Chapter 38. Gods of the City: Olympian Religion, Civic Cult and the Politics of Piety

Part 5 moves from the Iranian and Near Eastern worlds to the Greek city-state, where religion took a form very different from the scripture-based and priest-led systems treated earlier in this study. Greek cult ran through the institutions of the polis: its sacrifices, festival calendar, oracles, sanctuaries and laws on impiety. Religious authority and political authority were so closely woven together that modern scholars now hesitate to separate the two. This chapter sets out that civic system, the debates over how to describe it, and the political uses of piety, ending with the trial of Socrates. It also records two non-academic readings found in the library: Mitchell Heisman’s view of the Olympians as an idealised aristocracy, and Julius Evola’s view of Greek religion as a struggle between “Olympian” and “chthonic” orders. The chapter closes by pointing to the mystery cults, which offered what the civic gods did not.

A religion without a church: the framing debates

Charles Seltman’s The Twelve Olympians sums up what the Greek system lacked compared with the “religions of authority”. In his words, the Greeks “had a religious system which was deficient in a number of things: no priestly caste, no unquestioning obedience, neither dogma nor missions, no martyrs, no Sacred Book, and very little concern about sin” [Seltman, The Twelve Olympians, #87245, “The Pictures”]. Seltman insists that the Olympians were living objects of worship, not the allegorical figures of later European art. The Renaissance, “through the work of Raphael, Rubens, and many another genius”, painted heroic nudes “meant to depict pagan gods”, but “such are not the gods and goddesses of the Greeks. They are not symbols of Greek religion—of the Greeks’ living belief in the Divine” [Seltman, The Twelve Olympians, #87245, “The Pictures”]. He also stresses how open the system was to newcomers. The Greeks “were ready to accept foreign gods or goddesses, to worship them after the proper fashion due to them, to honour them as guests, and finally to give them ‘papers of naturalisation'”, so that “religious particularism was not a possibility for civilised Greeks” [Seltman, The Twelve Olympians, #87245].

The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion opens with four chapters built as paired oppositions. In “Unity vs. Diversity”, Robin Osborne questions whether the word “religion” fits at all, and proposes instead a Greek “theology of diversity” expressed through ritual practice. Thomas Harrison’s “Belief vs. Practice” looks at how scholars have struggled with the idea of belief. Emily Kearns’s “Old vs. New” examines how innovation and continuity coexisted. Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge and Gabriella Pironti’s “Many vs. One” argues that Greek gods must be understood as “simultaneously one and many, at every level of their cult” [Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion, #66316, “Chapter Overview”]. Osborne puts the theological point this way: the gods were “at the same time universal, found everywhere and powerful over the whole world, and intensely local, manifesting themselves in particular places” [Osborne in Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook, #66316, ch. 1].

Old and new gods: change inside tradition

Kearns argues that the Greeks themselves knew their religion had changed: “the Greeks were very clear that change had taken place in matters concerning the gods. The theogonic traditions exemplified in Hesiod and the Orphic poets narrated the violent overthrow of gods older than Zeus and the Olympians” [Kearns in Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook, #66316, ch. 3]. On the human level, new cults often began in crisis. The Persian Wars, she notes, “apparently stimulated the cults of Boreas, Pan, Artemis Agrotera, and Artemis Aristoboule (among others) in Athens”, which can be read as thank-offerings [Kearns, ibid., ch. 3]. Her case study is the Andanian mysteries in Messenia. In the version Pausanias gives, these “are represented as both new, at the birth of the modern Messenian polis, and very old”. Kearns concludes that the cult shows “not merely a mélange of old and new, but a pattern in which old and new have a tendency to acquire and represent certain significances” [Kearns, ibid., ch. 3].

How foreign deities were admitted was a matter of public regulation. Ralph Anderson’s chapter “New Gods” examines “the ways in which communities regulated the transmission of new deities between, and their introduction into, poleis” [Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook, #66316, “Chapter Overview”, ch. 21]. This is the mechanism through which the oriental cults of Part 5’s later chapters (Cybele, Isis, Mithras) entered the Greek and then the Roman world.

