Unthinkable as it may be for most modern city-dwellers, one glimpse of a truly dark night sky is simply captivating. Our daily immersion in light-polluted, densely constructed cities has resulted in our detachment from the night sky and open horizon views. This detachment has inevitably also influenced the way we approach ancient cultures the world over. Because we do not think of the night sky, we assume the ancients did not either. And although much has been written and theorised about ancient landscapes, space, and movement, such studies almost exclusively concern these concepts as experienced in the light of day, bypassing in this way a significant portion of ancient lives and experience. In our scholarly endeavours, we forget that darkness and light amplify in different ways the experience, perception, and impression of a place or event, optically altering colours, textures, figures, spaces, landscapes, and structures.1 The effect that pockets of artificial light in dark spaces have of tightening participants’ physical proximity during nocturnal performances, for example, has been demonstrated in recent research in cultural geography. Such use of light not only brings people physically closer, but naturally also affects experience.2 In modern theoretical and empirical studies of the Classical (and particularly the Greek) world, though, investigations engaging with ritual experience and spatial movement tend to assume seasonless, diurnal conditions, despite recent efforts to stress the inseparability of time and space – in other words, the importance of the chronotope3 – in human cognition, experience, and memory. And in this way, we so effortlessly bypass approximately half of the daily twenty-four-hour cycle and, consequently, a significant portion of human experience, encounters, memories, and interpretations.4 In other disciplines, work on nightscapes has emerged as an awakening of what we have been so far leaving out in relation to embodied practice and affect.5 Yet the study of the Classical world stubbornly resists.

Apollo’s strong solar and calendric attributes make him a particularly suitable deity for an investigation concerning astronomical links in religious spaces.1 This relationship, which continues well into the Roman period,2 appears in a number of texts from the fifth century BCE.3 Many of Apollo’s epikleses associate him with the sun: Phoebus,4 Lykeios, Aigletes (god of light or sun, with a temple on the Aegean island of Anafi),5 and Apollo Eos (of the Dawn).6 In literature, the identification of Apollo as Helios (Sun) is widely attested, as are a number of cults linking the two divinities, such as Apollo Helios in Rhodes and Athens and the Boeotian Daphnephoria.7 We will explore in this chapter how a number of Apollo’s other cults employed solar associations for timekeeping purposes and for shaping the cognitive ecology of the cults, triggering the senses within the religious experience. The sun’s fundamental importance in human existence stands as testimony to Apollo’s cosmic significance. His importance in the Greek pantheon is well known, but the god’s cosmic role is, in addition, palpable in his position as the god of music, which also carried cosmological significance through the sixth-century-BCE Pythagorean ideas of the music of the spheres.8 Plato, in particular, explains how Apollo directs celestial and musical harmony.9 Of particular relevance to this study is a third association of Apollo with the cosmos, his relationship with the land of the Hyperboreans, the people of the far north: a place associated, at least in the late sources, with eternal spring and light,10 where days were of extreme length and nights very short – an ideal ambiance for the god of light.

In this chapter we discuss festivals conventionally categorised as polis cults and initiation rituals, with the intention to investigate how time, memory, the re-enactment of myths and performances, and the integration of a seemingly participating cosmos become active ingredients within religious space. Since ritual performance translates to ritual and performative memory, a study combining temporal conditions, ritual narratives, and space has the potential to enhance understanding of how the human body responds to stimulants responsible for structuring experience and constructing context-specific memories, be they architectural, performative, or temporal.

In recent years, the study of ancient ritual experience and the role of emotions has become a subject of intense research.1 It is now somewhat a scholarly cliché that experience of a space is influenced by architecture and movement. Of equal importance to this experience, though, is time (day, night, and the seasons). The aspect of time – or, in more general terms, the inclusion of the total environment – has received, as we discussed in Chapter 1, very little attention in the study of ancient Greek ritual. The three components comprising the total physical environment (land, sky, time) are equally critical in shaping memories and experience. Previous studies have traditionally focused on a combination of these components, but hardly on all three.2 Just as the study of landscape or architecture alone cannot inform us of experience, a sole focus on the time when rituals took place, or indeed only on the orientation of the architecture in space, cannot be sufficient to enrich our narrative. It is now accepted that cognition is to be understood as ‘embedded in its surroundings’, not as a detached system.3 Thus a combined study of external elements and internal processes has the potential for a far better understanding of ancient cognition.

“Debts to Nature” explores Greek myths about overreach and encroachment involving the operational deity the Greeks variously described as Potnia Therōn (“Mistress of the Animals”), the Great Goddess, or Mother of All, whose domain is Nature. It also concerns the implications of some sustainability principlesembedded and at work in Greek cult, especially acts of reciprocity and exchange in sacrificial ritual, which are ultimately explained by way of Albert Schweitzer’s philosophy of “Reverence for Life” (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben). The poet Hesiod is proffered as an adherent to this kind of worldview and as an early systems thinker, deeply concerned about sustainable living.

“Cynics and Stoics” is an investigation into ecological aspects of both schools’ injunction that individuals should practice “self-sufficiency” (autarkeia) and live “according to Nature.” The relationship of autarky to the sustainability of systems on a global scale is considered in light of Cynic and Stoic cosmopolitanism and virtue ethics. The relationship of subsistence to sustainability is illuminated by Cynic practice and grounded in the modern concept of “appropriate technology.” The Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis (“proprioception”) is presented as an early instance of an “environmental ethics” that still speaks to the manifold relationships that human beings have to one another and that our species has to the rest of the natural world.

“A City for Pigs” portrays Plato as a systems modeler of a sustainable society. Plato’s argumentative methods, in the Republic especially, are favorably compared to techniques of computer simulation and to the heuristic objectives of game theory. Plato’s views about social cooperation in the use of common-pool resources, for example, are shown to be strikingly similar to conclusions reached via field studies by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990). Plato’s own homology, of city and soul, provides a compelling rationale for both individual and collective action vis-à-vis the environmental and social problems we still face today.

“Anaximander for the Anthropocene” presents a formal sketch of modern complexity theory, then argues that the cosmological propositions of Anaximander of Miletus represent a style of rational thinking in Greek antiquity, founded on analogy, to which modern systems science owes an unacknowledged debt. The systems approach to the world first adumbrated by Anaximander’s natural philosophy, it is suggested further, provides the conceptual basis for any meaningful sustainability ethos, even in the modern age.