For the Epicureans, the gods existed but they took no care for mankind and could not be influenced by human entreaty. Such a religious belief imposes no constraint at all upon human behavior. But any religious belief which holds that God or the gods do have some concern for humanity inevitably regards some forms of human interaction as approved by the divine power(s) and is likely to have some view as to how communication between humanity and divinity occurs. Both divine attitudes to mankind and the privileging of some modes of communication with the divine over others have political implications, although these may not be straightforward or without contradiction. Christian belief that God loves the world supports an egalitarianism that extends even beyond the human species; Christian belief that God was incarnate as man supports privileging the human over other species; Christian belief that God was incarnate to save those who believe supports privileging those within over those outside the Church; Christian belief in an apostolic mandate supports according particular respect and powers to Christian clergy; Christian belief in divine revelation to the individual supports allowing particular individuals peculiar authority, whether they belong to the apostolic succession or not.
In this chapter I am interested, first, in what sorts of political arrangements were supported by the beliefs about the gods that were generally entertained by Greeks in the classical period; second, in the political implications of the institutions and practices of religious cult; third, in the importance of polytheism’s capaciousness for the absence of victimization of particular cultural groups in Athens; fourth, in what impact the political reforms held to have created democracy in Athens had upon cult and religion; fifth, what, if anything, was distinctive about the religious beliefs and practices of democratic Athens. Finally I shall discuss what would have been different had there been no religious activity at Athens.
The Greeks conceived of the Olympian gods in whom they believed as a family.1 Zeus was the patriarch in this family, having achieved this position by overthrowing his own father Cronos. The other gods were variously related to Zeus as brother, wife, children, and so on. The expectation was that it was Zeus who had the ultimate sanction.
Hesiod, writing about 700 BCE, puts forward in his Works and Days (WD), which is formally a hymn to Zeus, a relatively simple model whereby Zeus is the only god who really matters (Clay 2003: 140–9), and it is Zeus who guarantees justice:
Often even a whole city suffers for a bad man who sins and devises presumptuous deeds, and the son of Cronos lays great trouble upon the people, famine and plague together, so that the men perish away, and their women do not bear children, and their houses become few, through the contriving of Olympian Zeus. And again, at another time, the son of Cronos either destroys their wide army, or their walls, or else makes an end of their ships on the sea (240–47; trans. Evelyn-White).
Zeus in this conception is fundamentally just and the source of justice – in fact, Justice (Dikē) is the daughter of Zeus (WD 256) – “Let us settle our dispute here with true judgement which is of Zeus and is perfect” (35–6).
The Iliad and Odyssey, which reached essentially the form in which we have them within half a century of Hesiod’s writing, offer a rather less straightforward picture.2 It is fundamental to the war at Troy that some gods favor the Greeks and some the Trojans – there is no simple attribution of justice and divine favor to one side. At the beginning of Iliad 20, Zeus summons the gods to assembly and gives them specific permission to offer help to either of the two sides, as their sympathies dictate, and the gods then head for Troy in two hostile groups, while Zeus watches the spectacle (20.4–40). The ability of individual gods to intervene in the world is limited only by divine politics. This is true of Zeus himself. At one point he contemplates saving his son Sarpedon from death, but Hera points out the consequences to him:
Do you intend to take a man who is mortal and long ago destined by fate, and release him from grim death? Do it then – but we other gods will not all approve you. I tell you another thing, and you mark it well in your mind. If you bring Sarpedon alive to his home, think how after this some other god too may wish to rescue his own dear son from the fury of battle. Many men fighting round the great city of Priam are sons of immortals, and you will cause these gods bitter anger (16.442–9; trans. Hammond).
Gods are capable of extremely frank speech to one another, and although Zeus is not formally constrained in his ability to act, his ability to carry through non-consensual decisions depends upon his listening to others.3 Zeus may have more power than the other gods, but what happens in the world is not determined simply by the will of Zeus but by what he and the other gods think they can get away with in the light of both Zeus’ power and his need to keep the other gods on his side.4 At the end of Iliad 1, after Zeus has agreed to grant a favor to Thetis, who has intervened on behalf of her son Achilles, Hera expresses her suspicion and is told by Zeus that there is nothing she can do about it. Hephaestus intervenes to prevent Zeus and Hera from coming to blows, concerned that Zeus might otherwise blast all the gods from their seats (1.580–1).
From at least the early fifth century onwards some Greek thinkers questioned whether it was not ridiculous to believe in gods who accorded with the Homeric and Hesiodic description.5 But the picture of rival gods with different views and values, asserting those views and values to the degree that the rest of the Olympians tolerate, essentially prevails throughout classical literature, and these remained the gods in which the Greeks believed. It is this picture, for instance, that lies behind the tragedy of Euripides’ Hippolytus, advertised by Aphrodite in the prologue as the enactment of her punishment of Hippolytus for renouncing her and honoring exclusively Artemis (Goldhill 1986: 122–5; Goff 1990; Burian 1997: 201–5).
This conception of the Olympian gods worried philosophers because it offered no single template for human morality, only a diversity of models of behavior; but equally it offered little by way of a template for human politics. Within the Iliad and Odyssey there is some correlation between the negotiated authority of Zeus and the necessity for human rulers, most notably Agamemnon, to persuade and not simply give orders.6 It is true that Agamemnon makes up his own mind not to give up Chryseis, but he holds not only meetings of elders but also of the people as a whole: popular backing may not be essential but it is clearly desirable. In an assembly in the Odyssey, old Mentor speaks in a way that presents kingly rule as something of a contract between ruler and people:
No longer now let one who is a sceptered king be eager to be gentle and kind, be one whose thought is schooled in justice, but let him always rather be harsh, and act severely, seeing the way no one of the people he was lord over remembers godlike Odysseus, and he was kind, like a father. Now it is not so much the proud suitors I resent.... but I hold it against you other people, how you all sit there in silence, and never with an assault of words try to check the suitors, though they are so few, and you so many (2.230–41; trans. Lattimore).
The king is a somewhat charismatic figure, on whom special privileges are bestowed (more booty, more meat and wine), and wealth generally follows the position of king (cf. Od. 1.392–3), but he is in contact day-to-day with his elders.