The machinery of civic religion

Michael Flower observes that “Greek priests did not mediate between gods and men/the city”, which raises the question of how religious decisions were made at all. Andrej Petrovic reviews the prescriptive cult texts known as leges sacrae. Fred Naiden questions the dominant theories of blood sacrifice (Burkert, Vernant) and “challenges the usefulness of the term ‘sacrifice’ itself”. Sarah Iles Johnston treats divination as the other main channel of contact between humans and gods. Jan-Mathieu Carbon shows how festival ritual “suffused everyday life” [Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook, #66316, “Chapter Overview”, chs. 20, 23, 31-32, 36]. The great Athenian festivals belong to this calendar. The City Dionysia, with its processions, sacrifices and dramatic contests (comedies from 487 BCE), ranked as “the second-most important festival after the Panathenaia” [Wikipedia: Dionysia].

Space was political too. Michael Scott treats sanctuaries as “multidimensional and polyvalent sacred spaces”, and Matthew Dillon studies household and women’s cult. Christy Constantakopoulou examines the management of shared cult centres and the “different kinds—and scales—of regional religious networks”, the setting of amphictyonies such as the Delphic league [Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook, #66316, “Chapter Overview”, chs. 16-19].

Heroes and god-men: the ground of ruler cult

The line between human and divine could be crossed. Gunnel Ekroth’s chapter on heroes considers “real or imagined human beings that, after their death, received quasi-divine honours”, and Ivana Petrovic’s “Deification—Gods or Men?” examines how “the human–divine boundary is negotiated in processes of deification” [Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook, #66316, “Chapter Overview”, chs. 26, 29]. Radcliffe Edmonds gives concrete political cases. Battos, founder of Kyrene, received a tomb in the agora, and the people of Amphipolis “turned the tomb of the Spartan general Brasidas into a hero shrine and held annual festivals” in honour of the man who had fought for them against Athens [Edmonds in Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook, #66316, ch. 37]. Hero cult of founders and benefactors was the Greek ground on which Hellenistic and Roman ruler cult would later be built (see the following chapters on ruler cult and the imperial religion).

Impiety and the trial of Socrates

Hugh Bowden notes that asebeia appears mainly in Athenian texts, and that Athens had a specific procedure, the graphe asebeias, “used most famously to bring Sokrates to trial in 399 BCE”. The evidence is narrow, however: “There is only one trial that is recognized beyond doubt as resulting from a graphe asebeias, that of Sokrates”. Other famous cases are known only from much later sources, and “their very existence has been challenged by some” [Bowden in Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook, #66316, ch. 22]. Scholars disagree on whether asebeia referred to a narrow set of actions or was “left largely undefined, and open to the interpretation of prosecution, defence, and jury”. They also disagree on whether it covered beliefs as well as acts, and whether charges were “genuinely ‘religious'” or “a pretext for what were fundamentally ‘political’ attacks”. Bowden regards that last distinction as anachronistic: it imports “a distinctly modern conception of what counts as ‘religious'” into a culture where such distinctions “cannot be made”. Ancient definitions were broad. Pseudo-Aristotle defines asebeia as “error concerning gods and daimons or concerning the departed, and parents and homeland” [Bowden, ibid., ch. 22].

Plato’s Apology gives the charge as Socrates reports it: “Socrate calcă legea stricându-i pe tineri şi necrezând în zeii în care crede cetatea, ci în alte divinităţi, noi” (“Socrates breaks the law by corrupting the young and not believing in the gods the city believes in, but in other, new divinities”) [Platon, Apărarea lui Socrate, #19606]. The translator’s note to the Euthyphron links the “new gods” charge to Socrates’ daimon, the inner voice that held him back from wrong acts [Platon, Euthyphron, #19610, n. 10]. In that dialogue, set as Socrates awaits Meletos’ prosecution, Euthyphro holds that failing to prosecute a wrongdoer, even one’s own father, “e o impietate” (“is an impiety”). This leads to the famous question of whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, or pious because it is loved [Platon, Euthyphron, #19610].

