Introduction

Religion in Hellenistic Athens, like Greek religion in the classical period and Christianity at later times, was a complex system of deities, rituals, and beliefs that responded to human needs. As the needs and circumstances of the Athenians changed, so changed their religion, but very gradually. I emphasize the word “change,” a neutral term, because the understanding of Hellenistic religion and of Athenian religion in particular has been significantly impeded by value judgments either condemning them as degenerating from the classical ideal or praising them for making progress toward Christian conceptions. In the most general terms, the devaluation of Hellenistic religion has led to cynicism about the motives and institutions of the worshippers of the period and to a failure to recognize sufficiently the continuity with classical religion. The search for proto-Christian elements similarly neglects the body of evidence showing continuity with classical religion and inclines scholars to overvalue or misinterpret what may appear as new or different in Hellenistic religion. These judgments can be combined in such a way that centuries of Hellenistic religion are treated as a mere transition period between two dynamic and fulfilling religious systems, that of classical Greek religion and that of early Christianity. According to this view, in the Hellenistic period classical Greek religion, which was closely tied to the political unit of the city-state, progressively meant less and less to the citizens as the city-states lost their independence and power; the citizens turned progressively more to private cults and beliefs; these private cults, in turn, were often imported from the East and offered more personal, direct relationships between individuals and the deities; and, finally, the collapse of state religion and the new, personal orientation of Hellenistic cults prepared the ground for Christianity.^[1]

Even more misleading than value judgments are two fundamental methodological errors in the study of Hellenistic religion that have distorted our conception of it: the failure to distinguish religious phenomena and evidence by date and by place. If for these purposes we date the “Hellenistic period” from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to Octavian’s victory at Actium in 31 B.C., we find that much of the evidence commonly used to describe religion in this period is drawn from the Roman imperial period, from the first, second, and even third centuries A.D. The Greek world under the Roman emperors became very different—socially, economically, politically, and, I would claim, religiously—from what it had been in the Hellenistic period, and it is simply wrong to impose, for example, the description of the Isis cult taken from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (second century A.D.) on the Isis cult on Delos in the second century B.C., or the musings of the hypochondriac Aelius Aristides (second century A.D.) on the Asclepios cult of third century B.C. Athens. In volume 2 of his monumental Geschichte der griechische Religion (1974), Martin Nilsson made a strong distinction, in theory and in the organization of his book, between religion in Hellenistic and in Roman times, and our understanding of Hellenistic religion has been set back by his successors’ failure to maintain this distinction.^[2]

Nilsson also argued that we should recognize differences in religion among the old mainland Greek cities, the old Greek colonies in Asia Minor, and the cities founded much later by Macedonian generals and kings in Asia Minor. That is, in our study of Hellenistic religion we must maintain distinctions of place as well as of time. Even for Nilsson this distinction, because he was describing religion topically, was unwieldy and nearly impossible to maintain, but it needs to be reasserted and maintained. Otherwise we are inclined to impose, for example, a religious belief or cult known from second century B.C. Alexandria on contemporary Athens or, even worse, to imagine it part of a religious system, a religious koinē that all or most Greeks of the Hellenistic period shared. Again, individual cities in the Mediterranean area even within the Hellenistic period differed significantly in their societies, economics, traditions, politics, and religion. To neglect these fundamental distinctions of place and time is to create a Hellenistic “religion” that was never practiced at one time or one place by anyone.

My purpose is to examine Athenian practiced religion of the Hellenistic period—that is, the religion of one people in one period—and to note changes within that period. I also intend to examine it on its own merits, to see how it reflected the constant and changing needs of both the state and the individual. My study of these two hundred and fifty years of religion in Athens, from the death of Alexander in 323 to the sack of Athens by the Roman general Sulla in 86 B.C., indicates that changes did occur, but that they were not nearly so dramatic or linear, or even necessarily of the same nature, as the common conceptions of Hellenistic religion would suggest. We require, I think, far greater precision than we have had about what changes occurred, when they occurred, where they occurred, and, especially, why they occurred and whom they affected. In the conclusion, when we have completed our survey of Athenian religion, we will attempt to relate religion in Hellenistic Athens to current and more general views of Hellenistic religion.