Perhaps the aspects of the Homeric picture of the gods that are most important for Greek political life are its stress on persuasion and its realism in noting that persuasion has its limits, beyond which what counts is the power to enforce one’s will (Schofield 1986 [2001]). The relationship between oratory and power, which is so central to Thucydides’ analysis of fifth-century Athens, is already centrally at issue in Homeric epic, not just among men but among the gods.7 Neither among the gods nor among men is there any assumption that power belongs to one person or group inalienably. Zeus alienated power from his father, and he is conscious that he himself could be replaced. Agamemnon and other kings have to continue to earn the respect and obedience that they hope to command. While we have no aggressive statements of equality, either among men or among gods, the potential of figures of all sorts to prove influential is repeatedly marked – from Hephaestus’ intervention at the end of Iliad 1 through Thersites’ intervention in Iliad 2.
In many ways the constitution of both Olympus and the cities of mortals portrayed in Homeric epic would be best described by the term tyrannis, which became current in the Greek world only a matter of decades after the Homeric poems reached their current form.8 Telemachus recognizes (Od. 1.394–6) that “there are many other Achaian princes, young and old, in seagirt Ithaka, any of whom might hold this position, now that the great Odysseus has perished.” That is, inheritance does not determine kingship, but anyone who can persuade others of his fitness for the job can take it over – as in tragedy Oedipus tyrannos takes over the throne of Thebes because of his success in answering the riddle of the sphinx, despite having come to the city as an outsider.
If hierarchy among the gods is temporary and fragile, nevertheless Olympus offers no model of equality; when the gods take decisions, it is not by majority vote. But it does offer a model of opportunity. There is opportunity, such as that variously taken by Thetis (Slatkin 1991) and Hera, to persuade the most powerful figure to act, or not to act, in a particular way. Persuasion may not work, but when it does not it is because of countervailing factors, not because the argument used is irrelevant. The Homeric gods may not be predictable (though generally they are very predictable) but they are rarely irrational. They offer a range of value-systems, but each of those value systems is more or less coherent. The way the gods behave suggests that there is opportunity to increase confidence in, and therefore the scope of, one’s decision-making by the way in which one acts in the position one has (whether at the top, in Zeus’ position, or in a subordinate capacity). And there is the opportunity afforded by Zeus of acting as one likes provided one keeps within the overall constraints of fate. Together these give a picture of the importance of persuasion, the role of the body of the gods as a whole in deciding questions of leadership, and the limits of governmental interference. No single constitutional arrangement is required by these guidelines, but they certainly do not offer a model of government by strict inheritance or the right of certain families to rule without regard to the interests of the ruled.
One of the earliest critics of established theology, Xenophanes of Colophon, objected that if cattle had gods they would think of them as cattle (no. 169 in Kirk et al. 2007: 168). Although particularly pertinent as a criticism of anthropomorphism, Xenophanes’ criticism is arguably a criticism of the structure of belief. Belief can only be in something that is believable, and what makes something believable is that it takes a form which is comprehensible in the terms with which the believer is familiar.9 The Homeric and Hesiodic poems formed the basis of Greek theology, as Herodotus (2.53) famously recognized, because they provided a framework within which gods of such characteristics could be understood. It was upon such a bedrock of understanding that all Greek religion was founded.10
The main cult acts in ancient Greece were the offering of sacrifices, pouring of libations, and making of inanimate offerings.11 As a general rule, anyone not barred from a sanctuary (people might be barred for sacrilegious behavior or homicide) seems to have been free to offer just about anything in a sanctuary. Certainly a wide variety of objects are found dedicated in sanctuaries, either surviving in the archaeological evidence or listed in sanctuary records. But in some recorded instances there was intervention to change what was written on a dedication, and there seems to have been some negotiation between potential dedicators and sanctuary officials over what might be set up where. Libation seems to have been a minimal acknowledgment of sanctity, might happen anywhere, and is something which gods, as well as men, are shown performing in images on painted pottery. Sacrifice happened in sanctuaries, that is, places dedicated to and set aside for the gods, at an altar. It normally involved the slaughter of domestic animals according to a fixed ritual which seems to have remained effectively unchanged from the descriptions in the Homeric epics through to the classical and Hellenistic city-state. The point of sacrifice was to offer the gods what they wanted, but although sacrifice was normally presided over by a priest (hiereus) the ceremony could still go ahead even if no priest was present (as, for example, in RO 27). What the gods were held to want was the fat and the bones, and the meat was a necessary by-product. The slaughter itself was regularly performed by a butcher, and the animal once killed was cut up, with the innards being grilled and the muscle meat roasted or boiled. Officials might be given particular parts of the animal in recognition of their office.
The most elaborate description of a sacrifice we have from the classical period comes in a religious calendar from fourth-century Cos (RO 62). In this text the concern focuses on the choice of a suitable animal, the making of ritual announcements (including about the slaughterer and his purity), and the definition of the different portions due to different officials.
Sacrificial victims were not only considered of themselves to please the gods, but their livers could be interpreted to reveal messages from the gods, and in particular whether or not the gods favored the enterprise which the sacrifice was made to inaugurate. Reading the livers of victims demanded expertise, and “seers” (manteis) were employed by a city to practise their skill on the city’s behalf, particularly in relation to undertaking military activities (Bowden 2003; Flower 2008). So when armies marched out or were about to enter battle, sacrifices would be made and seers would pronounce upon the advisability of proceeding. So too sacrifices were made in association with the foundation of new settlements.
