evacuation of the rural population into the protection of the urban center’s walls
during the Peloponnesian War, remarks that refugees ‘‘were depressed and took it
hard because they were abandoning their houses and the ancestral sanctuaries which
they had possessed from the time of the ancient political order [i.e., from times before
the Cleisthenic reforms], and because they were about to change their way of life, and
each was abandoning nothing other than his own city’’ (2.16). The cults observed in
the countryside were of considerable antiquity, some antedating even the establish-
ment of the villages themselves (cf. the description of the rustic rites of Pan at the
beginning of Menander’sDyskolos). The immense variety of rural religious observance
can be sampled from the five surviving sacred calendars of demes.
Cleisthenes’ reforms may be seen as a successful response to the regional factions
that bedeviled Athens for much of the seventh and sixth centuries. Nevertheless, the
continued existence of rural groups such as demes posed a threat to the unity of
the state. The local particularism of Attic religious observance was, as the quote
from Thucydides suggests, perhaps the most significant force working against the
coherence of the population of the state. Certain persistent regional and religious
associations of these villages, such as the Marathonian Tetrapolis, were more or less
overtly opposed to the Cleisthenic order.
Most of the famous state cults and festivals were celebrated only at the urban
center: if residents of distant demes wanted to participate they had to travel. Distance
may be seen as either a factor in consolidation (demesmen are integrated because
forced to come to Athens) or in fragmentation (demesmen are excluded because they
cannot come to Athens). Certain celebrations, however, notably those concerned
with women and families, such as the Dionysiac festivals, were recapitulated in city
and countryside. This reduplication is difficult to understand as anything but a
concession to the limits of the social solidarity of the rural population of the state.
Furthermore a host of peculiar divinities were worshiped in the countryside, but not
in the city. The divisive effects of rural worship find some confirmation in attempts,
notably in the sixth century, associated perhaps with the Pisistratids, as well as at other
times, to consolidate religious observance in the city by reduplicating rural sanctuaries
in central urban places, or even by moving entire shrines to the city.
Two of the more important religious institutions in ancient Athens were the
phratries and gene ̄(singulargenos). These may originally have been constituent
parts of the political state, analogous to tribes and demes, as Fragment 3 of the
AristotelianAthenaio ̄n Politeiaevidently suggests. Both groups presented themselves
as kinship organizations: the word phratry means ‘‘brotherhood’’ and the termgenos
(often translated ‘‘clan’’) suggests a group affiliated by birth. In the classical period
membership in both was hereditary. It was long thought that these organizations
developed out of earlier tribal and familial groupings. Present scholarly consensus,
however, holds that these groups were in origin political organizations that promoted
an ideology of genetic political affiliation: all Athenians were ‘‘brothers.’’
All Athenians were members of phratries, which served as gatekeepers of citizen-
ship. Admission to a phratry entailed acknowledgment of parentage, and so was
tantamount to acceptance into the community of the Athenians. Pericles’ Citizenship
Law of 451/0 BC seems to be implemented through the phratries, and in the fourth
century phratry membership was commonly used as evidence of disputed civic status.
It is significant, then, that phratry religious observance was highly (though not
Religion and Society in Classical Greece 293