In the beginning there was Chaos. Then came into being wide-
breasted Gaia—the safe foundation of the deathless ones who
hold the peaks of snowy Olympus—and dark Tartarus in the recesses
of the wide-pathed earth. And Eros came forth as well,
most beautiful of all the immortals, the limb-weakener, who
conquers the mind and thoughts of gods and humans alike.
– HESIOD, THEOGONY
ANCIENT GREEK RELIGION was very different from most modern Western beliefs. There were hundreds of gods, none of whom were all-knowing or all-powerful. There was no organized “church” of any sort, nor was there a set of beliefs that anyone was required to affirm. The Greeks did not expect their gods to love them or be moral examples for their own lives. There were no creeds, no sacred scriptures, no single path to salvation.
Yet the Greeks were very religious. There were always skeptics and atheists, but the evidence we have suggests that most men and women in ancient times took their worship of the gods quite seriously. It’s tempting to see this devotion as a purely business relationship—you give the gods sacrifices and they give you good fortune in return—but such a view can’t begin to capture the variety and complexity of Greek religion. Some Greeks performed their sacrifices and went on their way without another thought for the gods, while others devoted their lives to seeking personal salvation and a mystic union with the divine. Just as today, no two people practiced religion in the same way.
In spite of this individuality, religious practice was remarkably similar throughout Greece. The people of Thebes, Sparta, Athens, and Lesbos all worshipped the same gods. There were local variations of religious cults, but no Greek would completely ignore any of the major gods. And just as there was a unity of religion throughout the mainland and islands of Greece, so, too, was there continuity through time. The clay tablets written in the Greek Linear B script that survive from the Bronze Age name many of the same gods who were worshipped by their descendants a thousand years later. This doesn’t mean the Greeks weren’t open to outside religious influences, especially from the East. Adonis and Cybele from Asia Minor were just two of the many popular divinities imported to Greece. In the polytheistic religion of the ancient Greeks, there was always room for another god.
The gods of Mount Olympus, such as Zeus, Hera, Apollo, and Aphrodite, were worshipped by communities and individuals alike primarily through animal sacrifice. In origin, such sacrifices consisted of a shared sacred meal of gods and humans, with the gods enjoying the sweet savor of the burning fat and entrails while humans feasted on the meat. The sacrifices were not thought of as an atonement for sin, but as a way to honor and gain favor from the gods. Many of these sacrifices were part of public festivals such as those that honored Dionysus or Athena at Athens. Greeks also worshipped different degrees of divine and semidivine beings, ranging from the Olympian gods to wood nymphs and mortal-born heroes. In addition to public opportunities for worship, there were cults restricted to specific groups, such as women, or those of both sexes who had undergone special initiation. The latter category includes the so-called mystery religions—cults so secret that even now we know little about them, except that those who were initiated into them were promised a better fate after death.
As is the case with so many aspects of ancient Greek culture, we know less about the religious life of women than of men. Women were priestesses for the cults of most female divinities, though they could also serve some male gods, such as Dionysus. As we have seen, young girls in Athens were central figures in some community religious rites, and we can be confident this was true throughout Greece. Women were also oracles of the gods, such as the Pythia at Delphi, a woman who sat on a tripod in the temple of Apollo and spoke in verse inspired by the god.
One of the few all-female religious rituals we have any details about is the Thesmophoria festival in which women honored the goddess Demeter. The celebration took place throughout Greece, but wherever it occurred, men were absolutely forbidden to attend. Such single-gender celebrations naturally aroused the discomfort of men accustomed to keeping women in their place. Whether their wives were worshipping Demeter or Dionysus, Greek men often imagined that, once out of firm male control, women would succumb to drunken revelry and unrestrained sexual frenzy. But by all reliable accounts, the religious worship by women was serious and motivated by deep devotion.
Demeter was the goddess of the life-giving earth and the grain that sustained humans and animals alike. She was a child of the Titans Cronus and Rhea, and a sister of Zeus, by whom she had a daughter, Persephone. One day, the maiden Persephone was gathering flowers in a meadow far from home when a giant chasm opened in the ground and out flew Hades, god of the underworld, who seized her and took her against her will to the land of the dead to be his consort. There the young woman wept without ceasing for her mother and the happy life that had been stolen from her. Demeter searched everywhere for Persephone and at last found out that her brother Hades had kidnapped her child. She complained to Zeus but received no help, so she withdrew from Mount Olympus and went into mourning. She wandered the earth as an old mortal woman and became a nursemaid in the home of a local king, taking comfort in caring for the ruler’s infant son.
While Demeter was in the king’s service, the earth withered from her neglect, and no seed would grow. Famine spread across the world, and people everywhere began to starve. The gods begged Demeter to return, but she refused them. Only when Hades agreed to free Persephone for part of each year did Demeter relent. Thus, the Greeks believed that winter came each year because Persephone returned to Hades and Demeter was once again in mourning. This tale was told by the Greeks to explain the seasons and to remind themselves that they neglected the worship of Demeter at their peril. Zeus might storm and thunder, Poseidon might rule the waves, but it was a goddess who brought life to the world.