An alternative source of knowledge of divine will in such circumstances, and in others, was the consultation of an oracle.12 Oracles existed in a variety of forms, from books of statements that might be consulted at random, through locally favored holy sites with some means of giving positive or negative answers to questions, to the pan-Hellenic sanctuary at Delphi and words issuing from an old priestess and having to be interpreted. Oracles gained greater or smaller reputations according to the helpfulness of past responses, but consulting them was not itself a specialized business – though cities might take action to ensure that the person sent to ask the question did not manage to bias the answer by the question asked (see RO 58). The most important aspect of oracles in the current context is the overt role that chance played in the oracle produced. That is, although the most famous oracles involved procedures in which a special human intermediary (such as the Pythia at Delphi) intervened between god and consultant, there were plenty of oracles where the god’s will was revealed by what turned up by chance (thus in the so-called lot oracles: Latte 1939: 831ff.). That the lot could reveal the will of a god is articulated expressly by Plato in Laws 759b in connection with using the lot to choose officials:
[T]he appointments should be made partly by election and partly by lot, so that a mixture of democratic and non-democratic methods in every rural and urban division may lead to the greatest possible feeling of solidarity. In electing priests, one should leave it to the god himself to express his wishes, and allow him to guide the luck of the draw. But the man whom the lot favours must be screened to see that he is healthy and legitimate, reared in a family whose moral standards could hardly be higher, and that he himself and his father and mother have lived unpolluted by homicide and all such offences against heaven. (Trans. Saunders)
What this passage reveals well is that it was possible simultaneously to regard the lot as democratic and as an expression of divine will. Readers of Homer had no problem with “double motivation,” and Plato appears here to combine first the idea that the god chooses but all have an equal chance, and then the idea that the god has chosen whom he wants but may have chosen someone unsuitable. Attempts to distinguish between these ideas and decide which was more prevalent seem beside the point: both could be simultaneously entertained.13 Allotment of officials is most likely to have been introduced only with Cleisthenic democracy because democracy brought in the assumption of essential equality which was necessary before the god could be expected to make his discrimination; to have asked the god to choose by lot in a circumstance where it was understood that some were very much more suitable than others would have been the equivalent to asking the god whether it was better and more good to used a skilled or an unskilled charioteer (to use the ancient example of a silly question to ask an oracle).
Religious officials in Athens (listed in Aristotle Politics 1322b 18–19) were in fact variously chosen.14 Priests might be drawn from a particular family, with the role being inherited within one particular family line from one generation to another or with some other mechanism of choice operating within the family. But, from the classical period on, priests might be selected by lot from (volunteers from) the whole citizen body, or, and this occurs first and particularly in Ionia, the office of priest might be sold. Other religious officials, of which the most widespread are the hieropoioi (doers of sacred things), were regularly chosen who were like, or from, the magistrates of the state. So at Athens many boards of ten hieropoioi were chosen from the allotted members of the council (boulē; [Aristotle] Constitution of the Athenians [Ath. Pol.] 54.6). Priests, however chosen, tended to serve for life or for a long term, but the priest of Asclepius changed annually on a tribal cycle; hieropoioi were often appointed annually.
The use for religious duties of men chosen primarily to fill a civic office is entirely in accordance with the assumption by political bodies of the power to decide religious matters. So, the Athenian assembly made rules related to the Panathenaic festival (for example, RO 81) and also rules related to the Mystery cult at Eleusis. It was by a decision of the assembly that a new priestess of Athena Nike was established and a temple to Athena Nike built (ML 44), and so on. It is this assumption that cult matters can be decided by the polis that has led to the phrase “polis religion” (Sourvinou-Inwood 1990 [2000]).
Religious positions carried some authority, and religious expertise could be turned to political advantage, but not in a big way. We know of a priest of Asclepius drawing a matter to the attention of the assembly at Athens (IG ii2 47), but this is the only example of priestly intervention at classical Athens of which we know, and it concerns a cult matter. We have epigraphic evidence of the fifth-century Athenian seer Lampon intervening in an assembly debate (ML 73), but his intervention had rather limited effect. It is probably not by chance that Aristophanes gave the heroine of his Lysistrata a name that was reminiscent of and punned with the name of a woman long priestess of Athena Polias (Lysimache; Lewis 1955 [1997]). But the degree of special prestige attached to priestesses which this reflects seems quite minimal and, in contrast to Rome, priestly office never became sought by or dominated by those with political ambitions.
The rituals and personnel of religious cult allowed plenty of space for hierarchy and distinction. But this space was but lightly occupied. Offending the gods, or simply failing, by incompetence, to discover what they were trying to tell you was a serious danger, but not so serious as to demand the precaution involved in electing generals by vote because incompetence in warfare could not be risked by filling the office by lot. The necessary inequalities between one cut of sacrificial meat and another were made to map onto the secular distinctions necessarily created by selecting some rather than others for civic office. Men who claimed expertise about the gods, like those who claimed expertise on any technical matter, could get a hearing from council and assembly, but only when issues were being discussed to which that expertise was directly relevant. A great deal of religious activity was “do it yourself.” It is notable that the great law about purification from later fourth-century Cyrene (RO 97) does not tell those who are polluted to seek out cleansing from some expert (though at various points various cities are said to have done that) but prescribes some self-help remedy.15
What this description of cult personnel and rituals has neglected, however, is the cult community. Cult acts presuppose and create community. In particular, it required a community to consume the meat of the sacrificial animal. Whether or not all the shares in the meat were equal, there was an expectation of sharing. The rules for the phratry of the Labyadai at Delphi, dating to c. 400 BCE in the form we have them, appear to oblige phratry members to include the whole phratry in the occasion whenever they sacrifice (RO 1: D2–17). Any member of a city-state, particularly any male member, would find himself part of a whole range of communities in whose cult practices he would be obliged to take part. These sacrifices made visible the members to the group as a whole and the group to the wider world. The groups often, if not invariably, had entrance ceremonies which themselves involved making sacrificial offerings (RO 5, 61). Members of these groups were therefore obliged to take an active part in them. When the groups needed to take a decision, all the members had a stake in that decision, and at Athens such groups operated their decision-making exactly as if they were the Athenian state itself. The early fourth-century phratry decree from Dekeleia (RO 5), though puzzling in some respects, well illustrates the absence of special authority for priests even in these groups; the priest, like the phratriarch, has obligations thrust upon him (including the obligation to have the decision inscribed on a stone stele and displayed), but it does not seem to be either priest or phratriarch who proposes the taking of the decision.16
All these institutional sides to Greek religion map fairly straightforwardly onto the theology of polytheism. As with Zeus and Homeric kings, so with priests, the office is of rather limited advantage unless there is popular support. Seers, and oracles, have to succeed in persuading the public that their interpretations are correct, or they will not be consulted. Croesus’ “testing” of oracles may be a mark of his being a barbarian, but the idea that the public took past performance into account when deciding which oracle or seer to consult must have been generally true.
Greek gods were not moral models. From time to time Greek authors express the view that the Gods punish injustice. That is the view expressed by Hesiod when in Works and Days he is trying to persuade his brother Perses to act justly. But already in the Homeric epics the link between punishment and crime is loose, and suffering is inflicted upon the just as well as the unjust – as most notably when Poseidon turns to stone the Phaeacian ship that brought Odysseus back to Ithaca, not because of any Phaeacian injustice but out of spite, having failed to destroy Odysseus himself (Od. 13.125–87). The willingness of gods to indulge in immoral behavior – to deceive each other, commit adultery, and so on – was one of the aspects of the traditional picture of the gods most widely criticized, above all by Plato (Price 1999: 128–9).
