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Four Spheres of Greek Religion

• Panhellenic Sanctuaries: cities consult the oracles, make offerings -- e.g., Delphi, Dodonna, etc. These
were places outside the city states. Delphi had a pan-Mediterranean reputation.
• Polis religion: cycles of festivals to gods who reside in or near city -- when the city sacrifices to Zeus, you
take part in it, maybe in the procession to the sacrifice. You participate in the post-sacrifice meal.
• Household religion: weddings, funerals
• Personal religion: healing, magic, salvation -- there are all kinds of different rites in order to gain/show
gratitude to the gods. These were mostly personal acts. Magic -- emerges as those acts prescribed by
Roman law. Some magics were outlawed. In ancient times magic was just a skill in order to get what
you want (to wish a curse upon someone). Healing -- healing was sought through religious rituals to a
god. Even your doctor would prescribe prayers to you along with other medical advice. Sometimes a
god would appear to you in a dream or would give you a message at a shrine. Salvation -- saving the
ills/bad fortune of life, even misfortune of the afterlife.

Sacrifice
• Central act of Greek religion -- slaughtering an animal, set apart and made sacred, that is cooked on an
altar and divid
• Altar only necessary structure -- people associate religion with temples. But you don’t need a massive
temple. A temple is a way to show off your religious community’s prestige. But the altar was simply just
a place to sacrifice. The animal is particularly chosen -- it shouldn’t be sick, have blemishes. The gods
required the best animals. The gods would receive the fat, thigh, and bones from the sacrifice.
Prometheus tricks Zeus by wrapping up the bones with skin (?), thinking he would fool him. But Zeus
knew the difference between the two offerings.
• Lead animal to altar in procession -- procession goes through the town. Often the people would wear
white clothing, wear crowns, wreaths, etc., with music playing around them. USually the priests and
elite members will wash their hands and sprinkle the water on the animal to purify. They would wait to
see the animal to nod -- as if the animal is agreeing to be sacrificed to the god. They hit the animal with
a hammer and then slit the throat. They then immediately catch the blood in a vessel. Then some of the
chosen women will make particular cries.
• Participants form circle, wash hands
• Water sprinkled on animal, it nods
• Officiant cuts hair from animal, puts on altar fire

Sacrifice
• Wine poured on god’s portion as it burned -- wine dampens the heat of the fire, making the sacrifice a
slow cook.
• Entrails roasted on skewers, participants share -- why do they do this? It is to learn about the function
of the ritual. People themselves who are participating really don’t understand the details of the ritual.
Sometimes it misses the point. One of the primary points is to bring the society together and to
understand how the society is formed and works. When they are surrounding the altar they are closer
to the gods -- they are closer to what the community values. Another way elites enforced their status is
to be a hero. The elites are usually in the major part of the ritual.
• Rest of meat boiled and distributed

Panhellenic Delphi
• Legend: Apollo defeats Pytho, brings priests from Crete
• Process: prothysia, second sacrifice inside temple, prophetai (prophets) take inquirer to place near
Pythia
• Pythia -- lifelong priestess of Apollo stationed in adyton (laurel, omphalos). Omphalos is the rock Zeus
threw up. ...
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• Prepares by purification in Castalian springs. The inquirers are also purified.

• Burns laurel leaves and barley on altar. Usually the priestess would burn some substance and become
high. It is true that substances were used in antiquity. But it was part of the ritual in order to give a
message from the god.
• Wearing laurel crown, falls into trance, shakes laurel branch -- she speaks in poetry, in hexameters. It’s
usually obscure and she has interpreters.

Polis religion
• A cycle of festivals that formed the major events of the calendar
• Each month has its festivals -- usually each month had a big festival to one particular god
• First month begins in midsummer-Hekatombaion
• Its major festival: Panathenaia, celebrates the birthday of Athena

Panathenaia: 28 Hekatombaion -- the people treated the gods as if they were people. They are given
their own places to live, they have special clothing. It is almost like a rich person.
• Central event: procession to deliver Athena her peplos -- clothing depicting all the great feats of Athena.
• Giant peplos to clothe Pheidias colossal Athena statue
• Image of Athena conquering giant Enceladus
• Woven for 9 months by aristocratic girls
• Torch race to light Athena’s altar -- almost a mini-Olympics

Household: weddings
• Preliminary sacrifices
• Ritual bath in a particular spring, river
• Bride and groom dressed and adorned
• Banquet at house of bride’s father
• Ritual unveiling of bride: Anakalypteria
• Marriage procession to groom’s house
• Bride’s mother bears torch, others shout blessings, parochos escort
• Katachysmata-bride taken to hearth, showered with nuts & dried fruit
• To bridal chamber, consummation, epithalamia

Greek Wedding (pics)

Personal Religion
• Sacrifices and offerings to avoid bad fortune, acquire good.
• Do ut des: I give so that you give -- you sacrifice so that the gods give you gifts. It isn’t so different from
human relationships. The gods are like patrons who are more powerful and influential than ourselves.
• Do ut abeas: I give so that you go away -- I don’t want to make you angry in any way.
• Votive offerings: I will give X, if you will do Y

Votive offerings (pic)

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Often the people would offer part of the body that was ill.

