9. Conclusion

My purpose has been to show the status of Athenian public and private religious institutions and, where possible, beliefs at the beginning of the Hellenistic period and the developments they underwent in the years down to the siege and pillaging of Athens by the Roman general Sulla and his soldiers in 86 B.C.. In this concluding chapter we review major events and the general lines of development, both of which may occasionally have gotten obscured in the detailed accounts of earlier chapters. We proceed again chronologically but pause at appropriate moments to note the later development or significance of ideas or practices introduced during the period under discussion. These discussions and then remarks at the end of the chapter will, I trust, help fit the religion of Hellenistic Athens into the larger picture of both religion and society in the Greek Hellenistic world.

The defeat of Athens in the battle of Chaeroneia by the Macedonian forces commanded by Philip II in 338 B.C. had eliminated her independence in international political affairs, had endangered her democratic government, and had even threatened her existence. Immediately thereafter, under the leadership of the statesman Lycourgos, the Athenians undertook a national revival that involved rebuilding the walls and navy, establishing an educational program for their young men, invigorating the economy, and, no less important, refurbishing the finances, sanctuaries, and festivals of their traditional deities. On the religious side of this national revival the Athenians were clearly looking back to the age of Pericles, restoring dedications and buildings to the beauty and grandeur they had last had before the disastrous Peloponnesian War. The effort was broadly based, with financial and personal support from a large number of prominent Athenians and with the approval of the Athenian Demos. Lycourgos himself was clearly influential, on the cultic side as priest of Poseidon-Erechtheus and as an unofficial expert on religious matters, and on the financial side both as a private fund-raiser and as administrator of the state treasury. He also was a powerful spokesman for traditional religious values, as his speech against Leocrates demonstrates.

We must take care here not to think of these activities, by Lycourgos or the Athenians in general, as “nostalgic” or “pietistic.” Success as an individual or as a state was always, in the Greek tradition, in part the result of “honoring the ancestral gods in the ancestral ways,” and forward-looking and visionary statesmen in late-fourth-century Athens, if they wished to attain again the prosperity of fifth-century Athens, would naturally undertake to reestablish the religious sanctuaries, dedications, and rituals that had brought fifth-century Athenians their successes. The Greek instinct, in times of stress and failure, was (usually) not to give up on the ancestral gods or to seek new gods, but to return to the rituals and customs of earlier, better times. And thus the age of Lycourgos looked back, in religion particularly, to the age of Pericles, and herein we see continuity between high classical religion and that practiced in Athens at the outset of the Hellenistic period. And, I argue, the religion of the Lycourgan period itself became the model to which the Athenians in following centuries then returned after various dislocations caused by national and international events.

For Lycourgan Athens we have no contemporary statement about a conscious desire or systematic program for a national revival or for religion’s part in it. But a survey of what was then being done would naturally lead us to conclude that such a desire existed. The historian Polybius, writing in the third quarter of the second century, offers a useful account of the same general outlook as he records what his fellow Achaians did in the 220s after a series of brutal wars in the Peloponnesos (5.106.1–3): “The Achaians, as soon as they had put aside the war,…and the other cities throughout the Peloponnesos were trying to reacquire the same (lives they had before the wars): they were tending the land, and they were renewing their ancestral (πατρίας) sacrifices and festivals and the other traditions that they each individually had concerning the gods. For it was as if a forgetfulness (λέθην) about such things had occurred for most of them because of the unbroken sequence of wars that had gone before.” In the worst of wartimes the land and the religious cults might be “forgotten” and neglected, but the Greek instinct was, as soon as circumstances allowed, to renew the land and to renew the ancestral religious traditions.

So too the Athenians responded after Chaeroneia—a relatively minor disaster for them, in comparison to that of the Achaeans—when the war was short and neither their land nor sanctuaries were damaged. All the more they turned to religious matters after the ravages of Lachares and the disastrous siege of Demetrios Poliorcetes in 294, after their freedom from Demetrios in 287/6, and then again after the Chremonidean War in the 260s. Finally, after the escape from Macedonian domination in 229, under Eurycleides’ leadership they devoted attention to the land as well as to their religious institutions. But in an increasingly impoverished Athens, major, wholesale physical damage like that brought to the rural sanctuaries by Philip V in 201 could not be repaired. And likewise the damage—physical, economic, and psychological—wrought by Sulla in 86 was so extensive and Athens was so poor that thereafter permanent changes of much greater magnitude resulted. Now, for the first time, the restorations were qualitatively different—but that brings us to the end of the Hellenistic age in Athens and is a topic for another book.

In the Lycourgan period Athens was still relatively prosperous and had the funds and energy to devote to a religious revival. At the center of the this movement, as at the center of fifth-century state religion, was the cult of Athena Polias. Very early in Lycourgos’ administration work was completed on the Panathenaic Stadium for Athena’s major festival, the quadrennial Panathenaia. Various measures were taken to establish secure and lasting funding for the annual Lesser Panathenaia. Gold and silver processional vessels and gold jewelry for one hundred kanēphoroi were made for the procession of the Panathenaia. Most important symbolically for the association with the Periclean period was the restoration of the seven gold Nikai that had been melted down in the difficult times at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Authority over the cult of Athena Polias was held by Lycourgos’ family, with himself and later his sons serving as priests of Poseidon-Erechtheus and a female from another branch of the Eteobutadai holding the goddess’ priesthood. Lycourgos had special concerns with this cult, but happily his personal interest coincided with his statesman’s role of promoting the state as a whole. In enhancing his and his family’s cult he was also enhancing the major state cult of Athens.

Also fundamental to reasserting the essential place of religion in the Athenian social structure were the new buildings and remodeling of the sanctuaries of Apollo Patroös, one (along with Athena) divine ancestor of the Athenians; perhaps of Zeus Phratrios and Athena Phratria, the patrons of the phratries, which were key units in determining identity as Athenians; and of the eponymous heroes, the patrons of the political structure of the ten tribes. Further Lycourgan efforts were directed to the traditional but distinctively Athenian cults of the Dionysos of the theater and of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis. The theater enjoyed a major renovation, and significant new construction of a bridge and buildings was undertaken for Eleusis. Lycourgos, whose interest in tragedy is manifest in the Leocrates, himself was responsible for the law, exceptionally important for the survival of Athena drama, establishing canonical texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. At Eleusis he not only tended to financial details but also introduced a law of ritual, forbidding women from riding on wagons in the great procession. And both Dionysos and Demeter also prospered from Lycourgos’ more general financial innovations promoting the kosmos and securing the future for all cults.

A major addition to state cult was the acquisition of the healing sanctuary of Amphiaraos at Oropos and the creation of a new quadrennial Amphiaraia. This was new but hardly innovative in religious terms. Athens had long laid claim to the sanctuary, and the new festival was, from all appearances, very much along traditional lines. The acquisition of the Amphiaraion may have increased Athenian interest in healing cults in general, but this interest had probably been growing since the introduction of Asclepios to Athens in 420/19. Amphiaraos could provide, through dreams, some oracular information but apparently only that concerned with his own cult matters. There is no indication that the Athenians used his cult, as, for example, that of Apollo at Delphi or of Zeus at Dodona, as an oracle for state affairs. The Athenians lost Oropos after the Lamian War in 322, may have regained it from Demetrios Poliorcetes in 304/3, but then had lost it again by 287/6. Their claim to it and the Amphiaraion remained in the national consciousness, however, and in the late second century the ephebes annually made a day trip to the Amphiaraion, sacrificed there, and were reminded of the Athenian claims of ownership.

The one true cultic innovation in the Lycourgan age was the approval, by the state, of the purchase of land in Piraeus by the Citian devotees of Aphrodite Ourania for a cult site of their Cyprian goddess. This cult, limited to Citian nationals, was probably introduced as a favor and convenience to them, as the cult of Isis had been introduced for Egyptians some years before. We shall see that the introduction of foreign cults for foreign devotees in Piraeus occurred not irregularly in the following centuries but left virtually no evidence of an effect on Athenian state or private religion. The Citian cult of Aphrodite Ourania does, however, serve as our first if very small indicator of what will be a major factor in religious change later in the Hellenistic period: namely, the increasingly common phenomenon of Greeks and foreigners living abroad. We shall see that after the acquisition of Delos in 167/6 the effect on Athenian religion and Athenians was far greater when Athenians lived abroad as foreigners than when foreigners lived in Athens.

