton annihilation
is a funerary practice, seen, for instance, at Patroclus' funeral in the Iliad.)And because the killing of
animals was the central religious act, there were further rituals that exploited this source of power
even though they were not sacrifices to any god: to purify a murderer, for instance, to solemnize an
oath, or to take the omens before battle, the parts of slaughtered animals were manipulated in
various symbolic ways. Human sacrifice, by contrast, was unknown in the historical period. It is
common in mythology, but that is not good evidence even for prehistory, since the horrors that
stories postulate to thrill us need not ever have occurred. They may have done, however; what had
been the fate of a woman who was recently discovered, laid out with a sacrificial knife beside her
head, in a warrior's tomb of the tenth century at Lefkandi in Euboea?
One should not be misled by the goriness of the ritual and the savagery of certain myths into
thinking that this was a religion of horrors, of self-torment, and of perpetual confrontation with the
unspeakable. Certainly, a few rituals were deliberately uncanny; a few festivals or parts of them had
a gloomy or penitential tone. An Athenian festival of Zeus, the Diasia, was performed 'with a
certain gloominess', and the Panhellenic women's festival of the Thesmophoria involved a day of
fasting. There was even in many Ionian cities a ritual expulsion (though not killing) of human
scapegoats that must have involved real cruelty. But the dominant tone of Greek ritual was one of
festivity and celebration. Herodotus expresses this when he speaks of a group who spent their days
'sacrificing and having a good time'. Processions were very common, ranging front those of a single
household (there is one in Aristophanes' Acharnians) to those such as the Panatheniaic procession
that involved the whole city. We can see from the Parthenon frieze or the end of Aeschylus'
Eumenides what splendid occasions these were. Th gods loved beauty: one dedicated to them the
loveliest objects that one could, and the word for cult-image, agalma, means 'thing to take delight
in'. The gods were happy too to see performed in their honour many of the activities that humans
most relished. Singing and dancing in a chorus was one basic form of worship, and competing at
athletics was another. The great Panhellenic games and the great Athenian dramatic festivals had
moved far from their origins, but remained religious ceremonies. One had to put on a good show
for the god. When Thracian goddess Bendis was received in Athens late in the fifth century, she
was honoured not by a relay race of torch-bearers on foot (old hat by now), but by
a special torch relay on horseback. It never occurred to anyone to object, as did Newman of the
Neapolitan carnival, that 'Religion is turned into a mere occasion of worldly gaiety'. At the festivals
of country gods such as Demeter and Dionysus the fun did not even have to be kept clean. There
were obscene jokes, gestures, and objects (although not normally acts)-the whole range of what
scholars term 'ritual obscenity' (as if that made it less full). The gods were lustrous, graceful,
carefree beings, and a shoddy or joyless performance would not fulfill a festival's proper function
of 'delighting' them.
Ritual was accompanied by prayer. It was unusual to pray seriously without making an
offering of some kind (a sacrifice, a dedication, or at least a libation) or promising to make one
should the prayer be fulfilled. By his gift the worshipper established a claim to the counter-gift that
he requested, according to the notorious principle of 'do ut des', ‘I give so that you will give.' In
their prayers Greeks often alluded explicitly to this nexus of mutual benefit and obligation between
man and god:
If ever I burnt the rich thighs of bulls and goats in your honour, grant me this prayer.
Maiden [Athena], Telesinos dedicated this image to you on the acropolis. May you take
delight in it, and allow him to dedicate another one by preserving his life and wealth.
Protect our city. I believe that what I say is in our common interest. For a flourishing city
honours the gods.
Mistress [Athena], Menandros dedicated this offering to you in gratitude, in fulfillment of a
vow. Protect him, daughter of Zeus, in gratitude for this.
The gods were thus brought within a comprehensible pattern of social relations. As an old tag said,
'Gifts persuade the gods, gifts reverend kings'; gift-giving was perhaps the most important
mechanism of social relationships in Homeric society. It might seem to follow that the richest men
could secure the most divine favour, and that punishment for crime could be bought off by gifts.
