APOLLO WAS A RELATIVELY YOUNG GOD IN THE PANTHEON AND had many homes. In the Iliad he was still an enemy of the Greeks, and there is reason to think that his worship dates to a time not long before written records, to approximately 1000 BCE. In the Iliad he is a god of plague and healing, but by the fifth century BCE he had picked up his role as de facto god of the sun. Because he is just “prehistoric” enough for us not to be able to see him emerge, we can easily take him for granted. Augustus promoted him with a privileged home and a starring role on the Palatine and in the ludi saeculares. Well before that the Greek island of Delos, meeting place of merchants, had been a special place of his. No religious site of the ancient world, however, was more remarkable than Delphi.
Delphi is just out of the way enough to be mysterious, just close enough to other major Greek sites to be accessible and important. A little more than one hundred miles from Athens and Corinth, rather farther from Sparta, it sat in a valley on the southwestern side of Mount Parnassus (where the muses were supposed to live), commanding a dramatic site. To get there, one traveled about ten miles up a narrow valley from the Saronic Gulf, ascending to plateaus and terraces. The last couple of miles of the winding path ascended steeply, giving pilgrims a sense of accomplishment and some lovely views back toward the water.
The site came into religious use as recently as 750 BCE with an annual festival of the god’s arrival early in the year, when rushing freshets of water in the Castalian spring signified his presence. The pilgrimage to this site became so popular that three resident priestesses—called Pythias—were needed to handle the duties. A Pythian priestess, selected as a young woman and dedicated to the god for life, took the lead role in the famous ritual of oracular proclamation.1 On an appointed day she dressed as a maiden, bathed in the spring, sacrificed a goat, and made her way into the inner sanctum of the temple. There the burning of laurel and barley was meant to purify the air. Making her way to the back of the shrine, she took up what had to be a ludicrously uncomfortable position sitting atop the lid of a great cauldron, where vapors collected—from volcanic fumes? She shook a fresh branch from a bay tree, in this ritual of powerful smells, and worked herself into a trance. Once entranced, she, as the Delphic oracle, spoke clearly enough for the priests to understand—or say they did—and write down what she said in Homeric hexameters.
From its very early days, visitors came from afar to seek wisdom from this oracle. Delphi’s political power and influence sagged when the oracle predicted defeat in the Greco-Persian wars and recommended surrender. Marginalizing its public function made seemingly no difference to the site’s popularity, however, and we hear for many centuries of people taking long journeys to hear what the oracle might say. By Roman times, it was a tourist destination of enduring prestige.
Pausanias, who wrote his guide to the Greek world in the middle of the second century CE, offers us a vivid sense of what it was like when the wealth of the ancient world was at an apogee.2 The place was a gaudy mess.
According to Pausanius, the first thing you saw was the Phokikon, where the Phocians, natives of Delphi’s region, had built themselves a prominent meeting hall featuring a statue of Zeus, enthroned, and flanked by Athena and Hera. Farther along the road, the tourist was obligingly shown the spot where Oedipus had murdered his father. (So too in the fourth century CE, Christian visitors to Sinai were shown the exact place, conveniently nearby, where Moses had encountered the burning bush.)
Pausanias tells us that the oracle had gotten there first, belonging to the earth goddess, Gaia, and the nymph Daphnis lived on the mountain and served the goddess with prophecy. Other gods may have lived there, but it was an earthquake that opened the chasm in the earth to give the place its distinctive atmosphere and make it a suitable site for the temple of Apollo. Was it maybe, he wondered pragmatically, some shepherds who came there, fell under the spell of Apollo’s vapors, and began to tell of their visions? He doesn’t entirely care, but he knows the first priestess to sing the hexameters was called Phemonoe. (He’s a tour guide, not a historian.)
What we know from other sources (notably Herodotus) is that the classic temple was built around 530 BCE by exiled tyrants from Athens, with funds collected from the league of cities who maintained the site and got privileged prophecy in return. Subsequently, it had its disasters in the fourth and third and first centuries BCE. In Pausanias’s time, Nero was remembered as the last great donor to have reshaped the space, even as it filled with clutter, enough that Nero could have his forces steal five hundred bronze images of gods and men. From the sixth century BCE, the Pythian games at Delphi were funded by the league and the usual assortment of contests and races and musical performances was laid on. The league long outlasted its political origin; in Pausanias’s time, there were thirty supporting communities, from as far away as Macedonia and Thessaly.
