Was there ever such a thing as ‘Greek religion’? It may be an odd question to start this Survey with, but it should be absolutely clear from the start that Greek religion as a monolithic entity never existed. When archaic Greece emerged from the Dark Ages around 800 bc, religious unity and diversity had evolved together with the unity and diversity of the Greek world as a whole, as it came into existence with the emergence of the polis. Every city had its own pantheon in which some gods were more important than others and some gods not even worshipped at all. Every city also had its own mythology, its own religious calendar, and its own festivals (Chapter IV, §3). No Greek city, then, was a religious clone.Footnote 1 Yet the various city-religions overlapped sufficiently to warrant the continued use of the term ‘Greek religion’. The family resemblance (to borrow Wittgenstein's famous term) of these ‘religions’ was strengthened by poets such as Homer and Hesiod (see below), who from the eighth century onwards produced a kind of religious highest common factor by inventing, combining, and systematizing individual traditions, which they then spread via performances at aristocratic courts or local and Panhellenic festivals (below, §3).Footnote 2
Greek religion received its characteristic forms in the thousand or so big and small cities, the poleis, which spread Greek culture from modern-day Spain to the Black Sea.Footnote 3 The independence of these cities gradually diminished through the development of larger powers, such as Sparta and Athens, and they eventually had to cede their sovereignty to Philip and his Macedonians. These developments brought about rapid changes in the structure of Greek religion (Chapter VII). In this Survey, we will concentrate on the religious practices and beliefs during the ‘glory that was Greece’, namely the archaic and classical periods. Given its pre-eminence in the sources, Athens will often be our most important example, but I intend to show also something of the diversity of Greek religious culture.
Before we start looking in more detail at the different aspects, it may be helpful to sketch its main qualities in broad outlines. Greek religion was ‘embedded’; it was public and communal rather than private and individual, and it had no strict division between sacred and profane (below, §1). It was also polytheistic and ‘interconnected’; it served to maintain order and produce meaning; it was mainly concerned with the here and now, and passed down by word of mouth rather than through written texts (below, §2). Finally, it was male-dominated (Chapter VI) and lacked a religious establishment (below, §3).
I would like to conclude this brief introduction with two more observations. First, religious historians often present a relatively static picture of the archaic and classical age, as if during this period religion remained more or less unchanged until the Hellenistic period. Admittedly, it is not easy to keep a proper balance between a synchronic system and diachronic developments. Yet a modern history should at least try to stick to a minimal diachronic perspective. Second, the table of contents of this book may suggest to the reader that the following chapters are all independent subjects, which have little to do with one another. Nothing is further from the truth. Gods and sanctuaries, myths and rituals, beliefs and practices, sculptures and vase-paintingsFootnote 4 – since they are mutually supportive, they should ideally all be treated together in one close-knit treatise.Footnote 5 Such a treatment is hardly possible in this brief compass, but it will be one of our challenges to show the interdependent nature of Greek religion.
1. Embeddedness
Most Western countries have gradually separated church and state, at least on an ideological level, but this is not the case everywhere, as shown by societies such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. In ancient Greece, too, religion was totally embedded in society – no sphere of life lacked a religious aspect.Footnote 6 Birth, maturity, and death, war and peace, agriculture, commerce, and politics – all these events and activities were accompanied by religious rituals or subject to religious rules; even making love was named after the goddess of love, aphrodisiazein. Sanctuaries dominated the skylines, statues of gods stood on the corners of the streets, and the smell of sacrifice was never far away.Footnote 7 Indeed, religion was such an integrated part of Greek life that the Greeks lacked a separate word for ‘religion’ in the modern sense, which emerged only during the Enlightenment.Footnote 8 When Herodotus wants to describe religions of the neighbouring peoples of Greece, he uses the term ‘to worship the gods’, sebesthai tous theous, and when he wants to describe the Greek nation, he speaks of ‘the common blood, the common language and the common sanctuaries and sacrifices’ (8.144.2). In other words, for Herodotus the problem of describing foreign religions could be reduced to the question ‘Which [other] gods do they worship and how?’Footnote 9 In such an environment, atheism was simply unthinkable. The term atheos did not originate before the fifth century and even then indicated only a lack of relations with the gods.Footnote 10
Embeddedness went together with the virtual absence of personal religion, since in classical Greece the notion of a private sphere was still in an early stage of development. There could be individual cult acts, such as sacrifice, the dedication of an ex-voto (Chapter III, §3), or a silent prayer (Chapter IV, §2), but cult was mostly a public, communal activity. Worship outside the basic groups of family, deme (commune), tribe, and city hardly attained respectability before the weakening of the polis at the end of the fifth century, and remained long vulnerable: witness Demosthenes’ famous attack on Aeschines, or Theophrastus’ Superstitious Man.Footnote 11 This public character also meant that religion was strongly tied up with social and political conditions. As life in Greece was dominated by free males, they could (and did) seriously restrict religious opportunities for women (Chapter VI, §1), metics,Footnote 12 and slaves, whose religious position was modest, except for those festivals where the social order was temporarily suspended and they could enjoy themselves (Chapter IV, §3).Footnote 13 The role of politics is visible, for example, in the struggle for religious authority in Sparta. There, in their competition for power with the kings, the highest magistrates had created alternative modes of consulting the gods in order to be independent of the seers, who were controlled by the kings.Footnote 14 It is also illustrated by Athens: when the city became more democratic, it created priesthoods that were additional to those controlled by the aristocrats; when it became more imperialistic, it started to extend the cult of its most important goddess, Athena, in other cities.Footnote 15
