8

COMMUNICATING WITH THE GODS: SACRIFICE, ORACLES AND ATHLETICS

(Prometheus) Know: although seeing they did not see, although hearing they did not hear, ephemeral men apparitions of dreams, under the earth they lived like ants, until I showed them dawn and sunset.

Luigi Nono, Prometeo, II, First Island

Greek Worship

The moment that twenty-first-century people start to look into the world of Greek religion, they find themselves in a very alien environment where modern value-systems cease to apply. A religion is like a game of cricket: totally incomprehensible to outsiders, unless they have learned the rules from childhood and are au fait with the apparent inconsistency and weirdness that the participants take for granted. And so we find that the Classical Greeks were more concerned with rituals than with ‘beliefs’: they lacked concepts such as sin and faith, and they did not believe in their gods, so much as acknowledge them through prayer, sacrifice, erecting temples and making them the focus of cult. Their divinities were not omnipotent, and did not create the universe; there were no sacred texts equivalent to the Bible or the Qur’an or the Torah; no Ten Commandments, Five Pillars or Thirteen Principles; no creed or shahadah; no Talmud; no sharia; no covenant; no orthodoxy, and therefore no heresy; no jihad; and (perhaps incredibly to modern readers) no wars of religion.

 The large numbers of men and women who kept religious activity ticking over were very often simply public officials selected by lot for a limited term, although some priesthoods were hereditary and others could be bought. Priests and priestesses usually assumed responsibility for overseeing some communal religious activity, but they generally lacked any spiritual sense of vocation, special training or particular expertise.

Unlike synagogues, mosques or churches, Greek temples were seldom places of congregational worship. They are usually described as houses of their deity, where a cult image and often a good deal of treasure were stored. Strictly speaking, the temple building was an optional extra. What was needed was a clearly defined sacred space, called the temenos, and an altar (usually in the open air), where sacrifices would be made. But the Greeks also worshipped by means of hymns, dances, processions and competitions in athletics, music and drama, in contexts that were unique to each individual polis.

Greek literature is full of people saying prayers, which shows us that they understood and interacted with their deities in much the same way as they did with their fellow human beings: in many ways they regarded their gods as being fundamentally just likethemselves. In Herondas’ Mime 4, an ordinary woman called Kynno prays to Asklepios:

Hail to thee, Lord Paieon, ruler of Trikka, who hast got as thine habitation sweet Kos and Epidauros, hail to Koronis thy mother withal and Apollo; hail to her whom thou touchest with thy right hand, Hygieia, and those to whom belong these honoured shrines, Panake and Epio and Ieso; hail ye twain which did sack the house and walls of Leomedon healers of savage sicknesses, Podaleirios and Machaon, and what gods and goddesses soever dwell by thine hearth, Father Paieon; come hither with your blessings and accept the aftercourse of this cock whom I sacrifice, herald of the walls of my house … paying the price of cure from diseases that thou didst wipe away, Lord, by laying on us thy gentle hands.¹

She talks to Asklepios courteously and precisely, using his formal titles, naming his ancestry, powers and attributes, and including a ‘catch all’ phrase at the end: he will not hear her prayer if she gets his identity wrong. Also noticeable is the notion of reciprocity: Kynno’s humble offering is ‘votive’, made in fulfilment of a vow for recovery from illness, although in other contexts she might have made the offering first, hoping that the deity would reciprocate in kind. This practice of vows allows us into a deeply personal aspect of Greek religion, revealing genuine anxieties, hopes and prayers.

