1. On this aspect of the ephēbeia in Athens and elsewhere, see Nilsson 1967–74, 2:61–67.

2. Golden 1990, esp. 41–50, 65–72, 76–79.

3. Pollitt 1986, 128–130; Herter 1927.

4. Those who have studied the age of Lycourgos have tended, quite naturally, to focus their attention on it for its own sake, or, occasionally, on its relationship to the past, to the classical period. Few have considered its importance in the area of religion as a seminal time for the future. Sally Humphreys has addressed the issue most directly (1985, 1986), but even then in passing remarks. She sees, as elements of Hellenistic religion in the age of Lycourgos, the following: (1) the young are participating more extensively in cult; (2) priests are supplementing funds for sacrifices in their cults; (3) interest in cult is moving from the cult center (the Acropolis) to the edges (Eleusis and Oropos); and (4) the introduction of foreign cults shows a “growing taste for the exotic in religious ritual, a feeling that only what was wild, strange, and altogether different from ordinary life was truly religious” (1986, 108). I would disagree with or limit each of these propositions. First, the young were not participating significantly more in cult than they had in the classical period, but, as we have just seen, the mechanism for this change, the ephēbeia, was put into place. There is, however, no evidence that the ephebes in the Lycourgan period were making a major contribution to Athenian religious life. Such a claim is possible only by retrojecting late-second- and first-century B.C. ephebic activity into the Lycourgan period, and the evidence does not warrant this. Second, some individuals were making financial contributions—as priests, officials, or as private citizens—to religious cults and in particular to the construction of religious buildings, probably at the urging of Lycourgos himself, and there is very little evidence of this (except for chorēgiai) from earlier periods. But the practice had apparently not, as it would later, become institutionalized in the sense of priests and other religious officials being routinely expected to use their own funds. Third, there is no evidence that religious interest in the Lycourgan period was moving from the Acropolis to the geographical “edges.” Eleusis was prosperous and popular throughout the classical period, and the Athenians had always laid claim to Oropos. That they reacquired it in 335 and developed the cult there is an accident of history. Lycourgos himself was the priest of Poseidon-Erechtheus on the Acropolis and was by family and personally devoted to the cult of Athena Polias; much of his sacred building and restructuring of cult featured her cult. If anything it was a period of reassertion of the centrality of Acropolis cults. Lycourgos’ interest in Piraeus can be explained militarily and economically, and there is no indication that development there was at the expense of Acropolis or Agora cults. And, finally, the introduction of cults of Isis and Aphrodite Ourania for a few foreigners in Piraeus would have had virtually no effect on state or private religion. The impact of foreign cults in Athens lay far, far in the future.

5. On the nature of “safety” and “saving gods” in this period, see Z. Stewart 1977, 551–57. On the terms “Soter” and “Euergetes” as applied to both gods and men, see Nock 1972, 720–35, esp. 720–27. On the relatively high proportion of new festivals founded for such “saving gods” in Greek cities in the Hellenistic period, see Chaniotis 1995, 153. For an excellent summary of the physical, political, economic, and other dangers that Greeks of the mainland were subject to in the Hellenistic period, see Nilsson 1967–74, 2:42–51.

6. For the phrase “safety of the city” or “of the Demos” reflecting services rendered to Athenians during and after their revolt from Demetrios Poliorcetes in 287/6, see Shear 1978, 71 n. 201. For σωτηρία τῆς πόλεως as a technical term involving debates and decrees concerning the physical protection and general welfare of the state, see Rhodes 1972, 231–35.

7. Green, in contrasting the Hellenistic and classical periods, speaks of the “special kind of confidence that only self-determination can produce” (1990, 53).

8. A. Stewart (1979, 27) speaks of the period 261–229 as an “almost total cultural hiatus.” For more general accounts of the period in economic and social terms, see Day 1942, 4–14, 23–26; Rostovtzeff 1941, 215–18; Ferguson 1911, 182–85.

9. On Piraeus under Macedonian domination, see Taylor 1993, 214–26; Garland 1987, 45–53.

10. Schmidt 1991, 43–44.

11. As Green puts it, the elimination of such liturgies was “one more nail in the coffin of individual civic pride, of personal involvement in the affairs of the polis ” (1990, 46).

12. Cf. Green (1990, 527) on the “increasing trend toward professionalism: one more symptom of that move away from all-round amateur involvement that had been the hallmark of the polis in its classical heyday; one more similarity with our own age, a world of spectator sports, or organized shows, of passive, non-participating audiences.”

