D. Ogden – A Companion to Greek Religion

Автор: D. Ogden
Название книги: A Companion to Greek Religion
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Древний мир и Античность
Страницы: 523
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This major addition to Blackwell’s Companions to the Ancient World series covers all aspects of religion in the ancient Greek world from the archaic, through the classical and into the Hellenistic period.
Written by a panel of international experts
Focuses on religious life as it was experienced by Greek men and women at different times and in different places
Features major sections on local religious systems, sacred spaces and ritual, and the divine

Matters of religion are central to the things we hold most dear about the culture of
the ancient Greek world. So it is with its literature, where we think first of Homer and
tragedy, its art, where we think first of the statues of the gods and the mythical scenes
of the vases, and its architecture, where we think first of temples. But beyond this,
there was no sphere of life (or death) in ancient Greece that was wholly separate or
separable from the religious: the family, politics, warfare, sport, knowledge . . .The
task of designing a companion volume to Greek religion, even one of the substantial
length of this one, is accordingly formidable. Comprehensiveness is impossible.
Indeed, it is impossible even to define in an uncontroversial way the ground one
might aspire to cover comprehensively. Defending himself for directing Lear for the
third time, Jonathan Miller likened the play to a ‘‘vast dark continent’’ that one could
never hope to explore fully. All one could do was sail around it, disembark at different
points, and make narrow treks through the jungle ahead. The chapters of this volume
constitute such narrow treks into the vast continent of Greek religion. They cannot,
between them, render the territory fully and minutely mapped, but they may offer the
reader an impression of the land’s size, layout, and diversity. They may indicate the
areas that call for closer or further investigation. And the notes made of the flora and
fauna encountered along the way will certainly intrigue.
The volume’s basic purview is the Greek-speaking world in the archaic, classical,
and hellenistic periods (i.e. 776–30 BC), although the ‘‘bookends’’ fall outside these
parameters: an initial chapter contextualizes Greek religion within the wider family of
Near Eastern religions and there is a final chapter on reception. The selection of topics
offered has not been determined by any strong intellectual agenda. Rather, as befits a
companion volume, the chapters seek to reflect the subjects and issues generally held
to be of importance and interest by contemporary international experts in the field of
Greek religion. However, one theme the reader will find to recur in several parts of
the volume (and especially Part V) is that of the disaggregation of the term ‘‘Greek
religion.’’ Whilst a certain degree of across-the-board generalization is not only
unavoidable but actually desirable in a Companion, there has also been some attempt
to approach the distinctiveness of the religious experiences of individuals or of local
communities within the Greek world.
The subject of myth, whilst not addressed head-on here (see Ken Dowden’s
forthcoming Companion to Classical Myth in the same series), nonetheless pervades
the volume. It has been felt too restrictive to devote a focal chapter to each of the
Olympian pantheon (however defined), but care has been taken to include substantial
discussions of many of the major deities. Thus discussions of Zeus can be found in
Chapters 3 and 17, Apollo in Chapters 3 and 9, Athena in Chapters 14 and 26,
Demeter and Persephone in Chapters 19 and 22, Dionysus in Chapters 19 and 21,
Artemis in Chapter 3, Aphrodite in Chapter 20, Hades in Chapter 5, and Asclepius in
Chapter 10.