Kynno supplements her prayer with an animal sacrifice, a ritual with a very clearly prescribed procedure. First the victim, which must be a domesticated animal (goat, sheep, ox, chicken, etc.), is festively prepared for slaughter: it has to look like it is going to its death willingly. The venue for the sacrifice is then defined as sacred by carrying a sacred basket round in a procession and by sprinkling water over the worshippers and the victim. In the basket is barley grain, which everyone throws at the victim, and (out of sight) the sacrificial knife. Whoever is acting as priest cuts a few hairs from the animal’s forehead before its head is pulled back and its throat slit. Up until this point there has been ritual silence, but now the women scream a ritual cry. The animal’s splankhna(vital organs: heart, lungs, liver and kidneys), are removed, kebabbed and roasted; the tail, gall bladder and thigh bones are wrapped in fat and burnt on the altar as the god’s share; and feasting ensues when the lean meat is cooked, which everyone gets a share of once they have tasted the splankhna. In Herondas’ poem a slimy temple warden appears to announce the success of the offering, and to try to join the meal.

The Greeks made their gods in the image of man, which the philosopher Xenophanes thought was inevitable:

If cattle, horses and lions had hands, or could draw and do what men do, horses would draw gods like horses, and cattle gods like cattle.²

But gods who are exactly like humans are pretty pointless. They need to combine the human with the non-human, surpass humanity and have some kind of ‘otherness’. The Greeks inhabited an extremely precarious world, characterized by famine, fatal illnesses, earthquakes, warfare, and death in childbirth. Life-expectancy was low, but if, as many argue, religion tries to give people a sense of security in a frightening world, then the Greek gods enabled their worshippers to articulate in a complex and subtle way what they thought the world was like, and to provide a set of responses for dealing with life as it was actually lived, rather than as they would have liked it to have been lived. And it worked for them for hundreds of years.

At the core of the system were the twelve Olympian gods and goddesses (see Table 8.1, below). Being polytheists, though, the Greeks had far more than these twelve divinities – at Athens more than a hundred days of the year were assigned to one festival or another. The primordial ‘chthonic’ deities of the Underworld, such as Hades, needed to be appeased; trades had their own patron gods, such as Prometheus (potters), Kastor and Polydeukes (sailors); personifications such as Tykhe (Fortune) and Eros (Love) were felt to be at work in the world; Pan and the Nymphs were active in the countryside; and every home had its own shrine to Hestia, the goddess of the hearth. However, some intellectuals looked for a less anthropomorphic (anthropos = man; morphe = form/shape) concept of god: according to Thales, the ultimate basis of nature was water; according to Herakleitos, it was fire; later Plato saw god as the ‘divine architect’; and his pupil Aristotle saw god as the ‘unmoved mover’ of the universe.

Table 8.1 Major Greek and Roman Deities

These cults gave little reassurance about life after death. Homer’s Underworld (Hades) is a grim, grey, depressing environment, and fear of death was a fact of life. But, as Plutarch says, the polytheist found strategies for coping with this:

[Many people] think that some sort of initiations and purifications will help: once purified, they believe, they will go on playing and dancing in Hades in places full of brightness, pure air and light.³

This was achieved through ‘mystery cults’, voluntary, personal, secret initiation rituals that aimed at some form of salvation through closeness to the divine. These represented an ‘optional extra’, and did not entail conversion to a new religion, or the rejection of the old one. A prime example is the Eleusinian Mysteries, celebrated only at Eleusis, twelve miles from Athens, which offered people from all classes of society, even slaves, the promise of salvation and a blessed after-life. They were organized by the polis of Athens and supervised by the arkhon basileus, but, although our sources provide us with much information, the central ‘mystery’ remains just that – all we know is that the ‘hierophant’ revealed ‘the holy things’.

In the autumn, a procession went from Athens to Eleusis and culminated in a nocturnal celebration in the Hall of Initiations, the Telesterion, which could hold thousands of initiates. The Eleusinian Mysteries were devoted to the ‘Two Goddesses’, Demeter thegoddess of grain and her daughter Persephone, who is often just called Kore, ‘The Maiden’. In mythology, when Kore had been abducted by Hades, god of the Underworld, the Eleusinians had helped Demeter in her search. This was successful. However, Persephone had eaten a pomegranate seed, thereby binding herself to Hades for eternity, so a compromise was eventually reached in which she would divide the year between Hades in the Underworld and Demeter on Mount Olympus. While she was parted from her sorrowing mother, the earth was barren, but, when the two were united, it was fruitful. The myth explains the seasons, but because crops die and are ‘reborn’ every year, the same could apply to people: Demeter’s gift was rebirth after death, and therefore immortality. The prospect of a happy afterlife makes this life much more bearable.