13. For the development of Hellenistic ruler cult and its relationship to contemporary beliefs about gods and heroes, see Price 1984, 23–40; Z. Stewart 1977, 562–77; Nilsson 1967–74, 2:132–85.

14. F. Walbank 1987, 380.

15. On this important point, see Tarn and Griffith 1952, 52–54, who, however, view ruler cult exclusively as political: “It had nothing to do with religious feeling.” Significantly, they comment: “The Olympians conferred no personal salvation, no hope of immortality, little spirituality.” If that is our definition of “religious feeling,” classical Greek religion lacked it also.

16. Cf. Z. Stewart 1977, 565.

17. On the date of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, see Kennedy 1991, 6.

18. For a recent example of drawing such a distinction, see Green 1990, 402–3.

19. Athens’ relationships with one such tribal eponym can best be understood from Habicht’s survey (1990a 1994, 184–201) of her benefactions from and honors to Attalos I and the members of his family who succeeded him as king of Pergamon. Attalos and his successors are “kings” not “gods,” and they are awarded human, not “godlike,” honors.

20. For a study of the changing styles of Athenian sculpture during the Hellenistic period, of the negative effect on Athenian sculpture and sculptors of the Macedonian occupation, and of the revival after 229 and especially after 167/6, all in many ways offering intriguing analogies to religious changes in these times, see A. Stewart 1979.

21. Tarn and Griffith (1952, 93–95) note that most private clubs, religious or secular, of the Hellenistic period were for foreign, not citizen, residents of a state.

22. On these cults, see chapters 5, pp. 145–46, and 6, pp. 203–06. On the Amphiarastai of this period, see above, chapter 5, p. 150.

23. For a general survey of the spread of foreign cults in the Hellenistic period, properly broken down by deity, date, and region, see Nilsson 1967–74, 2:119–31.

24. For the rise of individualism in general in the Hellenistic period, see Green 1990, 337, 567, 587–91, 602, 609; in Athenian sculpture, A. Stewart 1979, passim, but esp. 115–26, 141; in philosophy and its Athenian environment, Long 1974, 2–4, 163.

25. Tarn and Griffith 1952, 338.

26. Demosthenes (23.198) noticed a similar difference between his time and the early fifth century when discussing “honors” given by the state: “There is no one of that time who would say that the sea battle at Salamis belonged to Themistocles. No, he would say it belonged to the Athenians. Nor that the Battle of Marathon belonged to Miltiades; rather it belonged to the city. But now many say that Timotheos took Corcyra, that Iphicrates cut down the Spartan force, that Chabrias won the sea battle at Naxos.”

27. On this trend in Athens and especially through portrait sculpture, see A. Stewart 1979, passim, esp. 115–26. On the nature and spread of such honors throughout the Hellenistic world, see Habicht 1995.

28. “Individualism” in religion for a foreigner living in Athens would have been quite different from that for a citizen, of course. There is very little evidence for the former, but Graf (1995) offers valuable comments on the well-documented case of the religious activities of Artemidoros of Perge when he lived in Thera.

29. For studies that emphasize the importance of the continuity from Hellenistic to classical religion, see Z. Stewart 1977 (Athens in particular, 517–19); Nilsson 1967–74, vol. 2 passim, but esp. 1–10. Note also the recent comments of Graf 1995.

30. On the latter point and on the tendency to compare Athens of the classical period not to Athens of a later period, but to what may be found of Hellenistic religion elsewhere, see Z. Stewart 1977, 505–6.

31. For other, very recent specialized studies on religion in Hellenistic Greece, see, on the structure and nature of festivals and particularly on the attested Athenian festivals, Chaniotis 1995; on honors for the dead, especially in civic cult, Herrman 1995.

32. Versnel 1990, 189–205.

33. Pfister 1924 collected the examples of epiphanies from throughout the Greek and Roman world, making important distinctions of terminology and distinctions between those epiphanies described in epic and other literature, between those in dreams and in person, and between cultic and noncultic contexts. We have noted the dreams associated with Asclepios and some oriental deities on Delos (chapter 7, pp. 223, 229, and 8. p. 265.) but, apart from them, no epiphanies are recorded for Hellenistic Athens. For classical Athens, the cult of Pan was founded because of the god’s appearance to Pheidippides in 490 B.C. (Hdt. 6.105; Paus. 1.28.4, 8.54.6; Suda s.v. “ Ἵππίας ”) and that of the hero Echetlaios for his appearance at the Battle of Marathon (Paus. 1.32.5). On these and on other matters related to the introduction of new gods in the classical period, see Garland 1992. On the general lack of ephiphanies, especially of gods as contrasted to heroes, in classical Athenian religion, see Mikalson 1991, 21, 65. In this regard one should note also Nilsson’s (1967–74, 2:183–84) discussion of the title ἐπιφανές in Hellenistic ruler cult.

