witnessed the development of important cults for a number of personifications, but,
in contrast with the Rhamnous sanctuary, these were all associated with the cults of
established deities. Persuasion was normally associated with Aphrodite, Fair Fame
with Artemis, and Health with Asclepius. The fourth century witnessed a significant
expansion in the cults of a number of political personifications, such as Peace,
Democracy, Good Fortune, and Concord, the spread of whose cult it is possible to
document in detail.
D. Felton(Chapter 5) looks at the dead. She notes the great importance that the
Greeks in all periods placed upon the honoring of the dead, and the remarkable
consistency they displayed in their modes of honoring, despite the widely varying
beliefs they entertained about the nature of death and the afterlife. The dead were
continually reverenced and appeased at family and state level. The principal Athenian
festivals devoted to these matters were the Genesia (reverence) and Anthesteria
(appeasement), the beliefs surrounding the latter partly coinciding with those sur-
rounding the modern western Halloween. In their new underworld home the dead
encountered a range of deities, some resident in the world below, others moving
between it and the world above. The Hades who ruled the underworld was a
somewhat evanescent god, with relatively little cult, myth, or iconography of his
own. Ideas about the organization and the internal topography of the underworld –
and the corresponding eschatological significance of these things – varied greatly,
although the notion that a river crucially separated the dead from the living remained
enduringly popular. There was, in the Greek imagination, a possibility of travel
between the two realms in extreme cases. Exceptional heroes penetrated into and
returned from the underworld in life: Heracles, Theseus, and Orpheus managed to
do this for different reasons. And the dead could be called back to the realm of the
living through necromantic practices, or could return spontaneously, particularly if
they had died before their time, or by violence, or if they remained unburied. In these
cases they would typically return to exact vengeance from their killer, or to demand
due rites of burial. Such themes are addressed in the highly entertaining ghost stories
the ancient world has bequeathed to us.
Gunnel Ekroth(Chapter 6) looks at the heroes. These very much constituted an
intermediary category between the gods and the dead, sharing important qualities
with both alike, and in some senses oscillating between the two. Hero shrines
connected to epic or mythic heroes seem to have become prominent in the eighth
century BC, and it is in this century too that offerings at Mycenaean tombs seem to
have become popular. The rise of the city-state and the establishment of oikist cults by
colonists may have been a spur to such activity. Heroes (men, women, or even
children) could be produced from a number of sources: from the tales of myth or
epic; from former gods or goddesses cut down to size to fit into new religious
systems; from historical or quasi-historical figures, particularly those associated with
extreme actions, for good or ill, or with extreme or violent deaths, including those in
war. It is no longer thought that heroes typically received holocaust-sacrifices. Rather,
they typically received sacrifices similar to those given to the gods, with whom they
could play a similar role in the religious system. These werethysia-sacrifices in which
meat was distributed to the participants, andtheoxenia-offerings, tables of vegetable
dishes akin to those consumed by the living, and designed to encourage the recipients
to come close to their worshipers. Dedications of blood were largely reserved for
4 Daniel Ogden