CHAPTER FOUR
Personification in Greek Religious
Thought and Practice
Emma Stafford
Introduction
Personification is an important phenomenon in Greek religious thought and practice.
Anthropomorphism is a fundamental characteristic of the Greek pantheon: in both
literature and art the Olympian gods are consistently represented as human in form,
with human emotions and character traits. In this context it makes sense that the
human form should have served as the standard vehicle for representing anything felt
to have the slightest claim to divine power. What is striking is the range of things this
includes: celestial phenomena, places, divisions of time, states of the body, emotions,
abstract qualities, and political concepts. Personifications of all these types can be
found in literature from Homer onwards, and in art they are clearly recognizable from
at least the beginning of the sixth century; some make only brief appearances, as one-
off creations of poet or painter to suit a particular purpose, but others can be found in
a variety of contexts, suggesting that they were widely recognized. The fact that these
figures are often represented in the company of Olympian gods, and exercising power
over mortals, shows that they were held to embody some level of divine power. In a
number of cases, however, we can be quite sure of a personification’s divine status,
because we have evidence that she (or he) was in receipt of prayers, dedications, even
sacrifices – exactly the same elements which constitute worship of the Olympian gods.
This chapter will survey the phenomenon chronologically, starting with archaic epic
and the influence that it had on cult, moving on to fifth-century developments, and
concluding with the late classical and hellenistic periods; these last are taken together
because most ‘‘typically hellenistic’’ personification cults in fact turn out to have
earlier roots.
Before we begin, however, it is important to consider some problems of evidence
and to establish the criteria by which we might determine a particular personifica-
tion’s place in Greek religion. From the outset, Greek literature presents us with a
Ogden / Companion to Greek Religion 1405120541_4_004 Revise Proof page 71 30.10.2006 4:25pm