The rich and the villainous were certainly free to nourish such hopes. Their subjects and their
victims, though, might take a different view. There were always those who insisted that the gods
'rejected the sacrifices' of oath-breakers, and that the modest offerings of the innocent were more
acceptable than hecatombs slaughtered by the lawless rich. One offered what one could from what
one had. A Greek was not ashamed to mention to the gods that if he were a little richer (wealth
being a gift of the gods) he could bring larger offerings. The real psychological significance of 'do
ut des' was not the hope of bribery, but the fact that it allowed the worshipper to feel that he had
established an ordered, continuing, two-sided relation with the god.
Religion and Society
Economic historians have found that the modern notion of an autonomous ‘economy’ is
inapplicable to ancient societies, where economic activity was influenced by innumerable social
constraints. To describe ancient conditions they have developed the concept of the 'embedded'
economy. We need for the Greeks a similar concept of embedded religion. It was a social, practical,
everyday thing. Every formal social grouping was also a religious grouping, from the smallest to
the largest: a household was a set of people who worshipped (in the Athenian case) at the same
shrine of Zeus of the Courtyard, while the Greeks as a nation were those who honoured the same
gods at the Panhellenic sanctuaries and festivals. To belong to a group was to 'share in the lustral
water' (used for purification before sacrifice). The Panhellenic sanctuaries were the great
meeting-places, where one could swagger before an audience from all Greece. Perhaps the most
important was Delphi, perched above a majestic valley on the slopes of Mount Parnassus in central
Greece; it owed its original fame to the oracular shrine of Apollo, already mentioned by Homer, but
also became the site of a great athletic festival. Its rival in importance, Olympia in the territory of
Elis in the Peloponnese, sacred to Zeus, was home of the original and always most prestigious
games, the Olympics.
Since religion was thus embedded, social and religious history are virtually inseparable. At
Athens, for instance, the growth of the democracy involved a transformation of the forms of
religious life. Cults that had been controlled by aristocratic families were absorbed into the public
calendar of the city; new public cults were established, free from aristocratic influence; alongside
the traditional groupings, based on kinship, the local group of the deme or village gained
importance in religion just is it was doing in politics. Even associations that one entered by choice
(the clubs of the Hellenistic period, philosophical schools) were normally dedicated to the cult of
particular gods. Since slaves, by contrast, had no social identity as a group there was no distinctive
slave religion. Such as it was, their religious life was conducted as humble participants in the cults
of their masters' household and in a few public festivals that derived from household cult.
The goals of religion were practical and this-worldly. One important function was of course to
steer the individual with appropriate rites of passage through the great transitions of birth, puberty,
marriage, and death. Many public festivals throughout Greece had to do with preparing boys to be
warriors, girls to be mothers. Another numerous class, including most of the many festivals of
Demeter, goddess of corn, and Dionysus, god of wine, related to the events of the agricultural year.
Others celebrated the political order; so, for instance, the Panathenaea (the 'all-Athenians' festival)
and the Synoecia (the festival of synoecism, political unification as a single city) at Athens.
Dangerous activities such as seafaring and warfare required especial protection from the gods; there
were clusters of rituals associated with them, and even in the historical period gods or heroes were
often thought to have intervened to save a ship or support a hard pressed army. Craftsmen appealed
to their divine patrons, and it was a common event in social, judicial, and even commercial life to
summon the gods, by sacrificial ritual, to witness an oath. There were above all two practical goods
that every Greek desired from the gods, prophetic advice and healing. Prophecy was obtained from
oracular shrines, such as Apollo's at Delphi, from wandering oracle-mongers with their books of
prophecies, or from seers who drew omens from the entrails of sacrificial animals and the flight of
birds. It had, as we saw above, an important role even in public life. For the kind of enquiry that a
private individual might make we have good evidence from the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, since
some of the lead question-tablets survive:
Heralceidas asks the god whether he will have offspring from the wife he has now.