The Lycourgan innovation that was eventually to have a major impact on Athenian state religion was, in fact, not cultic or religious. It was the introduction or major remodeling of the ephēbeia, the program of two years of military training and acculturation for Athenian young men aged eighteen to twenty. Probably initially and throughout the Lycourgan period the ephēbeia was intended primarily as military and civic training, but it would become, within two centuries, a vehicle for the performance of a broad range of state sacrifices, rituals, and festivals. Just after Demetrios of Phaleron the ephēbeia was reduced in the number of participants and the length of term served, now just one year, and for a century the records are scant. After 229 the ephebic corps remained relatively small, only twenty to fifty young men each year, but the ephebes by that time have assumed a major role in the many state religious processions, contests, and sacrifices. We cannot date precisely the beginnings of this new religious activity of the ephebes, but the terminus ante quem is 215/4 (SEG 29.116). The most likely time for this major innovation is just after the liberation of Athens from the Macedonians in 229, in part because of the ephebes’ association with Diogenes the “liberator” of Athens but also, and more tellingly, because several of the ephebes’ activities now and in the next century had a strongly nationalistic, pro-democratic cast. These included the Aianteia and the procession for Demokratia on Salamis, the display in arms at the Epitaphia, the participation of the priest of Demos and the Charites, and later, among others, the display at the Theseia, the offering to the Marathonian dead, and the day trip to Oropos. The ephēbeia would grow, involving more than a hundred Athenian young men by 128/7, and the Athenians were, after 229, clearly indoctrinating the ephebes in a complex system of national and religious traditions.^[1] The ephebes were also providing similar ritual and service functions in a wide range of public festivals, including the City Dionysia and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Whenever a procession, a contest, an escort, or a sacrifice requiring manpower was required, the ephebes were called upon.

There soon followed this “youth movement” for boys a “youth movement” for girls. In the classical and earlier Hellenistic period women were occasionally, girls hardly ever, honored publicly for their service as priestesses or other religious offices. But beginning as early as 220/19, we find increasingly large numbers of girls—numbers equaling those of ephebes—participating in major cults as errēphoroi, ergastīnai, and kanēphoroi and being publicly honored with statues and other dedications for their service. There is also a trend for Athenian priests to appoint their daughters and sons kanēphoroi and kleidouchoi. There had always been some participation of children in official cult at Athens,^[2] but the numbers now, the greater range of activities, and the public honoring of the child participants are distinguishing features of religion in late Hellenistic Athens and reflect the more general interest in children in the Hellenistic literature and art.^[3] This movement, intended perhaps as acculturation to Athenian national and religious traditions and no doubt as a venue for acquiring social prestige, grew throughout the period, culminating in the last years of the second century B.C.. Then young men and women were participating regularly, some almost weekly it seems, in a wide array of national and international festivals. The mechanism for their involvement in religious affairs was put into place, however, by the institution or the remodeling of the ephēbeia in the Lycourgan age.

What is most evident, and what was clearly intended, in the age of Lycourgos is continuity with the past, with the religious traditions of the classical period. If we are careful not to telescope the evidence, significant changes that point to the future are few.^[4] First and foremost is the establishment of the ephēbeia. Second is the now apparently systematic exploitation of the wealthy to support, in this period, the building and remodeling of religious buildings. Now we find some officials contributing substantial sums for such purposes to the cults they administered. In later periods the priests themselves were expected to do the same, apparently for the routine sacrifices and affairs of the cult they headed. And last, an important difference not so much in the administrative structure of religion as in psychology, is the first attestation of a phrase that soon becomes formulaic for expressing the purpose of a broad range of state religious activities: “For the health and safety of the Boule and Demos of the Athenians and their children, wives, and other possessions.”

In “for health and safety” we may be seeing a first sign of a changed religious outlook, one that is now becoming defensive, perhaps even pessimistic in contrast to the higher expectations and optimism of the fifth century. Recent political and military events could certainly have motivated this change, and future ones would certainly further its development. Most revealing among the latter were the introduction, in 307/6, of the cult of Antigonos I and Demetrios Poliorcetes as Sōtēres and then the dismantling of this cult twenty years later. In 307/6 and for a few years afterward these Macedonian generals were providing “health and safety” to Athens in immediate ways much welcomed and appreciated by the Athenians; hence they were the Soteres, their festival was the Soteria, and concerns for “health and safety” were no doubt directed largely to them. Immediately after getting rid of Demetrios in 287/6 the Athenians, if my analysis is correct, transferred the festival to a new Zeus Soter and Athena Soteira, imported from Piraeus perhaps; henceforth throughout the Hellenistic period Athenian sacrifices and prayers “for health and safety” are directed to the gods, not to men. In addition to Zeus Soter and Athena Soteira, prayers for this purpose are widely attested for Dionysos, Asclepios, Amphiaraos, Apollo Prostaterios and Artemis Boulaia and Artemis Phosphoros as group, Demeter and Kore, Aglauros and Ares and Helios and the Horai as a group, Athena Polias, and Eirene. And very often is added, to the gods specified by name, “the other gods” or “the other ancestral gods,” thus bringing all the state’s gods into play. It is noteworthy that all these gods are expected to protect both “health” and “safety.” Zeus Soter is asked for “health” as well as “safety;” Asclepios and Amphiaraos for “safety” as well as “health.” The phrase “health and safety” encapsulates what the Athenians of the Hellenistic period were wanting from the gods for their government, for their wives and children, for their friends and allies, and for themselves.

We should like to be able define more precisely what Hellenistic Athenians meant by “health” and by “safety,” but we are given little help from the texts.^[5] “Health” would seem rather transparent, but it was not, I expect, the curing of diseases and the mending of broken bones. For that the healing gods Asclepios and Amphiaraos would suffice; Zeus Soter would not have a role. I suspect that the Athenians here meant more the “things necessary for a healthy life”; in these often very lean times, punctuated even with occasions of general starvation, such things would include food and other such essentials. “Safety” is often taken to mean “political safety,” usually in the context of the preservation or restoration of the democratic institutions.^[6] So it might naturally be understood in “the safety of the Boule” and perhaps even in “the safety of the Demos.” Constituting the Demos, however, were also individual citizens, and by “the safety of their children and wives” was no doubt meant personal physical safety—safety from military attacks and the dangers of war that so immediately threatened and were, for the most part, now well beyond the control of Athenians. In the classical period the Athenians largely controlled their own food supplies and determined largely themselves when, where, and with whom they would make war.^[7] After Chaeroneia and increasingly as time progressed, the Athenians were dependent on others for their food supply and were at the whim of powerful foreign generals and kings who might or might not invade, besiege, or even destroy Athens and massacre its residents. In these circumstances the Athenians understandably turned ever more to the gods “for health and safety,” a phrase that apparently encompassed a large range of personal as well as political concerns. Emily Kearns (1990, 325) sees the areas of Greek life requiring “safety” or “deliverance” as breaking down into two groups: for the individual, death, disgrace, illness, injury, and poverty; for the city, defeat (in war), plague, famine, civil disturbance, and natural disasters. One can see how the phrase “health and safety” might come to be used to encompass all, or nearly all, of these.

Preoccupation with Macedonian expansionism had dominated Athenian politics since the 350s, and for the century after Philip’s victory at Chaeroneia in 338 Athenian religion too was dramatically affected, directly or indirectly, by Macedonian influences. One might even perversely claim that Philip’s victory motivated Athens’ religious revival under Lycourgos. But after Athens’ unsuccessful revolt against Macedon in the Lamian War and the occupation and garrisoning of Attica in 322, Macedonian influences on Athenian social, political, and religious life became much more immediate and would continue to be so for nearly a hundred years, until 229 B.C. The effects on Athenian religious life were varied: economic, psychological, artistic, physical, and institutional.^[8]

The Macedonian garrison occupied the Mounichion Hill overlooking Piraeus on Boedromion 20, 322 B.C., the very day that initiates made their procession from Athens to Eleusis for the Mysteries. In his account of this traumatic event Plutarch (Phoc. 28.1–3) has the Athenians question the gods. In their despair they thought that the gods were no longer protecting even their own rituals. Nor, for that matter, were they protecting their own sanctuaries. The Macedonians chose, as their major fortress, the very hill immediately above the sanctuary of Artemis Mounichia, the goddess who had, a century and a half previously, helped the Athenians defeat the Persians. For Artemis the break with her Athenian devotees would have been physical as well as psychological. Because of the fort the Athenians probably could not reach the sanctuary and they certainly would not have sent their wives and daughters to the area. It is hardly surprising that the cult of Artemis Mounichia and her sister cult at Brauron disappear from the record for nearly two hundred years.

