Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

The eighth century sees changes in religious practice that correlate with (are in some sense identical with?) political changes we have already noted. Richard Seaford writes: “Excavation has shown that in the eighth century BCE there occurred a sharp increase in phenomena associated with the early development of the polis in various parts of the Greek world, notably the genesis of monumental temples and a massive increase in the quantity and quality of dedications made in public sanctuaries. It has become clear that another important function of these early temples, in addition to the storage of dedicated wealth, was the sacrificial feast.“58 Outside the oikos-sacrifice there is Homeric evidence for sacrificial feasts among warrior groups, with emphasis on the equal participation of all. But from the eighth century it appears that animal sacrifice becomes a central and defining ritual of the polis itself. Seaford writes: “The solidarity and articulation of the polis is expressed in its animal sacrifices, in which the principle of equal distribution (found in Homer) remains powerful. Full citizenship and entitlement to participation in the sacrificial meal seem to be one and the same thing.”” This is again a reminder that in archaic Greece we are dealing with a world in which our normal distinction of the spheres, in this case the religious and the political, simply doesn’t work. We cannot speak of the “merging” of what has not been separated.

  A further example of this principle is suggested by Seaford’s argument that the word nomos, which we saw Havelock translate as “custom-law,” derives from the verb nemein, “to distribute,” and that therefore nomos meant “distribution, then the principle of distribution.” Nomos, as we noted, is not found in Homer, but nemein is and is almost always used to mean distributing food or drink. Further, Seaford writes, “Even the distribution of urban space may use the terminology of dividing up an animal.” He goes on to say that of the eight occurrences of the word nomos in Hesiod, two refer to sacrifice. And he concludes by saying that the word nomos, so central in the ethical thought of classical Greece, “originated in the widespread … practice of distributing meat.“60

  For present purposes, what is most interesting is that sacrifice, so closely linked to hierarchical authority in most archaic societies, in early Greece mirrors the polity in that it is oriented to the god, yes, but then to the community as a whole, not to ruler or priest. In fact, in most cases, anyone can carry out a sacrifice-there is no priestly, much less royal, monopoly. Thus Greek sacrificial feasts, the very core of ancient Greek religion, express the same egalitarian spirit as the political structure of the “citizen-state,” and is as unusual religiously as the citizen-state is politically.

  If egalitarian sacrifice (virtually an oxymoron) makes Greece markedly atypical, so is the fact that Greek religion was, in a sense, priestless. Walter Burkett writes: “Greek religion might almost be called a religion without priests: there is no priestly caste as a closed group with fixed tradition, education, initiation, and hierarchy … The god in principle admits anyone, as long as he respects the nomos, that is as long as he is willing to fit into the local community.“61 Of course there had to be people in charge of sacrifice and other rituals. What made Greece unique is that any citizen could serve. Zaidman and Pantel describe how “priests” (and significantly “priestesses”) were chosen:

  In most cases a priest or priestess functioned like a civic magistrate, exercising a liturgical authority in parallel to the legislative, judicial, financial or military authority of the city’s officials. The methods of selecting priests and priestesses make clear their affinity to the status of magistrates. Most were appointed annually, and often by lot, and at the end of their term of office they were obliged to render account … Again, like magistracies, these priestly offices were typically barred to foreigners, including permanent residents, and open to all citizens.62

  If religious officials were integrated into the structure of civic authority, this by no means is an indication that religious life was peripheral. On the contrary, the festivals that proliferated around the sacrificial feasts were central expressions of the self-understanding and solidarity of the polis. Greek festivals were many and various, and there is no space to describe them in detail here, but a few salient features need to be discussed. Important in most festivals was the procession, pompe, leading to the sanctuary where sacrifices would take place, but significant in its own right.63 The procession could begin at the city gates or even at the border of the polis and approach a sanctuary in the middle of the city, or, conversely, it could begin in the middle of the city and end at an outlying sanctuary. The procession itself consisted of those most concerned with the ritual, but it was a very public event and attracted crowds of onlookers. Because at some level the whole city was involved, the procession could overcome, at least momentarily, the deepest divisions of Greek society: women, if they weren’t already, as was the case in some important rituals, central actors, slaves, resident aliens, and children could all participate as onlookers in the festival atmosphere.

