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Ancient Greek Religion
Jon D. Mikalson
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Ancient Greek Religion
Jon D. Mikalson
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Ancient Greek Religion provides an introduction to the fundamental beliefs, practices, and major deities of Greek religion.
- Focuses on Athens in the classical period
- Includes detailed discussion of Greek gods and heroes, myth and cult, and vivid descriptions of Greek religion as it was practiced
- Ancient texts are presented in boxes to promote thought and discussion, and abundant illustrations help readers visualize the rich and varied religious life of ancient Greece
- Revised edition includes additional boxed texts and bibliography, an 8-page color plate section, a new discussion of the nature of Greek "piety, " and a new chapter on Greek Religion and Greek Culture
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FIVE MAJOR GREEK CULTS
Athena Polias of Athens
Demeter Eleusinia and the Eleusinian Mysteries
Dionysus Cadmeios of Thebes
Apollo Pythios of Delphi
Zeus Olympios of Olympia
Athena Polias of Athens
The Acropolis of Athens was enclosed by a large fortification wall with one major gateway on the west side (Plate 1). It was thus a temenos, and it was viewed, as a whole, as the sanctuary of Athena. If one had any doubt of this, he needed only look before him as he passed through the gateway. There stood squarely facing him, about forty meters away, a nine-meter tall bronze statue of a fully armed Athena.
For our visitor Athenaâs Great Altar, which was the religious center of her cult, lay at the far, east end of Acropolis. It was perhaps 15 meters in width and 8.5 meters in depth, and it was there that prayers would be made and offerings would be burned in the goddessâ honor at her festival of the Panathenaea and on other occasions. In the early fifth century this altar stood directly east of the Temple of Athena, but this âoldâ temple of Athena was at least partially destroyed by the Persians in 480 B.C.E. In the fifth-century rebuilding of the Acropolis, the old temple was replaced by a new temple, the building which we for convenience will call the Erechtheum. The Erechtheum was built just to the north of the old temple, and
so, uncharacteristically, did not align perfectly with the Great Altar. The plan of the Erechtheum was unusual. The east end, facing the Altar, is usual, but what should be the west end has been swung around as a porch at a lower level facing north, and another porch, supported by columns in the form of women (Caryatids, hence the Caryatid Porch), was added to the south side. These peculiarities of design can be explained only by requirements of cult, and, though we do not know the specific arrangements, the building encompassed some sacred marks and tokens and artifacts of three deities: Athena Polias, Poseidon, and the hero Erechtheus.1 In the east section of the building, facing the Altar, was the very old olive-wood statue of Athena Polias herself. Adjoining the west end of the Erechtheum was a special precinct of Pandrosus, a daughter of Cecrops, and in this precinct grew the olive tree sacred to Athena, the symbol of her possession of and devotion to Athens.
The Great Altar, the Erechtheum, and the precinct with the sacred olive tree on the north side of the Acropolis made up the core of the cult of Athena Polias, the center of Athenian state cult in general. Much that concerned the mythology and cult of this complex, however, was represented in the sculpture of the Parthenon
on the south side of the Acropolis: on the east pediment the birth of Athena; on the west pediment the competition of Poseidon and Athena for patronage of Athens; and, on the frieze, the procession of the Panathenaea and the presentation of the sacred robe, the peplos, that was to be worn by the Athena Polias of the Erechtheum. This raises the question of the function of the Parthenon in this sanctuary complex. It, too, had a statue of Athena, the ten-meter tall gold and ivory Athena Parthenos (Virgin) sculpted by Phidias (Plate 2). The Parthenon also housed precious gold and silver dedications to Athena, and its west room served as the treasury of Athens. But, unlike the Erechtheum, it had no altar to its east nor did it shelter, like the Erechtheum, ancient marks or tokens of special religious reverence. Scholars have established, in fact, that Athena Parthenos was not a deity distinct from Athena Polias â she did not have, for example, her own priestess or altar â but that Parthenos was an added, descriptive (not functional) epithet for Athena Polias. That makes it most probable that the Parthenon was, as it were, a treasury building of the Athena Polias cult â one exceptionally large and beautiful, and possessing an exceptionally beautiful dedication in Phidiasâ statue, but still, in terms of sanctuary design, more a building for storage than for worship. The cult
that the Parthenon âsupported,â both physically and by its sculpture, was that of Athena Polias with her Great Altar, Erechtheum, and sacred olive tree.
