The Oracle At Dodona. After Olympia Dodona was the principal shrine of Zeus, where he gave oracles through the rustling
of leaves of his sacred oaks, or the booming of his bronze cauldrons. These needed interpretation by priests. A more direct
approach was to write a question on a lead tablet, such as the one shown, and receive the answer inscribed on the back-
often just a 'yes' or 'no'. On this sixth-century example the writing is boustrophedon ('as the ox ploughs'), running in lines
alternately to left and right. Hermon asks which god he should approach in order to beget useful children by his wife
Cretaea.
The goals of religion were practical and this-worldly. One important function was of course to steer the individual with
appropriate rites of passage through the great transitions of birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Many public festivals
throughout Greece had to do with preparing boys to be warriors, girls to be mothers. Another numerous class, including
most of the many festivals of Demeter, goddess of corn, and Dionysus, god of wine, related to the events of the agricultural
year. Others celebrated the political order; so, for instance, the Panathenaea (the 'all-Athenians' festival) and the Synoecia
(the festival of synoecism, political unification as a single city) at Athens. Dangerous activities such as seafaring and
warfare required especial protection from the gods; there were clusters of rituals associated with them, and even in the
historical period gods or heroes were often thought to have intervened to save a ship or support a hard-pressed army.
Craftsmen appealed to their divine patrons, and it was a common event in social, judicial, and even commercial life to
summon the gods, by sacrificial ritual, to witness an oath. There were above all two practical goods that every Greek
desired from the gods, prophetic advice and healing. Prophecy was obtained from oracular shrines, such as Apollo's at
Delphi, from wandering oracle-mongers with their books of prophecies, or from seers who drew omens from the entrails of
sacrificial animals and the flight of birds. It had, as we saw above, an important role even in public life. For the kind of
enquiry that a private individual might make we have good evidence from the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, since some of the
lead question-tablets survive:
Heracleidas asks the god whether he will have offspring from the wife he has now,Lysanias asks Zeus Naios and Dione [Zeus' consort at Dodona] whether the child Annyla is pregnant with is
his [often it was the obscurity of the present rather than the future that the god was asked to illumine].Cleotas asks whether it would be beneficial and advantageous for him to keep sheep.As for healing, there were healing gods and heroes throughout Greece, their shrines bedecked, like those of Catholic saints,
with the votive offerings of grateful patients (often clay images of the affected organ). The commonest technique of healing
was by incubation: the patient spent a night in the temple, and the god appeared to him in a dream to perform a miraculous
cure, or at least to prescribe a treatment. The most successful such cult was that of Asclepius at Epidaurus, from which there
survives an inscription recording miraculous cures. A typical specimen runs:
A man came to the god as a suppliant who was so blind in one eye that he only had the eyelids left and there was nothing
between them, but they were wholly empty. Some of the people in the shrine made fun of his folly in thinking that he could
see when he had no trace of an eye but only the place for it. He went to sleep in the shrine and a vision appeared to him. It
seemed to him that the god boiled up a drug, drew apart his eyelids, and poured it in. When day came he went away, able to
see with both eyes.