The presence and, in 229, the departure of Macedonian garrisons may well help to explain other elements of Athenian religious history. The cult of Theseus, the legendary synoecist of Attica, received a major boost with the recovery of his bones by Cimon in 476/5. But the cult of Theseus and the several festivals associated with him—the Synoikia, Oschophoria, Deipnophoria, and so on—disappear from the record during the period of Macedonian occupation, only to reappear when, after 166, Athens regained all of Attica and many of her former overseas possessions. The causes again may be both psychological and physical. When foreigners held much of Attica, Athenians had little cause to celebrate the hero who had unified it. And, physically, it would have been difficult and perhaps impossible to hold the processions to Phaleron required for several of these festivals.

During Macedonian occupation Piraeus was, at various times, under tighter or looser Macedonian control, but it appears throughout to have been quite isolated from the city.^[9] Piraeus was, no doubt, impoverished, and this may have led to the loss of some major festivals. But in its isolation Piraeus seems to have operated, in religious affairs, more as an independent country than a deme, as it did in earlier times. Piraeic deities, in particular Zeus Soter and Athena Soteira, appear more independent and national in character, less affiliated with Athenian state cults than similar deities in other demes. The isolation from Athens thus affected religion in Piraeus, but more significant for Athenian religious history is the impact on the city of Athens. In part the Macedonian occupation of Piraeus probably meant that now Athens, in contrast to the classical period, was largely cut off from trade with the rest of the Greek world, especially from the movement of foreign cults that were usually transported and established by foreign merchants and sailors. And even what foreign cults might find their way to Piraeus were then cut off from access to Athens itself. Foreign cults in Greek cities often got their foothold in harbor towns, as did those of the Egyptian Isis and the Cyprian Aphrodite Ourania in Piraeus in the fourth century. From the harbor towns those foreign cults which appealed to citizens might move inland to the larger population centers. In Athens this natural development was thwarted for the nearly hundred-year separation of Piraeus and Athens, and the closing off of Piraeus by the Macedonians helps explain the relative lack of foreign cults in both Piraeus and Athens itself in the early Hellenistic period.

In the aftermath of the Lamian War the Macedonian general Cassander controlled Athens, and as his “overseer” of Athens he installed an Athenian, Demetrios of Phaleron, in 317/6. Among the various measures introduced by the “tyrant” Demetrios during his ten-year reign, two were to have a lasting effect on Athenian religion. His limitation on the size and nature of funerary monuments brought to an end the rich tradition of sculpted funerary reliefs that had flourished since the 420s. These now were replaced by columns, plaques, and other such simple monuments, and the elaborate reliefs, with a few possible exceptions, were not to appear again until the mid–second century B.C.^[10] Demetrios also eliminated the chorēgia, the classical but recently criticized system by which individual wealthy citizens each year were appointed to pay for individual dithyrambic choruses and for the productions of individual tragic and comic poets at the City Dionysia and other such festivals. He replaced the forty-five chorēgoi with a single, annually elected individual, the agōnothetēs. The Demos itself now became the chorēgos, but the agōnothetēs administered the contests of the major festivals and, probably from the very beginning, contributed significant funds of his own for the embellishment of the festivals. In one sense the innovation was democratic: the Demos, by the election of the agōnothetēs and by financial support, took control of its own festivals. But the establishment of one individual over the contests of major festivals simultaneously narrowed citizen participation in the production of the festivals.^[11] The replacement of the chorēgoi by the agōnothetēs under Demetrios may be a sign that these festivals were beginning to be put on “ for ” the Demos by the government and by a single wealthy individual rather than “ by ” the Demos for the Demos. The actors were now professionals; many of the playwrights were foreign; and, one suspects, unlike in much earlier times when more or less ordinary fellow citizens were chorus members, actors, poets, and chorēgoi, the audiences now felt themselves increasingly to be spectators at events staged in their behalf.^[12] The agōnothetai even in the third century contributed large sums of money to ensure the success of the festivals of their years, but the culmination of this new trend came only at the end of our period when, in 99/8, the ultrarich Medeios apparently himself financed a good share of Athens’ whole religious program. But the narrowing of the citizen base for the financial support of the festivals that made these later developments possible and perhaps even inevitable is owed to Demetrios of Phaleron.

Demetrios the tyrant was also a philosopher, a leading Peripatetic of his time, and his career offers a rare opportunity to see the intersection of politics, religion, and philosophy in the period. Demetrios’ innovations in religious institutions may well owe their origins, if not their details, to contemporary discussions in philosophical circles. Like Demetrios the philosophers of the time, including Aristotle and Theophrastos, were patronized by Macedonians and were themselves pro-Macedonian in their politics. Unlike Demetrios they were almost all foreigners who had no right by birth and who showed no inclination as foreign residents to participate in or to contribute to Athenian state cult. They were well-known and respected, often publicly honored members of the social community, and they no doubt attended literary, musical, and athletic contests at the major festivals, but they would not as members of the religious community sacrifice or be included among the beneficiaries (“the Demos of the Athenians, their children and wives”) of sacrifices and other rituals performed by Athenians. Moreover, living abroad they would be isolated from the religious rituals of their various homelands. These foreign philosophers formed at the Academy, in the Lyceum, and elsewhere quite separate, independent societies with, in each case, a cult of the Muses as their patrons. But these philosophical societies were hardly religious in the conventional sense, and there is no evidence that they had any formal or informal associations with Athenian public cult. These philosophers prospered under Macedonian rule in Athens, but in the moments of Athenian rebellion or independence they could become victims.

Charges of impiety were raised against Aristotle at the time of the Lamian War and against Theophastos a few years later, in Aristotle’s case for giving greater than human honors to his friend and patron, Hermeias the tyrant of Atarneus. There was no doubt an anti-Macedonian political element to the bringing of these charges, as there was a political element in the attacks on Socrates at the beginning of the century. And in both cases religious accusations were a convenient weapon. But in both cases the specific charges must have arisen from popular concerns of the time, and for Aristotle the charge was that he was treating a human ruler as one usually treated a god. And with Aristotle’s devotion to Hermeias and likewise with the devotion of Plato’s successors to the Academy’s founder, the philosophers may have opened the door conceptually, in Athens, to ruler cult.

Scholars have often assumed ruler cult to be a fundamental and distinguishing characteristic of Hellenistic Greek religion, an important and widespread mechanism for constructing the new political, social, and religious realities.^[13] In Athens, in fact, ruler cult had a very brief history, essentially that of Demetrios Poliorcetes from 307/6 to 287 B.C. and then, after a brief flirtation with Antigonos Gonatas, it ended. Only at the very end, two hundred years later, do we find the misguided partisans of Mithridates speaking of their champion as a god, as a New Dionysos. Athens’ two tries at ruler cult, the aborted one for Alexander in 324 and that for Demetrios Poliorcetes in 307/6, were both directed toward Macedonians and were both formal enactments of the Ekklesia. The debate about Alexander’s divinity in 324/3 generated sarcastic comments from Demosthenes and Lycourgos, but, for largely political reasons, the Ekklesia voted to make Alexander a god. The cult, if it was in fact ever established, certainly came to an end shortly with Alexander’s death and the Lamian War. The complaints of the orator Hyperides about the now-defunct Alexander cult in his funeral speech over the Athenian dead of the Lamian War are, interestingly, the last recorded criticisms from the Greek world about the inappropriateness of ruler cult on general or theoretical grounds.^[14]

The circumstances and the motives for the cult of Demetrios Poliorcetes and his father Antigonos Monophthalmos were significantly different from those of Alexander. Antigonos promised and Demetrios delivered to Athens in 307/6 and later in 304/3 political freedom, a restoration of democracy, physical safety, and food, all elements of Athenian life thought to be owed in good part to the gods.^[15] Antigonos and Demetrios did, basically, provide divine services to the Athenians, and the Athenians in an outpouring of gratitude and relief honored them as Sōtēres and established for them the apparatus of divine cult: an altar, sacrifices, festival, hymn, and golden statues.

