Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion

Death and Reciprocity

Ellie Mackin Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351273701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume presents a case for how and why people in archaic and classical Greece worshipped Underworld gods.

These gods are often portrayed as malevolent and transgressive, giving an impression that ancient worshippers derived little or no benefit from developing ongoing relationships with them. In this book, the first book-length study that focuses on Underworld gods as an integral part of the religious landscape of the period, Mackin Roberts challenges this view and shows that Underworld gods are, in many cases, approached and 'befriended' in the same way as any other kind of god.

Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion provides a fascinating insight into the worship of these deities, and will be of interest to anyone working on ancient Greek religion and cult.

1 The religious landscape of archaic and classical Greece¹

Jan Bremmer opened his 1994 study Greek Religion by posing the question ‘was there ever such a thing as Greek religion?’² He does not commit to proving an answer, but sixteen years later, Emily Kearns goes some way when she comments that ‘[al]though we may speak of a Greek religious system, it is a system which is never consciously defined as such (at least until the end of pagan antiquity), and remained extraordinarily fluid and inclusive’.³ But, before all this, in a 1985 essay titled ‘On Making Sense of Greek Religion’, John Gould noted that:

To talk meaningfully about the religion of another culture is not easy and requires of us some degree of tact and imagination. We need to be aware of the pitfalls. To begin with, it will seem all too clear that what we are dealing with is a human intervention, a ‘fiction’ constructed by men [sic] for their own purposes – an interpretation which we can never quite give to the religion of our own culture, even if we have rejected it. To make that assumption will not help us to understand though it may boost our sense of superiority. And secondly, there is the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of avoiding thinking about someone else’s religion as a kind of exercise of ‘decoding’, in translating myth and ritual into a ‘natural’ language (our own, of course) in which these things can be made to yield their true sense, which may be hidden from those who carry out of the rituals and who recount the myths.⁴

The gods of ancient Greece may well be a fiction to us.⁵ From cinema to books and graphic novels, from near fantasy worlds to attempts to realistically represent religion in the classical world, our prevailing view of the Greek (and Roman) gods is through the lens of fiction. Even much of our ancient evidence fits this category – drama and comedy, historiography and poetry. The Greek gods are, in many senses a fictionalised ‘other’. Perhaps this is also because the idea of the ‘real divinities’ that we are predominantly familiar with from modern ‘mainstream’ religion do not exhibit the same kind of moral flexibility that we know of the Greek gods and their tales of transformation, rape, adultery, murder, and more.

Reading through this lens, it is easy to understand why the Underworld gods of the Greco-Roman worlds have been cast at the ‘wrong’ end of the good–evil dichotomy, especially in popular culture representations of them. This has, often, leaked into scholarship about these gods. After all, many of these gods are shifty and slippery and they are almost impossible to define as a coherent group. So, the question then is: who counts? Hades and Persephone, yes obviously. Demeter and Hermes? Hekate? The Erinyes and Moirai? All these divinities will be addressed in this book in varying ways. In this opening chapter I will put these gods into some kind of context, looking at the religious landscape generally, and presenting thoughts on the ‘chthonic’, a term I do not frequently use in this book, but which demands addressing early on. Finally, I will present some methodological considerations.

In the last few decades, scholars of Greek religion have recognised that referring to a religious system with a single ‘creed’, or even with a minimally consistent set of beliefs, is erroneous. It has become customary to approach religion with more caution, with an attempt to understand what makes different religious experiences unique from one another. By and large, ‘uniqueness’ can be delineated by place, person, and space. That is, variation from sanctuary to sanctuary or polis to polis, and differences in experience based on personal circumstance: a wealthy citizen male, an enslaved person, a farmer, a youth, a woman, a priest, and so forth.⁶ Space is perhaps more difficult to define, because ‘space’ is also dependant on things we cannot measure, like personal expectations and experiences, atmosphere, and sensorial expressiveness. A place can be a ritual space at one point in time and a mundane space at another. And thus, we run into the sacred–profane nexus.

Despite this recognition of the place of individuality in the religious landscape, we still must talk about the ubiquitous influence of Homer and Hesiod and their effect on an increasing systematisation of religious practices throughout the Greek world. This is enhanced by the generalisations of travelling scholars, such as Herodotos,⁷ who himself alludes to the ‘connectedness’ of the ‘Hellenes’. In this oft-cited passage, the historiographer records the indignant response the Athenians make to a Spartan suggestion they would desert the Greek collective and make an alliance with the Persians, following Alexander I of Macedon’s advice. Herodotos’s Athenians say:

αὖτις δὲ τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν ἐὸν ὅμαιμόν τε καὶ ὁμόγλωσσον καὶ θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι ἤθεά τε ὁμότροπα, τῶν προδότας γενέσθαι Ἀθηναίους οὐκ ἂν εὖ ἔχοι.

and next the kinship of all Greeks with common blood and speech, and shared sanctuaries and sacrifices, and similar customs to all of which it would not become the Athenians to be false.⁸

