Polytheistic Greece was full of rites, cults, and festivals; ritual acts were performed in many different settings and for many different reasons, at sanctuaries and shrines, at political meetings, at social gatherings, at home; at war and at sea and during the harvest; as part of the regular public worship of a divinity, to commemorate a god’s arrival in the city, a military victory or deliverance from pestilence; to mark important stages in the life-cycle of individuals such as births, weddings, and funerals—ritual occasions are infinite. Ritual types are similarly manifold, including sacrifice, choral performance, libation, purification, initiation, maturation, divination, healing, oath-taking and many more. Evidence for Greek ritual belongs to all source categories of the ancient world, from texts to inscriptions to architecture and ritual objects and dedications (ThesCRA I–VI; Rudhardt 1958; Bremmer 1994, 38–54).
Throughout antiquity, the Greek world consisted of about a thousand city-states scattered around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, developing side by side over time and interacting with one another across the sea. They retained their individual political, social, and economic institutions alongside their local gods, cults, and practices despite a degree of overarching political control by the 5th-century Athenian empire, the federal states of the classical and later periods, and the Hellenistic and Roman empires. Individual cities had their own, uniquely structured pantheons, in which hierarchies and relations between the various gods were differently configured. Local and regional cult centers, such as Delphi and Olympia, brought worshippers from different places together, in a practice called theōria, as part of an official civic delegation (Elsner and Rutherford 2005). Private cultic associations developed around individual gods, at times tied to particular occupations. Individuals travelled long distances to oracular or healing shrines with their personal concerns. The Greek ritual world was thus utterly fragmented, geographically, politically, socially, but the system provided sufficient coherence for many ancient writers, notably the historian Herodotus, to use ritual customs to differentiate Greeks from non-Greeks (Hdt. 8.144; Kearns 2013).
The Greeks worked with a plurality of competing divine powers, all believed to have an impact on their lives as individuals and as a community, aiming to keep the gods assuaged and happy, and preventing their anger. In turn, each god was active in many different spheres, and the Greeks perceived each divinity both in its unity and its different facets (Vernant 1979; Henrichs 2010; Versnel 2011; Pironti and Pirenne-Delforge 2015). Different gods had different ways of showing their power: Zeus might manifest his authority by throwing a thunderbolt; Athena’s characteristic “mode of action” was mētis, “cunning intelligence” (Vernant and Detienne 1991). The capabilities of individual gods were circumscribed, complemented, and limited by other gods. Structuralism considered this to be expressed especially in binary pairs, such as Artemis and Apollo on Delos; Apollo and Dionysos at Delphi (Vernant 1983), but many festivals and sanctuaries, though ostensibly devoted to a single god, honored entire groups of divinities. Similarly, most spheres of activity were occupied by teams of gods, i.e. Demeter and Zeus oversaw different facets of agriculture; Poseidon, Athena, and Aphrodite navigation, and so on (Parker 2005, 416–451).
“Ritual” as a universal category of human action emerged at the turn of the 20th century (Bremmer 1998), but its definition remains contested. Generally speaking, religious ritual denotes the performance of strictly ordered sequences of formalized, traditional, or traditionalizing symbolic actions (“rites”), aimed at reaching a state of transcendence of reality that allows for communication with the divine. Rituals do not have meaning per se; rather meaning is found in them when particular activities are marked out as ritual by communal agreement and distinguished from every-day activity, often resulting in the ritualization of social relations (Bell 1992).
Scholarship on Greek ritual has traditionally been strong and lively, influenced as it is by classic French sociology, British social anthropology, performance theory, and religious studies (Durkheim, Evans-Pritchard, Geertz, Turner, Tambiah, J. Z. Smith, Bell). In the past, certain paradigms were particularly popular, including van Gennep’s theory of transition rites; Victor Turner’s (1969) conceptions of “liminality,” “structure and anti-structure,” and the evocation of communitas—the cohesion felt by a community through common emotional experience in ritual. Correspondingly, society has been the main frame of reference for the study of ritual (Burkert 1979; Parker 1996, 2005; Price 1999). Ritual has been a heuristic tool for social history, not just for the cultural knowledge it contains, but as a form of social activity itself. It is seen to foster a sense of community and the ritualization of social relations as an effective strategy for picturing what a community is, could, or should be. Where rituals used to be studied as a traditional form of behavior, static, unchanging and largely confirming a given social order, as in neighboring fields they are now understood to derive their power not from a fixed relation to the past, but from constant reinterpretation of what claims to be long-standing tradition. Flexible and dynamic, adapting to the needs of the present, rituals had agency in all areas of Greek life: society, politics, economics, culture, and religion itself (Stavrianopoulou 2006a, 2011; Kowalzig 2007, esp. 32–55; Chaniotis 2005; 2011; Graf 2015).
Understanding ritual as communication, or as an emotional experience, has also been a productive approach (Stavrianopoulou 2006b; Chaniotis and Ducrey 2012–2013), and more recently cognitive science has offered new perspectives (Larson 2016). Ritual song-dance has been a fertile context for the exploration of ritual as embodied practice (Kurke 2013; Kowalzig 2013), and has seen the greatest engagement with music in ritual, itself thoroughly documented (ThesCRA II, 344–396). Ritual’s visual dimension has been examined especially through divine epiphany (Platt 2011), while the sonoric experience lags behind (Petridou 2018). Despite the longstanding interest in the relationship between Greek and Near Eastern ritual (Burkert 1992, 47–75), systematic investigation is still in its infancy, with some forms, such as divination or magic, better known than others (Faraone 1991; Lopez-Ruiz 2015; Rutherford, forthcoming).