I have discussed in Honor Thy Gods (1991) and, more briefly, here in chapter 3 how, in the Greek tradition, “honor” is a notion fundamental to understanding much of divine cult. “Honor” was what was due to gods for great services, and that “honor” toward the gods was rendered through the “gifts” of sacrifice, hymns, dedications, and other such things. And it is important that the “honor” rendered to gods was not, generically, unlike that rendered to men for their service, but, in the classical period, the services provided by men to their fellow men were of a different and lower order than those provided by the gods and so were the “gifts” expressing that honor. For the Athenians the deeds or “services” of Antigonos and Demetrios now surpassed the usual, human level, and so the “gifts” expressing “honor” were elevated to the divine level. Alexander, we might recall, when he asked an Indian Gymnosophist the impossible question “How might a human being become a god,” was told, “If he should do something which it is impossible for a human being to do” (Plut. Alex. 64.4). Alexander found that answer acceptable.

The change in the types of “gifts” now given to these exceptional men was certainly significant, but it was facilitated and is understandable in the Greek tradition, I would argue, because the feelings of “honor” owed to gods and men were not fundamentally different.^[16] Aristotle offers us the best ancient and nearly contemporary commentary on this:

Honor is a indicator of a reputation for benefaction, and justly and especially those who have provided a benefaction are honored. But in addition also one able to provide a benefaction (but not yet having done so) is honored. The benefaction may concern either safety and the other things responsible for existence, or wealth, or any of the other good things of which the acquisition is not easy, either in general or at a given place or time. Many men receive honor for what seem to be small things, but for that the places and situations are the reason. The constituent parts of honor are sacrifices, memorials in verse or prose, gifts of honor, sanctuaries, front-row seating at public events, tombs, statues, board at state expense, the things given by non-Greeks such as proskynēsis and yielding place, and gifts that are, in each people, held in honor. (Arist. Rhet. 1361a28–b2)

In the Rhetoric, completed in the 330s,^[17] Aristotle shows that the linkages I see fundamental to the nature of Greek ruler cult were established even before any such cult of Macedonian kings had been broached in the Greek world: “honor” directly results from good services properly recognized; the areas of “good service” involve safety, things necessary for life (presumably food, water, and good health), and financial prosperity; and gifts express this “honor.” Note too that Aristotle simply lists, with no fundamental distinction, the “constituent parts of honor” belonging to gods (sacrifices, written memorials, and sanctuaries) and those belonging to men (front-row seating, tombs, statues, etc.). Finally, relevant in the context of ruler cult is Aristotle’s comment that “Many men receive honor for what seem to be small things, but for that the places and situations are the reason.” In 307 and in 304 B.C., it was in fact the specific situations that led the Athenians to give divine “honors” to Demetrios Poliorcetes for what must certainly not have seemed small matters to them.

If this is all correct, one should be wary of the many scholarly discussions of ruler cult that distinguish sharply between “genuine religious belief” (usually left undefined) and the awarding of “godlike honors.” ^[18] The awarding of divine honors, I would claim, is central, not peripheral, to “genuine religious belief” in the Greek tradition. However much we may disparage it, Greeks and even Athenians for a time were honoring these rulers as “gods”—not because they thought them immortal, but because they were receiving from them what, in the circumstances, only gods could give.

Initially support for the new gods was broadly based and widely advocated. Demetrios himself in cult was assimilated to Dionysos, Zeus (Kataibates), Apollo Pythios, and Demeter. But in 304/3 when the Sōtēr moved to Athens for a year, when he brought his debaucheries to the Parthenon and indulged himself playing Dionysos, his welcome began to fade. Opposition emerged from a few prominent religious and political figures, but, more important, Demetrios himself turned from benefactor of democratic Athens to its oppressor with the brutal siege of 295/4. His band of supporters in Athens continued to shower him with ever-more extravagant divine honors, but the Athenian populace quite probably was by now, for political and religious reasons, alienated from him. The divine honors given enthusiastically to Demetrios in 307/6 had become, largely through the behavior of Demetrios and his supporters, a travesty, and most Athenians were no doubt happy to see their Macedonian Dionysos depart in 287/6.

Among the honors Antigonos and Demetrios received in 307/6 was to be named eponyms of two new tribes, Antigonis and Demetrias, and thus to join the ranks of legendary eponymous heroes such as Erechtheus and Ajax. These tribal cults survived the “de-Demetricizing” of Athenian religion after 287/6, and in fact only this “heroic” honor persisted in later Athenian “ruler cult.” Ptolemy III Euergetes, apparently because of assurances of protection to Athens, was made eponym of a new tribe, Ptolemais, in 224; and in 200, after Antigonis and Demetrias had been eliminated, a new ally, Attalos the king of Pergamon, was given his tribe, Attalis, at the outset of the Second Macedonian War. These tribal honors can, however, scarcely be understood as ruler cult in the usual sense, because the religious elements are limited to one segment, about one-twelfth of the population. There is no evidence that the hero received statewide sacrifices, altars, or prayers in the role of Sōtēr or benefactor (euergetēs).^[19] Perhaps as a result of their experience with the divine Demetrios the Athenians henceforth limited the role of their benefactors, whether Macedonian, Egyptian, or Pergamene, to being—along with themselves, their children, and their wives—the beneficiaries and not the recipients of sacrifices and prayers. These benefactors were brought into the religious community, not set above it. The experience of true ruler cult in Athens was bitter, but short.

At the ouster of Demetrios Poliorcetes in 287/6 the Athenians began to de-Demetricize their cults and repair the damage. This process was long, was interrupted by the Chremonidean War, and could not be said to have been completed until the 240s. However, it was necessary, setting the stage for the resurgence of traditional, Lycourgan state religion when Athens finally gained her independence in 229. The Athenians first removed the Demetrieia from the City Dionysia, renewed the celebration of the Mysteries and the Eleusinia at Eleusis, and held again, after an interruption of four or eight years, the Great Panathenaia. These were all accomplished by 282 at the latest. The Soteria, the major festival of Demetrios and his father, was remodeled into a festival of Zeus Soter and Athena Soteira. Just at this time we see traces of a short-lived attempt to establish Zeus Eleutherios/Soter as the primary protector of Athens’ political freedom, a diminution of the role of the Acropolis cult of Athena Polias in this regard. For a time Athena, now as Ergane, was to look more to Athens’ economic and business interests, and Athenians directed more attention to Agora cults for protection of the state as a whole. This, if the slight evidence is not misleading, would be a major effect of Demetrios’ desecration of Athena’s cult on the Acropolis. The three cults of Athens co-opted by Demetrios thus underwent major changes upon his departure, as Dionysos and the Eleusinian deities returned to their Lycourgan status, and Athena was temporarily transformed. And, finally, again soon after the king’s ouster the Athenians began officially to participate again in international religious festivals, the Ptolemaia of Ptolemy II and the Soteria established by the Amphictionic Council to celebrate the Greek victory over the Galatians at Delphi in 279.

Of particular interest is that now, after the two decades of the divine Demetrios, sacrifices “for health and safety” again are made to the traditional deities: to Asclepios, Dionysos, Demeter and Kore, and to the newly popular Apollo Prostaterios, Zeus Soter, and Athena Soteira. During his domination of Athens Demetrios Poliorcetes was the Sōtēr of Athens, and as such would naturally receive the appropriate offerings. But immediately upon his departure the Athenians took up again the practice, begun in the age of Lycourgos, of making such offerings to the gods; they would do so throughout the rest of the Hellenistic period.