Greek polytheism was capacious. New gods could easily be accommodated provided that they were themselves accommodating – that is, as long as they did not question the old pieties (Garland 1992; Parker 1996: ch. 9). Although the sacrificial paradigm was so basic to the way in which relations with the gods were envisaged that one might take acknowledgment of it to be a requirement of all cults, in fact there were plenty of variations even on that theme, whether in the form of libations that did not involve wine, or sacrifices which involved non-consenting wild animals rather than consenting domestic animals (see Pausanias on sacrifice to Artemis Laphria at Patras, 7.18.7). Vegetarianism was not of itself regarded as impious.
The limits of this capaciousness are variously explored in Greek (as in Roman) texts, but particularly with regard to the advent of Dionysus. Attested in Greece in the late Bronze Age by the Pylos tablets, Dionysus was nevertheless regularly held in myth to be a recent arrival, and the effect of his coming is discussed in the Homeric Hymn to him and in tragedy, particularly in Euripides’ Bacchae (though the plot of that tragedy was anticipated in early fifth-century plays that are now lost).17 Whatever we think about the reality or otherwise of ecstatic female worship of Dionysus in the Greek city-state, the Bacchae is certainly interested in whether a place can be found for such worship within the city – and argues that it needs to be.18
The gods therefore provided no model for the strict division of the world according to the morality of behavior, and they provided a model for positively assimilating a very wide variety of types of person and activity. Although the gods are certainly capable of being cruel to each other, there is little divine excuse for the victimization of whole classes of people. Exclusive religions offer a model for conceiving of the world in terms of in-groups and out-groups, and for restricting rights and privileges to in-groups. That is something seen in the invention of heresy and in the sub-division of the exclusive group into further exclusive groups. The history of the Christian church both offers a clear example of how such a division proceeds (Catholic v. orthodox; protestant v. catholic; conformist v. non-conformist), and for the way in which such division is made directly to map onto political rights and privileges (the “Test Acts”). Greek polytheism offered no such model. It is indeed striking that Herodotus could imagine the model itself to be lifted from Egypt. Even if he was thought by some other Greeks to be philobarbaros, Greeks and Romans generally practised interpretation of non-Greek/Roman religions in terms of Greek/Roman religions, finding their own gods lurking behind the gods of other peoples.
This does not mean, of course, that classical Greeks were cosmopolitan and inclusive. There has been much debate of late as to whether racial prejudice can be found in antiquity (Bérard 2000; Isaac 2004; Tuplin 1999). Responses to this question usually turn on the definition of race. The most recent work stresses that Athenians defined themselves as a race and that they were racially prejudiced in as far as they were prejudiced towards themselves. The Athenians like other Greeks tended to divide the world into binary categories and were capable of putting together all those categories that were not themselves. So it is telling that pots in the shapes of heads were made at Athens featuring white female heads, black male heads, satyr heads, but never white male heads. The black and the female are here assimilated as equally “not white male.”19
The ways in which Greeks thought about their own identity by making contrasts with other peoples has been well explored. Herodotus’ own portrayal of non-Greeks seems sometimes more shaped by a tendency to see others as reversing Greek norms than by close observation (Hartog 1988). Even within the Greek world, the people of one city-state emphasized the differences between themselves and their neighbors. And in some ways the Athenians seem to have pressed their own claim to difference even more strongly than did other Greeks. The speeches given over the war dead at Athens, which became highly formulaic, developed into long descriptions of Athenian superiority over other Greeks (Loraux 1986).
That said, the absence of sharply defined groupings within the Athenian citizen body is noteworthy. There were formal divisions of the citizen body according to census class, but the only census class that ever becomes anything like an identifiable social group is the group of the hippeis, those who could afford to supply a horse. The Athenian cavalry was militarily not an important asset, and the combination of its ineffectiveness with the self-regard of its wealthy members led to some ridicule. This turned into more serious hostility after the cavalry sided with the oligarchs who replaced democracy with a violent junta of 30 men, backed by a Spartan garrison, at the end of the Peloponnesian War (Spence 1993; Low 2002). But these were extreme circumstances.
The informal divisions of the Athenian citizen body seem all to have been vague. The upper class were identified as kaloikagathoi (“the fine and good”), but this was both a designation which was somewhat free-floating, ascribed according to circumstances, rather than a fixed class, and it was a label which was always open to being heard as about moral quality and not simply about wealth. The late fifth-century treatise on The Constitution of the Athenians preserved among the writings of Xenophon is notable for its willingness to use evaluative terms to designate social classes, but what is most striking of all is the extremely wide range of evaluative terms employed (Osborne 2004b: 10–12). That those whom the author politically favors can be variously descibed as good (chrēstoi), noble (gennaioi), most capable (dunatōtatoi), best (beltistoi), cleverest (dexiōtatoi), best (aristoi), few (oligoi), fortunate (eudaimones), capable (dunamenoi), or better (beltious), strongly suggests that far from there being a clearly perceived elite grouping, there were instead a range of evaluative criteria which individuals were left to map onto the society around them as they perceived it.
The division of the citizen body from non-citizens was juridically clear. Slaves had no political rights and rather limited personal rights; slaves could be beaten and tortured as citizens could not. Visiting foreigners, including Greeks from other cities, were obliged to pay a tax if they stayed more than a month and had to have an Athenian representative if they appeared in court. But even these juridical divisions were not necessarily evident in daily practice. Not only did Athenian citizens, resident foreigners (metics) and slaves work side by side doing the same tasks, as is famously shown by the inscriptions listing the workmen responsible for building the Erechtheum (Randall 1953), but Pseudo-Xenophon’s Constitution of the Athenians (1.10) maintains that one simply could not be sure that one could tell Athenians and slaves apart by appearance alone (see further Vlassopoulos 2007; Osborne 2011: esp. chs. 4 and 5).