To determine change we need a base, a status against which activities and events of later periods can be measured. For this base I have chosen the ten years following the battle of Chaeroneia (338 B.C.) when, under the leadership of Lycourgos, the Athenians reaffirmed and, one might say, consolidated their religious (as well as other) beliefs and institutions on the classical model. In chapter 1 I describe from the relatively rich documentation of that period fundamental personal religious beliefs and state cultic institutions and activities. In subsequent chapters, I set out, in chronological order, reasonably distinct historical periods, to show both elements of continuity and change and the context in which they occurred. This diachronic orientation will, I trust, contribute to understanding the sequence and nature of change in Athenian Hellenistic religion. I attempt to note with some precision the first datable example of each new phenomenon. In this I take particular caution against retrojecting data from later to earlier times. For example, we know that a corps of Athenian young men aged eighteen to twenty (ephebes) served together for two years of training already in the Lycourgan period, and we know that in the second century B.C. these ephebes had one year of service with a full and large program of religious activities. It is very inviting, but ultimately unhelpful, to retroject the activities known for ephebes of the second century upon those of the fourth century. My procedure is rather to give what evidence we have for the fourth-century ephebes and then later to introduce that for the second-century ephebes and to note the changes. New evidence may well change the picture one day, but regularly to use late evidence to describe or understand earlier periods is quite likely to cause us to miss real changes and to fail to make connections with political and social situations that contributed to those changes. For this study it seemed better to let the evidence speak for itself in chronological sequence, however lacunose it might be. I conclude the study with a review of the major religious developments in Athens and an attempt to relate these developments to trends in religion found elsewhere in the Greek world in the Hellenistic period.

Continuity in religion is the norm, but some particularly Greek concepts promoted this continuity at Athens and elsewhere in the ancient Greek world. First is the fundamental Greek belief that, in religious matters, one should act κατὰ τὰ πάτρια (“in the ancestral way”). This belief, found in the earliest to the latest Greek prose and poetry, naturally led to religious conservatism of a high degree. A second Greek belief also came into play, that it was “impious” to “dishonor” a god. One might actively worship—that is, “honor”—a god, and presumably that cult thrived. But to disestablish a cult, to close a sanctuary, tear down the temenos wall, dismantle the altar, and to, for example, farm the property or to use it for other secular or religious purposes would be actively to “dishonor” the god, and that was always thought to be dangerous. Cults might be allowed to repose in benign neglect, but we have no record of a decision to eliminate a cult not devoted to the worship of a king or other such political figure. Even major state cults might suffer, at certain periods, benign neglect. In such cases priests or priestesses would continue to serve, annual festivals would continue to be celebrated, but revenues, attendance at festivals, the number of dedications, new construction, and, in general, the status of the cult might be diminished as the citizens found the needs once provided for by this deity better served by another. But the cult itself, because of the ever-present danger of “dishonoring” the god, would not be eliminated. The result was, in Athens and elsewhere, that as the years went by the number of cults increased but very few cults disappeared entirely.^[3] Cults, once founded, tended, like departments and programs in a modern government bureaucracy, to live on and on, some no longer having a significant role in state religion, some virtually forgotten. Also as in a government bureaucracy, new cults could be added to the existing structure with no attempt or thought to eliminate redundant cults.

Some cults become lost for us, and that means that they disappear from the epigraphical, archaeological, and literary record. Presumably, in some cases the cult did in fact come to an end, and there were no longer priests or priestesses, a sanctuary, sacrifices, dedications, or worshippers. For some, cult activity and prosperity may have slipped below the level of public notice, with members unable to afford inscriptions or attract the attention of orators or historians. Some cults disappear for us for centuries, only to reappear in the late Hellenistic or Roman periods. For them the question will be whether the reappearance is in fact a new foundation, the revival of a largely dormant institution, or simply another attestation of a cult or festival not likely, by its nature, to have left a continuous record.

In Athens exclusively foreign cults disappeared when their foreign devotees left the city; citizen cults would die completely only when, as in 200 B.C., sanctuaries were pillaged and destroyed by foreign invaders and not rebuilt. Apart from these rare occurrences, change in Hellenistic religion has two forms: the introduction of new cults and a changing degree of importance among existing cults. The former is relatively easy to document, but care must be taken to determine who participated in the new cults and whom they affected. Changes in the relative status of existing cults is much more difficult to determine and can only be traced, often quite hypothetically, in cases where new or existing cults seem to be assuming functions once commonly centered in another cult. Although the sources and evidence are never adequate to understand fully these changes, we need to point to what evidence there is if we wish to understand how Hellenistic Athenian religion came to differ from its classical predecessor.