The Riddle of the Delphic Oracle

The gods could also assist in important decision making. The number-one shrine of Apollo, god of prophecy, and the site of Greece’s most famous oracle, was Delphi. The term ‘oracle’ can refer both to the responses given by a god when consulted, and to the place where they were delivered, which the Greeks called a khresterion or manteion. The Romans called it an oraculum, so we call it an oracle. The prime function of the Delphic Oracle was to give people nemertea boulen (unfailing advice the Greeks consulted oracles on a broad range of personal, religious and political matters), not, crucially, to foretell the future.

The sanctuary at Delphi comprised a temenos, defined by a wall and entered by a Sacred Way, inside which were a vast number of monuments and inscriptions erected by various Greek states, plus around twenty treasuries, a theatre and a temple of Apollo. There was also a stadium, with various ancillary athletic facilities, and a separate sanctuary of Athena Pronaia.

The mythical tradition claimed that Agamedes and Trophonios constructed the first temple of Apollo. When this was destroyed by fire in 548 BCE, its replacement was funded by donations from foreign rulers such as Croesus of Lydia and Amasis of Egypt, and was supervised by the Alkmaionidai, who were living at Delphi in exile from Athens. That temple was destroyed by an earthquake in 373 BCE and another one was erected, the remains of which can still be seen on the site. The Roman Emperor Nero pillaged the sanctuary in the first century CE; the historian Plutarch was a priest there, giving us some excellent primary source material; and in around 350 CE the Emperor Julian tried to revive the sanctuary and sent the priestess Oreibasios to consult the Oracle, only to have her prophesy her own demise:

Go tell the king – the carven hall is felled,

Apollo has no cell, no prophetic bay

Nor talking spring; his cadenced well is stilled.⁴

In the last decade of the fourth century CE, Theodosius closed Delphi in the name of Christianity.

In Delphi’s heyday, Apollo gave his prophetic responses monthly throughout the year, apart from the three winter months when he relocated to the land of the Hyperboreans. His priestess, the Pythia, was dedicated to his service for life. She was an ordinary local peasant with no special training, had to be over fifty years old and, once selected, remained chaste and irreproachable. Prior to a consultation she bathed in (and probably drank) the waters of the Kastalia spring. You had to pay a consultation fee and sacrifice a goat on the altar outside the temple – if it had shivered from head to foot when it had been sprinkled with holy water, Apollo was ready to prophesy.

Then, having entered the temple, you would approach the adyton, the sacred area where the oracle would be given, which contained the omphalos (‘belly-button’), which marked the centre of the world, and a laurel tree sacred to Apollo (and perhaps two statues of Apollo, one wood, one gold). The Pythia would already have entered the temple, which was fumigated with barley-meal and laurel leaves on the sacred hearth. In the adyton, over a round opening in the ground, a tripod cauldron was set up, and the Pythia sat on its lid. She probably drank the waters of the spring Kassotis, which Pausanias was told had numinous powers, flowed underground into the adyton, and gave the Pythia prophetic abilities. You would probably go with the prophetai (‘interpreters’) and cult officials into a special room which prevented you from seeing directly into the adyton itself, and your enquiry would be put to the Pythia either orally or written on a tablet. Then she would prophesy.

 It is often said that she munched laurel leaves, became intoxicated by exhalations from the chasm, uttered obscure, equivocal, frenzied, incoherent babblings, which were transcribed by a poet, and left the inquirer totally bemused. She did no such thing. You undoubtedly didn’t have a normal conversation with her, but the image of her ranting and raving was fabricated by pagan and Christian writers seeking to discredit Delphi, although it has recently been the subject of a media-friendly hypothesis that the Delphic prophecies were made by a substance-abusing priestess. Essentially Apollo entered into the Pythia and used her voice as if it were his – Delphic utterances were always in the first person – but the Pythia’s psychological state remains obscure: the preliminary ritual is bog-standard magical procedure, and her trance could have been autosuggestively induced, although occasionally things could still go horribly wrong:

[The Pythia] went down into the adyton unwillingly … and at her first response it was at once clear from the harshness of her voice that she was not responding properly and was … as if she was filled with a mighty and baleful spirit. Finally she became hysterical and with a frightful shriek rushed towards the exit and threw herself down.⁵

She actually died a few days later. Clearly the incident shows that under normal circumstances her voice did not change in this uncanny and extreme way: the Pythia would not usually rant and rave. Furthermore, the business about her chewing of laurel is only attested by two late authorities who were attempting to bring the Oracle into disrepute, one of which is Lucian, writing satirically about Apollo, who was not an omnipresent deity, having to run from one oracle to another:

Now he has to be in Delphi, and soon after he runs to Kolophon and from there crosses to Xanthos, and then back on a run to Klaros, then to Delos or to Brankhidai, in a word wherever the [female] promantis (= ‘representative of the god and the organ of his prophecies’), after drinking from the sacred spring and chewing the bay and shaking the tripod, bids him be present.⁶

His account contains a number of factual errors: Klaros had a male mantis, and Delos never had an oracle at all. This is not a sound passage from which to extrapolate.

And what about the vapours that rose from a chasm in the rock and induced the Pythia’s utterances? Diodoros relates a myth that some goats discovered a hole in a mountainside, leaned in and started to shriek bizarrely. So did the goatherd, who also started to prophesy the future. Hence the oracle was established. Plutarch talked a great deal about the pneuma (= wind/breath/breath of life/odour/divine inspiration/spirit of god), and describes a delightful fragrance that sometimes emanated from the adyton. More recently a team of scientists has tried to argue that, because Delphi stands on the intersection of two geological faults lines, hydrocarbon vapour – largely methane, ethane and ethylene – rose into the adyton, and that the Pythia’s trance-like state resulted from inhaling ethylene or an ethylene/ethane mix. This would match the effects of the ancient prophetic vapours, they say. The theory appealed to positivist inclinations in the science-reading public, but, given that it is impossible to measure the actual ethylene levels present at the temple site more than two millennia ago, the explanation was always speculative, and now has been conclusively refuted.⁷

The problem with ‘rationalizing’ theories like this is that their authors don’t accept the power of Apollo, whereas the Greeks did. And, contrary to the popular misconception, Apollo spoke very straightforwardly. Of the 535 Delphic responses that survive, only 14 per cent are attested by contemporary sources. The questions are pretty direct: ‘Shall I do x?’, ‘How shall I do y?’, ‘Shall I succeed in z?’ The main concerns include portents, civic welfare, religious questions, worship, proposed enterprises and interstate relations. The responses were usually just commands and sanctions; predictions are rare, and of questionable authenticity. For instance, when Khairephon quizzed the Delphic Oracle about whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates, it delivered an unambiguous, ‘No’. The bemused philosopher didn’t feel that he was extraordinarily clever, so he decided to challenge those who thought they were, found their views confused and opinionated, and concluded that, paradoxically, his superiority lay in admitting his own ignorance. A typical enquiry came from the city of Halieis, which asked about a snake that had been carried there in a wagon that had brought home a recovered invalid from the sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidauros. Should they send it back, or let it stay in Halieis? The Oracle said that it should stay in Halieis, and that a sanctuary of Asklepios should be inaugurated there.⁸ On a personal level, Plutarch tells of a priest who had violated his priesthood by having sex with a woman when he was drunk. Asking whether his offence could be absolved, he was told that ‘deity forgives all uncontrollable acts’.⁹ It is only when we get into responses allegedly spoken in historical times but attested by people who were born later, mythical responses and deliberately invented fictional ones that we get the ‘ambiguous oracle’ stories. Any ambiguity that we do find seems designed to force the questioner to reconsider their position on an issue to which there was no straightforward answer.

The Olympic Games

In addition to the oracular activities conducted at Delphi, there was also the site of the Pythian Games, one of the four pre-eminent athletic festivals of the Greek world. All four sites were religious sanctuaries, and the quartet was completed by the Nemean Games at Nemea, the Isthmian Games at Corinth, and the Olympic Games at Olympia, which were the most prestigious. The Greeks believed that the Olympic Games were first held in 776 BCE, and that the only event held on that occasion was a foot-race, which was won by a local cook called Koroibos. As with Delphi, the Olympic Games came to an end in the reign of the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius.

Olympia was not a town, but a religious precinct in the territory of Elis; the Olympic Games were primarily a religious activity held in the altis, the sacred area. This was a male-only event, sacred to Zeus, and held every four years. The central day of the festival coincided with the second or third full moon after the summer solstice, which may indicate some original connection with a fertility cult linked to the end of harvesting. Certainly, holding an athletic festival at the hottest time of the year seems an odd choice,particularly in a stadium that held 40,000 spectators and when the prize for winning (at least on the day) was merely a wreath of wild olive.

One scholar has gone so far as to suggest that sport in ancient Greece can be regarded as the ritual sacrifice of physical energy, but we instantly encounter a problem with this, since there is no ancient Greek word for ‘sport’ as we understand it (or in any other language apart from English: you have to use ‘sport’, or modify the word to suit the language, if you want to express the idea). What the ancient Greeks were interested in was competition; their word athletes means ‘someone who competes for a prize’. They did not play for fun; they played to win. Philo wrote that, ‘athletes who are always beaten should give up’,¹⁰ and Pindar’s description of an athlete returning after failing is typical: ‘Even his mother will not smile on him.’¹¹

So when Bill Shankley, manager of the mighty Liverpool football team of the 1970s, was asked whether he thought football was a matter of life and death and he replied, ‘Oh no. It’s much more important than that,’ the crowds at Olympia would have stood and applauded. The fact that the games were a religious activity meant that cheating and bribery were sacrilegious, although that didn’t necessarily stop the highly competitive athletes trying to get away with doing such things: bronze statues called zanes were erected on inscribed plinths along the approach to the Olympic stadium, paid for by fines paid by competitors who had defiled the games.

The events contested varied over time, but the core of the competition revolved around running, diskos, jumping, javelin, combat sports and equestrianism. Cultural and religious activity completed the picture. The track on which the running races were held was one stadion (‘stadium’, sometimes rendered ‘stade’) long, i.e. 600 Greek feet (198.27 m) at Olympia. The stadion race was a straight sprint from a standing start, and its winner had the Olympics named after him. Over the years other races were added, always multiples of the stadion, including the dolikhos, a long-distance race of probably 24 stadia (just over 5,000 m) added in 720 BCE, and a race in armour (hoplitodromos) introduced in 520 BCE, in which the athletes wore a helmet and greaves and carried one of 25 bronze shields that were kept at Olympia for their use. There was, however, no marathon race, even though it is derived from a classical Greek precedent.

One other feature of the ancient Olympic festival is that, by and large, the athletes competed naked. There is a story that this practice was initiated after an athlete called Orsippos was leading a race, probably in 720 BCE, but tripped over his loincloth (diazoma),which had come undone. This may, however, be a fabrication based on Aias (Ajax) in the funeral games in honour of Patroclus in the Iliad, who was just about to win when he slipped on a pile of dung, allowing Odysseus to snatch the victory. But Homer’s heroes wore loin cloths in that competition, and in the fifth century Thucydides wrote:

In ancient times, even in the Olympic festival, athletes performed with loin cloths … and it is not many years since they stopped wearing them.¹²

Diskos, long jump and javelin were not usually held as separate events, but as part of the pentathlon, with a run (usually assumed to be a stadion) and wrestling completing the set. Quite how the winner was decided is heavily disputed, but if an athlete won the first three events he would be declared the victor, and the running and wrestling would be cancelled. The physique of a pentathlete was greatly admired, and erastai were attracted to the gymnasia to ogle at their sun-bronzed skin and fine muscular development, although celebrity athletes also came in for some criticism:

There are thousands of things wrong with Greece, but the athletes are the worst of all. Living properly – they don’t know about it and they don’t care. How could any man be a slave to his jaw and a servant to his belly, and outstrip his father’s glory? … When young they’re famous and add to their country’s repute. When old age comes grimly on them, they’re like cloaks with frayed ends. I blame Greek practice. We make a fuss of them, do them honour, give them free meals. Wrestlers, sprinters, discus-throwers, boxers – what good do their crowns do their country? Will they fight the enemy with discuses? Drop their shields and repel the invader by sprinting? Oh no; they’ve more sense than to face cold steel.¹³

The ‘heavy events’ as the Greeks called them, were: wrestling, where you grappled with your adversary and tried to force him to the ground three times; boxing, where there were no rounds, the fighters wore straps of leather to protect their hands (rather than boxing gloves to protect their opponents), punching was allowed but not grappling, and hitting a man when he was down was perfectly acceptable; and the pankration, a combination of the two, where the bout simply ended when one of the contestants could not, or would not, continue. There were no weight divisions, so big men usually did well.

The equestrian events (horse and chariot racing) were always extremely popular, but horses were incredibly expensive, which limited participation either to very wealthy individuals, or even to cities. A racehorse could cost 1,200 dr. in 421 BCE, but in 416 BCE, to ensure victory, Alkibiades entered seven chariot teams at Olympia and got 1st, 2nd and either 3rd or 4th place at a time when he was seeking high political office. Jockeys rode bareback and without stirrups, and were usually paid servants, as were chariot drivers, although it was the owner who collected the prize. This meant that several women were able to win prizes at the Olympic Games, even though they were not permitted to attend. The most infamous competitor of all was the Roman Emperor Nero, who postponed the festival from 65 to 67 CE so that he could compete during a tour to Greece: he was thrown from his chariot, and, despite being helped back in, failed to finish, although the diplomatic Greeks still proclaimed him the victor, on the grounds that he would have won if he had completed the race.

The modern Olympic Games are one of Ancient Greece’s most obvious legacies. Interestingly, this has also given rise to a myth of amateurism that still seems to permeate many people’s ideas about ancient athletics. In fact, however, the Hellenes had neither the ideology nor the vocabulary of amateurism; they didn’t know what it was. Their athletes accepted as much prize-money as they could. This is a classic example of how judging ancient cultures from modern ideological perspectives can lead to the misinterpretation of the ancient evidence.

Notes – Chapter 8

1. Herondas Mimiamboi 4.1 ff., trans. W. Headlam and A.D. Knox, in Herodas: The Mimes and Fragments, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922.

2. Xenophanes fr. 15, trans. P. Jones, Vote for Caesar, London: Orion, 2008.

3. Plutarch, Non posse, 1105b, tr. W. Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 23.

4. Quoted by both the Artemii Passio 35 (Philostorg. Hist. Eccl. 7. p. 77) and Georgius Cedrenus, Hist. Comp. I p. 532, Bekker.

5. Plutarch, Moralia 438B, trans. F.C. Babbitt, Plutarch, Moralia, Vol. V, Loeb Classical Library, 1936.

6. Lucian, Bis acc. 1. Promantis can be either masculine or feminine: he uses the feminine here.

7. J. Foster and D. Lehoux, ‘The Delphic Oracle and the ethylene-intoxication hypothesis’, Clinical Toxicology, 2007, 45(1), 85–9.

8. Fontenrose H.23.

9. Mor. 404a = Fontenrose H.63.

10. Philo, Sac. 116

11. Pythian Ode 8.85 f.

12. Thucydides, 1.6.

13. Euripides, Autolykos, fr. 282, trans. from J. Ferguson and K. Chisholm (eds), Social and Political Life in the Great Age of Athens, London: Ward Lock Educational, 1978.