Embeddedness also influenced the conceptualization of the sacred. In modern Western society, the sacred is limited to a direct connection with the supernatural and is sharply separated from the profane, but the situation was rather different in Greece. Here a variety of words existed to express our notion of the sacred. The most important term in this respect is hieros, which is everything that has to do with sanctuaries and the gods; for example, to sacrifice is hiereisthai and a priest is a hiereus. In short, hieros is ‘as it were the shadow cast by divinity’,Footnote 16 but it does not mean ‘taboo’, a quality often associated by anthropologists with the sacred; the more dangerous and unapproachable side of the sacred is expressed by the verbs hagizo, enagizo, and kathagizo.Footnote 17 In addition to hieros, the Greeks used hagnos, which could be applied to both humans and gods: regarding the gods and important social institutions, such as supplication and the oath, it denotes their awesomeness, but in the case of humans it refers to their ritual purity. The two notions are not easily combined, and in the late archaic age, when the gap between the human and the divine became enlarged,Footnote 18 a new word, hagios, was introduced, which is first attested for altars (Simonides fr. 519.9) and applies especially to temples, rites, and mysteries.Footnote 19
Another key term in this area is hosios. It had a wide range with a basic meaning of ‘what humans do to please the gods and to give them the timê [honour] they deserve, and whatever action or attitude the speaker can convince others that it belongs to that category’.Footnote 20 For example, hosios can denote purity because pollution is offensive to the gods, but also the proper bonds between guests and hosts, parents and children, and proper dealings with suppliants and the dead.Footnote 21 More strongly, it also includes the notion of ‘justice’, as is illustrated by a funerary epigram of a certain Sosikrates, who died ‘not in a hosios way but through an unjust death’ (SEG 38.440). From the fifth century onwards, the Athenians often used the combination hiera kai hosia to indicate two types of prime importance to society: the right ritual behaviour and the correct treatment of fellow humans. Even if the latter was not ‘sacred’, it was still felt to be parallel to and co-ordinate with the other sphere.Footnote 22 The same goes, in a way, for important institutions of society, such as the symposium or political offices, which were marked with a certain sanctity by the wearing of garlands. So, in Greece, the sacred ‘appears as the intensely venerable rather than the absolutely other’.Footnote 23
2. Polytheism, piety, and pollution
Unlike Christianity and Islam, Greek religion was polytheistic. This is not just a difference in quantity. In polytheism, the pantheon constitutes a kind of system, where gods may complement one another or may be in mutual opposition (Chapter II, §3). Did every Greek worship all the gods of their pantheon? We do not know, but it is unlikely. Wealthy Athens had dozens of sanctuaries, whereas excavators have found only few temples in small Priene on the west coast of modern Turkey. In some cases, worshippers may have tried to remedy the lack of sanctuary of a specific deity by dedicating a figurine of one god in the sanctuary of another, but on the whole inhabitants of rich urban centres must have had many more possibilities for worship than the ordinary person in the country or in small poleis.Footnote 24
Unlike God or Allah, polytheistic gods only cover a limited sphere of life. Their importance, as for example expressed in sacrifice (Chapter IV, §2), depends on their specific realm. As only the totality of the gods was believed to cover the whole of life, ranging from orderly Apollo to bloodthirsty Ares, piety never meant devotion to only one god, although the closeness of a shrine may have fostered a special relationship with a god or hero (Chapter III, §2). It was only in Hellenistic times that faith in one god, pistis, became possible (Chapter VII, §3); only after the birth of Judaism and Christianity do we find conversions.Footnote 25 In fact, religious single-mindedness was definitely dangerous, as Euripides showed in his Hippolytus (428 bc), where the protagonist comes to a sad end through worshipping Artemis but refusing Aphrodite.Footnote 26 Consequently, piety did not yet include loving a god. As Aristotle (Mag. Mor. 1208b30) bluntly states: ‘it would be absurd if someone were to say that he loves Zeus’.Footnote 27
Proper Greek piety, eusebeia, on the other hand, was connected with a root *seb- (‘retreat in awe’), but in the classical period the element of reverence had come to the fore and even extended to loving parents, patriotism, and keeping to the ancestral customs: as Isocrates observed: ‘piety consists not in lavish expenditures but in changing nothing of what our ancestors have handed down’ (7.30). In fact, eusebês (‘pious’), came very close to hosios, although more focusing on the abuse of temples, altars, and images of divinities.Footnote 28 That abuse was considered to be asebeia, which also included holding the wrong ideas about the gods.Footnote 29 Even though the evidence for many Athenian trials for impiety against famous philosophers is late,Footnote 30 Socrates was executed on the charge of innovation in regard to the gods, not for, say, religious theft.Footnote 31 Religious tolerance was not the greatest of Greek virtues.
