You must be some wretched outcast then and no Athenian at all, a man without
family gods and sacrifices or anything else good and beautiful.
I have my own altars and my own religion and family prayers and all that sort of
thing, as much as any other Athenian.
Then the other Athenians have no Zeus Patroos? He asked.
I said, none of the Ionians give him that title, neither ourselves nor any of the
colonials from the city; ours is an Apollo Patroosbecause of Ion’s parentage.
Our Zeus is not called a family god, but courtyard god (herkeios) and clan god
(phratrios), and Athena is our clan goddess (phratria).
Oh that’s quite enough, said Dionysodorus. For it seems you have both Apollo
and Zeus, and Athena.
Yes, I said.
Then these would be your gods? He said.
Ancestors, I said and masters.
(Euthedemus, 302bd)Socrates here identifies the Athenians as Ionians and since Ion, an early king of Athens,
was a son of Apollo says that the family god of the Athenians is Apollo, who thereby
merits the epithet patroos, as far as the Athenians are concerned. Athena’s association
with Athens is less direct. As a virgin goddess, she had no descendants, though in
Athenian mythology she was foster-mother to one of their early kings, Erechtheus, to
whom there is a temple on the Athenian Acropolis. However, her primary association
with Athens is through the contest which she had (and won) with Poseidon for the
possession of Attica and in which she had performed a decisive miracle in causing an
olive tree to spring up on the acropolis. Socrates uses the word herkeiosfor Zeus as
had Homer before him. For the Athenians, Zeus and Athena are clan gods, the word
for clan being phratria, aterm sometimes translated as clan, so that Socrates rightly
denies that he has a Zeus patroos, but is most concerned to show that he has the
appropriate altars and cult connections. A phratryis an ancestral association of families,
found in Athens and elsewhere throughout the Greek world. Every citizen was a
member of a phratry and all male children were presented to the phratry in a ceremony
known as the Apatouria at which the father had to swear on the altar that the child was
his son. This was requisite for the child’s future citizenship. The civic importance of
these relations is marked formally by the presence next to the Stoa of Zeus on the west
side of the Athenian agora, the centre of political and public life in Athens, of three
fourth-century temples to Zeus Phratrios, Athena Phratriaand Apollo Patroos, the
remains of which have been excavated in the twentieth century.
Socrates here declares that he has the requisite altars for proper religious
observance. It is perhaps ironic in view of his prosecution for impiety that his last words
are reported by Plato to have been ‘Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius (the
108 THE GREEKS