Lysanias asks Zeus and Dione (Zeus’ consort at Dodona) whether the child Annyla is
pregnant (often it was the obscurity of the present rather than the future that the god was
asked to illumine).
Cleotas asks whether it would be beneficial and advantageous for him to keep sheep.
As for healing, there were healing gods and heroes throughout Greece, their shrines bedecked,
like those of Catholic saints, with the votive offerings of grateful patients (often clay images of the
affected organ). The commonest technique of healing was by incubation: the patient spent a night in
the temple, and the god appeared to him in a dream to perform a miraculous cure, or at least to
prescribe a treatment. The most successful such cult was that of Asclepius at Epidaurus, from
which there survives all inscription recording miraculous cures. A typical specimen runs:
A man came to the god as a suppliant who was so blind in one eye that he only had the
eyelids left and there was nothing between them, but they were wholly empty. Some of the
people in the shrine made fun of his folly by thinking that he could see when he had no
trace of an eye but only the place for it. He went to sleep in the shrine and a vision appeared
to him. It seemed to him that the god boiled up a drug, drew apart his eyelids, and poured it
in. When day came he went away, able to see with both eyes.
All this was practical religion. There were few expressions of unpractical religion, of concerti for a
world other than this. After death, according to Homer, a kind of wraith of the dead man vanished to
the Underworld, there to lead a joyless, eventless, meaningless shadow existence. (Bliss and
punishment were reserved for a few select heroes.) Nothing therefore of any value persisted beyond
the funeral pyre. In classical times it was normal to bring offerings of food and drink to the dead
(indeed at Athens this was a condition of inheritance; when an inheritance was disputed, unseemly
competitions in mourning took place), but there was no clear theory about the afterlife to justify
them and no substantial hopes were based upon them. We often find in Athenian orators the
cautious formula, ‘The dead, if they have any perception, will think . . .' Stories about punishment
and reward in the Underworld were in circulation, but were only half believed. The whole question
was an open one, as Socrates’ remarks in Plato's Apology (41) show. Firmer claims were made in
connection with certain 'mysteries' or secret rites, entry to which was by 'initiation' (not an ordeal,
but a spectacular and moving ritual lasting several days). The most important mysteries were those
of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis near Athens, which promised a better lot in the afterlife
(eternal feasting perhaps), while for non-initiates 'everything there would be bad' (by the fifth
century specific torments had been devised for them). The Eleusinian cult was famed throughout
the Greek world, and it is spoken of with a reverence, tinged with moral awe, which shows that
initiation was somehow much more than a technique for purchasing such felicity as might be
available in the afterlife. But Greeks did not allow such an experience to inspire them with more
than, at most, 'good hopes'. Even though many Athenians had been initiated, the normal attitude to
the afterlife at Athens remained, as we have seen, one of uncertainty.
The Eleusinian cult was incorporated into the public religion of the Athenian state. Other more
radical religious movements of the archaic age defied assimilation. Late in the sixth century
Pythagoras taught that souls migrated after death into other bodies, both human and animal.
Meat-eating was therefore an abomination, a form of cannibalism. As vegetarians, his followers
were excluded from the principal institutions of social life; they lived in closed communities of their
own, subject to strict rules of conduct. Probably in the same period poems begin to be composed
that bore the name of Orpheus, the mythical singer. 'Orpheus' taught that man was a guilty and
polluted being. The human race as a whole was descended from 'unjust ancestors', the wicked
Titans who dismembered and ate the young god Dionysus. For Orphism, as for Pythagoreanism,
meat-eating was a further pollution, repeated day by day. The soul required 'purification' from these
taints, or it would pay the penalty in the next incarnation or the next world. In these two
interconnected movements (best illustrated for us by Empedocles’ poem Purifications) we find a
series of phenomena untypical of Greek religion: ascetism, preoccupation with the afterlife,
rejection of profane society, the concept of a special religions way of life, doctrines of guilt and
salvation. Herodotus believed that Pythagoras had imported his doctrines from Egypt, and external
influence is not to be excluded; another important factor was doubtless the growing individualism
of archaic Greek society, which loosened the traditional ties of kinship and encouraged the quest
for individual salvation. Some of these ideas seem to have affected the Eleusinian cult, and there
was an important Pythagorean influence on Plato. But it was on the outskirts of the Greek world,
particularly in Italy and Sicily, that such movements had most adherents, and they remained
marginal phenomena.
