Reviews

062

Athenian Religion: A History

Robert Parker
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 370 pp., $24.95

Greek worship was decidedly not monotheistic. One wonders how a people so famously devoted to reason and logic could have believed in so many gods and goddesses—deities often portrayed in Greek mythology and literature as unreasonable, even immoral.

Robert Parker avoids addressing the more irrational aspects of Greek religion by limiting his subject to Athenian public worship of officially recognized gods. This has the advantage of disciplining a good deal of unruly material. But it also means that more private or peripheral religious practices and rituals—curse tablets, magic, talismans, dreams and other cultic paraphernalia—are left to the side. Religion, to Parker, is a product of society, one of the primary means by which social groups define themselves and become integrated into a larger body politic. Parker therefore sets his history of Greek beliefs, rituals and festivals within the context of the political development of the Athenian city-state.

The story begins in the sixth century B.C., with the rise of Athens as a burgeoning power. The early part of the century is dominated by the political reformer Solon, who is credited with having written the first Athenian law code. Although little is known about these laws, Solon clearly knew that one way to keep the body politic functioning as a body is to exert some control over religious expression. Solon curbed the ostentatiousness of funerals and defined what resources were to be expended on what gods; thus he established a calendar of sacrifices, according to Parker, defining “the division of ritual privileges and responsibilities.”

As part of his program to “nationalize” religion, Solon sought to reform the institution of the priesthood (genos in Greek). Athenian religion had long been in the hands of inherited priesthoods devoted to different gods and cultic systems; these priesthoods were organized into pseudo-familial groups, who believed that the various priestly lines traced back to a common ancestor. This belief helped the priest-clans identify with one another and secure their power, excluding new arrivals in the city and citizens who were not members of the “family.” It was this tradition of the inherited priesthood, Parker writes, that Solon changed: He instituted religious leadership by wealth rather than birth, severing the “the original link between religious authority and political power.”

This message was not lost on Solon’s successors. In about 561 B.C., Athens got her first tyrant, Pisistratus, who passed his power on to his sons. The Pisistratids ruled until around 511 B.C., transforming Athens from a minor village into a major political center. Many of the new works organized by this dynasty had religious functions: for instance, the remarkable marble sculptures, including kouroi (statues of male youths) and korai (statues of maidens), that were dedicated in sanctuaries as gifts to divinities or used in the cult of the dead. The sixth century B.C. also saw the development of a number of religious-civic festivals—such as the Dionysia, in which playwriting competitions were held in honor of the god Dionysus, and the Panathenaia, a pilgrimage festival celebrating Athena, the city’s tutelary goddess (this procession of worshipers to Athena’s shrine is 063depicted on the frieze of the Parthenon, built in the fifth century B.C.). These festivals were often spectacular affairs financed by the city-state: candlelit vigils, drunken orgies, mysterious rites with large quantities of meat sacrificed at public expense. Such shows of piety do indeed appear to be celebrations of civic unity.

Athens’s rulers, Parker observes, had also learned another trick: By appealing directly to the populace, they could wrest power from priests and aristocrats. Increasingly, control of institutionalized religion was relinquished to the many—and proposals concerning public sacrifices, prayers, processions and oracles were voted on by the people. By the fifth century B.C., the great period of Athenian empire and democracy, most priesthoods, boards of temple treasurers and sanctuary supervisors were chosen by lottery. The role of aristocrats was now confined to “liturgies,” which were compulsory donations to fund public spectacles, plays, processions and feasts. The Athenians of the Classical period preferred to have average citizens, with little or no training or religious expertise, take charge of their temples.

But this democratization of religion was not without limits. Athens was now the center of a wide-ranging empire, visited by sailors, businessmen and artisans, who brought their gods with them. Some of these transplanted foreign gods won acceptance locally, including Asclepius (the god of healing), Cybele (the Great Mother Goddess from Phrygia), Pan, Orpheus and the Egyptian Isis. The Athenian authorities, however, could also react harshly against heretical foreign cults. A woman called Phryne, for example, was publicly accused of leading “shameless revels,” introducing a new god and assembling illicit thiasoi (worshipers).

The most fascinating case is that of Socrates, who was condemned to death in 399 B.C. Many have argued that political intrigue was responsible for Socrates’ execution: He associated with men who brought down the democracy and established a harsh oligarchy at the end of the fifth century B.C.; political foes thus punished him as the brain behind the brawn. But Parker, in line with his penchant for seeing political and religious phenomena as inextricable, leans toward another reason: “Was Socrates persecuted because of a true perception that his teaching subverted the basis of traditional religion?” In relying on reason and argument to arrive at ethical decisions, Socrates essentially declared himself an atheist. Many students followed him in this belief, and the new school of orators and teachers known as the Sophists also inclined towards atheism—suggesting that the end of the fifth century B.C. was a period of profound religious crisis. That the Athenians prosecuted and even executed such “heretics” indicates that they perceived the stakes as high.

Here, as elsewhere, we see the value of Parker’s concern with the sociopolitical contexts of religious beliefs. For this reason, Athenian Religion (which will prove tough going for the general reader) will serve as a scholarly reference book for years to come.

Nonetheless, this kind of explanation for gods and cults does not exhaust the subject. For instance, the names of many of the same gods and goddesses known from later texts are inscribed on Mycenaean tablets written toward the end of the 13th century B.C. So how far back do Greek rituals go? From artistic representations and archaeological evidence, it is clear that the Bronze Age peoples of Greece and Crete built temples, preserved sacred precincts and mountain sanctuaries, and made sacrifices—much like the Greeks of the Classical period. So it appears that some forms of worship were carried on, generation by generation, through the centuries. If similar religious practices appear in vastly different social contexts, the relation between religion and sociopolitical development may not be as strong as Parker suggests.

Some knowledge of this cultic continuity would also help us understand the earliest literary references to Athenian religion—those in Homer’s epics, probably written down in the eighth century B.C. In the Odyssey, Athena is said to have visited “broad-streeted Athens and entered the well-built house of Erechtheus.” In the Iliad, Homer describes the Athenians as “the people of great-spirited Erechtheus, whom Athena the daughter of Zeus reared … Athena set him down in Athens, in her own rich temple, where the young men of the Athenians propitiate her with bulls and lambs as the seasons come round.” From quite early, it seems, the Greeks associated Athena with Erechtheus and worshiped them together—and, indeed, in the fifth century B.C. a temple to Erechtheus was erected on the Acropolis near the Parthenon. Who is Erechtheus? Scholars have assumed that he was an ancestor hero, one of the Mycenaean kings of Athens, whose palace was superseded by a classical temple. But this, too, implies a continuity of beliefs and practices—or at least of memory—down through centuries of social change.

Perhaps the real mystery is not that religious beliefs have social consequences, but rather that they often show a very persistent life of their own.

Athenian Religion: A History