  One particularly important type of festival was the agonistic festival consisting of a procession, a sacrifice, a contest (agon), and a banquet. 64 Contests in the context of ritual are present from the earliest times of which we have knowledge. The funeral games for Patroclus that Achilles sponsored featured a number of contests and races with Achilles awarding prizes to the winners (Iliad 23). We have already noted that the Olympic games were part of a great festival for Zeus. But the contests were not necessarily athletic alone: contests among singers, individual or in chorus, instrumentalists, rhapsodes (reciters of Homer), eventually dramatists, were common. Often the contes Cants represented different groups within the city (or, of course, different cities in the Panhellenic festivals), and thus could express rivalry and group hostility in the course of reaffirming group solidarity. Kin groups, local groups, and various kinds of associations all had their own festivals, involving primarily their own members.

  Political /Religious Reform in Sixth-Century Athens

  Athens was geographically the largest of the Greek poleis after Sparta, but Sparta’s size was due to the fact that it included regions inhabited by helots, noncitizens kept in a condition of subjection and always potential rebels, whereas the Athenians consisted of all qualified citizens, not only in the city, but in the towns, villages, and countryside of Attica. Thus in terms of the citizen population, Athens was the largest polis from early on. Nonetheless, as we have seen, Athens lagged behind in the seventh century when striking cultural advances were taking place elsewhere-in Ionia and Sicily, for example. “Lagging behind” culturally and politically did not mean lagging behind economically, and it was economic advance that led to tensions between rich and poor, landlords and tenants, that were beginning to threaten the solidarity of the polis itself. In this context we can understand the important role of Solon, chief magistrate in 594-593 and instigator of major social and religious changes. Although we have a good bit of what many believe is authentically Solon’s poetry, later on he became such a central figure in the self-understanding of the Athenians that we cannot always be sure what he actually did as against what was attributed to him as a semimythical refounder of the city. It is from the time of Solon that Athens begins its rise to the status of cultural metropolis of all Greece. This does not mean that important things were not happening elsewhere; but increasingly, those who were outstanding in any field were tempted to visit Athens, or even to take up residence there.

  Solon, we are told, was given virtually dictatorial powers for a limited time to reform the polis, and it is those religio-political reforms that will concern us here. But Solon was also later considered to be one of the “Seven Sages” or “Seven Wise Men” of early sixth-century Greece, and wisdom was essential to his role as a reformer. After following the political and religious changes of the sixth and fifth centuries, we will return to the question of wisdom and its transformations from Solon’s time until the fourth century.

  Solon, of noble lineage but only moderately wealthy, placed himself “b
etween” the aristocrats and the middling and lower classes and held that his reforms were concerned not to overturn existing social arrangements but to give to each group its due-in short, he was above all concerned with justice, dike, and with Zeus as guarantor of justice. Meier calls Solon’s views a “third position,” attempting to encompass the positions of the nobles and the commoners with the end of creating a just and fair polis for all.65 In practice this meant attempting to moderate the dominant group and give the subordinates a greater role in political life. Important legislation is attributed to Solon, such as the canceling of all debts and the prohibition of servitude for debt. It is said that Solon ordered the return of Athenians who had been enslaved for debt, even if they had been sent abroad. Such acts were clearly intended to curb the oppression of the poor by the rich, but Solon knew that only a transformation of consciousness would make such reforms lasting. In his poetry he was as much preacher as politician, advising the well off to moderate their greed for the sake of civil comity, but also threatening them and/or their descendants with ruin (ate) if they violated the justice (dike) of Zeus.66

