Fragments of such herms have been identified in the excavations of the Athenian
agora. Alcibiades, then a general and politician of influence, was implicated in this
act of sacrilege, whether rightly or wrongly. He fled to Sparta and gave crucial aid
and succour to Athens’ enemy.
While civic customs and institutions differed from state to state, herms and
phratries were not unique to Athens. Underlying these Athenian beliefs and practices
were attitudes and assumptions about human relations with the gods that were shared
with the rest of Greece, indeed the very mark of what constituted Greek identity.
When the Persians, in advance of the battle of Plataea, tried to draw the Athenians
away from the Greeks allied against them, Herodotus reports the reassuring words
of the Athenians to the worried Spartans as follows:
There are many important reasons which prevent us from doing this, even if we
wished, the first and greatest being the burning and demolishing of our statues
and temples of our gods, which we must avenge with all our power rather than
making terms with the agent of their destruction. Furthermore there is the fact that
we are all Greeks, sharing both the same blood and the same language, and we
have the temples of our gods in common and our sacrifices and our similar lifestyle,
and it would not be right for the Athenians to betray all these.
(8, 144)As so often in human history, religion was at the heart of the matter. One hundred
and fifty years later Philip of Macedon based his appeal for Greek unity as he was
about to embark on a crusade against the Persians on the desire to avenge the
Persians’ destruction of Greek temples.
In Hellenistic times, new patterns emerge alongside the old, one such being the
development of the ‘ruler cult’ in relation to Alexander. The only previous known case
in which divine honours were granted before death concerns the Spartan king
Lysander deified by the Samians at the end of the Peloponnesian war. Alexander
encouraged the custom of proskynesis, prostration before the king, a custom asso-
ciated with the Persians. He was also addressed as a son of god by the priest of the
famous oracle of Egyptian Ammon (long identified with Zeus by the Greeks) when
he visited it in 331 and later encouraged the Greeks to offer him the divine status of
a cult hero. Coins survive in which he is represented with ram’s horns identifying him
with Ammon who appears so in eastern iconography (fig. 28).
Infounding Alexandria, according to the historian Arrian, Alexander specified
that one of the temples should be dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis; later
there was also an Alexandrian temple to the god Serapis, previously worshipped in
Babylon but imported to Alexandria as a Graeco-Egyptian god adapted in the reign
of Ptolemy I to unify Greeks and Egyptians in the new dispensation. He is shown in
110 THE GREEKS