Scott Noegel (Chapter 1) opens the volume with a synoptic study situating Greek
religion in the long context of the religions of the ancient Near East. The question of
whether, when, and how the various religions of the Near East may have influenced
the form and development of Greek religion is fraught with definitional and other
methodological complexities. There are prima facie cases for tracing a number of lines
of influence between Asiatic myths and Greek ones: the cosmogonies, the myths of
world deluge, and those of battle between god and chaos-dragon. However, since the
general relationship, if any, between myth and cult in the Near Eastern societies and
Greece alike remains obscure, it is impossible to read shared religious practices
directly out of such correspondences. A number of vehicles of transmission of
religious culture between east and west may be identified, including trade, war,
migration, foreign employment, religious festivals, and diplomacy. Already in the
Mycenaean period Greeks were in vigorous contact with Crete, Egypt, Syro-Canaan
(note that the Philistines are likely to have been Greek settlers) and Anatolia, and
peoples from all around the eastern Mediterranean mingled in Cyprus at this time. In
the eighth and seventh centuries BC peripatetic religious artisans may have disseminated
technologies across the eastern Mediterranean. When the Greeks did borrow
an institution, a god, or a rite, and install it in their own religious system, it is seldom
clear how they read the role and meaning of the institution borrowed, which, in any
case, were inevitably transformed radically in their new context. On what basis did the
Greeks decide to equate a particular god from a religious system structured so
differently from their own with a familiar figure from their pantheon?
The next group of chapters (Part II) addresses the supernatural personnel of Greek
religion, the gods, great and small, and the dead, great and small. Ken Dowden
(Chapter 2) asks how the Greeks constructed their suite of Olympian gods in various
intersecting contexts and media. For all their anthropomorphism, the gods were
characteristically remote and seldom presented themselves to mankind in direct,
visible, or scrutable form. They were constructed through the dimensions of local
cult worship, of myth and its refractions in poetry and art, and of theological and
philosophical reflection (cf. Part VIII). In visiting the great temple of Zeus at
Olympia one would experience the god repeatedly through all these dimensions.
Poets had probably taken the central role in establishing a common theogony
amongst the Greeks in the dark ages. The canonical number of Olympian gods was
twelve, but the number of important gods commonly held to dwell on the mountain
was significantly larger. Various attempts to define a pantheon of twelve can be traced
from the Homeric poems onwards, and it was often conceived of in terms of a series
of pairs of gods. The western tradition’s reception of the Olympian gods has inevitably
been formed by the great poetical works bequeathed to us from antiquity, such
as, Homer apart, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Such works have promoted a simple conception
of each of the gods in which they are strongly associated with a primary
function (‘‘the god of . . . ’’) and with a limited range of mythical tales. But when we
look at use of the gods on the ground, as it were, complex and diverse histories and
profiles emerge for them, at both local and panhellenic level alike, as can be seen from
case studies of Apollo and Artemis.
Jennifer Larson (Chapter 3) explains that the concept of ‘‘nature deities,’’ which
we might casually use, is an unsatisfactory one. But the notion of minor deities
resident in and intimately associated with local landscapes was one of huge significance
for the people of ancient Greece, its peasantry in particular. It is rewarding to
learn that, at least in some cases, the inherent aesthetic beauty of some places, remote
spots, or partly wild gardens, has to be considered a factor in their recognition and
cultivation as sacred. Such pleasant places were regarded as the abodes of nymphs.
Caves of nymphs with their associated gardens were seldom sponsored by cities. More
typically, they would be maintained either by individuals ‘‘seized’’ by the nymphs,
‘‘nympholepts,’’ or by families visiting from the immediate environs. Those who
worked in the countryside, such as shepherds, would often have a particularly close
affinity with the local nymphs. Commonly associated with nymphs was cheerful, noisy
Pan, protector of goats and shepherds. He was a temple-based deity in his native
Arcadia, but as his cult spread beyond in the fifth century he was put to live with the
nymphs in their caves. Similarly, local populations could be devoted to their adjacent
rivers, those vital engines of fertility, establish waterside shrines for them, and project
them into myth as founding kings of their communities. Those deities based in the
natural world but equally accessible to all in the wider Greek world, the Earth, the
Sun, the Sea, and the winds, were accordingly more widely worshiped.
Emma Stafford (Chapter 4) offers a review of the developing trends in the
personification of abstract entities as humanoid deities. The epic poetry of the archaic
period provided a ‘‘basic mythological pedigree’’ for a number of personified figures
later destined to achieve full cult status. It is often hard to judge how seriously any
given personification should be taken in the ca. seventh-century poetry of Hesiod or
Homer. Hesiod gives us a great many ‘‘genealogical’’ personifications (and in this he
may well exhibit the influence of the religions of the Near East), but did these
personifications enjoy any currency in Greek religious life beyond the poem itself?