To some extent it is hard to know which way to take this evidence. Should we be stressing the absence of in-groups and out-groups within the citizen body? Or should we be stressing the way in which belonging to the Athenian citizen body was highly restricted – after the middle of the fifth century restricted to those descended from Athenians on both father’s and mother’s side?20 That the Athenians do not pick out and act prejudicially towards any group of citizens on the basis of their religious practices, families, living habits, or whatever, might be held to pale into insignificance beside the total exclusion from rights of non-Athenians (or indeed of their notorious restriction of the political, economic, and legal rights, though not the religious role, of Athenian women). After all, a society which effectively excludes outsiders is unlikely to be marked by picking out “outsider” groups within its own ranks. It is highly plausible, indeed, that Athenians were the more able to ignore differences within the citizen body because of the much wider range of people totally excluded. Nevertheless it remains the case that the criterion for exclusion was the simple criterion of not being Athenian, not the possession of some belief or ethnic origin against which the Athenians were taking positive sanctions.
This discussion might seem to have strayed some way from religion. Is it at all plausible to reckon the absence of victimization of groups on the basis of origin, culture, or religion to be directly correlated with Greek polytheism’s capaciousness? The best support for that idea comes, perhaps, from one exception: the execution of Socrates (Parker 1996: ch. 10). If polytheism could tolerate such wide variety of religious practice and the introduction of new gods, and was the basic model for an open society, why could it not accommodate Socrates’ daimonion? What was so terrible about Socrates’ daimonion that he should be accused of “introducing new gods and not acknowledging the gods that the city acknowledges”? Does not the fact that a large Athenian jury could condemn Socrates to death show that the Athenians were as ready as any to victimize the non-conformist? Impiety was something about which the Athenians were demonstrably capable of being whipped into a panic. Their particular concern with the gods is reflected in one procedural peculiarity: the Athenians offered freedom to slaves who gave information against offenders only in the case of offenders against the gods (Osborne 2000). Two things seem to have been thought to offend the gods: damaging them or those they protected, and denying that they existed. The mutilation of the herms in 415 led to an unprecedented investigation, and the associated profanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries resulted in a wave of property confiscation and exile, apparently because the mockery of cult actions involved was thought possible only by men who denied that the gods existed. The tolerance of difference arguably stopped here because the capacity of the gods to tolerate additions to their numbers could not extend to the toleration of denial of divinity. Whether or not Socrates was effectively denying the traditional divinities, the Athenians could hear that allegation behind the charge, and this, combined with a strictly political prejudice against a man who had associated with some of the politicians most responsible for the political chaos and violence of 404–403, was sufficient to ensure condemnation. Isocrates 16.6 remarks of the accusers of Alcibiades in 415 that “knowing that the city would be especially angered on matters concerning the gods, were someone to appear to have committed a crime against the Mysteries, and, with regard to other matters, if someone were to dare to plot against democracy, they put these two charges together and brought an impeachment to the Council.” The combination of religious offence and association with those who had been responsible for political subversion is surely as important for Socrates as for Alcibiades. Arguably, the limited case of Socrates reinforces the claim that it was the toleration of the gods which should be reckoned to play a major part in the toleration found within Athenian society.
What impact did the adoption of a democratic constitution or a democratic way of life have on Athenian religious practice? Scholars debate exactly when Athens became democratic (Osborne 2006; Raaflaub et al. 2007) If we opt for Solon (and the reforms traditionally associated with his archonship in 594), then we do not have a very good idea of what, if anything, he invented or abolished, as opposed to codifying. He produced a law code which included a sacred calendar, making clear who was responsible for what, but whether this calendar added or deleted events or transferred any traditional responsibilities we simply do not know.
If we opt for Cleisthenes and the reforms of the last decade of the sixth century which followed the expulsion of the tyrant Hippias and which Herodotus associates with the beginning of isēgoria, there is more to be said (see especially Kearns 1985). Aristotle in Politics (1319b 19–27) gives the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes at Athens and those at Cyrene as examples of democracy’s need to increase the number and change the identity of tribes and phratries, “nationalise” private sanctuaries, and do everything possible to mix people up. Some of these measures seem only to be true of Cleisthenes – presumably the others were true at Cyrene. So Cleisthenes did change and increase the number of Athenian tribes (from four to ten), and the notion that he mixed people up is explored at length in the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (21), partly in relation to the deme and trittys system. But as far as we know, Cleisthenes did nothing to Athenian phratries, nor to “private sanctuaries.” Cult associations with their own property continue to be well attested in classical Athens. Aristotle (21.6) is actually explicit that Cleisthenes left untouched “phratries, genē and priesthoods.” The only evidence we have for the continued existence of the four old Ionian tribes, alongside the ten new tribes, is for their continuing religious role (they appear in the re-inscribed law code of the last decade of the fifth century). More interesting still, Cleisthenes actually gave old cults new roles. His new tribes were named after various Athenian heroes, some of whom already had cults. In at least three of the ten cases, the family that had previously run the cult of the hero in question now ran the cult of the eponymous hero for the tribe. In a somewhat similar way, old local cults got incorporated into the activities of the local communities which were now politically recognized as demes. Deme calendars incorporate a wide range of cults, many of which must go back to before Cleisthenes, while others seem closely associated with particular features of deme life which can only have been consequent to Cleisthenes’ reforms.
Compared with what Cleisthenes actually did, Aristotle’s description in Politics 1319b looks simplistic. This passage implies that cults are the basis for political power, and so need to be completely reorganized to break up the old power networks and introduce new ones. But, as far as we can see, Cleisthenes left the old power networks in place and simply constructed new networks around them or incorporating them. Any power of the Ionian tribes was removed not by their abolition but by providing alternative and more efficient power networks, into which the old tribes as such were not plugged. The old cults of eponymns which became new tribe cults were preferentially linked to groups other than those to which they had previously been linked – again the old network was not destroyed but a “faster” network was provided. In general, the political significance of the old cult units was counteracted simply by overlaying a political network which did the job more efficiently – which offered more rapid access to a greater number of people. The patchwork of local cults which in the sixth century was apparently uncoordinated became coordinated via the new deme structure. Just as identity as a member of a deme became the preferred citizen identity, or even the required identity (nobody could be a citizen except by being recognized in his deme, and the deme name became part of the official nomenclature), so with local gods and heroes it was their cultivation by members of a particular deme, rather than cultivation by those who lived immediately by their cult place or who belonged to a particular family, that came to be most important. Our earliest evidence for deme activity comes in the form of deme cult activity, and calendars of sacrifices have been recovered from a number of demes and groups of demes (Whitehead 1986: ch. 7; Parker 1987). One of the striking things about the priestly family of the Salaminioi, about which we know a great deal from a fourth-century inscription (RO 37), is that it identifies itself as made up of two groups, the Salaminioi of Sounion and the Salaminioi of the Seven tribes, where one group identifies itself by deme and the other by Cleisthenic tribes.