Greek ritual has predominantly been studied as collective and public ritual, often in the context of “polis-religion,” that is, a system of cults and worship regulated and controlled by the Greek city-state, and mapped onto its institutions and values (Sourvinou-Inwood 2000; Parker 2018). Civic rituals co-evolved with, and had an active role in adapting and transforming, social and political structures. They were indelibly intertwined with, and constantly changing, collective identity (Parker 1996; 2005). The ritual life of federal states such as Boiotia, similarly embedded in their social organization, was bound up with regional identities based on a supposedly shared ethnicity (Morgan 2007; Kowalzig 2007, 328–391; Mackil 2013). Recent work proposes different frames for a potentially more comprehensive account of religious experience, such as the social network (Eidinow 2011) or the individual (Kindt 2012, 2015), placing greater emphasis on personal agency and worshippers’ inner states (Petrovic and Petrovic 2016), part of a trend aiming to identify a psychological dimension of Greek religion, not necessarily involving ritual (Harrison 2015; Anderson, forthcoming). Meanwhile, the difficulty of sundering private and public worship has received renewed attention (Bodel and Olyan 2008; Dasen and Piérart 2000): unlike in Rome, families did not select from a range of household gods, but worshipped a standard configuration of Hestia and Zeus Ktesios (“of property”) that also had a public version (Parker 2015a). Similarly, while magic (Faraone and Obbink 1991) has often been the touchstone for the debate on private and public religiosity, curses are secretly practiced by individuals against personal or household rivals but also used by cities against their enemies (Faraone 1992, 74–78). It remains questionable whether modalities of individual ritual behavior—that is, of how to reach the gods—were essentially different from those of communal ritual, let alone a source of controversy.
Rituals characterized every aspect of Greek life, yet “ritual” was not an indigenous Greek category; ta hiera (“sacred things”) and theōn therapeia (“service to the gods”) are more capacious terms; teletē is used in mystic or initiation rites; other expressions are ta drōmena “things done,” while ta nomizomena “the customary things” emphasizes tradition.
For the Greeks, ritual was communication with the gods and aimed at achieving communality between humans and gods, principally in the service of a community’s welfare, cohesion, and stability, and at the very least configuring social relations between individuals. Although Greek philosophers have their own views on religion, the basic modalities of ritual behavior they outline correspond to those found in other sources. Rituals were “honors” (timai) offered to the gods for them to enjoy (terpesthai), a gift designed to please (charizesthai) and to propitiate them (hilaskesthai, meilissesthai), generally with the expectation of reciprocity (charis). Plato’s Euthyphron claims that service to the gods consists of sacrifice as the gift (dōreisthai) and prayer or vow as the request (aitein). Key rites like sacrifice, choral performances, processions, dedications, and festivals were all offered with that mindset. Sacrifice, especially, was thought to enable a sort of communion (koinōnia) between the human and divine worlds (Pl. Euthphr. 14b–15a; Leg. 910b; Symp. 188b–c). At the same time, the etiology of its introduction by Prometheus (Hes. Theog. 535–616) establishes a clear separation of the human and divine spheres by displaying the deficiency of this gift, the human inability to satisfy the gods’ demands. The gods were distant and despite their occasional presence on earth did not mingle with humans. Rituals aspired to bridge that distance, to make contact with the gods, and developed strategies working up towards a ritual moment, a transformative point of temporary intimacy with the divine.
While ritual aimed at communication with the gods, it was also geared towards communality among humans. The Greeks were very aware of rituals’ power to define social relations and a sense of connectedness between individuals. Plato’s city in the Laws explicitly rules that its citizens should gather in sanctuaries to develop “positive attitudes towards one another . . . to become familiar and to get to know one another” (Leg. 738d–e). The gods are understood to sponsor communality and cohesion; conversely, honoring the gods serves the community’s stability and success. More broadly, rituals in the Greek world were intimately bound up with the identity and ideology of social groups while also demarcating status and hierarchy, reflecting and resolving tensions, constituting sites for social change and, occasionally, rebellion.
Paradoxically, in a religious system so centered on ritual, it is little regulated, and, by association, explained. Unlike e.g. Assyrians, Hittites, or the Levantine religions, the Greeks have not left elaborate, prescriptive ritual texts; there was no casuistry; little training or expertise was required of religious officials, let alone participants. Regulations survive on stone, but are largely concerned with finance and the ritual obligations of the state and its sub-groups (Parker 2004a). With some exceptions, the Greeks performed their rituals without much reflection on their meaning, learned commentary, or exegesis (Henrichs 1998). Yet ritual language and allusions permeate texts and images; dramatic poetry, tragedy, and comedy articulate, use, and question ritual behavior. Why rituals were performed was in most cases self-evident: knowing that a ritual was traditional sufficiently warranted its continued use: it had worked in the past and was assumed to work in the future. The lack of theological, that is to say interpretive, conflict may be a direct result: you might compete for the antiquity of a tradition but not dispute the practice itself.
Greek ritual was based on an oral tradition, transmitted from generation to generation within social groups, cities and their institutions, and ethnic communities, where it held significance for the coherence, continuity, and identity of a community. In the absence of a systematic theology, sacred texts, and unified institutions, the authority of tradition and past practice provided the most important imperative. That does not mean that rituals were by definition old and unchanging—quite the contrary. Hellenistic inscriptions offer numerous examples of festival renewals or re-organizations; formulae such as “as is customary” (kata to proteron, kata ton archaion nomon) are often rhetorical devices to insinuate innovation in the ritual format (Stavrianopoulou 2011): changes are typically represented as a return to an ancient practice. That of course leaves room for innovation, especially where rituals came to play a role in contemporary social and political processes. The public performance of Pindar’s Olympian 7 in 464 bc on Rhodes may have helped to bring about the island’s unification in 408/7 bc by reconfiguring its fractious local traditions of myth and ritual to suggest a once unified island. Greek rituals were in a constant dialogue with the past, while firmly rooted in the preoccupations of the present; this is what allowed them to participate in, and even produce, social, political, and sometimes economic transformation (Kowalzig 2007, esp. 224–266).