The Homeric poems often like to exploit the ambiguity between abstraction and
personification: just how substantial, how anthropomorphic, is Fear when it (or he)
stalks the battlefield? We can be more confident about Sleep, who receives significant
attention and elaboration in both poets. In later periods Sleep and Terror alike
became the recipients of actual cults. From ca. 600 BC the figure of Youth, wife of
Heracles, becomes prominent in art and is associated with the cults of other deities.
The sanctuary of Nemesis and Themis (‘‘Righteous Anger’’ and ‘‘Divine Law’’) at
Rhamnous, which seems to have originated in the early sixth century, is of particular
interest because here we already have a major sanctuary focally dedicated to personified
deities. In the classical period personifications (not all of them divine) were
frequently given life, character, and substance on the Attic stage, and a broad range
of personifications is to be found on Attic pots of the same period. The fifth century
witnessed the development of important cults for a number of personifications, but,
in contrast with the Rhamnous sanctuary, these were all associated with the cults of
established deities. Persuasion was normally associated with Aphrodite, Fair Fame
with Artemis, and Health with Asclepius. The fourth century witnessed a significant
expansion in the cults of a number of political personifications, such as Peace,
Democracy, Good Fortune, and Concord, the spread of whose cult it is possible to
document in detail.
D. Felton (Chapter 5) looks at the dead. She notes the great importance that the
Greeks in all periods placed upon the honoring of the dead, and the remarkable
consistency they displayed in their modes of honoring, despite the widely varying
beliefs they entertained about the nature of death and the afterlife. The dead were
continually reverenced and appeased at family and state level. The principal Athenian
festivals devoted to these matters were the Genesia (reverence) and Anthesteria
(appeasement), the beliefs surrounding the latter partly coinciding with those surrounding
the modern western Halloween. In their new underworld home the dead
encountered a range of deities, some resident in the world below, others moving
between it and the world above. The Hades who ruled the underworld was a
somewhat evanescent god, with relatively little cult, myth, or iconography of his
own. Ideas about the organization and the internal topography of the underworld –
and the corresponding eschatological significance of these things – varied greatly,
although the notion that a river crucially separated the dead from the living remained
enduringly popular. There was, in the Greek imagination, a possibility of travel
between the two realms in extreme cases. Exceptional heroes penetrated into and
returned from the underworld in life: Heracles, Theseus, and Orpheus managed to
do this for different reasons. And the dead could be called back to the realm of the
living through necromantic practices, or could return spontaneously, particularly if
they had died before their time, or by violence, or if they remained unburied. In these
cases they would typically return to exact vengeance from their killer, or to demand
due rites of burial. Such themes are addressed in the highly entertaining ghost stories
the ancient world has bequeathed to us.
Gunnel Ekroth (Chapter 6) looks at the heroes. These very much constituted an
intermediary category between the gods and the dead, sharing important qualities
with both alike, and in some senses oscillating between the two. Hero shrines
connected to epic or mythic heroes seem to have become prominent in the eighth
century BC, and it is in this century too that offerings at Mycenaean tombs seem to
have become popular. The rise of the city-state and the establishment of oikist cults by
colonists may have been a spur to such activity. Heroes (men, women, or even
children) could be produced from a number of sources: from the tales of myth or
epic; from former gods or goddesses cut down to size to fit into new religious
systems; from historical or quasi-historical figures, particularly those associated with
extreme actions, for good or ill, or with extreme or violent deaths, including those in
war. It is no longer thought that heroes typically received holocaust-sacrifices. Rather,
they typically received sacrifices similar to those given to the gods, with whom they
could play a similar role in the religious system. These were thysia-sacrifices in which
meat was distributed to the participants, and theoxenia-offerings, tables of vegetable
dishes akin to those consumed by the living, and designed to encourage the recipients
to come close to their worshipers. Dedications of blood were largely reserved for
heroes associated with a martial context. The sites and shrines at which heroes were
worshiped were so diverse in their physical types, overlapped to such a degree with
other varieties of monument, and were so informed by local conventions that we
depend upon literary or epigraphic evidence to identify them securely. Because of
the way in which heroes were strongly rooted in local areas, they could function as
valuable expressions of local identity, and the possession of the body of a particular
hero could advance a community’s claim to precedence over its neighbors. Hence it
was not uncommon for a hero’s bones to be transferred between territories, or for
their location to be kept secret, to protect them from theft. But sometimes a hero
could be appropriated merely through the elaboration of a new version of his myth.