The assumption that it was the Athenian citizen body meeting together that decided matters of cult seems to go back at least to Solon (we do not actually know what body approved his laws). The Athenian assembly in the fifth century assumes the right to dictate various details of how the Eleusinian mysteries are organized, invents the new priesthood of Athena Nike, and undertakes programs of building in various sanctuaries. Locally demes make exactly parallel assumptions about their role in determining local religious practice. But none of this seems to be specifically democratic: all political bodies regarded themselves as the appropriate bodies to take decisions over matters to do with the gods, subject to advice that they might seek, for instance, from the Delphic oracle. The Athenians continued regularly to seek oracular advice over religious matters, but it is not clear whether they expected to consult on all religious matters or only on those matters where there was actual or potential significant disagreement in Athens itself or between Athenians and others over the course of action to be taken. Whether Athenian practice was significantly different from that of Greek cities governed under non-democratic constitutions we are not in a position to say.
Was there anything religiously distinctive about democratic Athens? Would a religious tourist, a “pilgrim” to use the term which it has become fashionable to extend to the Greco-Roman world (Elsner and Rutherford 2005), have detected something different and democratic about the religious institutions and apparatus he came across in Athens? The magnificent cult buildings of the fifth-century Acropolis certainly projected an image of Athenian power, but of democracy? In formal terms, the Parthenon was grander than any other mainland temple – the Athenians seem deliberately to have seen to that – but was it distinctively democratic? Any case for that would have to rest on its sculptural decoration. The amazonomachy of its frieze is well paralleled on other religious buildings (such as Bassai or Epidaurus), as are the gigantomachy (Siphnian treasury at Delphi) and centauromachy (Olympia, Bassai). The birth of Athena in the east pediment has artistic predecessors in non-democratic cities, and if the quarrel of Athena and Poseidon for Attica is unique its reference still appears to be local, not democratic. But the exceptional continuous Ionic frieze around the cella, with its parade of horsemen and so on, is a different matter. This may indeed represent the “local” Panathenaia, but it arguably represented it in such a way as to force the involvement of the viewer, to make the viewer join in the procession, and so to put an unwonted emphasis on the whole Athenian community.21 The friezes of the Athena Nike temple seem to have included mythical representations, but also representation of the Persian wars. This is unusual, but it is hardly distinctively democratic as such.
Was there anything distinctively democratic about Athenian festivals? Certainly the Athenian political body seems to have been mapped out in the Panathenaia, where the sacrificial meat was distributed by deme, but the distribution of meat was hierarchical, with more for city officials, not equal to all. (We know the Athenians to have been concerned about equality of opportunity, but it is harder to find concern about there being equality of treatment or rewards.) The preliminary events of the Dionysia showed off Athenian power, including, as it did in the fifth-century, the parade of imperial tribute, and the presenting of crowns to meritorious persons by the people and parading of war orphans certainly showed off Athenian values, but the extent to which these were distinctively democratic values has been rightly debated (Goldhill 1987 (1990); Rhodes 2003, 2011; Wilson 2009). The voting system employed to determine the victors in the dramatic competition seems to fit with democratic process elsewhere, though it does not involve a popular vote.
What ancient writers themselves noted about Athens’ festivals was their number. Most insistent in this respect is the Ps.-Xenophontic Constitution of the Athenians (3.2 with Osborne 2004b: ad loc.), which repeatedly observes that the Athenians have more festivals than anyone else. This text also claims that the number of festivals is a democratic feature:
As to sacrifices, temples, festivals, and sanctuaries, the common people recognise that every poor person individually is unable to sacrifice and feast, to erect temples, or to live in a great and beautiful city, but they have found a means of achieving this end. The city frequently makes many sacrifices publicly, and the common people enjoy the feasts and obtain a share in the sacrifices (2.9).
Sacrifices created community and might be forms of exclusion or inclusion: this text makes it clear that at Athens there could be detected a distinct movement to inclusion, at least as far as the limits of the citizen body.
It may not have been simply that the Athenians had more festivals, but that they had more festivals with competitive elements (Osborne 1993). Competition was part of a large number of Athenian festivals. Sometimes the competition was individual, but very often it was tribal, involving teams from each of the ten tribes or from paired tribes. Some of the competitive festivals can be traced back to before the Cleisthenic reforms. This was true of the Panathenaic festival itself, which both had competitions open to anyone, including non-Athenians, and tribal competitions, necessarily restricted to Athenians. It may be true of the Dionysia, though attempts have been made to date the origin of the competition at this festival to the last decade of the sixth century (Connor 1990; West 1989). But there are a large number of festivals whose competitive element is not attested prior to Cleisthenes’ reforms and which probably, if not certainly, acquired their competitive element after Cleisthenes. The advantages of competition, and in particular of competition by tribes, was that they actively involved individuals in the festival and gave a strong sense of corporate identity to the competitive units involved in team events. Arguably the democratic tribal structure facilitated festival competition in teams, and the festival competitions reinforced the tribal structure. We have no way of knowing whether Athens had tribal competitions at a higher number or proportion of festivals than other cities did, but it is notable that elsewhere it seems more common to find tribes and other sub-divisions of the polis involved in the provision of sacrificial beasts and distribution of their meat than in actual competition (RO 62, 73). Tribes, or other civic units, forming the basis of competitive teams are found outside Athens only among athletic events for the torch race (at Chalkis, Delos, Delphi, Erythrai, perhaps Lindos, Rhodes, Samos, and Syros), and, at Rhodes, for the euandria, and only in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, except possibly at Rhodes. Among contests of mousikē, tribes form the basis of choruses for dithyramb only at Cos and Rhodes. By contrast, classical Athens used tribes for the ship contest, anthippasia (mock cavalry fights), and various contests in orderly formations (eutaxia), physical fitness (euandria) and excellence in weaponry (euhoplia), in addition to torch races (see Jones 1987 for the data).