Athens’ growing prosperity and eagerness to recover Piraeus led her, in the early 260s, to form a Greek alliance and revolt against Demetrios’ son, Antigonos Gonatas. After two sieges, the war ended disastrously, and in 262/1 Antigonos through appointees and garrisons took tight control of Athens and Attica. The evidence is sparse, but it appears that the major Athenian cults did not recover from this catastrophe until the late 250s or the 240s. The Great Panathenaia first reappears in 254, just after Antigonos had somewhat relaxed his hold on Athens. Around 255/4 the City Dionysia is again attested after a lapse of fifteen years. In this same period there was inventorying of dedications to Asclepios (Aleshire, #V), the first such inventory in thirty years, and of dedications on the Acropolis (Pollux 10.126). By the 240s the status of Athenian cults seems to have been stabilized from both the desecrations of Demetrios and the effects of the Chremonidean War. Eleusis was functioning normally, the major festivals of the Panathenaia and City Dionysia were being held, and Asclepios and the Acropolis deities were accumulating dedications. Sacrifices were being made to a number of traditional deities for “the health and safety of the Demos, their children and wives,” and added to these beneficiaries, not as a god but as a man, was Antigonos Gonatas. And, finally, in 246/5, for the first time since the 270s, the Athenians again participated in the Delphic Soteria. Athena Polias and Aglauros, both Acropolis-oriented deities, are prominent in the evidence for the 240s; together with the renewal of other cults described above, they suggest that finally, after forty years, the Athenians had successfully restored their religious system to its pre-Demetrian, Lycourgan status.

In 229 the Athenians bought their freedom from the Macedonian garrisons and control. The changes we have surveyed in Athenian religious affairs since 323 were surely by-products of the Macedonian dominance, not the result of any systematic Macedonian policy. The temporary loss of Artemis Mounichia, the effects on foreign cults of the isolation of Piraeus, and even Demetrios’ bizarre behavior that tarnished Athena Polias and soured the Athenians on ruler cult resulted only secondarily from the Macedonians’ other purposes and concerns. The original deification of Demetrios Poliorcetes and his father was, I think, a spontaneous outpouring of emotion and gratitude by Athenians at large, but the extension and extravagance of later honors were orchestrated by that group of now-powerful Athenians who owed their authority to Demetrios. The Macedonians are always there in the background, but the real changes in Athenian religion in the period are the product of Athenian internal politics and social life. The case is otherwise for the Macedonians’ devastating final, parting shot. In 201 Philip V in a fit of rage systematically and barbarically had Attica’s rural shrines, temples, altars, and tombs destroyed—irreparably destroyed. This was apparently the fatal blow to very many rural and deme cults that had been a vibrant element of Athenian religious life in the classical period but had been struggling since at least the end of the fourth century. Henceforth Athenian public religion, or at least our evidence for it, is largely restricted to the urban centers of Athens and Piraeus and to Eleusis and the forts. The later increased participation we shall see in the urban cults may be a result in part of the greater urbanization and prosperity of Athenian life, but in part also of the impoverishment or loss of rural cults and their priesthoods, sacrifices, occasional festivals, and treasuries. Those rural cults that reappear after Philip’s destruction were primarily those reflecting Athenian nationalism: monuments, tombs, and sanctuaries associated with the great victories at Marathon in 490 and Salamis in 480. But to judge from the epigraphical and archaeological evidence, hundreds and perhaps thousands of other rural cults ceased to exist.

Also owed quite directly to Macedonian kings and generals was the internationalizing of Athenian tragedy and comedy. This led in turn to the formation of the Athenian (and other) technītai of Dionysos, the guild of professional poets, actors, and musicians. Alexander shared his grandfather’s and father’s taste for Athenian drama and brought to perform and converse at his banquets numerous Athenian poets and actors. As Alexander and his successors then undertook to stage magnificent festivals on the Greek model, they needed ready and organized troupes to perform, and the Athenian technītai and other guilds were formed to satisfy this need. The result was often a separation of the Dionysiac contests from festivals of Dionysos, with tragedy and comedy now produced at festivals of other deities or even in secular settings. In Athens itself there was an increased professionalism and internationalism in the poets, performers, and contests of the dramatic festivals. In a sense Athenian tragedy and comedy had become less “Athenian” and more “Greek.”

Underlying the whole Macedonian period is the Athenian impulse, after each dislocation caused by external or internal forces, to restore τὰ πάτρια, the “ancestral practices.” After 287/6 the Athenians began a forty-year effort, itself interrupted by a war and further losses, to reclaim the damage that they, the divine Demetrios, and his successor Antigonos Gonatas had done to traditional religion. The model of “the ancestral traditions” was, for this generation of Athenians, the age of Lycourgos, and those traditions had been kept alive throughout this period in part by the Atthidographers. From Chaeroneia to the Chremonidean War, Phanodemos, Philochoros, and their fellow Athenian writers were putting on record even the most archaic and esoteric Athenian religious traditions, and as prominent Athenians the Atthidographers must have been a force for revival after Demetrios as Phanodemos had been after Chaeroneia. This religious revival after 287/6, interrupted by the Chremonidean War, was not complete until the late 250s or the 240s, but that was well in time for the resurgence of an independent Athens after 229. Just as Athens attempted to return, in times of freedom, to the Lycourgan democracy and democratic institutions after oppressions of foreign or foreign-supported tyrannies and oligarchies, so in religion she returned to the Lycourgan model. The return, of course, could not be complete. Precedents had been set, such as the tribal cults for Demetrios and Antigonos, and not everything was rooted out; but the changes that survived the restorations, in comparison to the continuity, were few, small, and relatively inconsequential. The history of Athenian religion in this period is not flat and is not linear. It is a sequence of waves, of dislocations followed by restorations, and the classical traditions as formulated and interpreted by the Lycourgan age formed the model for the restorations.^[20]

Upon their liberation in 229 the Athenians created, near the Stoa of Zeus in the Agora, a new cult: that of Demos and the Charites. This new cult, I have argued, was intended to express Athenian gratitude to the foreigners who had assisted them and to promote what impoverished and war-torn Athens at this time particularly craved: democracy, peace, and agricultural prosperity. It was a new cult in a new location, but it was closely affiliated with some of the most ancient and revered cults of Athens.

It was Diogenes, the Macedonian commandant and (now) Athenian citizen, whom the Athenians convinced, with 150 talents, to remove the garrisons in 229. Then or shortly thereafter they rewarded him, as a benefactor (euergetēs), with divine honors, a palaestra in his name (Diogeneion), and a festival (Diogeneia). Diogenes, like Demetrios Poliorcetes in 307/6, had restored freedom and democracy to Athens, a feat beyond the power of Athenians themselves. The cult, palaestra, and festival of Diogenes were all intimately and primarily associated with the ephebes, and we find just in these years after the liberation of Athens a resurgence of interest in the ephēbeia, the ephēbeia that had essentially been created in not dissimilar circumstances in the national revival after Chaeroneia.

The epigraphical evidence, virtually the only evidence we have for religious activity in this period, would indicate that Athenians and their families were still participating widely in state but not in private cults.^[21] For the time from independence (229/8) to the takeover of Delos in 167/6, only three “private” citizen cults—that is, cults not financed by the state and not directed to the welfare of the state as a whole or a traditional subunit of it—are attested: a koinon of Asclepiastai on the south slope of the Acropolis; the Piraeic cult of the Mother of the Gods, which, following its uncertain origins, had become entirely citizen and was now flourishing; and the fifteen orgeōnes of the Piraeic koinon of Dionysiastai founded and headed by the members of one family.^[22] The latter two cults in particular had as members some prominent Athenians and give us our best evidence of private cults standing apart from state, local, and domestic cults. It would appear that apart from the one Piraeic cult of the Mother of the Gods, most such cults in this and earlier times were very small and short-lived. With the exception, again, of the Mother of the Gods, the private Athenian koina surveyed in chapter 5, mostly of the late fourth century and early third century, have all disappeared from the record by this time. There may well have been other private cults that left no epigraphical record, but if such cults were numerous one would expect to find, at the least, inscribed altars or boundary stones.

The case is much the same for cults practiced by foreigners. Bendis, Ammon, Sabazios, Isis, the Citian Aphrodite Ourania, Tynabos, Zeus Labraundos, and the thiasos of Artemis have all disappeared. Sarapis is the only new foreign deity to emerge in this period, with a substantial following of foreign Sarapiastai allowed and perhaps encouraged to honor this deity because of the growing Athenian pro-Ptolemaic and pro-Egyptian sentiments after 229. Some foreign cults too may have escaped the epigraphical record, but there is no evidence to indicate that either private or foreign cults were a major factor in religion in Athens at this time. This is all the more noteworthy since such cults are usually considered characteristic of Hellenistic religion.^[23] The real exposure of Athenians to foreign deities and the real participation of Athenians in their cults was to come only when the Athenians took over and managed religious affairs on Delos.