For the women of Greece, the Thesmophoria festival in honor of Demeter was an opportunity not only to worship the goddess but to escape the responsibilities of home and husbands for a few days. In Athens, the festival took place in autumn. The first day of the ritual was known as the anodos, or “going up,” when the women of the city moved in procession to the top of the hill named Pnyx, carrying all they needed for worship, including piglets for sacrifice. On the second day there was fasting and mourning, during which time the women slept on mats woven from plants that reportedly made them lose all interest in sex (as if hunger and sleeping on the ground weren’t enough). After this, the piglets were thrown into a deep chasm full of sculpted phalluses and snakes. At the same time, special women known as the Bailers descended into the cave and brought back the decayed remains of the previous year’s piglets to place on the altar of Demeter.
As strange as this ritual might seem from the outside, it was a sacred and symbolic descent to the underworld to bring fertility and balance back to the world—and it could be accomplished only by women. A great banquet in honor of the goddess brought the Thesmophoria to an end, after which the weary women descended the hill and returned to their lives as wives and mothers.
SAPPHO’S POEMS GIVE us haunting, tantalizing, extraordinary images of the religious life of women. There is nothing in them like the grand Thesmophoria—though such a festival was probably practiced on Lesbos—but instead something more deeply personal and profoundly moving.
Consider again the first poem in Sappho’s collection, in which she calls on the goddess Aphrodite for help to win the heart of another woman:
Deathless Aphrodite on your dazzling throne,
child of Zeus, weaver of snares, I pray to you,
do not, with anguish and pain, O Lady,
break my heart.
But come here now, if ever in the past,
listening, you heard my cries from afar
and leaving your father’s golden house,
you came to me,
yoking your chariot. Beautiful swift sparrows
drew you over the black earth
with their whirling wings, down from the sky
through the middle of the air,
and quickly they arrived. And you, O Blessed Goddess,
with a smile on your immortal face,
asked what was the matter now and why
had I called you again
and what I wanted most of all to happen,
me, with my crazy heart: “Who should I persuade this time
to lead you back to her love? Who is it, Sappho,
who has done you wrong?
For even if she runs away, soon she will pursue.
If she refuses gifts, she’ll be giving instead.
And if she won’t love, she will soon enough,
even against her will.”
So come to me now, free me from unbearable
pain. All my heart yearns to happen—
make it happen. You yourself,
be my ally.
The song begins as a formal and reverent prayer of petition to Aphrodite, but it quickly becomes an intimate conversation between Sappho and the goddess. Aphrodite hears the cry of a woman in pain and leaves the heights of Olympus to come to her. With a smile on her face, Aphrodite speaks to Sappho as an old friend: “Who should I persuade this time to lead you back to her love?” This is not the normal tone used by Greek gods when addressing mortals. Homer’s heroes rightly quake with fear when Zeus or Poseidon speak to them. Only Odysseus in his dealings with the goddess Athena comes anywhere close to this level of intimacy. Sappho’s Aphrodite is, as the last line of the poem says, her summachos (“ally”)—a word of war frequently used in Homer by equals who stand together in battle.
Sappho also employs images of closeness between herself and Aphrodite elsewhere in her poems:
I talked with you in a dream, Cyprus-born
And Aphrodite addresses Sappho in another fragment:
. . . you and my servant Love
This degree of intimacy between mortal and divine in ancient Greek literature isn’t unique to Sappho, but it is unusual and begs the question of whether these poems reflect an aspect of the religious life of women not attested to in the descriptions by men. Are we witnessing here a spiritual relationship between women and goddesses that was largely alien to a male world, or are these invocations and imagined conversations with the divine simply poetic devices that have no bearing on the religious lives of real women? It’s impossible to know for certain, but other poems by Sappho suggest there was an unappreciated depth in the spiritual lives of Greek women.
ONE OF THE oldest preserved poems of Sappho comes from an ostrakon, or potsherd, a broken piece of pottery used in ancient times for informal writing such as tax receipts, military orders, and school exercises. This particular piece contains four stanzas of a poem by Sappho recorded in Egypt in the third century BC and now preserved in the Laurentian Library in Florence, Italy. The writing is not always clear, and several words are missing, but what survives is once again a remarkable prayer of invocation addressed to the goddess Aphrodite:
Come to me here from Crete to this holy
temple, to your delightful grove of apple
trees, where altars smoke
with frankincense.
Here cold water babbles through apple
branches, roses shadow all,
and from quivering leaves
a deep sleep falls.
Here too is a meadow for grazing horses
blossoming with spring flowers and breezes
blowing sweet like honey . . .
In this place you . . . taking, O Cypris,
gracefully into golden cups
nectar mingled with our festivities
pour now.
Scholars can’t agree whether this is an imagined scene or an actual hymn used in worship, but in either case it’s a song of powerful religious imagery evoking a mystical union of worshippers, the goddess, and the natural setting of her outdoor temple.