Although Herodotos mentions ὅμαιμόν (common blood), ὁμόγλωσσον (common language), θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι (shared sanctuaries and sacrifices), and ἤθεά τε ὁμότροπα (similar customs), this phrasing refers to the context of a specific military alliance. It is not a philosophical espousal of what it meant ‘to be Greek’. Jonathan Hall has argued that the rarity of statements of ‘shared Greekness’ in the extant literature shows that ‘ultimately, [the Athenian’s] primary concern is with avenging their sacked temples, suggesting that the Athenian community of cult outranked any broader Hellenic affiliation’.⁹ He suggests it is simply not Herodotos’s style to explicitly point something out that would otherwise have been obvious to his audience. What we have here, then, is not an appeal to the panhellenic nature of religion, and we know that religious practice between poleis varied significantly when we start looking at local context. This is not to say, of course, that there was no coherence between poleis at all. An Athenian would recognise Zeus at Olympia, as an Elian would recognise Athena in Athens. There are many ritual types that transcend political boundaries, broadly including some of the most common ritual activities like sacrifice and epiclesis (‘calling down’ or invocation).

It is also worth noting here that the term ‘panhellenic’ was, as Michael Scott says,

imposed on the Greek world by its Roman masters in order to assert the unity of the province through a focus on its common ancestry and historical kinship, rather than a term often used by the Greeks themselves to describe their unity.¹⁰

I have a certain uneasiness about the broad strokes that ‘panhellenic’ connotes and tend to use the term ‘universal’ to denote something that is relatively understood by or common to Greek speakers and their associated allies.

Universalism is forged though by the wholesale adoption and adaptation of local divinities – who may or may not have shared a name in the first place – who then become intercultural and interstate and who have aspects that can be understood as ‘commonly Greek’. This, in large part, occurs when individuals, who are members of variously sized polis and non-polis related religious communities, encounter one another and exchange ideas. It does not follow that these universally recognised traits were utilised in religious practices in any other parts of the Greek world, and localised variations of each divinity retained their own attributes, honours, and rituals within their local contexts. Local divine identities still made up most worship in the Greek-speaking world, and local variation still coloured gods who had been ‘universalised’. The universal names given to these local identities – Athena, Zeus, Poseidon, and so forth – become a shorthand for simplifying a much more complex and nuanced system of worship. There are some areas of religious life where we can find a complete lack of regard for creating harmony in cultic practices from polis to polis. Poleis, for example, maintained their own ritual calendars without any form of coordination.

What we can deduce is that there are interlinking and overlapping aspects that become common to various independent but complementary ‘religions’, through an assortment of communities of various sizes – from one individual inscribing and burying a katadesmos to all the participants at the Olympic games – and which operated in both public and private spheres. In reality there was no overarching ‘Greek religion’; there was local variant practices which influenced, and were influenced by, other local variant practices of the same of similar divinities, who became amalgamated over time.

Greek religion

All Herodotos’s talk of ‘shared sanctuaries and sacrifices’ only serves to highlight that there is no Greek word for ‘religion’, which is nowadays a commonplace observation to make. But what Herodotos shows in this passage – and others – is that there were ideas about religious practices, and ideas about θεραπεία τῶν θεῶν (service to the gods).¹¹ On top of this there is a large and very specific vocabulary to articulate all different kinds of religious actions and ideas. The lack of one word for ‘religion’ does not mean that there was no concept of ‘religion’ or ‘religious practice’. In fact, there is significant evidence that there was a strict religious system in place. More accurately, there is a series of independent, but overlapping, systems. It is not necessarily the acknowledgement of the complex and chaotic nature of the study of ‘Greek religion’ where one may fall, but the application (or lack thereof) of a frame of understanding that ensures we do not resort to the easy habit of generalisation. How, then, should we map local beliefs and religious structures without falling into the trap of reducing the local subtleties and variations to unexplained or unimportant points in the schema of general ‘beliefs’? One of the ways scholars have attempted to do this is through the application of the polis religion model, initially formulated by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood.¹² This theorises that all religion in the ancient Greek world was mediated through the polis, and this mediation operated in both directions – that is, from the polis up to the universal level and down through the smaller political municipalities, households, families, and (finally) to the individual. Polis-religion has been criticised because it inadequately describes personal and individual religion,¹³ which is perhaps the integral component of building reciprocal relationships with the gods.

I do not want to suggest that there are no common elements in religious practices around the Greek-speaking world. There are structural similarities, with local variations that more or less conform to type, with some outlying exceptions. At least this is the picture that the relatively limited evidence suggests. Mythology is one aspect of religious life that does indeed appear to be relatively ubiquitous throughout the Greek-speaking world, and though myth may have limited direct influence on ritual, it would have had significant influence over the way that people think about the gods. This is where the influence of Homer, Hesiod, and other early poets comes to the fore. Myths can be told a...