Individualism, whether in domestic political attitudes, philosophy, art, or religion, is commonly considered a distinguishing feature of the Hellenistic period, in Athens as elsewhere.^[24] In religion, it is almost universally claimed, individuals found state cults and deities unsatisfying and abandoned or ignored them, turning instead to foreign deities who offered more direct, personal, and meaningful relationships and to private cult associations that offered a more immediate sense of community.^[25] For Athens there is, as we have seen, little evidence, certainly no more (despite fuller records) than in the classical period, either for the introduction of foreign deities or for participation in private cult associations. Increased individualism in Athenian religion of the Hellenistic period is instead much more subtle, to be found within state cult and not apart from it. The evidence is insufficient to chronicle the full development, but in very general and simplistic terms, I see it as follows. In classical Athens state cult—whether it be the festivals of the Panathenaia or the City Dionysia, sacrifices of the demesmen of Erchia, or the secret rites of the Arrephoria—was thought to be performed by, paid for, and done for the sake of the Demos at large. Individuals, of course, performed the sacrifices, carried the baskets in the processions, sometimes (if ordered to do so) paid the costs of choral performances, and so forth, but they did so largely as anonymous members (πολῖται) of the Demos. Despite exceptional cases and despite exceptional types of roles (chorēgoi, for example), one performed one’s religious duties and services in state cult primarily as a member of the state community, with, compared to later periods, relatively little attention paid to or sought for oneself.^[26] By the late Hellenistic period, however, we find that individuals were being, and no doubt wanting to be, widely honored by name, with statues, and on inscriptions for their service as priests, priestesses, kanēphoroi, ergastīnai, and arrēphoroi; for their dedications; and especially for their financial contributions for religious purposes. Fathers and mothers honored their daughters, children honored their parents, the Ekklesia honored priests, and long lists of financial contributors to the Pythaïdes and other religious festivals were inscribed on stones displayed publicly. Put in another way, there were now far more new statues representing identifiable men, women, and children in a sanctuary than there were new statues and dedications representing the deity. This is, of course, just part of the broader trend of Hellenistic Greeks to honor one another with crowns, statues, decrees, and titles for an increasing variety of reasons (no doubt itself another sign of individualism).^[27] But in the context of religion, these types of honors do tend to set the individual apart from the corporate body of citizens worshipping together and through one another in the classical period. More precisely, I think, in Athens it tends to isolate for attention individual families from the corporate body; nearly as many Hellenistic religious honorific decrees stem from or emphasize the family of the honoree as honor the one individual him- or herself. We have seen how many statues and other dedications there are now honoring children, often erected by their parents, and in chapter 6 we saw how many fathers and other family members appointed relatives to religious posts under their jurisdiction. Individuals now wanted and expected public recognition for themselves and their families for their religious services. Counterexamples certainly exist of self-promotion in religious affairs in the classical period and of group identity in the Hellenistic periods, but I would argue that the evidence in aggregate indicates significant new and growing interest in such individual and family honors in the Hellenistic period. Individualism in the religion of Hellenistic Athens was played out through, not apart from, state cult; and, perhaps at the expense of social unity, it involved the recognition of individual families as much or more than that of single people.^[28]

In 167/6 the Romans gave Athens Delos in return for her help in the Third Macedonian War. The Delians were banished from their own island, and suddenly the Athenians were faced with managing the complex and internationally prominent cult structure of the prior inhabitants. Among the existing cults were those of Apollo and Artemis, the particularly Delian cults of Hestia, Zeus Cynthios, and Anios, and also the relatively new cults of Asclepios, the Megaloi Theoi, the Cabeiroi, and Sarapis. As we have seen in chapter 7, the Athenians had recourse to their usual administrative practices and divided the Delian cults into ten units, some having more than one god, and annually selected ten priests from among themselves, one to tend each of the ten cultic units. The Athenians tended to “Atticize” some of these cults, most notably by adding an Athenaia to the Apollonia and by adding or emphasizing an Athena Cynthia alongside Zeus Cynthios. More important, however, some of the annual Athenian priests became personally quite interested in the deities they served, erecting dedications and even contributing major buildings. Athenian priests and laymen showed attention particularly to the cults of Zeus Cynthios and Athena Cynthia, the combined cults of the Theoi Megaloi, Dioscouroi, and the Cabeiroi in the Samothrakeion, and the cult of the Egyptian Isis and Sarapis. By 150 B.C. the Athenians had also allowed the establishment of a cult of the Syrian deities Atargatis and Hadad, and this cult found quick favor among the Athenians themselves. By 112 the deities have been given Greek names, Aphrodite Hagne and Zeus Hadatos, and have an annual Athenian priest. These Athenian priests and Athenian laymen also contributed numerous dedications and major buildings to the sanctuary. In 110/09 even the Athenian Demos, at the request of Aphrodite Hagne, dedicated a building to her on Delos.

The cults of Sarapis and Atargatis seem particularly to have captured the attention of the Athenians, and both are notable in being largely foreign to Athenian traditions. Both had oriental-type cult structures; there were Athenian priests, along with kleidouchoi and kanēphoroi (often relatives of the priest), but foreigners and even slaves served in other capacities. The deities of both cults also could order, through dreams probably, their devotees, their priests, and even the Athenian state to make dedications. On Delos these two cults had also a strongly international following, and in these and some other cults there Athenians had their first experience of worship, side by side, with Syrians, Romans, and citizens of many other states, and with freedmen and slaves. And in several of these cults the Athenians would have found themselves a small minority of the devotees.

The Athenians, I expect, were relatively isolated from much of the Greek and Eastern world during the nearly hundred years of Macedonian dominance and occupation, from the loss of the Lamian War in 322 to their final freedom in 229. There were, of course, philosophers from many Greek states teaching and studying in Athens during this period, but there is little evidence that they influenced Athenian society at large. The closure of Piraeus to the free movement of trade and people was an important determinant, especially in religious matters. It almost certainly inhibited the cosmopolitanism of Athens, in both religious and social terms, in the early Hellenistic period. Delos was, in 167/6, more cosmopolitan in social and political terms, but traditional religion remained very strong for the Delians themselves. The peculiar historical situation of Delos in 167/6, the expulsion of the Delians, the Athenian takeover of the cults, and the swarms of foreign merchants, traders, and sailors favored quick changes in the religious situation there. Eastern cults were promoted at the expense of traditional and local Delian cults, and new foreign cults were welcomed. And the Athenians themselves, living abroad and less restricted by their own domestic religious traditions, appear to have participated energetically in many of these new cults.

When living on Delos the Athenians as priests, other cult officials, or simply as individuals practiced cults like those of Sarapis and Atargatis. But interestingly, these same Athenians—many of whose families we can follow—back in Athens still themselves (or members of their families) continued to follow the old Athenian traditions, serving Athena Polias, Asclepios, and other state deities. There is little evidence that Athenians who had experienced life on Delos then immediately transported back to Athens wholesale the more exotic cults they had practiced when abroad. The importation to Athens of the cult of the Theoi Megaloi was apparently not successful, and only a few private dedications survive for an Athenian Aphrodite Hagne. The real effect on Athenians of the Delian experience was cosmopolitanism, which was in turn to have its real effect on Athenian religion in the rebuilding and perhaps even reconception of many Athenian cults and practices after the devastation of the city by Sulla and his troops in 86 B.C.. For our period the clearest indication, in Athens itself, of this new cosmopolitanism is the admittance, from 123/2 on, of foreigners into the Athenian ephēbeia. In 123/2 only 14 of the 127 ephebes were foreign, but by 102/1 40 of the 141. Since by now the ephebes as a corps were heavily involved in the activities of the oldest and most traditional state cults, the shift means that now foreigners, for the first time in Athenian history, were participating in a regular, programmatic, and long-term manner in native Athenian cults. Foreigners were not as yet officials of cult, but through the ephēbeia Athenian religion itself was beginning to be internationalized. We see also signs of Delian-inspired cosmopolitanism now in the appearance of some Athenians and foreigners worshipping together in Athens in cults of Isis, of Aphrodite Hagne, and of other foreign deities. This incipient cosmopolitanism in Athenian cult would become an important factor in the reconstruction of Athenian religion after Sulla.