Overall then, to perform rites it was sufficient to believe that they were ancient, which in turn entailed belief in the accompanying stories. Many rites, cults, and festivals harked back to etiological myths (Graf 1993, 101–120; Kowalzig 2007, 24–32). The relationship between myth and ritual, the search for exact correspondences in narrative and ritual sequence, has never ceased to intrigue historians of religion (Ackermann 1991; Kowalzig 2007, 13–23). The Cambridge ritualists of the turn of the 20th century attempted to identify a primacy of myth or ritual, an inherent superiority of practice (drōmenon) over thought (legomenon), or thought over practice; and eventually concluded that they were parallel phenomena (e.g. G. Murray, J. E. Harrison). Walter Burkert (1965) brought together narrative elements in folk-tales with what later became his action programs of Greek rituals, which he derived from evolutionary biology (1996). In fact, there are very few sustained myth–ritual sequences, such as at Eleusis where the process of mystic initiation is believed to have matched the stages of Demeter’s search for Kore in myth, and thus indirectly those of the agricultural year (Clinton 1992).
Nevertheless, the relationship between myth and ritual is extremely close. The telling of myth was present in most rituals, often as part of sung prayer, and worshippers would have been at least generally familiar with the stories surrounding a shrine. Not all rituals survive with myths attached, but myths usually have repercussions in cult. Rather than giving specific ritual detail, etiological myths tend to say things about a cult’s worshipping community, its catchment area, its relationship to other social groups, and to anchor it in history and geography. The Greek landscape is scattered with shrines for gods and epic heroes whose mythical travels connect entire regions in a shared ritual landscape, such as the network of cults projecting the epic hero Diomedes’ return from Troy along the Adriatic coast. Etiological myth generates interconnected myth-ritual geographies and assures localities a place in a religious system.
Rather than seeking specific contacts between myth and ritual, it is more accurate to say, with Jean-Pierre Vernant (2005, 3662–3663), that myth, ritual and their visual imaginary are different media operating on the same level of symbolic thought. In particular, they tend to intersect in the effort to evoke a sense of divine presence. It is at the moment of their coincidence, when myth and ritual merge, that the presence of the divine is felt most acutely, best illustrated by the effect of choral performance, an integral part of festivals in local, regional and panhellenic contexts. The greatest number of—albeit fragmentary—choral religious songs, so called paeans, survives in honor of Apollo and Artemis on the island of Delos. Delos was a center of polis-theōria, approximately translated “state-pilgrimage”; surrounding island states participated in the cult by contributing official delegations that included a chorus. All these songs recount or evoke the story of Apollo and Artemis’s birth on the island: by a palm tree and complete with their mother Leto’s birth-pangs “as the twins shot forth into the gleaming daylight” to the ololygē, the ritual birth-shout of the assisting female deities, eventually joined by the “daughters of the Delians” (Daliōn thygatres, Pind. Pae. 12; Simon. PMG 519 fr. 55). At the mention of the “daughters of the Delians,” the songs imperceptibly turn from the mythical past to ritual, describing the current choral performance: etiological myth and ongoing ritual blend in the chorus’s birth-shout; the local Delian girls are a hinge between myth and ritual, re-enacting the divine birth. The coincidence of myth and ritual occasioned a ritual moment, the point of highest intensity that had altered the religious landscape in the past, and brought the divine closest to humans in the present (Kowalzig 2007, 56–128).
Greek rituals worked with different degrees of intensity in building up to a ritual moment, perhaps of transcendence of reality and greatest proximity to the divine sphere. Sacrifice is generally perceived to command the greatest religious charge of all Greek rituals. The Greeks thought of sacrifice as a gift to the gods in order to maintain good relations with them (Pl. Euthphr. 14c; Phd. 290c–d; Theophr. fr. 12); it enabled communication between gods and men and was a precondition for human feasting, a fundamental form of sociability. Much influenced by universal theories of sacrifice developed in other fields (Robertson Smith, Hubert and Mauss, Durkheim), the coherence of the concept is increasingly questioned in the light of much greater variety in practice, occasions, and sacrificial products (Georgoudi et al. 2005; Parker 2011, 124–170; Naiden 2013; Faraone and Naiden 2012; Hitch and Rutherford 2017).
Thysia broadly denoted alimentary, participatory sacrifice of animals but also of fruit, vegetables, and baked goods; sphagia entailed ritual slaughter of an animal without a subsequent meal, but the distinction is often blurred. Theories are traditionally constructed around animal sacrifice. In the normative version of a thysia (Bremmer 2007), domesticated animals, cattle, sheep, goat, were carefully selected, decorated with garlands and their horns gilded, and led to face the altar. Participants purified themselves by sprinkling water, barley corns were thrown at the animal, libations poured and prayers sung before the animal was stunned and killed; the altar was daubed with its blood. The animal was divided up with meagre portions going to the gods, the thighbones and the tail that produced the smoke that the gods found so delicious (knisē, Ar. Av. 1716–1717), while the richer parts were distributed among the human community, roasted or boiled, and consumed at the feast that followed; sometimes portions were carried away.
The most persistent sacrificial theories dwell on the violence of animal slaughter while stressing ritualized killing as a precondition for communality amongst humans. Walter Burkert maintained that sacrifice was a diverted, controlled expression of human aggression, with the guilt felt over the animal’s death inhibiting violence within the human community (Burkert 1983). For Jean-Pierre Vernant and his circle, sacrifice centered around the shared meal, pivotal to community bonds (Detienne and Vernant 1989); eating meat was limited to religious contexts, and ritualized slaughter distinguished sacrifice from murder. It was a mark of civilization and differentiated god, man, and animal. For both, sacrifice enabled human communality through feasting on meat, but “To sacrifice is fundamentally to kill in order to eat, but within this formulation, you [Burkert] put the accent on the killing, I put it on the eating” (Vernant 1980, 7, 26). Both saw the silence about the killing in the evidence as confirming denial of, or lack of concern for, violence.