In his chapter on “Religion and Democracy,” Henk Versnel (1995) quotes Arnaldo Momigliano saying that “The connection between democracy and religion in the classical world, if it does exist, is not so obvious.” Versnel regards his own chapter as confirming that view. He thinks that there are virtually no clear-cut connections in the fifth century and that the democratic terminology and conceptualizations found in the fourth century are suspect since that century also sees traces of hierarchization. Robert Parker’s Polytheism and Society at Athens (2005) offers just one page reference in its index s.v. “democracy, and Athenian religion.” Here he first concedes that “at the level of representation, it is true, it is hard to trace much influence of the democracy on Athenian religion,” before insisting that “every citizen was entitled to eat as much sacrificial meat at the festivals of the city as any other, and even to participate actively in the ritual as a magistrate or hieropoios. At this level Athenian religion was very profoundly democratic” – and he goes on to quote Ps.-Xenophon on the number of Athenian festivals (Parker 2005: 372).22
Both Versnel and Parker are primarily concerned with the influence of democracy upon religion; I have been rather more concerned with the influence of religion upon democracy. But their minimalist verdicts on the relationship of democracy and religion stem less from their angle of attack than from what they consider to count as a relationship. That reflects both a particular attitude to religion, and a particular attitude to democracy.
I take religion first. Versnel’s list of what he is looking for (1995: 369–70) consists of new gods with clearly democratic names or old gods given clearly democratic epithets, new ways of worshipping the gods that reflects, and new modes of organization and communication within cult groups. But it is entirely unclear why there should be any link between belief that politics is best conducted by having all free-born adult male permanent residents of a state meet together and all have a chance to participate in debate and vote on the decision, and any beliefs about the gods. Whether Zeus is one among many equal gods or superior has no necessary bearing on the situation among men. Greek gods may have the shape of humans, but that does not, and indeed cannot, mean that everything that one believes true for humans has to be true for the gods. Nor does the way in which humans behave toward gods need to relate to the way in which humans behave towards one another: recognizing that gods are in some sense superior does not imply that men cannot be equal.
But there is an odd attitude to democracy here too, where democracy seems to be required to be different not merely in degree but in kind from other constitutions. Democracy in the modern world refers less to precise constitutional arrangements than to a particular ethos. To be democratic is to subscribe to the view that adult members of the community should all have a vote as to who should represent them in the body which takes decisions on matters of state. It is evidently not to subscribe to the view that all those votes should count equally or all be in some sense represented in the final outcome or that the elected representatives be involved in every decision of state. Nor is it to subscribe to the view that anyone who takes civic decisions should be chosen by election. Yet for Versnel, as for others who have recently expressed themselves on the matter (for example, Rhodes 2003), to be democratic at Athens something had to be directly the result of procedures which involved the whole people being equally involved. Versnel’s conclusion is determined by his premises: if it is the democratic taking of decisions by popular vote that is alone to be allowed to qualify for the adjective “democratic,” then the only possible thing that is democratic about Athenian religion is the role of the assembly in taking decisions on religion matters. But Versnel then also rules this out as not a product of democracy because it is not a uniquely democratic feature – other forms of state assumed similar roles. To count as democratic for Versnel, it is not enough to be arrived at by democratic procedure or to be an action undertaken by a democratic society, only acts which are products of directly democratic procedures and cannot be paralleled in non-democratic societies count. On this argument there would be no link between democracy and going to war for the sake of freedom in the modern world, both because the decision to go to war would not itself be the result of a democratic procedure and because states other than democracies have gone to war for the sake of freedom.
What I have tried to do in this chapter is to focus on aspects of religious belief and practice which encouraged the sort of attitude which characterized democracy. When Pericles unpacks what he takes to be the central features of democracy in the Funeral Oration (Thuc. 2.37) he emphasizes equality before the law and the opportunity of individuals to get involved in public affairs to the extent to which they are able, and to command obedience when entrusted with particular authority. But he also stresses free and easy interpersonal relations and absence of suspicion. Those are attitudes which neither the traditional picture of the organization of Olympus nor traditional cult acts did anything to question. What was at issue was not what the gods were like, or what the acts were by which they were worshipped, but who was involved in those acts. And here it is clear that, as Parker emphasizes, changes were made at Athens which increased the involvement of all Athenians in cult acts and which opened up the cult personnel so that any Athenian who wanted to serve as a cult official had the opportunity to do so. New possibilities were created alongside old, and that it was appropriate for both gods and men to have a say in appointments and cult practices seems to be recognized both by the variety of conditions of service of priests and by the continued consultation of oracles to settle cult matters. But the most important aspect is not how priests were appointed but who participated in festivals and shared in sacrifices. Here the increase in the number of competitive festivals, the use of the tribes of the new democracy as the basis for competing teams, and the shear number of festivals open to all to participate in, both at the level of the state as a whole and at the level of the deme, are the most important features. Inclusion not only signaled membership of a corporate body, but served to promote awareness of that corporate body. Every time Athenian citizens took part in a festival they advertised the absence of class or family as routes to differential roles within the city. So while it was not only democracies that paraded war orphans at a religious festival, parading the orphans of all citizens who had died in war served in Athens to advertise the equal value of all Athenian lives.23
Such absence of privilege and of unprivilege was arguably encouraged and reinforced by the traditional understanding of the gods. Individual gods in Homer have their individual favorites and their individual enemies, and enmity might extend to a whole group. Both personal enmity, of the sort advertised regularly in the Athenian courts, and the enmity manifested in the state of war could thus claim Olympian precedent. But the only classes of people on whom the gods traditionally take it out are classes defined politically, that is particular political states or coalitions of states, or defined morally, that is those who set themselves beyond the pale by their injustice or other seriously immoral behavior. On the one side, gods are not given to prejudices based on wealth or skin color or age, and offer no template to cities to introduce such prejudices; on the other side, gods give no encouragement to extending equality of opportunity beyond the boundaries of the political body.
