Ancient Greeks

Greek religion was something done rather than believed. Its central act, as Walter Burkert's standard study shows, was animal sacrifice: the procession, the sprinkled barley, the victim's consecrated death, the gods' portion burning on the altar while the community feasted on the rest. Around that act turned the festival calendars of every city, each polis keeping its own cycle for its own gods, Athena's Panathenaia at Athens, Hera's festivals at Argos, Dionysus' dramatic festivals from which tragedy and comedy grew.

The Olympian family gave the practice its faces: Zeus of the sky and oaths, Hera of marriage, Poseidon of the sea and earthquake, Athena of craft and counsel, Apollo of prophecy, music and purification, Dionysus of wine and ecstatic release, Demeter of grain and her daughter Persephone, whose abduction and return figured the seasons themselves. Poets, not priests, organized this theology; Homer and Hesiod, as the Greeks themselves said, gave the gods their names, honors and forms.

Between gods and mortals ran a dense traffic of communication: oracles above all Delphi, where the Pythia answered for Apollo; seers reading entrails and birds on every battlefield; and purification from pollution, miasma, whose logic Robert Parker has mapped. For deeper hopes there were the mysteries. At Eleusis, initiates of Demeter and Persephone underwent secret rites that promised a better portion after death, a secret kept so well for a thousand years that it remains unknown.

Greek religion is older than Greece's alphabet. The Linear B tablets of Mycenaean palaces, from the late Bronze Age, already name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon and Dionysus among recipients of offerings; after the palaces fell, the traditions reformed around the rising city-states, and the eighth century brought the panhellenic institutions that made the Greeks one people in religion while remaining rivals in politics: the oracle at Delphi consulted before colonies sailed, the games at Olympia dated by their four-year cycle, and the epics of Homer recited everywhere Greek was spoken.

Philosophy grew inside this world, not against it. Xenophanes mocked gods in human form, Plato rewrote theology as the pursuit of the good, and the Stoics allegorized Zeus into cosmic reason, yet the sacrifices, festivals and oracles continued unbroken; Socrates was executed for impiety by a city that took its gods seriously. Alexander's conquests carried Greek cults across the Near East, where they mingled with Egyptian and Anatolian worship into new forms, Serapis in Alexandria, ruler cult everywhere, and the mysteries multiplied.

Under Rome the old sanctuaries were honored, restored and finally closed: Theodosius ended the Olympic games and the Eleusinian mysteries at the end of the fourth century CE, and the oracles fell silent. What survived was the grammar: Greek terms, mystery, ecstasy, theology, liturgy itself, through which later religions, Christianity first among them, learned to describe the sacred.