The following chapters (Part VI) look at the role of religion in structuring or
reflecting the structure of society in ancient Greece, moving from relationships
between the largest social groupings through relationships within the family and
down to sexual relationships between individuals. But in fact the goddess who
presided over sexual cohesion between individuals was also, by analogy, asked to
preside over the social cohesion of the wider state.Charles W. Hedrick Jr.asks to
what extent religion should be understood to have cohered with, reflected, or
reinforced social structure in classical Athens. He concludes that general coherence
of religion with the political order was manifest, but that religious observance also
provided ample scope for conflict as well. From at least the time of Xenophanes the
Greeks had begun to perceive religion as a separable entity, and this notion came to
flourish with the Sophists. The isolation of religion allowed men to imagine an area in
which people could ‘‘make their world’’ and paved the way to the development of
political thought. Despite this, in classical Athens most religious observance was
‘‘civic,’’ that is to say, the constitution of the various worshiping groups often
coincided with the organization of the political order, their religious activities en-
couraging community solidarity. Thus, in the performances of the Dionysia, the
audience was seated in accordance with its civic categories. Religious rites of transi-
tion articulated the progression of the young through their changing civic statuses.
Women could sometimes achieve a degree of autonomy in the religious sphere
distinct from their position in the political sphere: cults of goddesses tended to rest
in the hands of priestesses, and women could enjoy festivals, such as the Thesmo-
phoria, and other varieties of worship, exclusive of men. In the Kronia the distinction
in status between free and slave was advertised through the mechanism of its tem-
porary inversion. Whereas classical Athens could legitimately boast to be a classless
society from the political perspective, high birth and wealth did continue to offer
some religious privileges, with certain priesthoods and roles being reserved for the
well born or rich. The different demes of Attica, the basic units of the democratic
organization, were all distinguished by their own cults and calendars of festivals, and
these could sometimes pose a threat to the unity of the umbrella state, to such an
extent that some cults were reduplicated in both the city center and the outlying
regions. While citizenship of the Athenian state legally seems to have depended upon
deme membership, access to deme membership was effectively controlled by the
phratries or ‘‘brotherhoods,’’ which were predominantly religious associations. Fam-
ily allegiance could always constitute a threat to the political order, and so family-
based cults or religious observances could be particularly problematic for the state:
hence the state’s particular anxiety about the destructive potential of women’s
lamentation at funerals.
Janett Morgan(Chapter 19) investigates the relationships between women, reli-
gion, and the home. In classical Athenian ideology citizen men were strongly asso-
ciated with the open, visible space of the city, whereas their wives were associated with
the closed, invisible space of the home, which their presence to some extent defined.
The home was normally a place of protection for them and a place that the women
themselves sought to protect with their rites. But it could also become a stage for
their domestic rituals. A striking example of this is the Adonia festival, the rites of
which were performed noisily on the roof of the house. Sexual imagery could identify
women with the house in which they lived, and in particular with the hearth that
12 Daniel Ogden