Stephanus of Byzantium’s gloss (s.v.Arkadia), according to which Pania was an
alternative name for Arcadia.
On the right of the Arcadian League coins that display Pan one finds Zeus Lykaios,
another symbol of the League (Jost 1985: plate 63, figure 4). He also had a role
as a national god in Arcadia. During the expedition of the Ten Thousand, the
Arcadians on the campaign celebrated the Lykaia sacrifice at Peltae and set up
games (Xenophon,Anabasis1.2.10). For these soldiers, remote from their home,
he was the Arcadian god par excellence. His influence across the Greek world is
attested by the lists of victors at the games on Mount Lykaion and by the sanctuaries
that Zeus Lykaios was given at Cyrene and in Triphylia (Jost 1985:268–9). But many
facets of his cult had a specifically Arcadian character.
Pausanias (8.38.4) gives us a striking description of the rite celebrated at the spring
Hagno:
If there is a prolonged drought, and if the seeds in the soil and the trees wither, then the
priest of Zeus Lykaios, after making prayers in the direction of the water and making all
the prescribed sacrifices, lowers an oak branch to the surface of the spring, without
sending it to the depths. When the water has been agitated, a mist-like vapor rises and
soon the vapor becomes a cloud and, drawing other clouds to itself, in this way causes
rain to fall on the land of Arcadia.The ceremony was designed to make rain; it did not take place on a fixed occasion,
but was used in case of prolonged drought. It was focused upon the spring Hagno
(the prayer is made facing the water) and the nymph Hagno could have been the
original addressee. But in the time of Pausanias, it was the priest of Zeus Lykaios who
officiated and it was to this god that the ritual was addressed, in his role of being
responsible for atmospheric phenomena. We know of prayer-texts to Zeus to make
rain, and Zeus’ role as ‘‘assembler of clouds’’ goes back to Homer. It is attested by
many epithets (Hyetios, ‘‘Rainy’’; Ombrios, ‘‘Producing rain from a storm’’). But the
recourse to a magical operation to make rain is much more rare and its association
with Zeus is unique in Greece (Jost 1985:251–2).
Amongst the ‘‘curiosities’’ of Mount Lykaion, Pausanias mentions anabatonof
Zeus (8.38.6). This sacred enclosure was off limits to every living being. According to
Pausanias, anyone who violated the taboo lost his shadow and died within the year;
Plutarch (Greek Questions39) speaks of execution by stoning or exile for offenders.
The tradition of the loss of the shadow is found already in Theopompus (FGrH 115
fr. 343). This is, it seems, a vivid expression of death (according to Plutarch’s
observation, ‘‘The Pythagoreans say that the souls of the dead cast no shadow’’).
The punishment of death corresponds with the strength of the interdiction. But this
was not exceptional: in Sophocles’Oedipus at Colonus(line 121), when Oedipus
mistakenly enters anabatonsacred to the Eumenides, the Chorus wants to stone him.
Above theabaton, on the summit of Lykaion, the altar received human sacrifices
offered to Zeus, according to tradition. Plato alludes to it in hisRepublic(8.565d),
where we read that, ‘‘if one has tasted morsels of human entrails amongst those of
the other victims, one is inevitably transformed into a wolf.’’ And a fragment of
Theophrastus preserved by Porphyry (On Abstinence2.27.2) tells that, ‘‘Still in
our own day in Arcadia, during the Lycaean festival... official human sacrifices are
266 Madeleine Jost