THE GODS OF POLITICS IN EARLY GREEK CITIESassociations withreligio-religereand the idea of ritualistic scruples, conjure up certain
scruples with regard to cults. No sooner had I won the freedom to embark upon research
at the E ́cole des Hautes E ́tudes than I began to plot how to escape from the protected
territory known asSciences religieuses(religious studies). My first collaborative seminar
set out to explore the limits of the field of religion. Where did it begin? And how was it
changing before our very eyes? The specialists of that protected territory, a good fifty or
so of them, shared a stubborn reluctance to ask fundamental questions about what was
conventionally called the ‘‘religion’’ of the ancient Babylonians, the Old Testament, or the
Aztecs. Among the topmost ten or twelve professorial chairs in Paris, there was even one
for Greek Religion, the one that I persistently endeavored to shake up in order to develop
its full potential during the period when it served as the basis for my comparativist opera-
tions. Although the Roman legacy cannot be held entirely to blame, it was through it, its
language, and its culture that there was pressure, already in the Christian Augustine, to
consider polytheisms as vastterrae incognitaethat were destined eventually to receive True
Religion, whether from Christianity or from Islam. As our experts have established, over
three-quarters of the world is naturally polytheistic. Consider for a moment the eight
hundred myriad deities in Japan, the countless metamorphoses of the deities of Hindu-
ism, the thousands of genies and powers of Black Africa. Likewise, the forests and moun-
tain ranges of Oceania, the Indian subcontinent, and South America are teeming with
pantheons with great clusters of deities.
It is probably fair to say, without fear of contradiction, that, in the limitless horizon
of polytheisms, monotheism appears as a kind of religious mistake—for these do occur,
just as sentimental mistakes do, although the latter fortunately tend to be more short-
lived. Polytheistic societies revel in their ignorance of churches and episcopal authorities,
whether pastoral or papal. They mock these upstart monotheists for their insistence on
‘‘having to believe’’ and their proselytizing efforts.
As we all know, the field of polytheisms constitutes a vast continent, one that awaits
all those wishing to experiment in the world of the possible relations that link divine
powers.^4 I will venture into it solely to seek out the gods who speak Greek, who, however,
are delighted to be translated and interpreted into other languages. Just as in Japan there
arekamifor ovens, for food, for costumes, and for domestic altars, so, too, in Greece the
gods are everywhere. So why should they not be there in the political domain?
To uncover the network of these Greek-speaking gods, it was necessary to concentrate
less on their individual features and to resist the attraction of their fine appearances, and
instead to identify all the different ways in which deities are associated on altars and in
sanctuaries. In a polytheistic system, a god is always plural, constituted by the intersection
of a variety of attributes. In this sense, a god is conjectural, a figure with many angles and
many facets.
Greek culture presents observers with well-established arrangements and organized
relations between two or more powers, relations of explicit partnership and complemen-
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