Significant correctives to these ideas have been made. Ancient imagery shows no qualm over the death of animals, let alone guilt (van Straten 1995, 103–13). Osteo-archaeology, the analysis of bones and festal debris in sanctuaries, has revealed that meat consumption extended to species with no role in sacrificial offerings (Ekroth 2017). A great variety of sacrifices was not followed by a meal, as in sphagia before battle, the precipitation of whole animals into the water in seafaring; the holocaust of hero-ritual (Jameson 2014; Koch-Piettre 2005; Ekroth 2002, 217–242); pigs’ blood was used to purify anything from temple to assembly to army (Parker 1983, 334–332; 371–374); to “cut an oath” (horkia temnein) involved swearing while touching, and occasionally standing on, cut-up animal pieces (Berti 2005).
Nevertheless, alimentary and participatory sacrifice held immense religious significance for the relationship between men and gods. Remains of burnt thighs and tails identified on altars suggest that the Greeks paid careful attention to the gods’ portions. The meal also structured the human community, and sacred regulations scrupulously detail the sacrificial shares for specific groups such as priests, magistrates, city-doctors, foreign visitors (Carbon 2017); the largely egalitarian nature of civic conviviality so characteristic of the Athenian Panathenaia mattered beyond democratic Athens (Schmitt-Pantel 1992).
Similarly, the careful selection of animals designated for sacrifice suggests that this was a focus of utmost communal attention. The responsibility of the entire community, the choice of the “fairest animal” was highly ritualized and dealt with by political or administrative bodies, and was probably as important as the sacrifice itself. On the island of Mykonos, the city council decided upon the right pig to offer to Demeter; at Bargylia in Asia Minor, magistrates reared a number of animals to be led before a panel of judges, also the arbiters in a human contest of “manliness” (Parker 2011, 133–134). Inscriptions refer to sacrificial animals as kritos (“chosen”), subjected to dokimasia like civic officials, showing that which of them was worthy of representing the community before the god was of great importance. Indeed, the numerous stories of the animal’s voluntary “assent” to its own death include elements of chance to free the community from the responsibility of making the wrong selection.
Yet where exactly the religious power of animal sacrifice lay is difficult to pinpoint: in the power of death and killing, despite the lack of ethical bias? Was the animal perceived to be closer to the gods than humans? A substitute for human life? Did, as ancient moralists thought, life have to be relinquished for life to continue? Or, with Hubert and Mauss, did the animal mediate between men and gods, and through human sociability give temporary access to the divine sphere? What is clear is that giving, and giving up, something worthy was central to obtaining the gods’ favor in Greek ritual: to offer in superlatives, to the best of one’s ability, something of the highest value to elicit the greatest return. How to achieve or determine that value—the proportion of material to symbolic, beyond the actual surrender of wealth—seems to have been of great concern: what the gods wanted remained a matter of speculation and guesswork.
In numerous cults, choral song-dance assumed a role as religiously charged as sacrifice; here, too, as more broadly in Greek ritual, giving (up) something valuable to facilitate communion with the gods while fostering a sense of community was a key strategy (Kowalzig 2004). To bring “choruses and sacrifices (hiera)” was a prerequisite for participation in the festival for Apollo and Artemis on Delos (Thuc. 3.104), and Plato’s lawgiver is asked to give each festival its appropriate chorus and sacrifice (Leg. 816c; 804a). Choral performances were an important demonstration of cohesion within the community and its social groups, defined by tribe, gender or age. Choruses of adult women singing in honor of Hera at Olympia left behind one of the oldest attested hymns (PMG 871). The dithyrambs performed at the Dionysia in Athens in tribal competition in boys’ and men’s divisions featuring future and current citizens became an especially potent symbol of civic identity and social solidarity throughout much of Greece, perhaps due to the festival’s association with Athenian democracy (Kowalzig and Wilson 2013).
Among the earliest rituals are maiden choruses (partheneia) performing the 7th-century songs of the poet Alkman in the context of the cult of Artemis Orthia at Sparta. Though choruses of young males are not specifically attested, later authors link this shrine to the agōgē, a period of physical separation of adolescent boys (ephebes) from the community when they learned the skills of endurance and courage needed to survive as a warrior citizen in Spartan society (hunting, fighting, starving, stealing; Paus. 3.16.7–11). Alongside thousands of small lead figurines showing musicians, dancers, warriors, dedicants, and the goddess herself, clay masks were also found in the shrine, suggesting cross-dressing in connection with maturation rites for adolescents (Calame 1997, 156–169).
The upbringing of future citizens was a chief preoccupation for the ancient Greek polis. What may be loosely grouped as rites of passage constituted a significant part of the ritual arsenal of the Greeks, though not all rituals involving the young need be classified as initiation rituals (Dodd and Faraone 2003). Aetiological myths leading to choral rituals by adolescent boys or girls explicitly concern the welfare of the entire community by securing its relationship to a particular god for the future (Kowalzig 2004). At Ephesos, the story goes that once the city’s youth went to “play” and “enjoy” itself by bringing Artemis’s statue to the seaside, and feeding her with celery and salt growing in the meadows, named Daitis (“feasting place”). When this procedure was not repeated the following year, the goddess sent a plague killing many girls and boys. Ever since, a chorus would “appease” (exeumenizesthai) the goddess in annual rituals; Artemis’s cult even had a standing female chorus and a group of boys serving in the temple, “the diners” (Etym. Magn. s.v. Daitis; Ar. Nub. 598–600; Ion TrGF 19 F 22; Paus. 8.13.1). Similar propitiatory choruses re-enact aitia of young people given up for the sake of the city, such as in the cult of Hera at Perachora, or of Artemis at the evocative site of Brauron in Attica, where Athenian daughters spent a year “performing the sacrifice and soothing” Artemis’s anger over the killing of one of her animals, which caused another deathly plague (Sourvinou-Inwood 1988). Offering a chorus to the deity was a sort of tribute in a cycle of reciprocity between community and god; the community symbolically surrendered human value—the city’s youth—to the divinity to ensure its continued good will.