Temples, including ruined temples, struck the eye first, and then a larger temple devoted to Foresight—the goddess of providence. Given by the city of Marseilles—a colony whose first settlers came from this region—that temple had a large statue of Athena outside, a smaller one within, and a story of a golden shield once placed there by Athena but stolen later. The oracle was centerpiece to a throng of these places for sacrifice, and the air around was doubtless often heavy with smoke and odors.
The precinct of Apollo himself was at the very top, and guides had not enough patience to describe every treasury and shrine, whether given from Thebes, Athens, Corinth, or by various Roman visitors. As you went into Apollo’s enclosure, you saw a bronze bull sent by Corfu, with a story of its own about sacrificing a bull to restore good fishing on the island there.
If the traveler’s attention had wandered by then, he would be jolted awake by the story of the seven wise men whose names and words were recorded there, including the two most famous Greek maxims of the good life, both already here, supposedly, in the sixth century BCE: “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess.” Both are mottoes trite enough for a schoolmaster to drum into his students, meaty enough to distract a philosopher.
After Delphi, the valley of the Nile, not surprisingly, was the most popular place with religious tourists. They flocked to the giant talking statues of Memnon for two hundred years until restoration activities around the year 200 CE seem to have stifled the crash or cry or twang often heard shortly after dawn. Until then, men made oracles of what they thought they heard.
The old Egyptian goddess Isis proved immensely popular beyond Egypt, and the story of her transmogrification goes hand in hand with the historically known, datable, and preposterous creation of her sidekick Serapis. Our best source for the baldfaced cooking up of a major god is the account we get from the historian Tacitus, supplemented by his near contemporary, Plutarch.3
It happened in the days of an early king Ptolemy—which one is not clear. Alexandria was newfounded and needed temples and gods. A divine young man appeared to the king in a dream and told him to send faithful men to find and bring his image from the lands of the Black Sea. Awakening, the king called his priests and told them the story, being sure to interrogate Timothy of Athens, who had been brought from Athens to establish and supervise the Eleusinian rites in Egypt and so now was asked what to make of this claim of divinity from the Black Sea.
You can see where this is going. Emissaries will be sent, they will find a temple, they will negotiate with the locals (for three years in this case), they will bring back an image, and the king will be happy. Did the image of the god not climb spontaneously and miraculously into the ship sent for him, and did the trip from the Black Sea back to Alexandria not take a miraculously swift three days?
With that scanty fig leaf of legend, a great new god was given his backstory. The legends authorized a fact: that under the earliest Ptolemies, a great shrine was erected in Alexandria in honor of this factitious and entirely new god Serapis, the famous Serapeum that would fall only centuries later when imperial law condemned old religions in the late fourth century CE. For all that the god was a cooked-up divinity, this was a mighty place. The temple itself was in the middle of a huge complex of buildings occupied by temple personnel, hangers-on, and people seeking cures who stayed near the god to spend the night in hopes of divinely inspired dreams. The giant statue of the seated god was praised for its precious materials (golden scepter, silver clothes, and shoes) and its gleaming colors—even the hostile Christian accounts go on and on about the wonders of the place. Was the great library of Alexandria there as well?4
Tanit, the presiding goddess of Carthage during its long war with Rome, got a name change and went on as before. When Rome finally prevailed and the city was destroyed, the goddess was made the object of the special ritual of “evocation,” where a Roman general summoned the god of a city under attack to abandon that city and take a better deal, as it were, with the Romans. When the goddess changed sides, as Tanit reportedly did, then Roman conquest was nearly inevitable—which offered one explanation for the final defeat of Carthage in 146 BCE.5
Tanit now became Caelestis, “the heavenly one,” and went right on being worshipped in Carthage. (Worship of Tanit originated in the Carthaginian homeland of Phoenicia and was tied up there with the cult paid to goddesses known under the name Astarte.) Caelestis’s temple had a long and powerful history in Carthage. In the 370s and 380s, the young scholar Augustine from African Tagaste a hundred fifty miles inland, already associating with Christians but with an eye for all religions, was deeply impressed with the richness and tenacity of her liturgy. In his City of God, written twenty-five years after her rites were formally banned, he still had to debunk her. His account of her rites emphasizes the spectacle and notably lacks account of blood sacrifice.