We turn then, in Part III, to the mechanisms of communicating with the divine,
moving from regular verbal communication by means of prayer and hymn, through
symbolic and ritualized communication by means of sacrifice, to the more focused
and interactive variety of communication found in divination. William D. Furley
(Chapter 7) discusses prayers and hymns, the means by which the Greeks attempted
to communicate with the divine through the voice. The silent, meditative variety of
prayer familiar from contemporary Christian practice was unknown to the Greeks, for
whom prayer more typically took place in the context of public performance. Indeed,
it is possible to conceptualize sacrificial procedure as constituting a ritual framework
for a multi-media prayer. Greek prayers traditionally had a tripartite structure of
invocation–argument–prayer (proper). The argument sections, which sought to persuade
the god that the petitioner deserved his help, often reminded the god of
sacrifices he had previously made, or used an ‘‘advent myth’’ of the god’s arrival to
crystallize the notion of his current attendance in the mind of worshipers. Prayers
could also be classified on the basis of the standing the petitioner perceived himself to
be in with the god: if one had already deserved well of the god, one used a euche¯; if
one had no existing claim to his favor, one used a hiketeia, or ‘‘supplication.’’ For the
most part prayers were spoken and hymns were sung, but hymns were also designed
to please and entertain the god with their artistic beauty, and formed part of a
reciprocal charis between man and god. Within the types of hymn a broad distinction
may be made between dactylic-hexameter prooimia, third-person narratives of the
god’s deeds, which could be used to introduce performances, and lyric, secondperson
addresses to the god, used in cultic contexts.
Jan N. Bremmer (Chapter 8) looks at sacrifice. He begins by outlining the details
of the normative process as laid out by Homer, and then contextualizes these against
later evidence, especially that from classical Athens, in which the various aspects of
sacrificial practice were more heavily dramatized. The most popular sacrificial victims
were adult sheep and goats, cheaper than full-grown cows or pigs. Sometimes the
age, sex, and color of the victim could be significant, and perfection of form always
was. The kill itself was accompanied by a tension-breaking cry of joy from the women
present. The dead animal was carved up, and attention was directed first to the parts
to be given to the god, the thigh-bones wrapped in fat, or parts of the innards. Then
meat was distributed, after cooking, to the mortals present: the notion that all human
participants shared in the meat equally was honored more at the ideological level than
at the practical one. The principal modern interpretations of ancient sacrifice are
critiqued: Meuli’s view that sacrifice was essentially ritual slaughter, Burkert’s that
the shared aggression of sacrificial killing bonded communities, and Vernant’s
that sacrifice was killing to eat. All have merits, but are ultimately too reductive in their
treatment of this polyvalent ritual at the center of Greek society. The significance
that, above all, should not be omitted from our understanding of the institution
is that which the Greeks themselves gave to it: communication with the gods. In
origin, it seems, the Greeks had imagined the gods to be literally sharing in the postsacrificial
banquet with them. Their explicit remarks and implicit indications make it
clear that for them sacrifice served the tripartite purpose of honoring the gods,
expressing gratitude to them, and appealing to them for things needed. The myths
of Prometheus and Deucalion show that for the Greeks sacrifice ordered the correct
relationship between man and his gods.