Greek ritual is always an exploration of the divine: where it is, how to contact it and ensure its presence. Festivals provided an occasion, with many aiming to maintain or renew a community’s relationship to its gods. The regular recurrence of festivals every year, two or four years structured the passage of time through socialization, creating a sense of order. The Greeks had numerous festivals (heortē, plr. heortai), at Athens more than elsewhere, “to relieve the mind from toil” (Thuc. 2.38.1; Plut. Vit. Per. 11.4; Nilsson 1906; ThesCRA VII; Parker 2011, 171–223). The 1st-century bc geographer Strabo held that festivals were times of freedom from human preoccupations and offered relaxation (anesis), in turn enabling engagement with the god (“turning the mind (nous) to the divine”); such empathy (enthousiasmos) afforded divine “inspiration” (epipneusis); the delight engendered by music and dance put humans in touch with the divine. Greek festivals were large, splendid pageants involving great expenditure; sources talk of brilliant (lampros), radiant, synesthetic events full of sensory stimuli. “Sometimes with religious frenzy, sometimes not, sometimes with music, sometimes not; sometimes in secret, sometimes not,” Greek festivals had moods—many were cheerful, and loud; some were somber, commemorating a sad event or the dead; but all provided relaxation and enjoyment (Strabo 10.3.9).
Broadly speaking, festivals offered the opportunity for a community to show and experience itself, using appeal to the gods to help define, preserve and recall the group’s identity, and set itself against others. Often ideological, they were bound up with civic, ethnic, territorial or gender identities, boundaries and interactions. Over several days, sometimes as many as sixteen (Ilion, SEG 53.1373.6), they entailed processions, sacrifices, choral song and dance, musical, dramatic and athletic competitions, plenty of food and drink, as well as informal events like mime performances at the Athenian Diasia for Zeus. New elements were constantly introduced, though only in the case of very time-resistant, conspicuous festivals such as the Panathenaia at Athens can changes over time be observed in any detail (Shear forthcoming). The Hellenistic world saw many festivals newly created or re-established; the self-celebration of the community became increasingly focused on the procession, banquet and contests (Chaniotis 1995; Parker 2004b).
Regional and Panhellenic festivals at Delphi, on Delos or at Olympia, were the responsibility of the shrine itself, or administered by an alliance of cities, the so-called amphictyonies. Such theoric festivals, to which cities sent delegations, often formed the foil for inter-state relations while still celebrating communality at a time of peace and undisturbed economic interactions (Kowalzig 2005). During the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter and Kore, since at least the 6th century, a truce (ekecheiria) was proclaimed to allow safe travel to the shrine (IG I3, 5–6). In the Hellenistic period, the institutionalization of theōria rose to unprecedented heights of complexity, and diplomacy based on networks arising from theōria relationships was common (Rutherford 2013). Many regional and panhellenic festivals were accompanied by market fairs, providing necessities for the throngs of worshippers and often sizeable supra-regional markets where a heightened atmosphere might have provided an extra stimulus to the trade in bulk goods such as grain, slaves, crafts (Chandezon 2000, Kowalzig 2020).
Polis-festivals were organized by the state; public calendars on stone recorded their dates, the sacrificial victims required, and the groups responsible for their financing. Many civic festivals involved the entire community, including women, and sometimes foreigners and slaves, but others were exclusive to citizens or their sub-groups. Tribes, phratries, demes in Athens and their equivalents elsewhere had their own festivals, often the context for introducing adolescents into the citizenry, as soldiers and political participants as at the Apatouria in Ionian cities. The Brauronia ritualized the transition for girls from all over Attica to wives and mothers. Festivals tied to the agricultural cycle were generally bound up with elements of social significance, such as the Athenian Thesmophoria for Demeter, assembling married citizen women only in three days of rites whose symbolism blended agricultural with human fertility. The Athenian Adonia, celebrated across the city in private homes, were open to all women, married or unmarried, citizen, foreigners, and hetairai, all rejoicing in the cheerful, tumultuous celebrations in honour of Aphrodite and her lover Adonis (Parker 2005, 270–289). Festivals of reversal usually affirmed the existing social order, as when masters served their slaves at the Athenian Kronia, perhaps evoking the egalitarian conditions of the Golden Age (Parker 2011, 211–112). Other festivals provided charters for territorial conquest, such as the Gymnopaidia, recalling the Spartans’ victory over Argos and the incorporation of the contested Thyreatis in the Eastern Peloponnese, while the Karneia known from many Dorian cities evoked ethnic identity founded on conquests during the Dorian migration (Malkin 1994).
Festivals aimed at refreshing a community’s relationship with a god often achieved this by testing the boundaries of divine presence. They might hark back to stories of a god’s arrival in a locality (epidēmia, katagōgia), such as Dionysos’s sailing into many Ionian cities at the Anthesteria. The god’s temporary absence was felt in the anagōgia at Eryx in Sicily, when Aphrodite left for Africa, to return after nine days (Ael. NA 4.2; VH 1.15; Athen. 394f). Close engagement with the divine notably occurred through the cult image, itself a chief constituent of lived religion (Romano 1988; Mylonopoulos 2010). The Greeks did not distinguish clearly between the divinity itself and its cult image, and instead dwelled on the cognitive dissonance between materiality and immateriality. Divine images, usually hidden from view, could peer out of the doors exceptionally opened at festival times, and many statues were taken out and carried around, as in the periphora (“carrying around”) of Dionysos at Methymna (IG xii.2, 503; Paus. 10.19.3). Usually the older xoana, the small, clumsily crafted wooden images, travelled while the large chryselephantine, marble or bronze images made from the late archaic period stayed in the temple. But both pushed the limits of anthropomorphism to establish contact with the divine. Naturalistic cult statues sought to evoke the divine presence—and the inability to grasp it in a human-like form—with their size, light, radiance, characteristic of divine epiphany in myth (e.g. Hom. Hymn Dem., 268–280). The obviously artificial, schematic xoanon was brought to life by being cloaked in an arrival myth and anthropomorphizing ritual (Platt 2011). The divine images were brought to the sea, bathed and washed, dressed, clothed, decorated, and fed: Artemis of Ephesos was offered salt and celery; large tables were set up before Athena Hygieia at Athens (IG i3 506, ca. 430 bc). Their wardrobe was refreshed—a newly woven peplos for Hera at Olympia (Paus. 5.16.6; 6.24.10); a chiton for Apollo at Amyklai (3.16.2).