An abnormal approach not to the next life but to this one was offered, in particular to women, by
certain forms of the cult of Dionysus (best illustrated by Euripides' Bacchae). In myth and
literature Dionysus is represented as an outsider, a stranger from Lydia, and scholars used to
believe that his cult had indeed been introduced to Greece at some date within folk memory. The
decipherment of Linear B showed that he was almost certainly already known in Mycenaean times,
and it now seems that the myth of Dionysus' arrival is not a reminiscence of historical fact but a
way of saying something about his nature. Dionysus Bacchius had to he a stranger because the
ecstatic irresponsibility that he offered to women was unique in Greek religion. All women's
festivals were a release from domestic confinement, and most of them entailed a kind of temporary
repudiation of male authority (the fantasy of Aristophanes' Women at the Thesniophoria has a real
basis); but their content was often austere, and they normally related in some way to woman's
proper function as a fertile being (which allowed her to promote the fertility of crops too, by
sympathy). The votaries of Dionysus Bacchius, by contrast, laid down their weaving and
abandoned their children to follow the handsome god to the mountain. There as 'maenads' they
would dance, revel, and even (so it was said) tear apart live animals and eat them raw. Even in Greek
states where such a flight to the mountains was not practiced, some form of ecstatic dancing by
women in honour of Dionysus certainly took place. But if this was a liberation it was only a
temporary one, and indeed in an important sense it tightened the chains, since it confirmed the belief
that woman was a volatile and irrational thing in need of close control. Maenadism could thus be
readily accommodated within public religion. Male bacchic ecstasy, on the other hand, seems to
have been long confined to disreputable private associations. (It was in time taken up by Orphism,
another fringe movement, and given a novel eschatological meaning.)
It is hard to summarize Greek attitudes to their gods. Much depends on the kind of evidence that
one selects. The high literary genres tend to offer a pessimistic view, they often stress the
unbridgeable gulf between blessed gods and puffy, doomed, suffering mail. The gods' concern for
mortals, creatures of a day, is necessarily limited, and they rule the universe for their own
convenience, not for ours. Sufferings comes even to the strongest, wisest, and most pious of men;
one scarcely knows why, but ‘nothing of this is not Zeus'. Poets who wrote so were not trying to
do down the gods but to describe what, at the limits, human life is like. The gods can appear
comfortless beings because life itself is brutal, and there was for the Greeks no power distinct from
the gods, no devil, to be blamed for the wrongness of things. But since not everyone cared to look
into life's worst possibilities so closely, there was always room for a more optimistic view.
According to Zeus in the Odyssey, men are responsible for their own misfortunes; far from hurting
them the gods do what they can to save them from themselves. This comfortable doctrine was taken
up by the Athenian statesman-poet Solon and became a keynote of Athenian civic religion,
Whatever he might hear in the tragic theatre, the Athenian in daily life did not normally doubt that
the gods were on his side. For their own Athena the Athenians clearly often felt a genuinely warm
affection. Comic poets could even make good-humoured fun of certain gods. How indeed could
one help being amused by Hermes, in myth a merry thieving rogue, in image little more than a huge
erect phallus? There was nothing irreligious about such laughter, the expression of a relaxed and
unthreatened piety. As we have seen, the mood of cult was normally one of festivity, and
dedications express gratitude and faith: one of the seventh century, for instance, from the precinct of
Hera on Samos was set up 'In return for great kindness'. The divine lustre, which is emphasized in
high literature to bring out by contrast the murkiness of man, was also available to be admired for
itself. It is clear from art and poetry (particularly the Homeric Hymns) that Greeks rejoiced in the
grace and radiance of the immortals. They were marvellous figures; their deeds and their loves were
as fascinating as those of film stars. Tragic literature was not, therefore, a simple expression of a
generally shared tragic world view. (And there is, of course, much variety of attitude even within
tragedy.) On the contrary, it often gained its effects by putting optimistic popular beliefs, such as
that in the justice of the gods, to the test of extreme cases. The chorus in Euripides' Hippolytus
comments, when faced by the downfall of a most virtuous man: 'To think of the gods' care for men
is a great relief to me from pain. Deep within me I have hopes of understanding; but when I look
around at what men do and how they fare I cannot understand.'