  Just as there was ongoing tension over economic relations between the nobility and the middling, which Solon tried to address, so was there more than a little tension between rituals sponsored by the noble households (oikoi) and rituals sponsored by the whole city. Not only was the noble oikos a potential patrimonial state in waiting, and thus always a latent threat to the citizen-city, but the presence of several such oikoi in the same polis created the possibility, not infrequently realized, of civil violence. Funerals mobilized intense feelings among the group to whom the deceased belonged and could give rise to violence against rival factions. It is in this context that legislation, attributed to Solon but also to early lawgivers in other cities, sharply limited the number of participants and the kinds of activities that such noble funerals could include. Seaford suggests that though there were many motives for these laws, at least an important one was the need to curtail the power and proclivity to violence of the noble families. When such legislation was followed by the creation of citywide funerals or memorial rituals for the war dead, we can see the polis asserting its primacy over the noble households. There was also legislation against overly lavish weddings among the nobility, and the creation of festivals for young women that to some extent gave collective expression to what would otherwise be purely household celebrations.67 If Solon was supposed to have curtailed the private rituals of the nobles, so a late tradition attributes to him the first comprehensive ritual calendar for the city as a whole.68

  Although the example of Solon was etched deeply into the consciousness of the Athenians-Christian Meier calls him Athens’s “first citizen,” and Eric Voegelin calls him “the most important single person in Hellenic politics”-he clearly did not succeed in solving the problems that plagued the city.” The rivalry of the great families and the exclusion of the middling continued, so that by the middle of the sixth century the Athenians accepted the tyrant Pisistratus, over Solon’s strenuous objections. After two unsuccessful attempts to gain power, Pisistratus’s tyranny lasted from 547 until his death in 528; the tyranny of his sons was finally overthrown in 510. As in other cases, Pisistratus came to power as a solution to otherwise intractable problems, and though his reputation in later times was very negative, he extended privileges to the lower strata and worked hard to build the civic image of the city through the encouragement of festivals and a building program on the Acropolis. He was succeeded by two sons, the second of whom seems to have turned despotic, encouraging the opposition that led to the fall of the tyranny. In a sense, however, the extent to which Pisistratus promoted the interests of the common people and encouraged them to identify with the city undercut the very rationale for the despotism, and it was not long before reforms much more extensive than those of Solon moved the city ever more in the direction of radical democracy.

  Though the very name of Athens points to its particular divinity, Athena was a generally recognized goddess and had cults in many places. Nonetheless, Athena’s importance for Athens was very great and grew markedly in the sixth century when her temple on the Acropolis was increased in size and splendor. The Panathenaea, whose origins are obscure but which was already one of the great festivals of Athens in early times, was augmented in the first half of the sixth century (just before or just after the tyranny of Pisistratusthe dating is unclear) with the Great Panathenaea-that is, every fourth year the Panathenaea was expanded to include athletic games similar to those at Olympia, together with other competitions, including by the time of Pisistratus’s son, Hipparchus, three-day recitations of the entire Iliad and Odyssey. These festivals were intended not only to celebrate the greatness of Athena for all Athenians but to appeal to a Panhellenic audience as well.

  One remarkable event has been interpreted as an indication of just how important Athena was to the Athenians. Herodotus (1.60) reports that Pisistratus, in his second attempt to establish his tyranny in Athens (ca. 556 BCE, the dating is disputed), had a tall, beautiful woman dress as Athena in full armor and drive into the city in a chariot with heralds proclaiming that she was Athena and that she called upon all Athenians to accept Pisistratus as their leader. The stratagem worked, and Herodotus remarks on the gullibility of the Athenians, who were supposed to be the most intelligent of the Greeks. But Rebecca Sinos has pointed out that there was a long tradition of Athena serving as leader of a hero’s procession, that the Athenians did not believe the woman portraying Athena was literally the goddess, but that they were participating in a drama that pleased them. In particular they wanted to believe that Athena had chosen not only Pisistratus but the Athenian people for a heroic role. She finds this a recurrent theme in later Athenian history.7’ This is a remarkable example, for if Sinos’s interpretation is correct the Athenians felt themselves “chosen” by Athena over an extended period of time and this sense of chosenness gave them a feeling of pride and selfconfidence greater than that of the citizens of many other Greek cities. But if Athena “chose” the Athenians, she was not a jealous goddess. She didn’t seem to mind if her chosen people worshipped other gods, which they did in great numbers. Among the many who could be mentioned we should especially consider Dionysus.