Such cleansing rituals revivified the power of an image. The Tonaia on Samos temporarily restored Hera to her pre-nuptial status; every year, her image was brought to the sea and washed ever since, so the story goes, it had been found on the beach and deemed to have escaped, perhaps prior to the goddess’s wedding with Zeus on the island (Menodotus of Samos, ap. Athen. 15.672a–74b; Paus. 7.4.4; Varro ap. Lactant. Div. inst. 1.17.8; Pirenne-Delforge and Pironti 2016, 141–59). Robing and derobing rites in particular probed the limits of divine power. At the Athenian Plynteria members of the Praxiergidai clan removed the clothes and ornaments of Athena Polias’s ancient xoanon, veiled the statue, probably washed her garments, performed secret rites, and eventually redressed the image at the following Kallynteria (Parker 1983, 26–27; 2005, 478). The days when the goddess was naked were inauspicious, temples remained closed, as if Athena were in danger of being caught off-guard, stripped of her full powers. Such days of transition show that Greek gods were not continuously present, had their off-days, and that communities were continuously preoccupied with tending to the relationship with their divinities.
The procession, pompē, from pempein, “to send,” further supports the climactic structure of Greek ritual. Processions escorted statues in or out of the city, established them in a new temple, and transported gifts or cult objects, such as Dionysos’ phallus (ThesCRA I, 1–20). Though Herodotus claims that processions were a recent addition (neosti, 2.58), they had been a constituent element of rituals since the Bronze Age. Like other ritual modes, processions aimed to forge a relationship to the divine that in turn empowered human society (Kavoulaki 1999). Conceived as “offerings” to “please” the gods ([Pl.] Alc. ii 148e; Ar. 399), they showed the worshipping community in its greatest splendor to itself, others, and the gods. Magnificence and superlatives characterize the language for processions at Athens and elsewhere, “as beautiful as possible” (hōs kallista), “extremely lavish” (polytelestatai); “very stately” (semnotatai); “the most sacred” (hierotatai) (Plut. Vit. Lyc. 30; [Pl.] Alc. ii 148e; Ar. Nub. 307; cf. LSAM 81.8).
The point of a procession is that it moves, literally and symbolically, gradually approaching the god and culminating in a central act, usually a sacrifice, at the moment of greatest intimacy with the divine. Processions are a distinct type of movement, where the divine power might be perceived to join the marchers in a coordinated pace and rhythm. Processions could lead into or out of the city, connect cult sites and landmarks. Whichever direction the pompē took, it affirmed a “spatial model of how the city was structured” (Graf 1996), by demarcating, appropriating, and linking spaces, and perhaps retracing the journey of a god as sh/e took possession of a place. Processions connecting city and extra-urban shrines, such as Argos and the Heraion at Prosymna, might periodically have reaffirmed a city’s control over the territory, and encouraged the integration of town and countryside (De Polignac 1995; Alcock and Osborne 1994).
At the same time, processions engaged the social organization of a city in all its complexity and interconnections, displayed hierarchies, defined social groups with respect to one another and outsiders. The procession at the Greater Panathenaia at Athens, celebrated every fifth year in late summer, was devoted to delivering the peplos, Athena’s robe. It was evoked in all its splendor and energy in the Parthenon frieze, where the presence of the gods suggests the hoped-for acceptance of the gift. The peplos had been woven over nine months by a group of select girls (arrēphoroi) and women; it was hauled “by countless hands” (Strattis fr. 30) up the mast of a ship-cart and pulled towards the Akropolis in a procession starting from the boundary of the city, marched along the “Panathenaic Way” across the agora, stopping at some key shrines on the way (Neils 1992).
In 5th-century imperial Athens, the entire social body was represented, including men and women, citizens and non-citizens, pubescent girls and ephebes, cavalry and hoplites, civic officials and ordinary demesmen, colonists and delegations of allied states, and slaves. This was a spectacle of unity and cohesion, but also accentuated the hierarchies and ideological contradictions entailed by the uneasy cohabitation of democracy and empire: the daughters of noble Athenians parading as basket-bearers (kanēphoroi) were set against the daughters of resident foreigners (metics) carrying their parasols and stools. Their fathers, or in any case male metics, clothed in conspicuous purple robes, acted as “tray-bearers,” and all were singled out from ordinary Athenian citizens and their daughters (Maurizio 1992; Parker 2005, 257–264).
Setting up dedications was another ritual act available to the Greeks to communicate with the gods and ensure their favor (Linders and Nordquist 1987; Bartoloni et al. 1989–1990; van Straten 2000; ThesCRA I, 269–318; Prêtre 2009). As opposed to regular ritual activity, which aimed at long-term maintainance of good relations with the gods, dedications were made on specific occasions, retrospectively in return for a benefit accrued, or as a vow in the expectation of future benefits. Whether initiated by the human vow or by a favor received from a god, the dedication belonged to a continuous cycle of gift and counter-gift, leaving god and man under an obligation that cannot be clearly distinguished from gratitude, embodied as it is in the divine figure of Charis (“thanks, grace, reciprocity”). From their earliest attestations, literary prayers (e.g. Hom. Il. 1.37–42; 451–456; Versnel 1981a; Furley 2007), hymns (Bremer 1981) and dedicatory inscriptions all reflect this cycle of reciprocity: “Mantiklos has dedicated me to the Striker from Afar with the Silver Bow [sc. Apollo] . . . grant in exchange, Phoebus, an agreeable reward” (LSAG 94, no. 1, bronze statuette, ca. 700 bc).
