CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Time and Greek Religion
James Davidson
Time is one of the most important elements in any religious system. Like the spatial
dimension, with which it is integrally entwined, time functions both as something to
be organized and as a given field of orientation, by turns informed by and informing
the sacred. This means that ultimately there are few areas of Greek religion, its
myths, divinities, rituals, cult, in which questions of time are not resonant. In this
chapter, therefore, I will merely be looking at those areas of religion in which the
temporal dimension is most obviously in play: the movements of stars and luminaries,
calendars, New Year, the language of days and sequences, the age of Cronus, and the
human life-cycle.
The Universal Calendar: Sun, Moon, and Stars
Time in Greece is not an abstract entity, but the cycles of stars and luminaries (Sun
and Moon). Hence, when Plato inStatesmanimagines a time when time went
backwards he describes a change in the universe: ‘‘I mean the change in the rising
and setting of the sun and the other heavenly bodies, how in those times they used to
set where they now rise, and rise where they now set’’ (269a). Each polis had its own
‘‘lunar-solar’’ calendar organized around the annual Sun cycle of solstices and equi-
noxes and its twelve (and a third) moons. Helios (Sun) was an important figure in
Corinth, and a reconstruction of Corinth’s calendar from those of her colonies reveals
a summer month called ‘‘Of the [festival of the?] Solstice,’’ Haliotropios (tropai¼
‘‘solstice’’). Meanwhile at Olympia, ‘‘on the summit of ‘Cronus’ mountain,’ the
so-called ‘Basilae’ sacrifice to Cronus at the spring equinox’’ (Pausanias 6.20.1),
and the quadrennial Olympic festival itself was scheduled to coincide, it has been
calculated, with the second full moon after the summer solstice, a date which had to
be known, and publicized well in advance. A quadrennial Olympics means a festival
every fifty moons, which informs the myth of Endymion, the ancestral king of Elis,
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