GENERAL FEATURES

So far in this book the emphasis has been placed squarely upon the tight nexus between religious and civic life, as we have been attempting to show how all citizens were enmeshed in the network of festivals and rituals through which they were integrated into the civic community. But the emergence of the city as a state-form and way of life was also contemporary with a truly original and highly consequential religious phenomenon, namely the appearance and development in several parts of Greece of interstate sanctuaries – sanctuaries, that is, whose influence and catchment-area exceeded the limits of the individual city. These served as places of meeting and exchange for Greeks coming from the farthest reaches of the Hellenic world. It was no coincidence that in this same epoch, the second half of the eighth century, the first wave of overseas migration from the Greek heartland began, chiefly to Magna Graecia (south Italy) and Sicily.

In ‘Old Greece’ there was now a sharp increase in archaeological sites yielding votive deposits of valuable objects – painted pottery and terracotta figurines to begin with, then objects of bronze, jewellery, and finally arms and armour. The surplus wealth that had formerly been reserved for destruction in aristocratic burials was now being diverted to the greater glory of the gods, especially those of Olympia, Delphi, Dodona and Delos, all sites which were destined to experience a Panhellenic florescence.

DIVINE POWERS: GODS, DAIMONES, HEROES

The Classical Greeks did not define themselves as ‘polytheists’. The nearest ancient equivalent to our ‘polytheism’, namely polutheos doxa (literally, ‘belief in many gods’), was coined by Philo of Alexandria, a philosopher of the first century ce whose ancestral religion, Judaism, was monotheistic. But polytheists the Classical Greeks certainly were, since a polytheistic religion is characterized by the plurality of the divine powers that it recognizes and of the cults that it observes; indeed, for the Greeks everything, according to the formula attributed to Thales (sixth century bce), was ‘full of gods’. This diversity of gods, however, was not necessarily incompatible with the idea of a unity of the divine. As the Greeks saw it, the divine simply manifested itself in multiply diverse aspects.

The Greeks worshipped more than one type of divine power, of which there were three principal categories: gods, daimones and heroes. Within each category they distinguished several sub-categories. Each divinity, moreover, might be invoked under titles or epithets that emphasized different aspects of its power; Athene, for example, is known to have been honoured under as many as fifty or so such epithets, including Apatouria, Boulaia, Khalkioikos, Erganē, Parthenos and Polias. Polytheism as a system may thus be thought of as resembling a nest of Russian dolls. We shall now consider each of its aspects in turn.

DIFFERENT WAYS OF REPRESENTING THE DIVINE

The Greeks did not recognize one and only one mode of representing the divine, the familiar anthropomorphic statue. Different forms of representation coexisted peacefully in any given epoch. In this chapter we attempt to answer two questions: what were these different forms? And what can they teach us about Greek conceptions of the divine?

First, though, some remarks of a general nature are in order. The special characteristic of all religious representation is to endow the divinity being figured with a presence without obscuring the fact that it is not actually there. The cultic image must at the same time be thoroughly material – it can be touched, moved, manipulated – and yet leave no doubt that it stands for something which is not actually present. In the ancient Greek world, however, images were not conceived in the same terms as they are today. Notions of likeness and imitation of an external model, which are basic to our definition of an image, were not fundamental for the Greeks. At least until the beginning of the fifth century bce, none of the plastic forms in which the divine was expressed could be subsumed into the category of either likeness or imitation. These Archaic Greek representations gave form to that which had none, but they were not mimetic.

The Greeks employed a large number of different words for representations of the divine: xoanon, bretas, andrias, palladion, agalma, kolossos, eikōn and eidōlon, among others.

DEFINITION

A ritual is a complex of actions effected by, or in the name of, an individual or a community. These actions serve to organize space and time, to define relations between men and the gods, and to set in their proper place the different categories of mankind and the links which bind them together.

It has often been said that Greek religion was a ‘ritualistic’ religion, that epithet being understood in a restrictive and depreciatory sense in accordance with the hierarchy of values we have already discussed (chapter 1). If, by contrast, one starts from the definition of ‘ritual’ that we have just given, Greek religion may then fairly be said to be ritualistic in the sense that it was the opposite of dogmatic: it was not constructed around a unified corpus of doctrines, and it was above all the observance of rituals rather than fidelity to a dogma or belief that ensured the permanence of tradition and communal cohesiveness. However, this Greek ritualism did not exclude either religious ‘thought’ or religious ‘beliefs’ (see Part III, below); the formalism of ritual observance, moreover, depended on a comprehensive organizing framework that structured both human society internally and its relationships with the surrounding universe.

NATURE AND PERFORMANCE

Everyday private life, no less than public civic life, was rhythmically regulated by all kinds of rituals, so that every moment and every stage of the Greek citizen's existence was intimately imbued with a religious dimension.

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter we shall be discussing the rituals and beliefs relating to critical points in a person's life-cycle, that is, transitions from one life-status to another – birth, attainment of majority, marriage, death. ‘Domestic (or family) religion’ and ‘popular religion’, the labels usually employed to cover these, do not seem satisfactory to us. The former is inadequate, because the rituals in question are as much civic as domestic, and the cleavage familiar today between private and public life has hardly any meaning in a context where matrimonial and funerary rituals were a matter of concern to the community at large, not just the few individuals immediately involved. As for ‘popular religion’, despite its currency among historians of religion at the beginning of this century and its recent revival by English-speaking writers, the term both is excessively vague and corresponds to no ancient Greek notion. M. P. Nilsson, for example, lumped absolutely everything concerning religion under this rubric, while other exponents of the ‘popular religion’ category assert or assume an untenable contrast between the ‘spontaneous’ actions and rituals of the masses and the sophisticated religious thought of the élite.

It need hardly be added that such a conception of Greek religion is the end-product of centuries of ‘Christianocentricity’ and has nothing whatsoever in common with our outlook. We have adopted rather an anthropologically inspired approach that brings out the peculiar logic underlying irreducibly alien rituals and beliefs.