What Plato criticized as an “art of trade” (emporikē tis technē, Euthphr. 14b–e) may have been an act of renunciation understood as a long-term investment in the divine. Dedications were often made at moments of anxiety, transition, or accomplishment: a completed sea journey; adolescents offered a lock of hair, belts and toys at maturation; athletes dedicated their trophies and craftsmen their tools on retirement. Not unlike sacrifice, some offerings were declared as the god’s portion, a dekatē, the tenth part e.g. of a harvest, a successful catch of fish, or a “first-offering” (aparchē, Jim 2014).
Dedications could be of any size and material, from pre-monetary iron spits to large civic offerings, from perishable foodstuffs to textiles, wood, clay, stone, marble, ivory, more or less precious metals. Greek cult precincts overflowed with such objects, a forest of bronze and marble gods, large monuments erected by cities or individuals, bronze cauldrons on their tripods, votive reliefs; bronze figurines and terracotta statuettes of human and animals, inscribed vase sherds; masks, protomae and votive pinakes hung up on temples and on trees (ThesCRA I, 281–318). Measures had to be taken for ritual acts not to be hidden by cluttering votives (LSCG 43; LSS 43, 107, 123). A precinct inundated with dedications was a sign of prosperity, conferred status on the shrine, and put the community that owned it in good standing with the god (Linders 1987). The Greeks had no qualms about advertising religious devotion through their wealth. But temple treasuries also stored actual wealth. Inventories from the Athenian acropolis, Brauron in Attika, or Delos show meticulous accounting of valuable objects like gold, silver, and bronze; the accumulated worth of the Parthenon treasury during the Peloponnesian War, including both coined and uncoined gold and silver, according to Thucydides was a fabulous 6500 talents (Thuc. 2.13.3–4).
Dedications are often considered a ritual mode giving access to individual religiosity, but the claim is problematic. Not only were communal dedications extremely frequent, from the Athenian victory monument after the battle of Marathon to the bronze oxen that the people of Kerkyra dedicated after a miraculous tuna catch (Paus. 10.10.1–2; 10.9.3–5). The state frequently determined the ideological or moral framework: outgoing civic officials like the “market overseers” (agoranomoi) in Hellenistic cities (Capdetrey and Hasenohr 2012) might be expected, slaves at manumission obliged to make a dedication (ThesCRA I, 280). The relationship between worshipper, god, and dedication is often generic; it is mostly impossible to identify a deity by its votive record alone. Among the most frequent dedications are those by athletic victors and spoils of war, bronze tripods, marble chariots, horse riders; bronze armor, helmets, breastplates, greaves, found in great quantities at Panhellenic sanctuaries for all to see. The famous marble or limestone archaic kouroi and korai littering sanctuaries such as the Athenian Akropolis, Delphi, Delos, Apollo Ptoios’s in Boiotia, and Hera’s at Samos may represent god or worshipper (Keesling 2003). Still less specific are the tens of thousands of small terracotta figurines scattered throughout the Mediterranean, measuring on average 10–15 cm, mass-produced from molds, representing the entire cult sphere, from objects and animals to goddesses or devotees holding gifts or a sacrificial animal, commemorating or perhaps replacing the actual sacrifice, similar perhaps to the thousands of miniature bronze bulls found at Olympia (Muller et al. 2015–2017). Drinking or cultic vessels, often in miniature form, likewise occur in the tens of thousands at almost every sanctuary.
That said, votives can also be more individualized. Some are inscribed with the name of the dedicant and sometimes the divine recipient in a loose set of formulae (Lazzarini 1976). Intriguing are occasional multiple or repeat dedications by otherwise unknown individuals, such as the 6th-century inscribed drinking vessels in the sanctuary of Aphaia on Aigina, by Aristophantos, seemingly plying his trade between Aigina and Naukratis (Williams 1983, 184–186). At shrines of Demeter in Sicily, agricultural tools have been found, and very large iron lumps suggest that great wealth was surrendered in expectation of the goddess’s gifts, production and growth (De Angelis 2016, 251–252, 231–312, 234).
That Greek ritual was a form of communication with the gods that generally regulated social relations may also apply to private religiosity. Undoubtedly individuals had a degree of agency and choice of what gods to worship when (Kindt 2015; Harrison 2015), but the boundaries between private and public religion, individual and collective experience are blurred, and without much evidence or a good definition of “interiority,” “spirituality,” or the recently popular “individuation,” personal ritual experience is hard to pin down (Rüpke 2013).
Social institutions, often overseen by the state, mostly created the framework for an individual’s piety. There is ample evidence for sacrifices by private individuals, though made in public shrines, sometimes to top up the state-financed sacrifices. Cultic associations like the private thiasoi of Dionysos at Miletus sacrificed jointly with, and often respecting the authority of, the public thiasos (LSAM 48, 3rd cent. bc; Parker 2018). Individual life cycle events, the initiation of adolescents into the citizenry or marriage were celebrated collectively in the context of age or gender classes. Much of what must have been the sensually most engaging religious experiences, initiation into the mysteries at Eleusis or Samothrace, remains carefully hidden from sight. At Eleusis, individuals from all over Greece paid a fee, sacrificed a piglet “on their own behalf” (Ar. Ach. 747 and schol.) and made clothes offerings to mark their transformation, but the initiation itself happened in a group, not individually: at Eleusis in an enormous hall of initiates, at Samothrace the Hall of the Choral Dancers. These were ritual spaces in which performer and audience constantly changed roles, and collective and individual experience were not easily sundered (Clinton 1992; Cole 1984; Bowden 2010).
