Cult & The City

‘You cannot make a city of ten men, and if there are a hundred thousand it is a city no longer,’ - Aristotle
… In order to be like God knowledge would have to

be some form of wisdom where secret processes were
unfolded. This would then give Adam, as we have
pointed out, a range of choice, a godlike
independence which he did possess before. The
Knowledge Of Good And Evil
Therold S. Stern Page | 1
The polis was consistently concerned with bringing
the world of human affairs into alignment with the
affairs of the gods. Cult and ritual were quite simply
considered essential for the continuing existence and
health of the Athenian polis.
Feasts, Citizens, And Cultic Democracy In
Classical Athens - Nancy A. Evans
CULT &
THE CITY
shrines & temples - the hubs
- of ancient Greek city-states
on the menstruant
as the original priest
on ancient clans
becoming tribes
‘It is the men that are the Polis’
Thucydides
compiled by
amma birago
… The cult, in contrast, flourished and it continued to

articulate what it meant to be a citizen in democratic Athens
and how that citizen should act.
Religion and the Polis -
The Cult of the Tyrannicides at Athens
Julia L. Shear
But why and how did mortals, human beings, gain such a holdover "the affairs of the
gods"? It turns out that among these people, "our" Greeks, the gods, the gods of Olympus
and the whole world, never thought of inventing such a thing as a "city." … clamoring
for the privileges of a so-called poliad deity as it were,. …
The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities - Marcel Detienne and Janet Lloyd
‘if the Greek was not within a day’s walk of his political centre, then his life was something less than the life of a real man’.
“Thus it is for religion not just to embellish, but to shape all essential
forms of community. The definition of membership is participation in a
cult. This begins with the family, for which Greek has no special word:
one speaks of house and hearth, thus consciously designating the
domestic sacrificial site.”
Greek Religion Page | 2
Walter Butler
“The worship of the gods could be carried out on various levels

of the society’s structure: it could be a matter of the initiative of
a single individual, of a household, of one or more kinship groups,
of the polis or even of a confederation of poleis. Before the creation
of the polis, however, cult practice would have been either a matter
of private initiative of an individual or a household,
or that of a kinship group.”
Mazarakis Ainian
A Lieutenant General in the Hellenic Army
They are not to be divided by their ties to separate mothers, to separate

wives, returned to a private realm that may raise questions about the
universality of the polis and its goals. Saxenhouse is right to point out
that the myth of autochthony excludes women from the origin of the
city.
Athena's Cloak Plato's Critique
Of The Democratic City In The Republic
Bruce Rosenstock
… an acknowledgment of the role of women in reproducing the city, and a tempering of the patriarchal fantasy to be
born without Woman. Perhaps in his renunciation of this whole symbolic domain, and his return to the dream of a
monogendered community of autochthons, Plato is registering his awareness of the profound malaise that gender
asymmetry brings to the city, a malaise which no ritual can cure.
Feasts, Citizens, And

Cultic Democracy In Classical Athens
Nancy A. Evans
… a "polis" cult includes: cults whose priests received a salary
from the public purse, or perquisites from public sacrifices;
sacrifices or dedications by polis officials or on the initiative
of the polis to the deity in question
A Polis and its Priests:

Athenian Priesthoods before and after Pericles' Citizenship Law
Stephen Lambert
A cult might be seen to be important to the polis without necessarily attracting broad participation; and indeed some
of the provisions in the sacrificial calendar of the polis do not look to be for "popular" cults in this sense. The
religion of the city comprehended "the obscure" as well as "the spectacular". Moreover, on the other side of the
equation, there were local cults which attracted wide participation, but did not, … count as "polis" cults, in terms of
funding or other criteria …
… a "polis" cult includes: cults whose priests received a salary from the public purse, or perquisites from public
sacrifices; sacrifices or dedications by polis officials or on the initiative of the polis to the deity in question; the use
of the cult location as a meeting place the Assembly; laws or decrees of the polis regulating the cult; and decrees of
the Council and/or Assembly honoring priests or other cult officials.
Page | 3
…Knowledge of ritual and myth was widely diffused
throughout the society. All adult males were potential
sacrificers, … communal cults attempted to define the
rights of recognized priests belonging to particular
families ..
Sacred space and the city
Michael H. Jameson
Feasts, Citizens, And
Cultic Democracy In Classical Athens
Nancy A. Evans
There was no way for any citizen to avoid taking part
in cultic occasions. Being a citizen necessarily meant
taking part in cultic democracy. Being a good male
citizen, especially for those who had wealth, also
meantextra obligations, liturgies, and gifts for fellow
citizens.
Having secular institutions is a quite modern invention of

the western world, but this sentiment was unheard of by the Greeks.
How closely linked was religion linked
to the state and civic authorities?
Ricardo Fortuné
“The people decides what gods are to be worshipped
by what rituals at what times and places and at what
expense; it regulates too the duties and terms of
office of priests and priestesses and creates new
priesthood at need.” Parker
Just as there were gods on the agora, on the acropolis,