On Delos the Athenian religious service at the end of the second century was characterized by multiple offices and even multiple priesthoods (though not in one year), by the high social status of these officeholders, by the often very large and expensive dedications and defrayals of cultic expense by the priests, and by the involvement in the cult of several members of the families of the officeholders. Most significantly, despite our rather extensive evidence there is no indication of exclusive devotion to one cult or one deity. Even those who served Isis and Sarapis or Aphrodite Hagne might, the next year, serve another quite different cult, and their children might well be involved in other cults on Delos or in very traditional cults back in Athens.

These features of Athenian religious activity on Delos can be paralleled in Athens itself and surely reflect the times, politically as well as religiously. The major development in these years in Athens, from ca. 100 to 90 B.C., is that, rather suddenly, fewer individual families participate in the state cult and these fewer families assume much larger financial burdens for religious activities. Eventually Medeios of Piraeus (PA 10098) and Sarapion of Melite (PA 12564), who were also political leaders in a now narrow oligarchy, held multiple religious offices each year and between them provided much of the money required for the major festivals. The close association of financial and cultic support with a few political leaders meant, of course, that the success and future of state cult was now dangerously tied to the political fortunes of these few leaders; this too was a new situation in the religious history of Athens, new at least since the tyranny of Peisistratos in the sixth century. The chaos in religious life just after the forced departure of the anti-Mithridatic Medeios, Sarapion, and their like is reported by Poseidonios of Apamea: sanctuaries were closed, the theater had no gatherings, and the Eleusinian Mysteries were not being celebrated. Quite remarkably it seems to have been the technītai of Dionysos, that guild of internationally experienced actors, musicians, and poets, who for a short time moved into the void. This guild was formed in the 280s and by the beginning of the first century B.C. was playing a major role in Athens’ religious dealings with Delphi and even in the Eleusinian Mysteries. It was they who welcomed Mithridates’ agent at their sanctuary with libations and prayers. Mithridates, another “Dionysos,” was being promoted by the technītai of Dionysos, and he was promising to the Athenians much of what Demetrios Poliorcetes had promised them two hundred years earlier: freedom from political oppression and restoration of the democracy. Had events taken a different turn, no doubt the Athenians would have honored Mithridates, as did other cities, with the same type of divine honors they had given Demetrios. But now, in the beginning of the first century, it was a much more violent world and the Romans were on the scene. Mithridates’ massacre of the Italians in 88 and Sulla’s campaign against him led quickly to the punishment of all pro-Mithridatic states, including Athens. Sulla’s siege of the city and the pillaging of it by his troops in 86 B.C. were devastating to Athenian life, politics, and religion, and it would take the Athens more than two generations to recover. In the rebuilding, Athenian state cult and religion would become quite different. Had Sulla not let his men slaughter the citizens and pillage the city, and had he not systematically destroyed or damaged some of the major political and religious monuments, Athens might have been able to recover from the political and religious anomalies and chaos of the previous decade, as the city had so many times before. But the devastation caused by Sulla in 86 truly brought the end, I believe, to centuries of continuity in much of Athenian religion.

Change is always easier and more interesting to describe than continuity, but I would like to stress, one final time, that the distinguishing feature of Athenian religion in the Hellenistic period is continuity, a conscious continuity of the Lycourgan period with the classical period and an implicit continuity of Hellenistic times with the Lycourgan age.^[29] We have charted several disruptions to the traditional practices and beliefs of the Athenians, disruptions caused usually by foreign potentates and their supporters in Athens. But each time the Athenians freed themselves from the power of these foreigners, they reestablished, not perfectly but to a good degree, their traditional political and religious practices.

In the current state of scholarship it is difficult to compare religion in Hellenistic Athens to that in other cities of either mainland Greece or Asia Minor. Much good work has been done on individual cults and cult practices in various cities, but only rarely have scholars attempted a comprehensive study of the religion of a single city in the Hellenistic or any other period. And thus, with the few exceptions discussed below, cities to which to compare Athens in the Hellenistic period are lacking. Most general studies of religion in Hellenistic times have instead been based largely on literary and philosophical writings culled from throughout the Greek world. These studies tend to overlook the distinctions of place and time that I discussed in the introduction, thereby neglecting significant differences between, for example, second century B.C. Alexandria and Athens and between sources from the third century B.C. and the second century A.D. Many of these studies are also based on the assumption that there was a Panhellenic koinē of religion in the Hellenistic period and that the writings of Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman poets, philosophers, novelists, and other literary figures reflect this koinē. Both assumptions may be mistaken,^[30] and we can now offer Athens as a touchstone for evaluating what these studies commonly attribute to “Hellenistic religion.”

This is not the place to review all that has been attributed to “Hellenistic religion,” but let us examine some recent views of two scholars, one from the area of religious study and one from social and political history, for comparison to the evidence from Athens.^[31] I chose both because they offer lucid, lively, informed, and relatively traditional views of religion in Hellenistic Greece. H. S. Versnel in an excellent essay on Dionysos and Euripides’ Bacchae, in which he argues that Euripides’ Dionysos is “Hellenistic avant la lettre,” offers what he terms nine “well-known features of the religious mentality of the Hellenistic and Roman periods.” ^[32] I give or paraphrase each:

1. Cosmopolitan pretensions and claims to universal worship by individual deities and cults.
2. Miracles and epiphanies serving as evidence of a god’s greatness and as an incentive to worship.
3. Expressions of beatitude (makarismoi) as the effect of the immediate divine presence, here and now, with the interdependence of bliss and devotion and of the liberating qualities of the god.
4. The dogmatic elevation of one god above all others and the concomitant affective exclusion of other gods.
5. The interpretation of worship as personal submission or devotion to the god, even to the effect of being “possessed” or “enslaved” by the deity.
6. The refusal to believe in and, consequently, to honor a particular god.
7. The futility of resisting a god, and the divine triumph over atheists and sinners.
8. The severe punishment of those who “fight the god” (theomachoi).
9. Public confession of guilt toward the god, either as a token of reverence or as an instrument of propaganda or both.

Peter Green in his bold and thought-provoking survey of Hellenistic political, artistic, intellectual, and social history, Alexander to Actium (1990), attempts to place the religion of the time into a much larger intellectual and political context. He draws a very definite line between state and private religion. In the former there is “the steady erosion of the old Olympian pantheon (still accorded traditional public honors, but progressively more peripheral)” (396). Zeus, Athena, and Poseidon “retain their official civic status: their worship and calendar were too deeply embedded in the structure of polis life; they were part of the obsolescent fabric to which Greek city dwellers obstinately clung” (396). But “This did not mean that the gods themselves, in the business of everyday life, were always taken seriously. Ethical and scientific advances had robbed them of many of their original functions as anthropomorphized natural forces, and middle-class city dwellers had long looked askance at their indifference to civic morality” (397). Concerning ruler cult, he found it “Small wonder that, as the years went by, the traditional civic gods were not so much rejected—public ritual has always been the most stubbornly conservative of phenomena—as shunted off into a vague, blissful, remote, Elysian heaven, and left with no direct impact on, or interest in, human existence. Real men had, in the end, outperformed their own anthropomorphic deities” (57). Nevertheless, “We sometimes forget the stubborn, glacial resistance, at a lower level, to what must seem, in retrospect, a general collapse of faith.…Were not the Olympian deities still officially worshipped? Did not every polis retain its traditional divine patron? All true; and yet the image had grown dead and hollow, eaten away at the heart by the boreworms of political impotence, creeping secularism, social fragmentation, loss of cohesive identity” (399, 587).