Traditional, local, mythological religious such as that of Greece are thought to have little power
of survival. The proselytizing international religions based on books and doctrines mop them up.
Greek religion, however, lasted for more than a thousand years, and it was able to do so largely
because of its very lack of doctrinal precision. Criticism had begun in the sixth century with
Xenophanes, who said that ‘Homer and Hesiod ascribed to the gods everything that among men is
a shame and disgrace: theft, adultery, and deceiving one another.' But it was easy to counter the
objection, by rewriting embarrassing myths (as Pindar did in Olympian 1), interpreting them
allegorically, or simply refusing to believe them (so Plato). Xenophanes went on to criticize
anthropomorphic conceptions of deity: Ethiopians made their gods black and snub-nosed like
themselves, and if cows had hands they would represent the gods as cows. He declared that god
was in truth a single disembodied mind. Other pre-Socratic philosophers had already by
implication banished anthropmorphic gods--for them the divine was some first form or princoiple
of the world--and were ready to explain all observable phenomena in terms of natural laws: thus
Zeus was robbed of his thunderbolt. No philosopher henceforth seems to have believed in the literal
reality of deities such as those of Homer, human in form and erratic in conduct. There is, however,
no evidence that, when first advanced, such ideas caused scandal. But late in the fifth century there
was a kind of religious crisis at Athens. Protagoras the sophist announced: 'About the gods I
cannot declare whether they exist or not'; other sophists speculated about why men had ever come
to believe in deity, and it is possible that Anaxagoras, the leading scientist of the day, was an atheist.
Men began to notice the moral implications of the scientists' physical explanations of the world,
which left the gods powerless to intervene in defence of their ordinances. It is clear from
Aristophanes' Clouds that traditional religion was felt to be under threat, and with it, crucially,
traditional social morality. Late sources tell of a persecution of intellectuals at this time; details are
very uncertain, but it is symptomatic that one of the charges brought against Socrates was that of
'not recognizing the gods that the city recognizes'.
But--we do not quite know how--the crisis was surmounted. Explicit atheism remained virtually
unknown. Scientific enquiry ceased to be seen as threatening: even if Zeus did not hurl the
thunderbolt with his own hand, might he not be working through the mechanisms postulated by the
physicists? Philosophers could not accept the riotous Olympians of mythology, since it was now
axiomatic that any god must be wholly wise and good, but they had no wish (least of all the
influential and conservative Plato) to dispense with the divine. A compromise was therefore
possible. One ought not believe in the traditional gods exactly as they were described and
portrayed, but one believed in the divine and in piety, and there was no reason not to pay homage to
the divine principle through the forms of worship sanctified by tradition. Many philosophers even
came to terms with a traditional belief as problematic as that in divination.
The institution of ruler-cult has often been seen as a symptom of a religion in decay. It was first
paid, to our knowledge, to the Spartan general Lysander by the Samians late in the fifth century, and
subsequently to Alexander and many Hellenistic kings. This was certainly a radical change, but the
real precondition for it was a loss not of faith but of political freedom. In an autonomous
democracy or even oligarchy there had been no room for men-gods. The divine kings did not
supplant the old gods but took their place alongside them; they had little in common with, say,
Asclepius, but were not so different from Zeus the King or Zeus the Saviour. The gods lived on.
The traditional religion could still in the second century AD win the earliest devotion of a man as
cultivated as Plutarch. It was still the old religion that was vanquished in the end by Christianity.