Now in turn Athene, daughter of Zeus of the aegis, beside the threshold of her father slipped off her elaborate dress which she herself had wrought with her handsâ patience, and now assuming the war tunic of Zeus who gathers the clouds, she armed in her gear for the dismal fighting. And across her shoulders she threw the betasselled, terrible aegis, all about which Terror hangs like a garland, and Hatred is there, and Battle Strength, and heart-freezing
Onslaught
and thereon is set the head of the grim gigantic Gorgon, a thing of fear and horror, portent of Zeus of the aegis. Upon her head she set the golden helm with its four sheets and two horns, wrought with the fighting men of a hundred cities. She set her feet in the blazing chariot and took up a spear heavy, huge, thick, wherewith she beats down the battalions
of fighting
men, against whom she of the mighty father is angered.
Homer, Iliad 5.733â47 (Lattimore translation)
The statue of Athena Polias in the Erechtheum was probably life-sized and seated, of olive wood, and very ancient, so ancient and crudely shaped that some thought it had fallen from the sky, others that Cecrops or Erechtheus had had it made. She wore the saffron-colored peplos, a dress woven and decorated with scenes of the battle between the gods and the Giants. A new peplos was presented to her each year at the Panathenaea, and the presentation of the peplos is the central scene amidst the gathering of gods and ten heroes, perhaps Athensâ ten eponymous heroes, on the east frieze of the Parthenon.2 Athena Polias wore, in addition, a crown, earrings, a neckband, a gold owl, and an aegis with the image of the Gorgon. She held in one hand a type of bowl commonly
used in offerings to the gods. The goddess might thus seem to be in domestic garb, but the aegis, a goatskin fringed with snakes and worn over her peplos and with the Gorgonâs head in the center, served as an almost magical breastplate. It was with the aegis that Athena armed herself for battle in the Iliad (5.733â47), and the similarity between the dress of Polias and the Athena of the Iliad is so great that one might be inclined to assume that the Athenians used Homerâs description to design the âclothingâ for their most sacred statue.
Athena Promachos was the armed goddess facing the entrance of the Acropolis, known to the Athenians as the âbronze Athena.â She was a dedication from the victory over the Persians and was erected in the 450s. The ivory and gold Athena Parthenos was completed in 438 B.C.E. (Plate 2). Both were much more overtly militaristic than Polias herself. Both goddesses, monumental in size, were represented by Phidias as fully armed, with helmets, breastplates, spears, and with shields resting on the ground at their sides. Both are the warrior goddess âat ease, but vigilant.â The upright spear and helmet of Promachos could be seen from out at sea by those sailing into Piraeus harbor. The Parthenos held in her right hand a life-sized statue of a winged Nike (Victory). Inside her shield was coiled a large snake. In the Erechtheum the Athenians tended a real snake, perhaps embodying or symbolizing the hero Erechtheus, and, when the Persian attack on Athens was imminent in 480, the Athenians discovered that the food they left out each month for the snake had gone uneaten. They concluded that the goddess had evacuated the Acropolis and that they should take their statue of Athena Polias and do the same.
We may view both Athena Promachos and Athena Parthenos as monumental dedications to Athena Polias, and therefore in attempting to understand the cult of Athena on the Acropolis, we should focus our attention on Athena Polias. She, a goddess, was appropriately served by a priestess. Her first priestess may have been Cecropsâ daughter Aglaurus, and we saw in Myth #3 of Chapter III that Euripides had Athena herself name Erechtheusâ wife to be her priestess. In the historical period the priestess of Athena Polias was chosen from the family of the Eteobutadae, and the same family provided the priest for the cult of Poseidon-Erechtheus who was also, for reasons we saw in Myth #3 of Chapter III, worshiped in the Erechtheum. One old, aristocratic family thus provided the priest and priestess of this core state cult, and they would do so for centuries to come. The priestâs and priestessâ main duties were to make the prayers and offerings to their respective deities, and the priestess no doubt presented the peplos to Athena as one of the culminating acts of the Panathenaea. Athena Polias was also served each year by four girls aged 7â10, who, under adult supervision, wove and embroidered Athenaâs peplos. Athenaâs cult was also very wealthy, with hundreds of dedications, many of gold and silver, and with many precious statues. The gold of the Parthenos statue alone weighed about 1,000 kilos (Thucydides 2.13). During the prosperous times of the Athenian empire Athena received 1/60 of the tribute being paid by subject states, and Athenaâs share of this tribute could amount to as much as ten talents ($6,000,000) in some years. To record, inventory, and account for these considerable as...