Whereas the Christian world-view increasingly separated God from this world, the gods of the Greeks were not transcendent but directly involved in natural and social processes. Myths related divine visits on earth, and in Homer's Iliad gods even participated in the fighting before Troy.Footnote 32 Gods also intervened in the human world in cases of moral transgressions: the myth of Oedipus relates the fatal consequences of incest, and the Spartans believed that their murder of helot suppliants in a sanctuary of Poseidon had caused the catastrophic earthquake of 464 bc.Footnote 33 It is for such connections between the human and divine spheres that the Greek world-view has been called ‘interconnected’, in contrast to the Christian ‘separative’ cosmology.Footnote 34
An important consequence of overstepping or breaking existing cosmological, social, and political boundaries was the incurring of pollution. The vocabulary of pollution and purity, together with its concomitant practices, was most frequently used in Greek religion to indicate proper boundaries or categories not to be mixed. Natural pollutions are to a certain extent understandable, with the messiness accompanying birth and the smells arising from a decaying body. But we would not so readily use the vocabulary of pollution for the violation of temples, divine statues, and sacred equipment, which infringes the domain of the gods, or for murder, which infringes social relations, as does killing suppliants, while madness and other diseases infringe the wholeness of the physical person. On the other hand, incest and cannibalism were seen as monstrous, polluting crimes, which confuse the boundaries between humans and animals. Males who confused gender roles by assuming the passive role in homosexual acts and women who transgressed boundaries of respectability by prostituting themselves were also considered to be polluted. The latter, though, were not seen as contagious or dangerous and the committers of these sexual activities did not need to purify themselves. The employment of this particular vocabulary with the corresponding rites of purification can, in one way, be seen as an important Greek means of dealing with maintaining religious and social norms and values in times when the legal process was still underdeveloped.Footnote 35
In addition to removing disorder, Greek religion gave meaning and explanation to life. Dreams, waywardness of behaviour, unforeseen events such as shipwrecks, plagues, and earthquakes – all could be traced to particular gods and in this way were given a recognizable and clear place in Greek world-view; if necessary, there were even anonymous and unknown gods to take the blame.Footnote 36 On the other hand, not everything became clear through the mediation of religion, and some divine actions remained inexplicable. Tragedians explored these actions, but their juxtaposition of the human and the divine in such plays as Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Euripides’ Bacchae shows something of the bafflement evoked, on occasion, by the gods’ reactions.Footnote 37
Most Greek religion, though, was directed at this life not the hereafter. In Homeric times, death was still more or less the end of life, although most people believed in a journey to the underworld as their final destination.Footnote 38 In the course of the archaic age, life after death became an issue for reflection. Aristocratic circles (probably the more intellectual among them) began to think about their personal fate and crave for an existence prolonged beyond their allotted lifespan. Salvation through leading a model life or through initiation into mysteries gradually gained in popularity (Chapter VII, §1), but belief in a life after death never flourished to the extent it did in the Christian Middle Ages. There, if anywhere in Greek religion, it seems that opinions differed widely.Footnote 39
Such a variety of opinion is hardly surprising in a society that was oral rather than literate. Books did not play a role in Greek religion except for a few groups outside mainstream Greek religion, such as the Orphics (Chapter VII, §2), and children were religiously socialized by attending and practising rituals.Footnote 40 This meant that religious ritual played a much larger role in Greek life than in modern society. We should not deduce from this that the Greeks had no beliefs, but in classical times a Greek would never say ‘I believe’: the modern term ‘belief’, with its propositional content, is the fruit of a very long development which we should not retroject on classical Greece or, for that matter, early Christianity.Footnote 41 Together with the absence of a holy book went the absence of a creed and, consequently, of heresy, but not of a certain amount of theology, which has recently started to receive attention, although usually neglected in previous studies of Greek religion.Footnote 42 Religious authority was widely fragmented because priests were rarely professionals, and there was no Greek equivalent to Christian ministers, Jewish rabbis, or Islamic mullahs (Chapter III, §1). Most citizens could sacrifice by themselves; indeed, Herodotus was amazed that the Persians had to call upon a magus to perform their sacrifices (1.132).
