Votive Offering (Anathema)

The variety of surviving Greek votives is itself a record of what worshippers wanted and feared. Healing sanctuaries of Asklepios have yielded thousands of terracotta anatomical votives, model eyes, legs, breasts and internal organs, left by patients as thanks for a cure or as a request the god address that specific part of the body, a practice archaeologists find echoed at sanctuaries across the Mediterranean world well beyond Greece itself. Sailors dedicated model ships or actual ship parts on safe return from a voyage; farmers dedicated model animals or tools; victorious athletes and cities dedicated statues, and after a battle, captured arms and armor were commonly stripped from the defeated and dedicated as a tropaion or hung in a sanctuary as a permanent record of the victory attributed to the god's favor.

The Athenian Acropolis alone has yielded thousands of dedicatory inscriptions and statue bases, the objects themselves long since removed or destroyed but their donors' names and reasons for giving preserved in stone. Inscriptions accompanying many dedications name the giver and sometimes the specific favor received, turning a single object into a small, permanent public record of an individual's otherwise unrecorded life and its moment of crisis or relief.

Greek religious thought treated a dedicated object as permanently transferred to the god's ownership, which created a real practical problem for sanctuaries that had centuries of continuous use and finite space. Priests could not simply clear out old votives the way a household might clear old possessions, since the objects remained sacred property even once damaged, unfashionable or simply too numerous to display. The standard solution was ritual burial: older votives, sometimes broken deliberately as part of the process, were interred in pits within the sanctuary grounds called favissae, keeping them within consecrated ground rather than removing them from the god's domain.

Archaeologists have recovered enormous quantities of Greek votive material from exactly these deposits, at sanctuaries from the Athenian Acropolis to smaller regional shrines, and these pits are often the single richest source for reconstructing which offerings a given sanctuary actually received across its working life, since standing collections were far more likely to be looted, melted down for metal, or lost to fire and war than a deposit deliberately hidden beneath consecrated soil. The Athenian Acropolis favissa deposits in particular preserved fragments of the archaic sculpture destroyed in the Persian sack of 480 BCE, since the Athenians buried the damaged dedications reverently rather than discarding them once the site was rebuilt.