Erechtheum, anomalously by the standards of Greek temples, drew together a diver-
sity of cults under Athena’s patronage. It was above all in the context of Athena’s
great civic festival, the Panathenaea, that the Athenians celebrated their communality.
But as Athens rose to power in the Greek world it was through Athena’s great festival
above all that the city projected its image to that world. Major events in the city’s
history were symbolically incorporated into the festival – a trireme after Salamis, and
the participation of the ‘‘allies’’ as Athens established her empire. And major events in
Athenian political historical typically implicated the goddess, as in the tyrant Pisistra-
tus’ triumphant return: he was able to unite the people of Athens behind him through
the conceit that he was being escorted back by the goddess in person.
Nicolas Richer(Chapter 15) looks at the religious system of Sparta, a city
renowned in antiquity for its scrupulous devotion to the gods. There the gods
presided over human life in its entirety: they helped in the rearing of children, male
and female, and they managed transitions to adulthood, in the context of both the
brutal initiation ceremonies in the sanctuary of Orthia and initiatory homosexual
relationships. Amongst the city’s cults the oldest seem to have belonged to Zeus,
Athene, and Apollo, all of whom are mentioned in the Great Rhetra. The kings owed
their special position and privileges not least to their role as mediators between gods
and the community, in peace and especially during war, when they presided over a
sophisticated religious technology of warfare on the army’s behalf. The Spartans led
their lives emmeshed in religious structures of both spatial and temporal dimensions.
The central city itself and the wider territory of Laconia alike were protected by rings
of shrines and tombs, with key gods often occupying sanctuaries both at the center
and at the periphery. The religious calendar ordered the Spartans’ lives with both
regular and movable feasts. Religion was heavily exploited in the inculcation of the
discipline for which Spartan society was famous: the bodily passions that had to be
kept under control were abstracted and sacralized. Spartan beliefs in this area may
have exercised a significant influence over Plato’s thinking on the passions. Living
Spartans were, furthermore, protected and encouraged by the dead, who were
meticulously stratified into categories and ranked in accordance with the benefits,
martial and other, they had conferred upon Sparta during life or could continue to
confer in death. Richer appropriately concludes that the great awe the Spartans
displayed towards their gods seems to have been a motor of their history.
Franc ̧oise Dunand(Chapter 16) reviews the religious system of Alexandria. For all
this city’s greatness and importance, evidence for religious life there is scarce: only a
tiny amount of the city’s literature survives by comparison with that of the heydays of
Athens or Rome; its archaeology has been destroyed by two millennia of continuous
occupation; and the papyri are less helpful than they are for other Greco-Egyptian
topics. And so it is difficult to chart the progress of the city’s religious system from
blank piece of paper upon foundation in 331 BC to the ‘‘palimpsest’’ it had become
in late antiquity. Most cults will have been started spontaneously by groups of Greek
immigrants. Amongst the cults of the traditional Greek gods those that came to
particular prominence were the ones belonging to Zeus, to Demeter (Eleusinian
Mysteries may even have been performed for her), to Dionysus (whose image the
kings liked to appropriate), and to Aphrodite (a favorite of the queens). Egyptian
gods were repackaged for the city’s Greek masters. Isis was already known in main-
land Greece before Alexander’s campaign, and it may indeed have been he that
10 Daniel Ogden