The nature of the evidence also makes the study of change in Hellenistic Athenian religion difficult. Most of the evidence, particularly from the later periods, is from inscriptions, and, although they are fairly abundant in comparison with those of other cities and can often be exactly dated, they still provide a very lacunose record in terms of time and subject. Attestations of a festival might be, for example, a hundred years apart, and then only the briefest mention of the real or planned occurrence of the festival. And for religious matters these inscriptions provide only the external details, the names of priests and priestesses, the occurrence of sacrifices and expenses therefrom, inventories of dedications, changes in cult procedures, and such matters. Much or most of my description and argument will depend on this very partial record, and I, like all who work with epigraphical material, recognize the risks and dangers inherent in this. A newly discovered epigraphical text, a new fact, will always have the potential to explode an argument or conclusion. But such is the way of progress in the historical study of ancient religion.

After the age of Lycourgos we have little to reveal the personal beliefs and devotion of Athenian worshippers, and I present that little I found. There is little evidence for continuity in this regard, but there is also little evidence for change, and we must beware of unsupported claims that, somehow, the religious “mentality” of the Athenians underwent significant changes in these years. Here we must be particularly cautious with statements of philosophers and other “intellectuals” who practiced at Athens. Most were not Athenians and did not participate in Athenian religion, and we need to consider their role in Athenian society and what influence they appear to have had on that society. Let me state here that my purpose is a history of religion in Hellenistic Athens as it was practiced in cult by the Athenians. The theories about religion and the gods and the comments on religious matters by philosophers, themselves extremely interesting and important areas of inquiry, are investigated only to the extent that they appear to have affected the religion practiced by the Athenians. In philosophy and theology change is the norm, but not so in cult and religious belief. There the norm is a continuity that we will see unmistakably in religious institutions and ritual. And we should assume similar continuity in religious beliefs and attitudes unless there is clear evidence to the contrary.

I see in the history of Athenian religion from 338 to 86 B.C. a more or less regular pattern: after 338 B.C. the Athenians, under the leadership of Lycourgos, as part of a general national revival, reasserted their traditional beliefs, rehabilitated their major sanctuaries, and placed their cults on a firmer financial basis. In the course of the next 250 years Athenian religion was affected by various external and internal pressures for change, but as each pressure was removed, the Athenians, explicitly or implicitly, returned to the Lycourgan model. The return, however, was never and could never be complete. Precedents had been set and attitudes on some subjects had been changed, and the effects of this become apparent in the reaction to the next set of pressures. But always, when the Athenians were free to act as they chose, there was at least a putative restoration of τὰ πάτρια (“the ancestral ways”) as they were defined in the Lycourgan era. This repeated pattern of τὰ πάτρια, dislocation, and partial restoration of τὰ πάτρια parallels political developments in the period where the pattern is democracy, dislocation caused usually by foreign influence, and partial restoration of the traditional democracy. It will not be surprising that the religious and political patterns tend to be waves on the same frequency, because dislocations in both were caused largely by foreign influences and restorations in both tended to occur when the Athenians, however briefly, could manage their government and lives as they pleased.

The major influences for change in Athenian religion of the Hellenistic period I see to be political events and dislocation of populations. The political events were essentially Athenian domestic reactions to foreign pressures, as when, for example, they chose of their own accord to award divine honors to Antigonos Monophthalmos and his son Demetrios in 307 B.C. Such events, though relatively few and more or less explicable from current religious beliefs and practices, served as precedents for the future and, despite periodic reactions against them, eventually determined the shape of Athenian state religion. More important than these relatively infrequent events were, however, dislocations of populations. For old Greek city-states like Athens, religion was almost indissolubly tied up with their local deities, shrines, and cult practices and was almost without exception limited to their citizens and members of their households. A Milesian, for example, could move to Athens and live as a metic, but he would be unable to continue his Milesian religious customs and would be able to participate in Athenian religion only in the most limited, superficial ways. Some Egyptian and other oriental cults, unlike most Greek cults, appear to have been relatively easily transplanted, and this may be one explanation for their growing popularity in the period. The movement of peoples from their homelands, accelerating in the course of the Hellenistic period, was, I submit, the major force for change in personal, practiced religion, both in Athens and elsewhere. The initial stages seem of minimal importance in Athens, with, for example, a small group of Egyptians worshipping their Isis or a similar group of Citians from Cyprus worshipping their Aphrodite Ourania. The full force of population dislocation will become clear, however, when we examine Athenian relationships with Delos after 166. With the Delians expelled from their island, with Athenians administering religious affairs on Delos and returning to Athens after their years of service there, we shall see in both cities signs of religious change, of the explosion of foreign cults and Athenian participation in them, of syncretism, and of some (but not all) other elements commonly associated with Hellenistic religion. Spiritual changes and changed personal beliefs resulted from exposure to and participation in these foreign cults, and for Athenians this exposure and participation began with their stays on Delos and with the resulting permanent or temporary separation from their own, inherited cults and religious traditions. A very unusual set of circumstances involving religious and social affairs on Delos when the Athenians occupied it, their administration of Delian cults, and their return to Athens all contributed to bringing “Hellenistic religion” to Athens. The effects, however, were much greater on Athenians during their stays on Delos, for in Athens, even as Athenians who administered and participated in the cults of Delos returned home, traditional Athenian religious cults and structures still predominated. I argue, however, that Athens was finally opened to Hellenistic religious influences from the East by the experience on Delos.

