CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Greek Religion and Art
T.H. Carpenter
Our term ‘‘Greek art,’’ with its demands of selectivity, is an old-fashioned and
misleading term that should be permanently retired. What we have from the Greek
world are remnants of the material culture – artifacts and monuments – some of
which may be beautiful and some not, but all of which are valuable in helping us to
understand the culture that flourished there. For the Greeks themselves, who had no
word equivalent to our ‘‘art,’’ all of these remains were the work of artisans –techne ̄–
and they all had a function within the society. Art for art’s sake is not a concept that a
Greek would have understood.
Among the artifacts and monuments that have come down to us many include
images, sculpted and painted, and these images will be the focus of the discussion
here. Figure-decorated vases, principally from Attica, are our richest source of images;
more than 50,000 of them with images from myth and daily life have been cataloged
from the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Many of these images are explicitly religious in that
they show rituals or depict deities. Many others with no obvious religious content are on
objects that had religious functions as offerings to gods (votives) or as elements of
festivals or rituals. In every case, however, the object or monument on which an image
appears had a function that is fundamental to an understanding of the image itself.
In looking at images there are two dangers to be avoided. One is to ignore the
context (i.e. what sort of objects they appear on, what the objects were used for,
where and when they were made, and where they were found), which leaves them
floating in a kind of synchronic limbo as curiosities or abstractions that give us little
sense of a connection with living, breathing people. The other danger is to think of
them as photographs. Painters are always selective in their choice of what to include in
an image. In scenes of daily life made by an Athenian for Athenians, the painter had
no reason to include details that we might like to see but which his customers would
have taken for granted.
In what follows here I have limited my discussion to Athens during the second half
of the fifth century, when our sources are particularly rich. All the artifacts and