3. Religious specialists
It was mainly outside their own homes, though, that the Greeks could meet certain religious specialists, in particular poets, priests, and seers. Originally, poets were undoubtedly the main religious ‘inventors’ and ‘reproducers’. Even if he exaggerated slightly by implicitly suggesting that there was only the barest of religion before Homer and Hesiod, Herodotus was not far wrong when he stated that these poets defined the theogony, gave the gods their epithets, assigned their functions, and described their forms (2.53.2). Poets could exert this influence because they were supported by the aristocrats, who controlled life through their religious, political, social, and cultural hegemony.Footnote 43 Poets also enlarged their religious capital by claiming to be in close contact with the gods. Not only did they manage to make the Greeks believe, if not unconditionally, in the divine guarantee by the Muses of the information they supplied, but they also claimed a privileged knowledge about the gods which was denied to normal humans, as for instance when Homer tells us that an owl is called chalkis by the gods but kumindis by humans (Il. 14.290–1).Footnote 44
Poets also regularly ‘invented’ religious traditions, if necessary by borrowing from neighbouring peoples. It was only realized in the 1950s that the myth of Kronos’ castration of his father, Ouranos, derived from the Near East: the slow but steady decipherment of ever more clay tablets has now shown that this myth ultimately derived from the Hurrians, having passed through Hittite and Phoenician intermediaries.Footnote 45 Only a few decades ago, it also became clear that the division of the world between Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades through the throwing of lots, as described in the Iliad (15.187–93), derives from the Akkadian epic Atrahasis. And when Hera, in a speech to deceive Zeus, says that she will go to Okeanos, ‘origin of the gods’, and Tethys, the ‘mother’ (Il. 14.201), she mentions a couple derived from the parental couple Apsu and Tiamat of the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish.Footnote 46
Priests and priestesses (Chapter VI, §1) conducted larger rituals and supervised sanctuaries (Chapter III, §1), but never developed into a class of their own because of the lack of an institutional framework. Consequently, they were unable to monopolize access to the divine or to develop esoteric systems, as happened with the Brahmans in India or the Druids among the Celts. On the whole, priesthoods had no great influence except for those of certain important sanctuaries, such as the Eumolpides and Kerykes in Eleusis (Chapter VII, §1) and the Branchidai at Apollo's oracle at Didyma (Chapter III, §3). Despite their modest status, priests must have played an important role in the transmission of local rituals and myths, and Hellanicus (FGrH 4 F 74–84), one of the earliest historians, used priestesses of Hera in Argos as his most trustworthy chronological source.
In the case of problems or inexplicable events, it was a male seer (although more recently several female seers have emerged [Chapter VI, §1]) who could bring help. In the archaic age, seers were still aristocrats, who participated in every aspect of aristocratic life, including the battlefield. But, despite their expertise, their words were not definitive. People were free to accept or reject their advice, and epic and tragedy supply various examples of seers whose word was wrongly neglected, such as that of Teiresias in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, which must have contributed to the status of the seers.Footnote 47
Despite this support from tragedy, the position of poets and seers gradually declined in the later classical age through various developments, such as the rise of literacy, increasing knowledge of the world, and growing self-reliance. Even though tragedians still held an important position in the adaptation and formation of religious traditions in the fifth century, they now had to share their one-time monopoly with historians and philosophers. After the fifth century the former took over to a large extent the task of preserving religious traditions, and the latter became the main ‘theologians’. Moreover, at the end of the archaic period the most important religious authority had become the polis, which now mediated and articulated most religious discourse and controlled much of the cultic activity. This control has led to the expression polis religion,Footnote 48 but we should beware of overstressing such control. There were always certain areas, such as magic, mysteries, mythography, and oracles, where that control was less than complete, and more or less space for individual agency remained available;Footnote 49 individual households may also have differed in their religious practices.Footnote 50 In addition, it should be noted that there is a certain Athenocentric bias in the approach, which neglects the innovations in, for example, southern Italy, or the freedom in colonial outposts or even in the periphery of Attica itself.Footnote 51 As there was no creed or divine revelation, the polis, when challenged, appealed to the traditional nature of rites, ta nomizomena, and customs, ta patria (Chapter IV, §1). Such a stress on tradition could lead to rigidity, but possible tensions between conservatism and innovation were resolved by introducing new cults rather than abandoning old ones.Footnote 52