One way of appreciating how bizarre the conclusion of Momigliano and Versnel is, is to imagine an Athens without religion. Imagine that there were no purificatory sacrifice or prayers before the assembly, no religious matters for discussion at the assembly, nothing about religion in the law code, no sacrifices or festivals to be organized or attended, no cults for genē to exist to support, no offerings to the gods to be made to mark births, marriages, or entry to the phratry, no festival games for tribes to gather to compete in, no cult occasions for demesmen and women to meet together, no excuses for moving out of one’s home to an out-of-town sanctuary or into town to join a festival on the Acropolis, no consuming the meat left over when the gods have been given the fat and bones. Would democracy have ever got under way? Could it have survived? Many more of the occasions when Athenian citizens gathered together were religious than were secular: virtually all groups larger than the family gathered primarily, or solely, for religious purposes. It is a matter of historical fact that religious activity provided the prime social dynamic – even war has to come in second place.
Of course, secular equivalents for religious activities can be manufactured. Meat can be eaten without the killing of the animals involving the gods. Games can be played without being part of a festival. Plays can be performed other than in celebration of Dionysus. But just as the argument that one does not have to have democracy to do many of the things that democracy did overlooks the way in which doing those things in fact came out of the democratic framework and rationale, so to say that one does not have to have religion to do what religion does overlooks the way in which it was religion that in fact provided the framework and the rationale. It was in relation to the gods, and not simply in relation to other men, that individuals came to acquire and envisage their own capacities for autonomy. It was because all these aspects of life were religious that they were all considered to be linked.
It is worth stressing the rationale. Religious cult activities gave a reason for getting together, and worship of the gods provided a reason for engaging in cult activities at key life moments or moments of decision. The social and political consequences of cult activity came as a secondary benefit, an incidental result, but they were no less profound for all that. We can see these results both at the practical and at the theoretical level.
First, the practical. This independent rationale for cult communities made it inevitable that new communities – the deme, even the boulē – became cult communities, inevitable that political units “took over” and subsumed existing cult communities. It was the pattern of cult communities which enabled the new political communities of Cleisthenic democracy to be built not out of individuals but out of existing groups. The sociological brilliance of the deme was that it was both a local and a descent group, and as such it was easy to identify as just another community like the descent group that was the phratry or the local group that supported a particular local sanctuary. But at the same time it was a local and descent group with a difference, since belonging gave rights in a superordinate group and powers and responsibilities no other local or descent group possessed. Without religious cult, the local and the descent group would have been juxtaposed, but hardly joined. Religious activity was vital to the identity of the deme, and without the deme there would have been no democracy.
The theoretical consequences were no less important. Political institutions were never totalitarian. An assembly which began with purificatory sacrifices that acknowledged the possibility of powers not under the control of the political body could not conceive its powers to be unlimited. The Athenian assembly had sacred matters compulsorily on the agenda for one meeting each prytany (that is, in ten of the forty meetings a year). The oracles of the gods are the only body to which the assembly defers decisions. The gods constitute an interest group not represented in the assembly but whose views are such that no one in the assembly can claim to know them (they cannot be read off from a text, only assembled in answer to specific questions to an oracle) but they have to be respected. The political community could never regard itself as the only relevant community.
Religion cannot be held to have determined democracy, nor democracy religion, but the very possibility and shape of democracy was arguably dependent on religion, and every expression of religion at classical Athens the expression of a democratic community.
I am grateful to Peter Wagner for the invitation to contribute this paper to the 2006 workshop on “The Greek polis and the invention of democracy,” to him and all participants at the workshop for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this chapter, and to Kurt Raaflaub for helpful editorial advice. I have also benefitted from being able to discuss this paper at a seminar in Oxford organized by Marc Stears. It is with great sadness that I dedicate this paper to the memory of Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, from whom I learned so much.
IG | Inscriptiones Graecae |
ML | Meiggs and Lewis 1988 |
RO | Rhodes and Osborne 2003 |
RE | Realencyclopaedie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft |
ThesCRA | Thesaurus cultus et rituum antiquorum |
Notes
1 For a good brief introduction to Greek gods, see Bremmer 1999: ch. 2.
2 Useful introductions to gods and religion in Homer are provided by Calhoun 1963: 442–50; Griffin 1980: 144–204; Kearns 2004.
3 Bertelli, this volume, discusses the value of “frank speech” (parrhēsia), and Flaig, this volume, draws attention to the importance of listening in tragic representations of rulers’ behaviour.
4 To put it in the terms used by Wagner and Karagiannis, this volume, Zeus’ political autonomy is a matter of the “agential relations of an instituted political to the social world to which it refers.”
5 For an introduction to critical thought on Homeric (and more generally Olympian) gods, see Price 1999: 126–42.
6 On Homeric society, see Osborne 2004a: 211–16; Finkelberg 2011: III. 810–13.
7 For discussion of the Thucydidean aspects of this, see Grethlein, this volume.
8 On tyrannis and its history, see Parker 1998, although some of his own conclusions are dubious.
9 I explore some further consequences of this in Osborne 2011 chapter 7.
10 Belief was once a dirty word among scholars of Greek religion; it has been rehabilitated through the work of Veyne 1983 (1988) and Feeney 1998.
11 For a good brief introduction to ritual actions in Greek religion, see Bremmer 1999: ch. 4. For extensive documentation, see ThesCRA.
12 On the most famous of oracles, that at Delphi, see Parker 1985; Bowden 2005; on oracles more generally, see Eidinow 2007, Johnston 2008.
13 For prevalence of randomization over divine will see Parker 2005: 101 n. 40; for full discussion of evidence for allotment at Athens, see Hansen 1999: 49–52.
14 For the interaction of religious officials and civic life in Athens, see Parker 2005: ch. 5.
15 On experts in purification, see Parker 1983: ch. 9.
16 On Athenian phratries, see Lambert 1993.
17 For Bacchae as a discussion of sacrifice, see Seaford 1994: 293–301.
18 On the more general issue of maenadism at Athens, see Osborne 1997a.
19 For dichotomous thinking by the Greeks see Lloyd 1966. For division between Greeks and non-Greeks, see Hall 1989. I have been made to see the force of the particular example of the head vases by my undergraduate pupil Helen Chambers.
20 The reason for the introduction of this restriction is disputed. I review the possibilities and offer my view in Osborne 1997b.
21 Osborne 1987. On the program for the Parthenon sculptures as a whole, see Osborne 1994.
22 Others who have discussed the topic of “democracy and religion” include Jameson 1998; Boedeker 2007.
23 I chose this example in response to Versnel and Rhodes complaining against Goldhill (1987 [1990]) that features of the Dionysia such as this cannot properly be described as “democratic.”
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