cultivating the fields’’ (Philochoros,FGrH328 fr. 97). This inversion of political
status is exceptional, yet it finds parallels in many other ancient cities, the most famous
example being the Saturnalia at Rome. Current consensus holds that reversal of roles
was not socially subversive; the Kronia was sanctioned by the civic social order and had
the paradoxical function of supporting conventional social hierarchy.
Other criteria than political status figure in civic religious celebrations: the most
important are economic class and birth status. In hisContribution to the Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, Karl Marx said that religion was ‘‘the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It
is the opium of the people.’’ He meant that people are divided along economic lines,
and these ‘‘classes’’ are always necessarily in competition with one another. Religion
he saw as a palliative, which works to disguise the reality of economic oppression: it
teaches and persuades the poor to suffer by dangling before them the prospect of a
reward in heaven. The Athenians of the classical period boasted – accurately in my
view – that class and birth carried with them no legitimate political preferences; they
did, however, guarantee certain religious privileges. Priests and other prominent
participants in rites were frequently chosen by virtue of the fact that they were
‘‘well born’’: certain hereditary associations purporting to be families (gene ̄) monop-
olized the priesthoods of various cults (see below). To take another notable case, each
year four girls were chosen by the ‘‘king’’ archon on the basis of ‘‘excellence of birth’’
as ‘‘bearers of the sacred secret objects’’ (these are thearrhe ̄phoroi). The garment
paraded to Athena on the Acropolis during the Panathenaea was woven by two of
these girls, along with a team of workers (ergastinai), also ‘‘well born’’; all these
enjoyed a prominent position in the procession. To take another example, at the
festival of the Oschophoria, a festival that among other things commemorated the
deeds of Theseus on Crete, two young men, ‘‘chosen from those outstanding in birth
and wealth’’ (IstrosFGrH334 fr. 8), conveyed the ̄oschoi(vine shoots with bunches of
grapes) in a procession.
Urban versus Rural Religion
The Athenian state, like our own, was articulated for administrative purposes into
smaller groups, including (from larger to smaller) ten tribes, thirty trittyes, and about
139 rural villages, called demes. These groups functioned not only to organize
citizens’ participation in the state, but also communities; and part of communal life
was religious observance. Demes seem to have engendered a particularly vivid sense
of community among their members, and there is substantial evidence for religious
practice within them.
Every Greek polis was composed of an urban center and a surrounding
countryside, and the tension between the two is manifested by a corresponding
tension between central and local religious observance. In the case of Athens, the
surrounding countryside was occupied by numerous demes, some of which were of
considerable size and antiquity. The settlements were, by the reforms of Cleisthenes
(508/7 BC or soon after), integrated and subordinated to the state. These demes
offered the environment of small cities to their inhabitants, who often felt greater
allegiance to them than to the general state. Thucydides, in his description of the
292 Charles W. Hedrick Jr.