On technical matters: the spelling of Greek names here, as everywhere, is inconsistent, but I aim to be consistently inconsistent. Greek personal names I generally transliterate, but with “c” for kappa and “ch” for chi: hence “Lycourgos,” not “Lykourgos.” I am reluctant, however, to make strangers of very old friends: hence “Aeschylus” and not “Aiskhulos” or “Aischylos.” The epithets of deities I generally transliterate more strictly because their etymological significance thus emerges more clearly. For the names of the Attic demes I follow Traill 1975. For the abbreviations of authors’ names and the titles of their writings, I follow The Oxford Classical Dictionary (2nd ed.). The translations throughout are my own, and I indicate by square brackets [ ] passages of restored Greek, by curved brackets ( ) supplements I have made to clarify the meaning. To make further inquiry easier and to distinguish between homonymous individuals I give most Athenians their PA (Kirchner, Prosopographia Attica) or their APF (Davies, Athenian Propertied Families) numbers. These numbers will also help in the consultation of the invaluable new Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, vol. 2, by Michael Osborne and Sean Byrne (1994).

Most of the hundreds of inscriptions cited in the text and notes have been edited, reedited, emended, and commented upon by a number of scholars in a wide variety of publications. Many have long bibliographic trails, and I have attempted to reduce where possible references to the inscriptions themselves and to discussions of them to the citations in Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (SEG), the annual survey of epigraphical scholarly work. The cross-referencing system of the appendix will lead from the SEG reference to the original publication. On occasion a single SEG entry gives accounts of several publications, and for these one should turn directly to SEG.

The year dates given to events and documents in this study are based ultimately upon the lists of eponymous archons for whom the Athenians “named” their years. The sequential list of archons for the Hellenistic period, after many years of painstaking work by scholars, is now mostly secure. Some uncertainties remain, however, and in particular John Morgan’s recent work indicates that several archons of the late third century may be dated one year too early. When his work is published, revisions to the dates I have given may have to be made, but they will in no way, I think, affect the conclusions to be drawn about religious matters. And, finally, I regret that Christian Habicht’s Athen: Die Geschichte der Stadt in hellenistischer Zeit (Munich, 1995) and Robert Parker’s Athenian Religion: A History (Oxford, 1996) have appeared too late to be incorporated into this study.

On this foray into the Hellenistic period I have had the pleasant sense of treading in the footsteps of three of my teachers, Paul L. MacKendrick at the University of Wisconsin and Sterling Dow and Zeph Stewart of Harvard University, and of their teachers, Arthur Darby Nock and William Scott Ferguson. In recent years I have been helped immeasurably by Christian Habicht and Stephen Tracy, both of whom have read the manuscript at various stages, have saved me from errors great and small, and have pointed me in important new directions. Glenn Bugh and Diskin Clay read parts of the manuscript in its early phases and contributed much. In 1995–96, as a Sesquicentennial Associate of the University of Virginia and Whitehead Visiting Professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, I had not only the opportunity, environment, and library necessary to complete this work but also colleagues such as Judith Binder, Alan Boegehold, John Camp, and Carol Lawton who daily enriched my knowledge of religion in both classical and Hellenistic Athens and had many immediate, practical suggestions to offer. To them, to the director of the American School, William D. E. Coulson, and to the staff of the School I owe much.

Notes