Healing from Asclepius

• Son of Apollo, hero
• Cult center called Asclepeion
• Epidauros and Cos -- two major sanctuaries
• Cos site was near a medical school: Aesclepiadai
• Incubation: dream followed by medical treatment

Story of Kleo -- from an inscription at the sanctuary

• Kleo had been pregnant five years…She came as a suppliant to the god and slept in the abaton; as soon
as she was outside…she bore a son, who as soon as he was born washed himself from the spring and
walked about with his mother. In return for this she inscribed on her offering: “the size of the tablet is
not wonderful, but the god is, in that Kleo was pregnant with the burden five years, until she slept in the
temple and he made her healthy.”

Story of Ambrosia
• Ambrosia of Athens, blind in one eye…As she walked about the sanctuary she laughed at some of the
cures as incredible and impossible, that the lame…should be made healthy just by seeing a dream. She
slept and saw a vision: the god seemed to stand beside her and say he would make her well, but…he
would require her to dedicate…a silver pig as a memorial of her ignorance…he cut the diseased eyeball
and poured in some drug. When day came, she was cured.

Magic
• A techne -- simply a skill
• Purpose: frustrate enemies, win your love
• Tools: spells, incantations, dolls, curse tablets (thin durable material where curses are written down)
• E.g., “I consign and entrust Karpile Babbia, the weaver of garlands, to the Fates who exact justice,
so that they may expose her acts of insolence, and to Hermes of the Underworld, to Earth, to the
children of Earth, so that they may overcome and completely destroy her [_?_] and her heart and her
mind and the wits of Karpile Babbia, the weaver of garlands. I adjure you and I implore you and I beg
of you, Hermes of the Underworld, [to grant] heavy curses.”

Binding spells: defixiones

• “I bind Andromache, born of Hector
• In your presence, Hermes Katokhos.
• May she be restrained in hand and foot and body!”

The Grudge
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• Spirits of the netherworld, I consecrate and hand over to you, if you have any power, Ticene of Carisius.
Whatever she does, may it turn out all wrong. Spirits of the netherworld, I consecrate to you her limbs,
her complexion, her figure, her head, her hair, her cheeks, her lips, her speech, her breath, her neck, her
liver, her shoulders, her heart, her lungs, her intestines…Spirits of the netherworld, if I see her wasting
away, I swear that I will be delighted to offer a sacrifice to you every year.
~ Almost a votive aspect: if you do X, I’ll do Y.

Salvation: The Mysteries -- Mystery cults are initiation groups where outsiders won’t know very much of
your organization.
• Telete -- outsider
• Mustês -- initiate
• Aporrheton (forbidden to speak) and arrheton (not able to express it) -- often times it was like a
mythological drama. Sometimes the ritual ceremony would end with an epiphany of the god.
• Secret initiation rituals -- transition from being an outsider to being an insider
• Knowledge confers happy afterlife
• Cult of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis

Christianity and the mysteries

• Paul speaks of the mysteries of the kingdom of God -- people during his time were familiar with some of
the mystery religions.
• The secrets of salvation? -- Through Christianity, a person might attain certain knowledge in order to
be saved.

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Ancient Sparta
Spartans were known to be warriors in ancient times. This is a culture that formed in a particular way for
a particular reason. Spartans didn’t have an innate superiority, but they trained and bred generations.
Ancient Sparta was a totalitarian state -- controlling every aspect of life. Many Greeks saw the
ancient Spartans as a super power. In the 5th cent. BCE when Athens and Sparta came into conflict, the
Athenians hid behind their walls because they were scared silly toward the Spartans.
The Spartans are a paradigm of freedom, of democracy, of heroes. By our standards the Spartans
would have been like the Nazis or like the Soviets during the Communist era. Everything was controlled
and dictated by the society. But the idea of freedom of Sparta is still compatible with what we think.
Herodotus mentions the Spartans’ love for freedom. Their idea of freedom was not being
enslaved to some other nation or king. Greeks thinking of freedom of that time (Classical period) was
autonomy of your own city. “We conquer others; others don’t conquer us.” This is almost imperial. This
is early in Spartan history.