34. Without an archaeological context these curse tablets are difficult to date. Therefore Wünsch (1897) in his early collection of Attic tablets offered dates for only 21 of 220 whole or fragmentary tablets: ten (#26, 38, 47–50, 78, 89, 100, 107) he put into the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.; two (#72–73) before the end of the third century B.C.; one (#57) in early third century B.C.; and six (#31, 35, 36, 60–62) into the Roman period. Jordan (1985) records Attic curse tablets for which there is clear archaeological evidence for dating, #1–14 from the Cerameicos and #20–38 from the Agora. All the Cerameicos tablets are from fifth or fourth century B.C. From the Agora one (#20) is fourth century B.C., one (#21) is first century A.D., and all the rest are from the third century A.D. Of all the fifty-four Athenian tablets in Jordan’s list, only two (#15, 49) may date to the third century B.C. (or fourth), none to second or first century B.C. From the finds to date, in Athens the Hellenistic period was not a time of the efflorescence of such tablets. Quite the contrary: the use of curse tablets then was negligible compared to both earlier and later periods. Similarly, in Athens datable lead “voodoo dolls” associated with curses date to the fifth and fourth century B.C., one possibly to third century B.C., none later (for a list, see Faraone 1991, 200–201). The distribution of Athenian curse tablets may not be unusual. A survey of the ca. 150 non-Athenian curse tablets in Jordan’s inventory shows more than twice as many attributed to sixth, fifth, and fourth century B.C. as to the Hellenistic period. On the nature and use of such tablets and dolls throughout the Greek and Roman world, see Gager 1992.

35. Of the seventy-five Delphic oracles deemed “historical” by Fontenrose (1978, 244–67), twenty-three were directed to Athenians or the Athenian state. Seven (H1–3, 8–11) are from the fifth century B.C.; nine (H12, 18, 21, 24, 27–30, 33) are from the fourth century B.C., all before the death of Alexander; only two (H51, 57) are Hellenistic; and five (H58, 59, 64, 66, 75) are from the Roman period. On the somewhat limited role of the Delphic and other oracles in the Hellenistic period, see Nilsson 1967–74, 2:103–13, 229–31.

36. “Miracle cures” are, of course, at least as old as the cult of Asclepios, and that brings us to the mid–or late sixth century B.C. in Epidauros and to 420/19 in Athens. The four inscriptions (IG IV^[2] 1.121–124) from Epidauros that offer our first written descriptions of such cures have drawn great attention and are a staple of discussions of religion in the Hellenistic period. The inscriptions date from the second half of the fourth century B.C. but probably collect and remodel earlier material. Many—perhaps all—of the tales may thus be classical. In a sense these inscriptions are just the verbal narrative of events implied in the earlier votive plaques, reliefs, and dedications of body parts found in Asclepios’ sanctuaries since their beginnings. As such they stand much closer to the classical traditions than to the ruminations of the second-century A.D. orator and hypochondriac Aelius Aristides to which they are often compared. On the Epidaurian “cure” inscriptions, see now LiDonnici 1989.

37. On the critical need to distinguish between Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman sources in the study of Hellenistic religion, see Z. Stewart 1977, 504 n. 1; Nilsson 1967–74, vol. 2.

38. For the continuing importance of Athenian aristocratic genē in religious cults in the Hellenistic period, see MacKendrick 1969.

39. On the importance of Apamea see Graf 1985, 17.

40. Possible exceptions are Agathe Tyche and Eirene. The leasing of the priesthoods recorded in this text is not known for Hellenistic Athens or other mainland cities. It was limited to the Greek cities of Asia Minor and the adjoining islands. On such sale or leasing of priesthoods, see Graf 1985, 149–53; Z. Stewart 1977, 516–17; Nilsson, 1967–74, 2:77–82.

41. For the contributions of the Seleucids to Erythrai, see Graf 1985, 158.