Ancient Greek Religion

There is no ancient Greek word for religion in the modern sense, and no institution corresponding to a church. What existed were the customary honours owed to gods, performed by a household, a village, a kin group, a trade or a city. The term usually translated as piety, eusebeia, describes correct conduct toward gods, parents, the dead and guests, all in the same breath. Impiety was a matter of neglect or violation rather than of holding wrong opinions: the prosecution of Socrates in 399 BCE turned on charges of not acknowledging the gods the city acknowledged and of introducing new ones, which is an allegation about cult and civic loyalty rather than about theology.

The central act was sacrifice. An animal was led to the altar, killed, its thigh bones and fat burned for the god, and the remainder cooked and eaten by those present. Most meat eaten in a Greek city had been sacrificed, which makes the rite as much a distribution of food and standing as an offering. Alongside it ran libations, first fruits, incense, prayer and votive dedications, and at the other end of the scale enormous civic festivals: the Panathenaia at Athens, or the Dionysia at which tragedies were performed as part of the worship of Dionysus.

Priesthoods were generally not vocations. Many were annual offices, allotted or elected, occasionally sold, and often reserved to a particular family. The holder administered a sanctuary and its funds and performed the rites; there was no preaching, because there was no body of doctrine to preach. This is why the religion accommodated philosophers who argued in public that the gods were nothing like the poems described. Theology was not the point of the exercise, and getting it wrong was not in itself an offence.

Civic sacrifice did not answer every need, and a range of other practices grew up alongside it.

Oracles were consulted by states and individuals on questions of action rather than of doctrine: whether to found a colony, go to war, marry, or which god to placate. Delphi was the most prestigious, where enquirers received responses through the Pythia. Dodona in Epirus answered through the oracle of Zeus, and hundreds of lead strips carrying private questions have been recovered there, asking about children, theft, livestock and travel. The famous ambiguity of oracular replies is largely a feature of the literary tradition; the surviving questions are mundane.

The mystery cults offered something the civic calendar did not: an experience undergone individually, and a change in the initiate's prospects. The Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone were celebrated near Athens for over a thousand years and were open to almost anyone who spoke Greek and had not incurred blood guilt. The secrecy held: surviving accounts describe the procession and the preparation, not what took place in the hall. What initiates were promised is usually summarised as a better lot after death, and beyond that the evidence thins quickly.

The dead and the heroes received cult in their own right. Families tended graves and made offerings at fixed points in the year, and cities honoured heroes at tombs, real or claimed. A hero might be a figure from epic, a city founder, or a general killed within living memory.

Below all of this ran everyday practice that the literary sources mention only in passing: curse tablets folded into wells and graves, purification after birth, death or bloodshed, amulets, and freelance specialists selling all of it. Plato complains about such people, which is good evidence that they existed and did well.

Greek religion is unusually well documented and unusually easy to misread, because almost none of the documents were produced in order to explain it.

Poetry and drama supply most of the myth. Homer and Hesiod were old and authoritative but not canonical, and later poets and tragedians reworked their material freely. There is no single correct version of a Greek myth, and the same story was told differently in different cities, often to suit local claims. Reading these texts as though they were doctrine produces a tidy pantheon that no Greek would have recognised.

Inscriptions are much closer to practice. Sacred laws set out who may enter a sanctuary, what may be sacrificed, which portions the priest receives, and what a worshipper must do beforehand. Accounts record temple property; dedications name the giver and the occasion. This material is dry and intensely local, and it is the best evidence there is for what people actually did.

Archaeology supplies sanctuaries, altars, votive deposits and animal bone, which sometimes confirm the texts and sometimes contradict them. Philosophers are evidence for educated criticism, not for common belief. Later writers such as Pausanias, travelling in the second century CE, described sanctuaries and their stories at a point when much of what he saw was already antique.

Two consequences follow. Athens is heavily over-represented, because Athenian texts survive in quantity, so the standard picture is skewed toward a single city with an unusual literary output. And the interior of the practice, what a farmer took to be happening as he poured a libation, is essentially unrecoverable. Statements about what the Greeks believed are, with few exceptions, statements about what the Greeks did.