Lecture Objectives
• Discover the elements of the Spartan way of life
• Learn what makes Sparta distinctive from our usual views of ancient Greece -- many times when we
think of Greece we think of Athens. So we’re Atheno-centric. And sometimes Athens and Sparta are at
opposite ends of the spectrum.
• Appreciate the Spartan myth -- after seeing 300, is Sparta really what we have seen in the movies?

What made Sparta different?

• The role of geography
• System of domination over people around them
• Less involvement in colonization
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Where is Sparta? -- Sparta is in the Peloponnese. Sparta has good farmland compared to Athens.

But the advantage of the Athenians is that they are near the sea and so they colonize quicker than the
Spartans. When they began to expand they started conquering other peoples. This makes Spartans very
distinctive. It is conquest vs. colonization.

Geography
• Spartans isolated from other major cities -- Athens was close to Thebes. Several major cities were in the
north. Cities such as Corinth and Argos are quite away from Sparta, separated from mountains. It is
far from the sea.
• Location in plain with lots of agricultural resources
• Far from any port to the sea (Gytheion 46 km. away)

Where did they come from? -- They spoke a different dialect than the other states.
• Two major theories of Dorian origins
• Came from the north in 10th century-myth of the return of the sons of Herakles -- why Herakles? He’s
strong, powerful, masculine. Those are the qualities the Spartans liked to strive for. There is a touch of
humanity with Herakles and so with the Spartans.
• Already under Mycenaeans, their dialect, Doric, a sub-Mycenaean dialect.

Conquest instead of colonization

• There is a population explosion. When resources become scarce, Spartans start conquering other in
Peloponnese
• Look to Messenia, lands on other side of Mt.Taygetus
• Two wars with Messenians, Spartan victorious -- primarily to get control of much of the land. The
Messenians are pretty much distinguished.

Subjugation
• Messenians subjected to Spartans in two ways
• 1: perioikoi (those who live around), lighter subjugation, half-allies of Sparta -- they made crafts and
weapons that the Spartans needed.
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• 2: helots: serfs of the city of Sparta, work lands to support full Spartan citizens -- helots are slaves (or a
better term, serfs), despised by the Spartans. They had to give 50% of the produce to the Spartans.
• Tyrtaeus: “Like asses exhausted under great loads: under painful necessity to bring their masters full half
the fruit their ploughed land produced.

Further wars of expansion

• Sparta becomes wealthy through conquering the fertile valley of Messene -- Messenian rebels are sent to
Italy after being conquered. At this point in time the Spartans really change into a militaristic society.
• Evidence of high culture in early Sparta: poetry, art. -- look at the offerings given to Artemis, one of
their chief goddesses, riches are in the temple(s). But there is a decline because their focus shifted
primarily to military. A warrior culture.
• Conquests to the north end in failure: battle of Hysiae defeated by Pheidon of Argos
• Turn to exploiting helots

It stinks to be a helot
• As part of a young Spartan’s initiation into adulthood he joined the krypteia.
• Krypteia: “secret service,” spy on helots, find likely trouble makers, and beat them up or kill them at
night. -- “We’re watching, so do your job and give us food.”
• Annual declaration of war against helots, making it legal to kill them. -- They were in a never-ending
state of war.

Periokoi
• Literally means “Dwellers around”
• Called Lakedaimonians, not Spartans -- they don’t participate with the Spartans, they don’t vote with
them.
• Half-allies of Sparta, go to war with Sparta but don’t get to vote on it
• Worked metals for Sparta, supplying votive figurines and weapons for the army
• Produced crimson dye for cloaks of Spartan warriors

Spartiates: Equals?
• The full Spartan citizen called equals: homoioi, although great differences in wealth
• Provisions for a minimum allotment of land to provide their share of mess contribution -- so that you
can contribute to the mess (hall) and provide the share of food for the boys and young men.

Mixed constitution
• Tension between wealthy and less wealthy result in reforms
• The Great Rhetra, an oracle of Apollo to their lawgiver and reformer Lycurgus -- probably done because
they were having problems in their expansion phase. People of less wealth were requiring more wealth.
Lycurgus is mostly a legendary figure.
• Dual king, a Gerousia (30 elderly Spartans), Assembly of the people -- dual kingship from two family
lines. They also had a counsel of elders. The assembly of the people were full blooded Spartan male
citizens.

The Great Rhetra (Great Saying)

• “Having established a cult of Syllanian Zeus and Athena, having done the “tribing and obing,” and
having established a Gerousia of thirty members, including the kings…the Gerousia is to both introduce
proposals and to stand aloof; the damos is to have power to “give a decisive verdict”; but if the damos
speaks crookedly, the Gerousia and kings are to be removers.”
• They are the only ones (the kings and the Gerousia -- about 30 people) to bring authority to whatever is
being voted on.