Individuals travelled long distances to healing shrines, especially those of Asklepios, whose cult rapidly spread throughout Greece from the later 5th century bc onwards. No sharp distinction between scientific and religious medicine can be made (Graf 2015): in incubation rituals patients slept in the sanctuary, hoping the god would appear in a dream with instructions for a cure or even administering the therapy himself (von Ehrenheim 2015). Stories of sacred healing survive in the literary record, were incised on pinakes hung up on the temple walls; anatomical votive reliefs show hands and feet, ears and eyes, presumably referring to the afflicted body part (Draycott 2017); at Epidauros, a sizeable body of healing miracles (iamata) was inscribed on stone stēlai, possibly as a continuous story-sequence (Martzavou 2011). Healing in the shrine thus orchestrated the god’s power through a shared story-world and common ritual experience, thereby emphasizing recovery in a social context; the community of sufferers was vital in restoring individuals to their social role (Scott 2017). A chance of healing entailed trusting the god, believing and accepting his powers to restore “health.” For the Greeks the boundaries between physical and social welfare were fluid, as suggested by the iama of a slave boy who on entering the god’s sanctuary with a handful of sherds saw his master’s cup immediately mended—the god helped to heal broken or endangered social situations (LiDonnici 1995, no. 10).
The overlap of personal and social concerns also characterizes oracular consultation, incidentally another recourse for illness. While for the better-known sanctuary at Delphi mostly public enquiries are known (Johnston 2008), the recent publication of a remarkablly large corpus of ca. 4500 tablets inscribed with questions to the oracle at Dodona in northwestern Greece confirms the relevance of oracular consultation to individuals’ lives (Eidinow 2007), including women, again in a social context. Questions regard impending decisions about the future in general—should I travel, trade, change residence, hope for freedom as a slave? Others involve finance (loans, debts), health, property, marriage, and offspring, aimed at ensuring the requisite status in society (Parker 2015b).
A few consultations show a perceived personalized involvement of the god in an individual’s life (Eidinow 2018). Also exceptional are single oracular tablets displaying acute anxiety about the immediate future, not unlike curses—the outcome of a court case, or an athletic competition, as if extreme uncertainty brought one closer to the gods. The Greeks used ritual curses to restrain their enemies, individuals or groups, even entire cities, through words or incantations, directed towards a god (Faraone and Obbink 1991). While curses are often considered anti-communitarian, a rite available to individuals outside, or even alternative to, the public religious system, they are likewise concerned with social interaction, albeit under strain. Over 1500 “binding spells” (katadesmoi or defixiones) are inscribed on small lead tablets as early as the 5th century and increasingly found throughout the Greek world, rolled up and occasionally accompanied by lead, clay, or wax effigies, sometimes with their hands “bound” (“voodoo dolls”; Faraone 1992). The curses anonymously seek help from gods of the underworld by “binding” the tongue, body, soul, activity, life of a rival or enemy, and were deposited in graves, pits or wells, but also in public sanctuaries. Most only give the name of the target, but the more elaborate attest everything from athletics to theatrical performance, law, commerce, love. So you might try to bind your opponent in a trial, “I indict the tongue of the man from Selinous so that it may be twisted and useless to them” (Gager 1992, no. 51); or curse a competing business (“I bind Aristaichmos the bronze worker to those [gods] below and also Pyrrhias and his work and their souls” Gager 1992, no. 71). Erotic and love spells, issued by both men and women against a rival, try to constrain someone in explicitly sexual terms, and occasionally express desire for “romantic” love or marriage (Winkler 1991, 216–245). Among some two hundred curses from 2nd-century AD Knidos, about two dozen tablets, likely hung up on the temple for everyone to see, portray women seeking justice from Demeter in private matters regarding other women, stolen property, slander, and so on. In entreating Demeter by a public display of emotions and by “consecrating” their enemy to the goddess, these women might be appealing to a collective sense of otherwise unobtainable justice (IK 147–159; Chaniotis 2009; Faraone 2011).
All these spells arise from conflict between individuals or groups perceived to be particularly upsetting and where official intervention was perhaps not available. Paradoxically, then, the most personal ritual acts occurred in situations of intensely felt social interaction. Even this ritual mode may actually regulate social relations—an attempt to return to normality, not destroy the enemy. Just like curse tablets (perhaps inscribed by professionals), fortune-tellers, soothsayers, travelling healers, itinerant magicians dealing in dubious substances all belonged to religious life in ancient Greece. Philosophers and intellectuals’ disdain for magoi (“magicians”) might be a critique at least as social as ritual, directed against profiteering from people’s uncertainty and proclaiming expertise in a religious system that largely lacked professionals (Parker 2005, 116–135). In a famous passage of the Laws (909d–10a), Plato rails against founding private shrines precisely in situations of extreme distress, suggesting that the ideal city, a functioning polis-religious system, should be able to absorb that anxiety—but no polis was ever ideal. Perhaps then, it is not the ritual mode or the agent but the social situation that we should examine to understand the full religious experience of communities and individuals alike.
All ancient authors are abbreviated according to Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edn. (2014).
IG = Inscriptiones Graecae, Berlin, 1903–.
IK = Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien, Bonn, 1972–.
LSAG = The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, ed. L. H. Jeffreys. Rev. edn. Oxford, 1990.
LSAM = Lois sacrées de l’Asie Mineure, ed. F. Sokolowski. Paris, 1955.
LSCG = Lois sacrées des cités grecques, ed. F. Sokolowski. Paris, 1969.
LSS = Lois sacrées des cités grecques: supplément, ed. F. Sokolowski. Paris, 1962.
PMG = Poetae Melici Graeci, ed. D. L. Page. Oxford, 1962.
ThesCRA = Thesaurus Cultus Rituum Antiquorum, 8 vols., Los Angeles, 2004–2012.
TrGF = Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta, ed. B. Snell, R. Kannicht, S.L. Radt, 5 vols. Göttingen, 1971–2004.
SEG = Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum, Leiden, 1923–.