When I was young, I used to go to the sacrilegious shows and games and watched the deranged worshipers and the dancing choristers and really enjoyed the filthy shows performed for the delight of gods and goddesses, especially the virgin Caelestis and mother Berecynthia. On the day devoted to her ritual bathing, they performed things so filthy with such disgusting actors that it wouldn’t be right for the mother of the gods or the mother of any senator or indeed of any honorable man to hear them—or indeed for the mother even of any one of the actors… . I don’t know where the people devoted to Caelestis ever got any instruction in chastity, but in front of her shrine, where they set up her image, we all stood, swarming from everywhere, watching her shows, taking turns looking at the image of the virgin goddess and the parade of whores honoring her. They really knew what a virgin goddess liked!6
Honorable women blushed to watch, or rather to be seen watching, and still stole sidelong glances at the unseemly proceedings. As a goddess in Roman Africa, Caelestis had retained some old traits (were her temples not most often at the foot of hills, rather than the top?) but acquired some new ones (e.g., more interest in rain than she had needed back on the Levantine shore of the Mediterranean). She was regularly compared to Juno, but we see Augustine and others reporting she was worshipped as a virgin, as Tanit had been. Romans living in Africa made her a sign of their Romanness and took her with them to other parts of the Roman world, though she remained, primarily, an African goddess.
Our last, and perhaps surprising, stop on this tour of “paganism” is Jerusalem.7 Judaism’s entanglement in the origins and history of Christianity is well known, but I’d like to try, here, to see Judaism with fresh eyes, as just another religious community in the Greco-Roman world.
From early in recorded history down to the reign of King Josiah in the seventh century BCE, the cult of the god called YHWH in the lands between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean and between Galilee and the Negev was powerful but far from exclusive. There were other gods in the region and many, if not most, people paid attention to more than one. The insistence that YHWH be worshipped alone is quite early, but the real monocult emerges only slowly. In the seventh century BCE, three things mark this transition: King Josiah led a movement to encourage the exclusive worship of YHWH, the exodus story emerged to define a community of blood and heritage, and parts of the Torah come into something like their later shape—and with them the insistence that sacrifice to YHWH should happen only in Jerusalem.
Within a few decades of Josiah’s rule, the Babylonian captivity intervened. Jerusalem fell to a conquering power, but some who were deported to Babylon survived and even prospered there. The return of exiles and the beginning of “Second Temple” Judaism marked the beginning of a Judaism moderns might recognize, with insistence on the Sabbath, circumcision, dietary rules, and endogamy. The scribe Ezra, flourishing c. 460 BCE, is credited with establishing the scriptures in their standard form—that is, credited with having miraculously restored them. His time is also that of the first ethnic cleansing of the region and the attempt to create a monolithic Judaism.
This attempt was not entirely successful. After Alexander’s conquests, Greek ways of living and thinking pervaded the world the Jews lived in. By the time of the Maccabees’ revolt in the second century BCE, Jews had been assimilating with fair enthusiasm into Greek culture. Their revolt successfully staved off the more complete Hellenistic absorption seen elsewhere and effectively created an island of modest cultural distinctiveness at the geographic edge of the Hellenistic world.8 (Judea was the last frontier of Hellenism, moving south from Asia Minor through Syria; beyond in one direction led to the Arabian desert, while in the other lay Sinai and beyond it the isolated culture of Egypt that Greece best approached by sea.) The immense reconstruction of the Jerusalem temple in the age of Augustus is an indication of that island’s prosperity.
From this period we get the possibility of hyperobservant Judaism, embodying itself in the Pharisees for example, and the eventual rise of small sects—call them Essenes or call them Christians—of people with their own take on heritage and obligation. These movements have in common an awareness that the “old-time religion” of Jerusalem and its surrounding population had become different in a world where many Jews went abroad and the integration of Jerusalem itself into the Greek world had brought strangers and wealth even to Zion. The growth in numbers of Jews living abroad, especially in Alexandria,9 while honoring and respecting the rulers and temple of Jerusalem, made this post-Maccabee Judaism unique in the Mediterranean world. The story ended badly with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, but that ruin was far from inevitable and came only after centuries of remarkable success on the part of those who would preserve Jewish identity and cult and culture while participating actively in the booming world of Hellenism.
So were the Jews “pagans”? When Christians constructed the category of “pagan,” they designedly omitted the Jews from it because they were Christianity’s forerunners and siblings, worshippers of the same god, so the terminologically correct answer is “no.”
On the history I have outlined, however, the distinctive features of Judaism are few, their god and their practices are very similar to others of the region, and their claim to separatism and distinctiveness is very different from the one Christians would advance in centuries to come. In many ways they were little different from their neighbors. The emergence of Judaism as something genuinely unlike its ancient neighbors is a story played out in post-temple times and very much in a dance of adversity and imitation with Judaism’s Christian and later Muslim siblings and cousins.10