Greek religionArticle Free Pass
- Beliefs, practices, and institutions
- Contributors & Bibliography
Greek religion, religious beliefs and practices of the ancient Hellenes. Greek religion is not the same as Greek mythology, which is concerned with traditional tales, though the two are closely interlinked. Curiously, for a people so religiously minded, the Greeks had no word for religion itself; the nearest terms were eusebeia (“piety”) and threskeia (“cult”).
Although its origins may be traced to the remotest eras, Greek religion in its developed form lasted more than a thousand years, from the time of Homer (probably 9th or 8th century bc) to the reign of the emperor Julian (4th century ad). During that period its influence spread as far west as Spain, east to the Indus River, and throughout the Mediterranean world. Its effect was most marked on the Romans, who identified their deities with those of the Greeks. Under Christianity, Greek heroes and even deities survived as saints, while the rival madonnas of southern European communities reflected the independence of local cults. The rediscovery of Greek literature during the Renaissance and, above all, the novel perfection of Classical sculpture produced a revolution in taste that had far-reaching effects on Christian religious art. The most striking characteristic of Greek religion was the belief in a multiplicity of anthropomorphic deities under one supreme god. Priests simply looked after cults; they did not constitute a clergy, and there were no sacred books.
The sole requirements for the Greeks were to believe that the gods existed and to perform ritual and sacrifice, through which the gods received their due. To deny the existence of a deity was to risk reprisals, from the deity or from other mortals. The list of avowed atheists is brief. But if a Greek went through the motions of piety, he risked little, since no attempt was made to enforce orthodoxy, a religious concept almost incomprehensible to the Greeks. The large corpus of myths concerned with gods, heroes, and rituals embodied the worldview of Greek religion and remains its legacy. (See Greek mythology.) It should be noted that the myths varied over time and that, within limits, a writer—e.g., a Greek tragedian—could alter a myth by changing not only the role played by the gods in it but also the evaluation of the gods’ actions.
From the later 6th century bc onward, myths and gods were subject to rational criticism on ethical or other grounds. In these circumstances it is easy to overlook the fact that most Greeks “believed” in their gods in roughly the modern sense of the term and that they prayed in a time of crisis not merely to the “relevant” deity but to any deity on whose aid they had established a claim by sacrifice. To this end, each Greek polis had a series of public festivals throughout the year that were intended to ensure the aid of all the gods who were thus honoured. They reminded the gods of services rendered and asked for a quid pro quo. Particularly during times of crises, the Greeks, like the Romans, were often willing to petition deities borrowed from other cultures.
The roots of Greek religion
The study of a religion’s history includes the study of the history of those who espoused it, together with their spiritual, ethical, political, and intellectual experiences. Greek religion as it is currently understood probably resulted from the mingling of religious beliefs and practices between the incoming Greek-speaking peoples who arrived from the north during the 2nd millennium bc and the indigenous inhabitants whom they called Pelasgi. The incomers’ pantheon was headed by the Indo-European sky god variously known as Zeus (Greek), Dyaus (Indian), or Jupiter (Roman). But there was also a Cretan sky god, whose birth and death were celebrated in rituals and myths quite different from those of the incomers. The incomers applied the name of Zeus to his Cretan counterpart. In addition, there was a tendency, fostered but not necessarily originated by Homer and Hesiod, for major Greek deities to be given a home on Mount Olympus. Once established there in a conspicuous position, the Olympians came to be identified with local deities and to be assigned as consorts to the local god or goddess.
An unintended consequence (since the Greeks were monogamous) was that Zeus in particular became markedly polygamous. (Zeus already had a consort when he arrived in the Greek world and took Hera, herself a major goddess in Argos, as another.) Hesiod used—or sometimes invented—the family links among the deities, traced out over several generations, to explain the origin and present condition of the universe. At some date, Zeus and other deities were identified locally with heroes and heroines from the Homeric poems and called by such names as Zeus Agamemnon. The Pelasgian and the Greek strands of the religion of the Greeks can sometimes be disentangled, but the view held by some scholars that any belief related to fertility must be Pelasgian, on the grounds that the Pelasgi were agriculturalists while the Greeks were nomadic pastoralists and warriors, seems somewhat simplistic. Pastoralists and warriors certainly require fertility in their herds—not to mention in their own number.
The Archaic period
The name Dionysus occurs in the Linear B tablets, so it seems very likely that his worship was a part of Mycenaean religion. His devotees, armed with thyrsoi (wands tipped with a pinecone and wreathed with grapevine or ivy leaves) and known as maenads (literally “mad women”), were reputed to wander in thiasoi (revel bands) about mountain slopes, such as Cithaeron or Parnassus; the practice persisted into Roman imperial times. They were also supposed, in their ecstasy, to practice the sparagmos, the tearing of living victims to pieces and feasting on their raw flesh (ōmophagia). While such behaviour continued in the wild, in the cities—in Athens, at any rate—the cult of Dionysus was tamed before 500 bc. Tragedy developed from the choral song of Dionysus.
In the 7th and 6th centuries bc “tyrants” (monarchs whose position was not derived from heredity) seized power in many poleis. Some tyrants, such as Peisistratus in Athens, were nobles and rose to power by offering the poor defense against the rest of the nobility. Once established, Peisistratus built temples and founded or revived festivals. At this time too, the earliest references to the Eleusinian Mysteries appear. The Mysteries offered a more personal, less distant relationship with the divine than did most of the Olympians. There was no Eleusinian way of life. On one or two occasions (depending on the grade they wished to attain) the initiates went to Eleusis; what they saw there in the place of initiation sufficed to ensure them a life after death that was much more “real” than the afterlife portrayed in the Olympian belief that the dead were witless ghosts.
- Beliefs, practices, and institutions
- Contributors & Bibliography
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