Pierre Bonnechere (Chapter 9) investigates the complex subject of divination. He
sets the practice against the context of the pervasive contact and communication the
Greeks felt that they had with the gods in all aspects of their lives. It cannot be
doubted that the Greeks did in general believe in the power of their oracles, but they
had three obstacles to contend with. The first was ambiguity: oracles had to be held to
be ambiguous to bridge the gap between the assumption of divine infallibility and
ostensible errors made. An interesting outgrowth of oracular ambiguity was the
refinement of indirect forms of question by the consulters in order to parry it. The
second obstacle was the problem of charlatanism: where did the credibility of
the form of divination one happened to be employing lie, on the scale that stretched
from the great oracle of Delphi to the unimpressive and hucksterish itinerant diviners?
And the third was the vigorous manufacture of false, largely post eventum oracles,
which, however, remain interesting for us for what they can tell us about the way in
which the oracular sanctuaries were projected. The major distinction between ‘‘inductive
divination’’ and ‘‘inspired divination’’ is explained. In inductive divination,
properly the preserve of the mantis, messages from the gods are read out of
the world around, in the form of such things as prodigies, celestial phenomena, the
behavior of birds, the involuntary spasms of the human body, double entendres, and
the inspection of sacrificial innards. In inspired divination the gods speak directly to or
through individuals, and this type of divination is principally associated with the
sanctuaries and prophets. Much inspirational divination took the form of dreams,
whether spontaneous or sought out in an incubation sanctuary, such as that of a
healing hero. It could also take the form of ‘‘enthusiasm,’’ in which a medium or
sometimes the consulter himself gained access to the god through a modified state of
consciousness, to which he had been helped by some preliminary ordeals. The
inspiration-led sanctuaries included Delphi, Dodona, Claros, Didyma, and that of
Trophonius, and we know quite a lot about the elaborate consultation rituals used at
some of these.
The next group of chapters (Part IV) charts the continuum from sacred space to
sacred time, moving from fixed sanctuaries and the more mobile notion of pollution
through to the festivals that were defined by space and time, and on to the sacred
significance of time itself. Beate Dignas (Chapter 10) recreates a day in the life of a
Greek sanctuary, a surprisingly difficult task, since sanctuaries were generally more
interested in recording regulations for special festival days rather than for the daily
routine. Many smaller sanctuaries will have been closed most of the year, or at any
rate will seldom have had their priest on site, a local caretaker supervising them at
other times and, as appropriate, making arrangements for occasional visitors to pray,
sacrifice, offer votives, or just ‘‘share in the beauty and awe of the sacred place.’’ The
best-documented sanctuaries, although not necessarily the most typical, are the big
healing sanctuaries dedicated to Asclepius and his avatars. This is not simply a
function of their importance but also of the fact that they had to devote so much
attention to the supervision of their visitors and the management of their needs.
A significant record of the most important aspect of the ‘‘daily life’’ that unfolded in
the healing sanctuaries is afforded by the many surviving votives, which were displayed
either in the temple, in its treasury, or in the open. These most typically
consisted of models of the body-part healed, but reliefs and verbal accounts, both
of which can be highly vivid, are also found. Inscribed regulations make it clear that
sanctuaries could often become embarrassingly cluttered with the votives, which,
once given, could not leave the sanctuary. Sometimes their accumulation could
even obscure the cult image from view. Older ones could be buried, and metal ones
melted down for reuse. The priests had the ultimate say over the organization of the
displays of votives, and sometimes liked to group together those given in their own
term of office. The experience of being a visitor to one of these sanctuaries is perhaps
most immediately conveyed by Herodas’ poetic description of a visit to an Asclepieion
by two women. We hear how they progress through the sanctuary, which is seemingly
open to all visitors, make their offering, admire the displayed votives, and have a
friendly chat with the caretaker. Some larger sanctuaries could be the principal source
of employment, direct or indirect, in their local community, as Pausanias observed.
Sick people and their attendants, who might lodge in the sanctuaries for an extended
period, would need all the provisions of the market, and these would come to them,
with some sanctuaries even leasing out shops within their precincts.