Sappho weaves a profoundly sensual prayer with her use of sight, smell, taste, and sound in the lush and primal grove of Aphrodite. Apples, a symbol of love and a fruit of the autumn, mingle with roses and other flowers of the spring in a magical place removed from time. The worshippers hear the babbling water of a sacred spring echoing through the branches above and see the dappled shadows of blossoming roses, a powerful image of female sexuality favored elsewhere by Sappho. They can smell sweet frankincense burning on the altar, feel the gentle, warm wind from the meadow on their skin, and taste the nectar, a food of the gods, poured into golden cups for their festivities by the goddess herself. From above through the quivering leaves, a deep sleep falls down upon them—and not just any sleep. It is a koma, or hypnotic sleep, of enchantment, a powerful trance such as that which descends on Zeus after making love with Hera or which overcomes an audience listening to a skilled bard sing and play the lyre.
This gathering of women worshippers is echoed in another poem of Sappho mentioned in Chapter 5:
The moon in its fullness appeared,
and when the women took their places around the altar . . .
This fragment is another rare glimpse into the private religious life of women in ancient Greece. The moon, as seen earlier, is a powerful feminine symbol that oversees the worshippers as they gather around the altar at night. Whether this is a sacrifice to Aphrodite or another goddess is unknown, but the solemnity of the occasion is clear even from only two lines. We don’t know whether Sappho was a priestess or leader of a religious cult herself, but these two poems do speak of her as a participant in worship in a time and place set apart by women for themselves.
Libation bowl with young women dancing around an altar (c. 450 BC).
(MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON)
IN ANOTHER FRAGMENTARY poem, Sappho invokes Hera, the wife of Zeus and a goddess favorable to women in all phases of their lives:
Come close to me, I pray,
Lady Hera, and may your graceful form appear,
you to whom the sons of Atreus prayed,
those glorious kings,
after they had accomplished many great deeds,
first at Troy, then on the sea.
They came to this island, but they could not
complete their voyage home
until they called on you and Zeus the god of suppliants
and Thyone’s lovely child.
So now be kind and help me too,
as in ancient days.
Holy and beautiful . . .
virgin . . .
around . . .
to arrive . . .
It’s possible this is a choral song sung by a group of women worshipping Hera, or it could be a private prayer by Sappho, perhaps for the safe return of a loved one from a sea voyage, as we’ve seen elsewhere. We know that the sons of Atreus she refers to in the first stanza are Agamemnon and Menelaus. In Homer’s version of the story, Agamemnon stays at Troy after the war to appease the angry goddess Athena, but his brother Menelaus, along with aged Nestor and Odysseus, sails away. Odysseus soon returns to Agamemnon, but Nestor and presumably Menelaus continue to nearby Lesbos to seek a sign from Zeus about the best route for the voyage home. Here Sappho is presenting an alternate local tradition in which both brothers arrive together in Lesbos to pray to the trio of Zeus, Hera, and Dionysus, Thyone’s love child, and a god particularly worshipped by women.
Sappho’s contemporary Alcaeus also sings of this peculiarly Lesbian trinity:
The people of Lesbos founded
a great and conspicuous temple precinct
to be held by all and placed in it
altars of the blessed immortals.
They named there Zeus, god of suppliants,
and you, Hera, the glorious goddess of Aeolia,
mother of all, and third Kemelios, Dionysus,
eater of raw flesh . . .
Alcaeus and a later ancient commentator also say that the section of the temple devoted to Hera was the site of an annual beauty contest for the women of Lesbos, who gave a sacred shout each year in honor of the goddess.
In this poem Sappho once again turns Homer on his head by deliberately presenting a different tradition and adding the goddess Hera along with Dionysus as a trio of gods the brothers once prayed to. Then she herself sets aside the two male gods and invokes Hera alone, both building on and altering the legendary precedent laid down by the sons of Atreus in Homer’s tale.
A FINAL FRAGMENT of a religious poem composed by Sappho and quoted by Hephaestion once again addresses Aphrodite. It is our earliest evidence of the imported Eastern cult of Adonis:
“Delicate Adonis is dying, Cytherea—what should we do?”
“Beat your breasts, girls, and tear your clothes.”
This song is a different sort from the previous poems. We have here part of a group ritual in which women call on Aphrodite (Cytherea) in mourning for the handsome young Adonis.
Adonis was a mortal born from an incestuous affair who attracted the attention of Aphrodite. She entrusted him to the underworld goddess Persephone, who also fell in love with the boy and refused to give him back. In judgment, Zeus decreed that Adonis would spend four months each year in Hades with Persephone, four months with Aphrodite, and the other four months with whomever he chose. He picked Aphrodite and enjoyed his life with her until he died in a hunting accident in the arms of his heartbroken lover.
Each year, Adonis was mourned by the women of Greece as an emblem of the fragility of life. To honor him in Athens, women planted seeds in broken pots in the midsummer heat so that they soon withered and died. The Athenian celebration was a noisy, obscene, and public affair of women that alternated between joy and grief. A similar religious celebration almost certainly happened annually on Lesbos. And although we may long to know more, the images we do have in Sappho’s poetry provide us with a unique, inside glimpse into the religious life of women in ancient Greece.