beneath the earth in the course of their cycles, and their clear reflection in the still
lagoons associated with underworld entrances, led to a paradoxical association
between stars and the underworld. In theOdysseyOrion is already found in the
world below. In this way, stars formed perfect avatars for heroes and heroines, caught
between the worlds of immortality and mortality, and allowed them to make spec-
tacular, natural appearances or disappearances at the appropriate times. The number-
ing of days in the month reflected the moon’s waxing and waning structure. Religious
activities tended to be concentrated in the earlier part of the month, with the first day
being held particularly important. The earlier dates of the month also tended to be
sacred to individual gods. These dates inevitably tended to attract their annual
festivals, and the date number could structure or reflect the structure of other aspects
of their representation and the mythology associated with them. The Greeks some-
times mapped their ritual processes onto imagined mythistorical narratives. Thus the
ban on bread on the first day of the Spartan Hyacinthia ceremonially evoked a
primordial time when bread had not yet been invented. Myths of Dionysus’ arrival
project onto the historical level an essential quality of his divine personality, that of
being the adventitious god. The Greeks imagined the reign of Zeus not as an
unchanging, eternal given, but as a midpoint in a narrative: before Zeus there had
been Cronus, and in the future there would be another regime again, headed by a
figure akin to Achilles. The Greek cities were age-class societies, and human progres-
sion through the age-classes could be mapped onto other varieties of time and
process, such as the yearly cycle. In Athens the year sets of adults aged between 18
and 60 each carried a patron hero, with the ‘‘retiring’’ set relinquishing its hero to the
newest. The tombs of these (largely obscure) heroes may have formed a sort of
‘‘generational clock’’ around the circuit of the city wall. The 42-year ‘‘generation’’
period structured some important events in Athenian history, such as the reincarna-
tion of the Acropolis.
Our next chapters (Part V) explore the very different shapes into which ‘‘Greek
religion’’ could be configured through discrete analyses of the contrasting religious
systems of four separate places. The cities of Athens, Sparta, and Alexandria are
chosen for their general importance and for the manifest and extreme differences in
their social organization and development. Arcadia is chosen for a fourth study as a
religious environment functioning outside the framework of the polis.Susan Deacy
(Chapter 14) takes on the difficult task of analyzing Athens, and asks how the
Athenians balanced the notion that they managed a stable religious system with
constant innovation. As a massive city by classical Greek standards, Athens had a
massive pantheon of its own to match, consisting of the familiar Olympians, personi-
fied abstractions, and heroes and heroines. The patron Athena held a presiding place
in the complex religious life of the city. She was literally central to it, her major
sanctuary towering over the city centre, as opposed to being located at an external site
as was often the case with ancient Greek poleis, and she was symbolic too of the
supposedly Thesean synoecism of Attica. The tendency to centralize the religion of
the polis under Athena is clearly seen in her appropriation of the ‘‘sacred things’’ of
the Eleusinian Mysteries, which had once been controlled by the independent polis
of Eleusis. The ‘‘Athenian foundation myth,’’ enshrined in the topography of the
Acropolis, established Athena’s presiding relationship over the other gods and
heroes there and represented her as the chosen mother of the Athenian people. The
Introduction 9