In the sphere of private religion Green finds, in summary, “that curious underworld of exotic cults and associations, often foreign in origin; of curse tablets, spiked wax dolls, and formulas guaranteed to induce passion or dispose of enemies; of a proliferating variety of demons, friendly or malevolent; of mystery cults, syncretic distillations of Pythagoreanism and Orphism, oracles, miraculous cures, and, above all, astrology” (586). Times had changed:

Olympianism had been strongly bound up with family and polis, but now the individual was adrift in an indifferent world and free to choose his own gods. Not surprisingly, he tended to pick those that could best replace the emotional and cultural support structure that he had lost.…We also find a proliferation of private religious clubs, whose members call themselves Apolloniasts or Sarapiasts, Hermaists or Iobacchi. Again, one senses a desperate reaching-out after identity and community: those who can no longer be meaningfully involved with their society can at least strive for oneness with God. The ties of the polis had broken down, and these clubs enabled persons isolated in the new urban solitude of megalopolis to reach out, through formal worship and shared banquets, not only to a communal deity, but also to one another. (586, 590–91)

Of the period 221–168 B.C., Green notes, “Religious traditionalism, the fear of divine retribution, still had a strong grip on the majority of Athenians, and fostered, in an increasingly godless age, remarkable susceptibility to any exotic cult with emotional drawing power” (399).

These brief quotations to indicate Green’s and Versnel’s positions do little justice to the detailed arguments, evidence, and scholarly traditions on which they are based. They do serve, however, as good markers of current (and often past) views of Hellenistic religion in general, and they can be measured against what we have found for Athens.

For most of what Versnel and Green describe there is no evidence in Hellenistic, pre-Roman Athens: of claims by deities to universal worship (except perhaps for the late developing and, at this time, very small cult of Isis); of markarismoi-oriented devotion; of the elevation of one god to the exclusion of the others; of personal submission or servility to the worshipped god; of worship through public confession of guilt; of a proliferating variety of demons, good or bad; of individuals turning from state cult to private cult; of Pythagorean- or Orphic-based cults; or of astrology as a practice and not a part of a philosophical system. Yet other of Versnel’s and Green’s “Hellenistic” elements had been evident in the classical period in Athens, and indeed some were more evident in the classical period than later: miracles and epiphanies causing foundation of or new interest in cult (more commonly attested for classical Athens);^[33] the refusal to believe in a deity, followed by the deity’s anger and ultimate triumph over the rebel (a theme of classical tragedy, unattested in Hellenistic Athens); the magic of curse tablets and “spiked wax dolls” (to judge from archaeological finds, common in Athens of the fourth century but almost nonexistent in the third and second centuries);^[34] oracles;^[35] and miraculous (i.e., Asclepios’) cures.^[36]

Some of the religious elements that Versnel and Green put into the Hellenistic period are, I think, characteristic of some cults and some levels of religion in Athens in the Roman period: that is, after, in some cases centuries after, the battle of Actium in 31 B.C. In more general terms, even a cursory look at the date, nature, and milieu of the sources commonly used by scholars writing on “Hellenistic religion” will indicate that much that is usually termed “Hellenistic” in Greek religion is in fact Graeco-Roman, from Roman imperial times.^[37] Although seeds may have been sown in the Hellenistic period, these new plants did not really appear and certainly did not flourish until Roman times; to do so, they quite probably needed the political and social environment of the Roman imperial world, not that of the Greek Hellenistic world. We may be making serious errors in our understanding of the history of Greek religion and of the history of religion in the Mediterranean world by retrojecting these Graeco-Roman developments into the Hellenistic Greek world, thus creating the impression that they appeared centuries before we have evidence for them. We would certainly be wrong to impose them on Hellenistic Athens.

If we turn from the more general studies of “Hellenistic religion” to those of the cults and deities of specific cities, we find much that corroborates what we have found for Athens. This, again, is not the place nor am I the person to survey all that has been discovered for all Greek cities of the Hellenistic period, but we have one excellent source in Fritz Graf’s Nordionische Kulte (1985). Graf exhaustively collects, dates, and surveys what is known of the cults and deities of the Ionian city-states of Chios, Erythrai, Clazomenai, and Phocaia for the archaic, classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. The formal developments of the two best-documented cities, Chios and Erythrai, parallel, in the Hellenistic period, what was happening in Athens. Each had its own elaborate cult structure, the product of its own heritage and of influences from its neighbors, but in the new developments in the Hellenistic period and in the continuity with the classical period these city-states are similar to one another and to Athens. For Chios the various classical state cults of Athena, Zeus, Apollo, and Dionysos continued to be practiced in the Hellenistic period. The ephebes training in the gymnasia made dedications to Hermes and Heracles and performed in agonistic festivals in their honor. In the third century, interestingly, young women performed contests for Leto, an activity for which the girl might be publicly honored with a dedication not unlike those honoring girls in contemporary Athens. Asclepios appears early in the Hellenistic period, as in Athens worshipped sometimes by a private cult association. Aristocratic genē on Chios, as in Athens, maintained long-standing “private” cults in their regions of predominance on the island.^[38] The Egyptian gods, as at Delos, were introduced in the second or first century B.C. by private individuals. Otherwise, private cults—especially those of the more exotic oriental deities, some of which are found in the Roman period—are noticeably lacking in the Hellenistic period. No cult of Hellenistic rulers is attested, and the cult of the goddess Roma is introduced here relatively early—sometime after the peace of Apamea in 188, the Roman intervention so important for this part of the world and this island.^[39]

For Erythrai the epigraphical evidence is far better in both quantity and quality. Fifty-four priesthoods (including five of Athena and seven of Apollo) are listed on one inscription (IE 201) of ca. 300–260, and all served cults with apparent archaic or classical origins.^[40] The one clear exception is that of Alexander the Great, who gave the city its independence and hence was and was honored as a genuine benefactor. His cult was quite probably founded during his lifetime and, unlike in Athens, lasted into Roman times. On a very fragmentary Erythraian sacred calendar of ca. 188–150 B.C. (IE 207) we have further evidence of ruler cult, with monthly offerings: one for Antiochos I and, as on Chios and no doubt for the same reasons, one for Roma. Elsewhere we learn that Seleucos I received a cult and festival associated, like that of Demetrios Poliorcetes in Athens, with the Dionysia.^[41] Clearly Erythrai, unlike Athens and Chios, had throughout the Hellenistic period a strong and continuous cult of the Macedonian kings. The Erythraians also had one of the earliest (early third century B.C.) attested cults of Demos, but this Demos was, unlike in Athens, often associated with deities such as the Dioscouroi and Zeus Soter. On the second century B.C. calendar appear also the abstract deities Homonoia (“Concord”), Arete (“Virtue”), and Nike (“Victory”), all quite possibly Hellenistic in origin. Asclepios came to Erythrai ca. 370 B.C. the Egyptian cult of Sarapis, Isis, and Anubis, at the end of the second century B.C. Private cult in Erythrai, as Graf says, remained “konservativ,” limited to the traditional gods of Greek belief. Only in the third century A.D. do we find attested exotic cults like that of the Persian Anait.

These two cities are not, of course, documented nearly as well as Athens, but the pattern appears much the same. They all display maintenance of traditional and classical cults throughout the Hellenistic period; some ruler cult, the extent and success of it probably depending on local circumstances; late (i.e., second century B.C.) introduction of the Egyptian gods; no evidence for other, even more exotic oriental gods; no evidence for the rise and little evidence even for the presence of private cult standing apart from the traditional units of the city, tribe, family, and so on; and some indication of increased recognition and perhaps activity of women and children in religious cult.

The sources for the religion of Hellenistic Chios and Erythrai are largely those available, but in far greater quantity, for Hellenistic Athens: inscriptions and occasional (usually passing) remarks in historians and geographical writers. What these sources for Chios, Erythrai, and Athens record is what W. K. C. Guthrie called “the routine of religion which was accepted by most of the citizens…as a matter of course” (1950, 258); what Peter Green, much less charitably, speaks of as “the obsolescent fabric to which Greek city dwellers obstinately clung” and “the stubborn mindless glacis of public faith” (1990, 396, 596); and what I would term the “popular religion” of the time—that is, the religion actually practiced by the vast majority of the citizens, dwelling in cities or not, in the Hellenistic period. Since we have been led by those writing on Hellenistic social, philosophical, and intellectual history to expect so much religious change, so many new deities, and such fundamentally different relationships between human and gods and between individual and state religion, it is important for those concerned with religious history and its postclassical and pre-Christian periods to recognize how very strongly the classical traditions maintained themselves, in Athens certainly and I expect in many other Greek states as well, to the very end of the Hellenistic period.

Notes