hunting catches, of spoils of war, and the like. In this case it was rather a meagre share, since they were given only the
inedible portions of the carcase. Comic poets joked about this unequal division, and it was already a puzzle to Hesiod, who
tells a myth to explain it: when gods and men first divided out the sacrificial portions, man's helper, Prometheus, tricked
Zeus into taking the wrong share. None the less, by a convenient fiction, these useless parts were deemed an acceptable gift
for the gods. Thus a basic form of human festivity, the communal banquet, was sanctified and became a means of approach
to the gods.
Sacrifice was a theme on which subtle and expressive variations could be played. Sex, age, and colour of the victim varied
with the god or festival concerned; there were rules governing who might participate and what portion of the meat fell to
each. In an important alternative form the animal was held close to the ground while its throat was cut, so that the blood
would drip into the earth. The carcase was then, it seems, normally burnt whole close to the ground. This ritual was used in
particular in the cult of heroes and of powers of the earth (though they also received sacrifices of the other form); it
probably derived from the cult of the dead. The antithesis between Olympian sacrifice and this earth-bound form was
marked in various ways: on the one side a high altar, smoke rising to heaven, light-coloured victims, libations of wine (the
drink of normal civilized life), sociable sharing of meat; on the other a low altar or pit, blood dripping down to 'glut' the
powers below, dark victims, wineless libations, destruction of the victim uneaten. (Such wanton annihilation is a funerary
practice, seen, for instance, at Patroclus' funeral in the Iliad.) And because the killing of animals was the central religious
act, there were further rituals that exploited this source of power even though they were not sacrifices to any god: to purify a
murderer, for instance, to solemnize an oath, or to take the omens before battle, the parts of slaughtered animals were
manipulated in various symbolic ways. Human sacrifice, by contrast, was unknown in the historical period. It is common in
mythology, but that is not good evidence even for prehistory, since the horrors that stories postulate to thrill us need not
ever have occurred. They may have done, however; what had been the fate of a woman who was recently discovered, laid
out with a sacrificial knife beside her head, in a warrior's tomb of the tenth century at Lefkandi in Euboea (above, p. 21.)?
One should not be misled by the goriness of the ritual and the savagery of certain myths into thinking that this was a
religion of horrors, of self-torment, and of perpetual confrontation with the unspeakable. Certainly, a few rituals were
deliberately uncanny; a few festivals or parts of them had a gloomy or penitential tone. An Athenian festival of Zeus, the
Diasia, was performed 'with a certain gloominess', and the Panhellenic women's festival of the Thesmophoria involved a
day of fasting. There was even in many Ionian cities a ritual expulsion (though not killing) of human scapegoats that must
have involved real cruelty. But the dominant tone of Greek ritual was one of festivity and celebration. Herodotus expresses
this when he speaks of a group who spent their days 'sacrificing and having a good time'. Processions were very common,
ranging from those of a single household (there is one in Aristophanes' Acharnians) to those such as the Panathenaic
procession that involved the whole city. We can see from the Parthenon frieze or the end of Aeschylus' Eumenides what
splendid occasions these were.
The gods loved beauty: one dedicated to them the loveliest objects that one could, and the word for cult-image, agalma,
means 'thing to take delight in'. The gods were happy too to see performed in their honour many of the activities that
humans most relished. Singing and dancing in a chorus was one basic form of worship, and competing at athletics was
another. The great Panhellenic games and the great Athenian dramatic festivals had moved far from their origins, but
remained religious ceremonies. One had to put on a good show for the god. When the Thracian goddess Bendis was
received in Athens late in the fifth century, she was honoured not by a relay race of torch-bearers on foot (old hat by now),
but by a special torch relay on horseback. It never occurred to anyone to object, as did Newman of the Neapolitan carnival,
that 'Religion is turned into a mere occasion of worldly gaiety'. At the festivals of country gods such as Demeter and
Dionysus the fun did not even have to be kept clean. There were obscene jokes, gestures, and objects (although not
normally acts)-the whole range of what scholars term 'ritual obscenity' (as if that made it less fun). The gods -were lustrous,
graceful, carefree beings, and a shoddy or joyless performance would not fulfil a festival's proper function of 'delighting'
them.
Ritual was accompanied by prayer. It was unusual to pray seriously without making an offering of some kind (a sacrifice, a
dedication, or at least a libation) or promising to make one should the prayer be fulfilled. By his gift the worshipper
established a claim to the counter-gift that he requested, according to the notorious principle of 'do ut des', 'I give so that