Th e private religion of the family continued as earlier at
household shrines. Cemeteries became centers of family reli-
gion also. Traditionally the dead were believed to sleep peace-
fully, and families brought wine and food to graves to keep
their dead ancestors content and prevent troublesome ghosts
from returning.
Th e principal form of worship in civic religion was ani-
mal sacrifi ce, nearly identical to the practice of the Near East
and certainly imported into Greece from the older civiliza-
tion. Descriptions of sacrifi cial practice in Homer indicate
that Eastern rituals were adopted by Greeks of the Myce-
naean era and remained almost unchanged through classical
and later times. Th e purposes of sacrifi ce were to honor the
god who received it, to give a gift in exchange for the many
gift s the god had bestowed on humanity (such as rain, peace,
or justice), and to ask for more benefactions. Since everyone
who attended a sacrifi ce shared equally in the following meal,
the ritual was oft en also a gift from the wealthy to the poor
(who might otherwise rarely have meat in their diets).
Sacrifi ce usually took place aft er a procession through
the city with hymn singing and dancing, leading the animals
to the temple. A Greek temple was meant for housing the cult
statue of a god, but its dark interior was rarely entered. Th e
outside of the building was the important part, ringed by a
row of columns to act as a backdrop, its facade topped by a
frieze illustrating a well-known myth of the god. Th e ritual
centered on an altar in front of the temple. Th e sacrifi cial ani-
mal, preferably a bull, had to be perfect, free from illness or
deformity. A girl carrying a basket of grain on her head led
the procession. When it reached the altar, the priest and the
professional butchers who would actually kill the animal pu-
rifi ed their hands by washing them with water. Th e animal
was asked if it was willing to be sacrifi ced; it could be induced
to nod its head by giving it water or food in a bowl on the
ground.
Th e participants in the sacrifi ce threw the grain from the
basket over the animal and the altar. Th e priest used a knife
hidden in the grain to cut off three hairs from the animal’s
back and threw them onto a fi re built on the altar; this was
the sacrifi ce in symbolic form. A single blow from an ax then
cut the bull’s spine. At the moment this deadly blow fell, the
women present made a shrill cry. Two attendants held up
the animal’s limp head, while a third used the knife to slit
its throat. Th e blood was caught in a basin and splashed on
the altar to purify it. Th en the animal was butchered. If the
sacrifi ce was made in order to perform divination—that is,
to learn whether the will of the gods was favorable or unfa-
vorable to a particular action—the diviners examined the
animal’s liver for special indications. Th e liver, certain other
organs, and the thighbones were wrapped in a sheet of fat cut
from the carcass and burned on the altar. Th e remaining meat
was usually cut into chunks, roasted on sticks over fi res, and
eaten. Th e hide became the property of the temple or priests.
If the person who initiated the sacrifi ce had a special reason
to do great honor to the god, all the meat was burned.
PANHELLENIC SHRINES AND GAMES
All Greeks recognized themselves as a people bound together
by common culture and language. Organization above the
level of the city-state was of a religious rather than a politi-
cal character. When the city-states were established in the
Archaic Period, national religious institutions also came into
existence at what modern scholars call Panhellenic shrines.
Available to all Greeks (pan means “all,” and Hellenes was the
Greeks’ name for themselves), these shrines helped form a
Greek identity and dealt with issues whose importance went
beyond individual cities.
Th e most important shrine was Delphi, founded in the
ninth century b.c.e., where a priestess known as the Pythia
gave oracles from the god Apollo. Delphi, as the most pres-
tigious source of divination in Greece, was especially impor-
tant, and its oracle oft en adjudicated disputes between cities
where no ordinary legal recourse was possible. Th e Delphic
Amphictyony, a league of Greek states organized to admin-
ister and protect Delphi, could also act as an embryonic fed-
eral body for Greece. For example, in 334 b.c.e. the league
declared war on Persia in retaliation for the Persian sacking
of Delphi in 480 b.c.e.; this was the legal pretext for Alexan-
der the Great’s conquest of Persia.
Other Panhellenic shrines also pointed toward ideas of
national unity. At the temples of Zeus at Olympia and Nemea
and that of Poseidon at Corinth as well as at Delphi, athletic
and artistic contests were held in an annual rotation, with
competitors from all of Greece. Th ese games had a political
dimension, since during them a general truce was enforced
on all Greek cities at war with each other (as many oft en
were). Other temples of Panhellenic importance included the
temple of Demeter at Eleusis (near Athens), where initiates
into the goddess’s mysteries received a kind of personal salva-
tion, and that of the hero Asklepios at Epidaurus, famed for
healing the sick and disabled through the interpretation of
dreams.MAGIC
Many rituals that had existed in early Greece were not suited
to the religion of the new cities because they served private
rather than public interests. Th ese were mostly of two kinds:
purifi cations meant to cure disease or remove guilt from per-
sonal or ancestral sin, or initiations into secret mysteries that
were supposed to bring salvation of the soul aft er death. Th ese
ceremonies were performed by ritualists, especially priests of
the god Dionysus or the hero Orpheus, who wandered from
city to city and thus were not part of the religious hierarchy
of any city. Since these initiates stood apart from the city in
some way, they were thought of as alien and hostile and their
rituals characterized as foreign. Aft er the Persian invasion of
Greece in 480 b.c.e they began to be called “magicians” and
their practices denounced as magic. A magician, or magus,
was, properly speaking, a priest of the Persian national reli-
gion, but the term came to be used in condemnation of Greekreligion and cosmology: Greece 855