… there were gods for becoming a citizen, …
Temples and sanctuaries were public places, open to all.
There was no Holy of Holies; and the so-called "priests"
were annually elected magistrates who were expected
to give an account of the spending of public money.
The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities
Marcel Detienne and Janet Lloyd
A temple shall be built as Callicrates will draft, and a

stone altar. Hestiaeus proposed: to elect three men
from the council; these shall join with Callicrates in
drafting and indicate to the council how the work is
to be contracted.
Greek Historical Inscriptions

Meiggs and Lewis
“The worship of the gods could be carried out on various levels of the society’s structure: Page | 4
it could be a matter of the initiative of a single individual, of a household, of one or more
kinship groups, of the polis or even of a confederation of poleis. Before the creation of the polis,
however, cult practice would have been either a matter of private initiative of an individual
or a household, or that of a kinship group.”
The genesis of the Greek temple between
the 11th and the 8th centuries BC,
Mazarakis Ainian
Multiple ritual occasions seem to be described here because the enagismata should be separate from the libations
and wine-offerings. The libations at sacrifices find parallels in occasions when offerings for heroes accompanied
offerings to specific divinities.
Sacred space and the city.
Michael H. Jameson
Nausithoos. In the past, he had lived in the neighborhood of the rowdy and violent Cyclopes, who despised the gods
and their altars and had no conception of what an assembly, an agora, was. They exasperated Nausithoos, who
decided to move away and eventually came to found the city of the Phaeacians. He did so as a proto-founder of what
we, using a Latin word, came to call the "colonies" of Sicily and elsewhere. To be on the safe side, Nausithoos built
great ramparts of stone around his city; he shared out parcels of land, for which lots were drawn; and he designed a
magnificent agora, made of well-hewn stone, flanked by a temple for Poseidon. It was as if this god had an
unquestionable right to the rank of poliad (or city) deity.
At the end of the sixth century, somewhere in the mountains of Crete, a little city engaged a scribe, for a large fee.
His name was Spensithios, and he was an expert in purple letters, that is to say Phoenician writing. His contract
specified that he should set down in writing all public matters (demosia), or, to be more precise, both the affairs of
the gods and the affairs of men. The two were kept clearly separate, as it attested by scores of epigraphical
documents. The contract also stated that Spensithios of Crete should be responsible for the management of public
sacrifices, those known as "common" or "ancestral," which were an essential part of the communal affairs of any
city. As all Hellenists know, the ritual calendar, with all its information, relayed about fifty percent of the so called
"laws" of Solon.
Long before the printing press and the wide diffusion of debates in our eighteenth-century Europe of only yesterday,
in every village-city there were temples with walls, and sanctuaries with space: and it was there, in the temples of
Apollo, Artemis, Hera, Poseidon, and others, that the public documents such as the rules of sacrifice and the
decisions of the assembly were published, that is to say exhibited, posted up. Temples and sanctuaries were public
places, open to all. There was no Holy of Holies; and the so-called "priests" were annually elected magistrates who
were expected to give an account of the spending of public money. The sanctuaries of the agora, the temples on the
Acropolis, and the altars scattered through the countryside were all public places, places of publicity by decision of
the council and the assembly, which could thus make known to all and sundry what they ought to do. Just as there
were gods on the agora, on the acropolis, in the Prytaneum, and in the Council chamber, there were gods for
becoming a citizen, for all males born from parents who lived in the city territory. Such youths had to be presented
to the altars and members of their phratry, and then be accepted into a deme, which was a city in miniature, with its
own assemblies, its own sacrifices, its own particular gods, and its own sanctuaries that were used to publicize the
decrees passed by the deme members, the demotes. Page | 5
“agnates are not people biologically related by descent

in the male line who occasionally remind themselves of
this sacrificially; agnates are instead people who sacrifice
together - who know they are agnates because
they sacrifice together.”
Reclaiming The Role Of The Old Priestess
KM Gentile
Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece

Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne
… the starting point of discussion of the expression
of ancient polytheism on the terrain must include an
assumption that the landscape too was, in the words
of Thales, "full of gods."
The priestly office was open to Athenian women and enabled them to exercise a type of leadership: To appoint for
Athena Nike a priestess who – from all Athenian women, and make doors for the sanctuary as Callicrates will draft.
The poletai shall let out the contract in the prytany of [the tribe] Leontis. The priestess shall receive 50 drachmae
and the legs and skins from the public [sacrifices]. A temple shall be built as Callicrates will draft, and a stone altar.
Hestiaeus proposed: to elect three men from the council; these shall join with Callicrates in drafting and indicate to
the council how the work is to be contracted.
Meiggs and Lewis
Greek Historical Inscriptions
The State, an entity distinct from both the wider community

as a whole and its chosen rulers or government, cannot be
found either in ancient Greek actuality or in ancient
Greek terminology
Putting The Greek Gods In Their Places
Paul Cartledge
'At their origins' - but not only at their origins - 'both the city's territory
as a whole and its urban centre were organized and ordered by its
sanctuaries and religious shrines'. … What we call religion (the Greeks
themselves derived term) was ubiquitous in ancient Greek the
polytheistic Greek view, was 'full of gods', …

to the state and civic authorities? Page | 6
Ricardo Fortuné
In certain communities, the state would require its citizens to participate in the rituals that took place in state shrines.
The states also expressed their city particularism by building permanent monuments such as temples and sanctuaries
to which the archaeological record bears witness. In these buildings, the cities expressed their sense of identity but it
also reveals the state rivalry that was going on at the time.
The Personality Of The Greek State

Greg Anderson
Thomas Hobbes called the state, among other things, a 'mortal god'. Nietzsche pronounced it 'the coldest of all cold
monsters'. For Lenin, meanwhile, it was a ruthless, oppressive 'machine'. But one will search in vain for any
comparable imagery in the thought of Classical Greece. The Greeks, it seems, knew no equivalent of the standard,
modern idea of the state as a free-standing, superordinate agency, one that can bend and shape society to its will.
And yet, when one looks at, say, Classical Athens, with its intricate skein of demes and tribes, its institutionally
regulated deliberative process and its bewildering array of legal procedures, one does not see a society that is self-
evidently 'traditional' or 'primitive'. One sees instead a highly calculated exercise in the production of social order.
More to the point, one sees a complexity of reason and design that would be entirely foreign to the kinds of 'pre-
state' or 'stateless' societies studied by anthropologists. How, then, ought one to categorize the Classical polis!

Greg Anderson
Were the poleis of Classical Greece state-based or stateless communities? Do their political structures meet standard
criteria for full statehood? Conventional wisdom maintains that they do not. According to a broad consensus, the
Classical polis was neither state-based nor stateless as such, but something somewhere in between: a unique,
category-defying formation that was somehow both 'state' and 'society' simultaneously, a kind of inseparable fusion
of the two.
Power and Society in Ancient Greece

Elites, Elitism, and Community in the Archaic Polis
John Ma
The structures of the Archaic polis are then interpreted as elite practice and networks. Archaic Athens starts to look
less like a state than a chieftain society, shaped and dominated by the power relations of elite groups and families:
the real world of polis politics and its true actors, far from the shadow-world of law and institutions, whose role may
have been to feebly regulate or to legitimize the power-sharing arrangements of the aristocratic families.
The brief review of symbolic space in ancient Greece

suggests that some features of Greek culture that at
first sight seem rationalist and modernizing, signs of
the transformation of the archaic city, were deeply
rooted in the culture of the city-states from as early as
we can study them. …
Sacred Space and the City
Michael H. Jameson
Fifth-century Athens was a maritime, imperial, city

with far-flung international interests and an
increasingly cosmopolitan population; and
polytheism was an "open system" that adapted Page | 7
readily to new influences.
A Polis and its Priests
Stephen Lambert
... it contained many sanctuaries and temples

within the polis. Important shrines were located close to
the boundaries of the city, probably as a marker for
the territory of the city-state.
The Emerging City of Greek polis
Urban Patterns & Precendents
Raymond Chua
… hero cults in the colonies. Hero worship grew at

the same time as the colonization movement. The
founders of colonies were often worshiped. These
hero cults demonstrated aristocratic prestige and
solidarity.
Ethnicity And Early Greek States
Historical And Material Perspectives
Catherine Morgan
… the mistletoe wherein is stored magic potential, and both magic

and science take humanity "to the top of the mountain and show him
the vision of the celestial city" (712, 49).
Stories of Sacrifice
John Milbank
It has been said of ancient society that whereas modern life may be analyzed in terms of its public versus private
dimensions, antiquity requires a tripartite division: public, private, and cultic. The elements which, when assembled,
constituted the foundations of political society-family, clan, tribe, and village forms of subordinate association-were
all religiously defined. This means that they were each associated with cultic rites and practices which created a
differentiated set of common bonds for different purposes.
Politics, Primordialism, And Orientalism:
Marx, Aristotle, And The Myth Of The Gemeinschaft
Patricia Springborg