  It is part of the myth of Dionysus that he was an outsider, that he came from abroad, from Thrace or Phrygia, in historic times. Modern scholars as well as ancient Greeks tended to accept this part of the story as historically true, until the name of Dionysus appeared several times among the gods of the Mycenaeans in Linear B texts. So Dionysus is a very ancient Greek god, but he is “always” coming from abroad. He was very important in Athens, where a number of festivals, some of them very early, were dedicated to him. Robert Connor has seen the growth of Dionysiac worship in sixth-century Athens as a kind of religious preparation for the emergence of Greek democracy in the reforms of Cleisthenes beginning in 508-507.” Connor discusses the Dionysiac thiasotai (confraternities) as among the many forms of voluntary association that made up something like “civil society” in sixth-century Athens-associations that were to some degree self-governing and that fostered the practice of group discussion and group decision making. It was the combination of the social practice nurtured in such associations with the spirit of Dionysiac religion that Connor sees as an important foundation for the democratic reforms, reforms that Cleisthenes nurtured but could not have created.

  The structural reforms undertaken by Cleisthenes, or by the people of Athens under his leadership, are too complex for us to describe in detail. Suffice it to say that these reforms overcame some of the divisiveness that char acterized Athens in earlier times and extended the participation of the common people in the government of the polis. What is significant for us is the fact that these political changes were accompanied by, were one aspect of, a general change that was religious as much as political. It is this religious side of the change that Connor characterizes as the increasing importance of Dionysiac re
ligion.

  The myth of Dionysus is complex and ambiguous, indeed ambivalent, with a dark side as well as a joyous one, but one of its foci is that of the outsider god who comes into a city and turns it upside down, leading to the destruction of those who oppose him but to a new solidarity among those who accept him. He is transgressive, to use a term common in current discourse, a boundarycrosser to be sure, but also integrative, the symbol of new community.72 Connor believes that Dionysiac worship in the sixth century “is best understood as the first imaginings of a new type of community.” More specifically, he writes:

  Dionysiac worship tumbles into carnival and carnival inverts, temporarily, the norms and practices of aristocratic society. While these inversions may provide a temporary venting mechanism and thereby help stabilize repressive regimes, in the longer run they can have quite a different effect. They make it possible to think about an alternative community, one open to all, where status differentiations can be limited or eliminated, and where speech can be truly free. It is a society that can imagine Dionysiac equality and freedom.73

  Connor gives the example of features institutionalized in the political realm “that probably originated in religious practice, for example, ‘outspokenness,’ parrhesia, and isegoria, `equality of speech.“‘74 Given the importance of Dionysiac cult groups and the spirit of Dionysiac religion, Connor finds it “not surprising” that the newly established Athenian democracy would express itself in a new festival, the City Dionysia, or festival of Dionysus Eleuthereus (that is, the Dionysus who came from the border city of Eleutheria, but also with the etymological implication of freedom). He argues that the City Dionysia was founded not under the Pisistratids but under Cleisthenes or shortly thereafter and so was a kind of “freedom festival” celebrating the fall of the tyranny.75 Other specialists on Greek religion believe that the City Dionysia was founded under the Pisistratids, but that it underwent significant reform and enhancement at the time of Cleisthenes.76 In that case, Connor’s argument would still be applicable.