Religion and Society
Economic historians have found that the modern notion of an autonomous 'economy' is inapplicable to ancient societies,
where economic activity was influenced by innumerable social constraints. To describe ancient conditions they have
developed the concept of the 'embedded' economy. We need for the Greeks a similar concept of embedded religion. It was a
social, practical, everyday thing. Every formal social grouping was also a religious grouping, from the smallest to the
largest: a household was a set of people who worshipped (in the Athenian case) at the same shrine of Zeus of the Courtyard,
while the Greeks as a nation were those who honoured the same gods at the Panhellenic sanctuaries and festivals. To belong
to a group was to 'share in the lustral water' (used for purification before sacrifice). The Panhellenic sanctuaries were the
great meeting-places, -where one could swagger before an audience from all Greece. Perhaps the most important was
Delphi, perched above a majestic valley on the slopes of Mount Parnassus in central Greece; it owed its original fame to the
oracular shrine of Apollo, already mentioned by Homer, but also became the site of a great athletic festival. Its rival in
importance, Olympia in the territory of Elis in the Peloponnese, sacred to Zeus, was home of the original and always most
prestigious games, the Olympics.
Since religion was thus embedded, social and religious history are virtually inseparable. At Athens, for instance, the growth
of the democracy involved a transformation of the forms of religious life. Cults that had been controlled by aristocratic
families were absorbed into the public calendar of the city; new public cults were established, free from aristocratic
influence; alongside the traditional groupings, based on kinship, the local group of the deme or village gained importance in
religion just as it was doing in politics. Even associations that one entered by choice (the clubs of the Hellenistic period,
philosophical schools) were normally dedicated to the cult of particular gods. Since slaves, by contrast, had no social
identity as a group there was no distinctive slave religion. Such as it was, their religious life was conducted as humble
participants in the cults of their masters' household and in a few public festivals that derived from household cult.