Greg Anderson
Far from being governed by some autonomous rule-making agency, the Athenians were simply administering
themselves. This brings us to the second of the two claims which might seem to threaten the case for a state-based
polis, the contention that Greek political organizations lacked the necessary structural differentiation required for
full statehood. In Athens, as elsewhere in the Greek world, polis institutions were quite simply inseparable from
polis society. The essence of the claim is succinctly expressed by Paul Cartledge: The State, an entity distinct from
both the wider community as a whole and its chosen rulers or government, cannot be found either in ancient Greek
actuality or in ancient Greek terminology. And one does not have to look far to find other distinguished authorities Page | 8
who are willing to make similar assertions.
… the gift also in part represents an acknowledgment of the role of women in

reproducing the city, and a tempering of the patriarchal fantasy to be born
without Woman. … Plato is registering his awareness of the profound malaise
that gender asymmetry brings to the city, a malaise which no ritual can cure.
Athena's Cloak
Plato's Critique of the Democratic City in the Republic
Bruce Rosenstock
As orientalists and classicists now concur, kinship or tribal organizations were,

in the last analysis, voluntary forms of association rather than primordial networks.
Recent work on tribalism in both classical antiquity and the modern Middle East
suggests that tribe and clan are socially constructed entities that bear a tenuous
relation to real blood lines, while trading off the moral resources of family and
other forms of in-group loyalties.
Patricia Springborg
…patrilineal "clanship ties are a consequence of sacrificing together". …

"agnates" means literally "people who share the meat of sacrifices. " The affinity
between sacrifice and systems of patrilineal descent does not mean that sacrifice
is performed only in societies organized exclusively by patrilineal descent.
Societies may figure descent more than one way. The Romans recognized two
ways: cognation (bilateral descent) and agnation (patrilineal descent); but only
agnation was tied to sacrificial religion.
KM Gentile
this corporate mask, the mask of 'state',

… this population, with a single mind and a single purpose,
is actually ruling itself. For Hobbes, then, the 'state', …
is a kind of legal contrivance, a discursive construct.
It is in its purest essence no more than an idea, an idea of power.

Greg Anderson
The 'state', meanwhile, the 'great Leviathan', is simply a persona ficta, the unitary corporate persona of the
'multitude' that is assumed by the 'sovereign' whenever this agency acts on the multitude's behalf and embodies its
'common power'. And so long as the 'sovereign' keeps this corporate mask, the mask of 'state', firmly in place, it will
always appear as if the multitude is the true 'author' of all that is said and done in its name. It will always seem as if
this population, with a single mind and a single purpose, is actually ruling itself. For Hobbes, then, the 'state', like
any other 'person by fiction', is a kind of legal contrivance, a discursive construct. It is in its purest essence no more Page | 9
than an idea, an idea of power.
Placing the Gods

Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece
Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne
If the structuralists are correct in assuming that we are predisposed towards binary thinking, this may explain the
enormous appeal of the 1984 essay by Francois de Polignac, who links the birth of the city with the sanctuaries, both
urban and extra-urban; these central and peripheral sanctuaries delineated the territory, the "space of the citizen,"
between them.
We may not always have sufficient knowledge, but the starting point of discussion of the
expression of ancient polytheism on the terrain must include an assumption that the
landscape too was, in the words of Thales, "full of gods."
In Defense of Morgan's "Grecian Gens":

Ancient Kinship and Stratification
Howard Becker
Eduard Meyer's theory of the nature of the gene is much preferable. They are aggregates of men who through the
acquisition of large estates have achieved for themselves, at the same time with economic pre-eminence, social,
political, military, and religious distinction which they seek to preserve by organization, the fiction of a common
descent, and the formation in this way of exclusive ideal groups. They create for themselves special deities who are
often abstracted from the names of their leading families, and cherish peculiar religious rites for their propitiation or
honor. They become the chief personages in the phratries to which they belong, and through drawing together from
Attica into Athens they give new vigor to the state idea;
Feasts, Citizens, And Cultic Democracy

In Classical Athens
Nancy A. