Religious Tradition in a Period of Change

Greeks maintained religious tradition as protection against life’s dangers. They participated in the city-state’s sacrifices and festivals, and they also worshipped privately. Each public and private cult had its own rituals, from large-animal sacrifices to offerings of fruits, vegetables, and small cakes. State-funded sacrifices of large animals gathered the community to reaffirm its ties to the divine world and to feast on the roasted meat of the sacrificed beast. For poor people, the free food provided at religious festivals might be the only meat they ever tasted.

The biggest festivals featured parades and contests in music, dancing, poetry, and athletics. Laborers’ contracts specified how many days off they received to attend such ceremonies. Some festivals were for women only, such as the three-day festival for married women in honor of Demeter, goddess of agriculture and fertility.

Families marked significant events such as birth, marriage, and death with prayers, rituals, and sacrifices. They honored their ancestors with offerings made at their tombs, consulted seers about the meanings of dreams and omens, and paid magicians for spells to improve their love lives or curses to harm their enemies. Hero cults included rituals performed at the tomb of an extraordinarily famous man or woman. Heroes’ remains were thought to retain special power to provide oracles, heal sickness, and protect the army. The strongman Herakles (or Hercules, as the Romans spelled his name) had cults all over the Greek world because his superhuman reputation gave him international appeal. Mystery cults initiated members into “secret knowledge” about the divine and human worlds. Initiates believed that they gained divine protection from the cult’s god or gods.

The Athenian mystery cult of Demeter and her daughter Persephone offered hope for protection on earth and in the afterlife. The cult’s central rite was the Mysteries, a series of initiation ceremonies. So important were these Mysteries that an international truce—as with the Olympic Games—allowed people to travel from distant places to attend them. The Mysteries were open to any free Greek-speaking individuals—women and men, adults and children—if they were clear of ritual pollution (for example, if they had not committed sacrilege, been convicted of murder, or had recent contact with a corpse or blood from a birth). Some slaves who worked in the sanctuary were also eligible to participate. The main stage of initiation took more than a week. A sixth-century B.C.E. poem explained the initiation’s benefits: “Richly blessed is the mortal who has seen these rites; but whoever is not an initiate and has no share in them, that one never has an equal portion after death, down in the gloomy darkness.”