temple of Hera. The small buildings at the right are treasuries dedicated by Greek states, beside the tunnel leading to the
stadium, bottom right. The area before the temple was closed by a stoa. At the left are administrative buildings and beyond
a big guesthouse and exercise areas. The columnless gabled building is Phidias' workshop in which the gold-and-ivory
Zeus was made.
With the fall of the Mycenaean civilization around 1200, Greece relapsed into illiteracy. When writing revived with the
introduction of the Phoenician script in the ninth or eighth century, the crucial transition from Mycenaean to Greek religion
had already occurred. The new script was used to record the poems of Homer and Hesiod, the earliest documents of true
Greek religion, but for the preceding centuries we have only the fragmentary and* ambiguous evidence of archaeology.
Very few Mycenaean holy places continued to be used for cult throughout the Dark Ages. There is a growing body of
evidence for oriental influence during the period, perhaps transmitted first through Cyprus and later through the trading post
of Al Mina in Syria. From the eighth century, for instance, a typical religious site consisted of a free-standing temple, a cult
image inside it, and a fire-altar in front of it; there are Near Eastern, but not, it seems, Mycenaean, antecedents for such a
complex. Apollo and Zeus could be portrayed in the eighth century in the guise of the Hittite-Syrian war god. It was
perhaps not until early in the Dark Ages that the cult of Aphrodite was introduced from the East (or took on eastern
characteristics) and not till the end of them that the Kingship in Heaven myth was translated into Greek. It was almost
certainly in this period that two foreign gods won a place on the fringe of Greek religion, Adonis the lover of Aphrodite
(compare the Semitic word adon, 'lord') and the mountain mother Kybele/Kybebe (Kubaba is known as an Anatolian
goddess).
There is also a striking 'hymn to Hecate' in Hesiod's Theogony. Hecate seems to be a goddess of Asia Minor by origin, and
Hesiod's hymn perhaps reflects the propaganda of a cult that was newly entering Greece. (Greek religion never lost this
openness to foreign gods: at the end of the fifth century, for instance, two new gods arrived in Athens, Sabazius from
Phrygia and Bendis from Thrace, and, though the cult of Sabazius was confined to private associations, Bendis found a
place in public religion.) On the more important theme of religion's internal development in the period in response to social
change we can say little. The cult of heroes seems to have had its origin in these centuries, beginning possibly in the tenth
century and becoming more widely diffused (perhaps under the influence of epic poetry) in the eighth. To judge from epic,
communities of this period were heavily dependent for their defence on individual warriors such as Homer's Hector, who
'alone kept Troy safe'. This prominence of the aristocratic champion in life may well have helped to foster the cult of heroes
who continued to guard their people from the grave. But the archaeological evidence alters at the moment from year to year,
and theories to explain the innovation (if such indeed it was) proliferate.
To understand the place of religion in Greek society we must think away the central religious institution of our own
experience, the Church. In Greece power in religious matters lay with those who had secular power: in the household -with
the father, in early communities with the king, in developed city-states with the magistrates or even with the citizen
assembly. At Athens it was a magistrate who impersonated the god Dionysus in an important ritual of 'sacred marriage', and
decisions about the use of sacred moneys or land were taken by the democratic assembly. (As a result the gods found
themselves willy-nilly financing Athenian efforts in the Peloponnesian War.) Individual gods had their priests, but to hold a
priesthood was a part-time activity which normally required no special qualification or training. There was no institutional
framework to unite the priests into a class -with interests of its own. The only true religious professionals in Greece were
the seers. They were important figures, because omens were taken before many public activities, such as dispatching a
colony, beginning a military campaign, or joining battle. As interpreters of the divine will, seers could come into conflict
with generals and politicians and their secular plans. There are several reflections in literature of this tense relationship
(Hector and Poulydamas, Agamemnon and Calchas in the Iliad; Teiresias and various kings in tragedy).
These were not, however, disputes about the rival claims of piety and patriotism, since there could be no conflict of interest
between the good of the city and of the 'city-keeping' gods, but about the best means to secure the agreed end of the city's
welfare. And such turbulent seers had no actual powers behind which to take their stand. In high literature the seer is always
right (for 'the mind of Zeus is ever superior to that of men'), but the theme has tragic potential precisely because he cannot