Neel Burton traces the charge partly to comedy: “Aristophanes had assimilated Socrates with the sophists, leading, ultimately, to the charges of impiety”. Socrates’ daimonion “contributed in no small part to the charge of impiety and ‘inventing new gods'”. Burton sets out the interpretive problem: was the accusation that Socrates believed in “some gods but not in the right ones, or that he did not believe in any gods at all?” [Burton, The Gang of Three, #67276, Part II].

Non-mainstream readings: Heisman and Evola

Mitchell Heisman’s Suicide Note gives a sociological genealogy of godhood. “Greek aristocrats, by definition of the rule of the best, were considered superior to Greek commoners”, he writes. In the same way “the Greek gods were imagined superior to the Greek aristocracy. The gods, then, embodied the presumptions of human superiority inherent in the notion of aristocracy taken to superlative, imaginative extremes” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, part 881]. Heisman contrasts this aristocratic-pagan conception with monotheism, holding that “pagan, Greek gods conflicted with the values of a God both good and supernatural” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252]. On his reading the Olympians were idealised superior beings, not moral judges of mankind.

Julius Evola, writing as a Traditionalist, makes the Olympian/chthonic opposition the key to Greek religion: “All the main characteristics of the Greek religion are related to the opposition between chthonic and Olympian deities. The opposition was not merely between Hades, Persephone, Demeter, Dionysus and Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo. It was not just a matter of the difference between two orders of gods, but also of the opposition between radically different cults” [Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, #67630]. Evola carries this into politics. In the traditional view, “the state was related to the people, just as the Olympian and Uranian principles are related to the chthonic and ‘infernal’ world”, and deriving the state from the demos he calls “an ideological perversion typical of the modern world” [Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, #67630, ch. 4]. Academic scholarship treats the same polarity much more cautiously. Susan Deacy’s Handbook chapter calls the Olympian/chthonian duality “one of the most fundamental yet not unproblematic distinctions” structuring the pantheon [Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook, #66316, “Chapter Overview”, ch. 24].

Toward the mysteries

Civic religion secured the city’s relationship with its gods. It promised individuals little about death. Caroline Tully, in the Memento Mori anthology, warns that “the Greek gods were not overly concerned with the activities or individual fates of mortals” [Tully in Huggens (ed.), Memento Mori, #74105]. Edmonds notes that in Homer “there is nothing there to look forward to” after death [Edmonds in Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook, #66316, ch. 37]. The initiation cults of the next two chapters grew up in that gap.

Key points

• Seltman stresses that Greek religion had “no priestly caste… neither dogma nor missions… no Sacred Book”, yet its gods were real objects of worship, not Renaissance-style symbols.
• The Oxford Handbook frames Greek religion through four debates: unity/diversity (Osborne), belief/practice (Harrison), old/new (Kearns) and many/one (Pirenne-Delforge and Pironti).
• Kearns shows that the Greeks recognised religious change. Cults such as the Andanian mysteries were presented as both new and very old.
• Sacrifice, divination, sacred law, sanctuaries and regional leagues were the machinery of polis religion. Priests did not hold a monopoly on mediation (Flower).
• Hero cult of founders and benefactors (Battos, Brasidas) and deification debates laid the ground for later ruler cult.
• Bowden argues that asebeia cannot be neatly sorted into “religious” or “political”. Socrates’ trial in 399 BCE is the only securely attested graphe asebeias.
• Heisman reads the Olympians as aristocratic superiority “taken to superlative, imaginative extremes”. Evola reads Greek religion as a clash of Olympian and chthonic orders with political consequences.
• The civic gods’ indifference to individual fate (Tully) leads into the mystery cults.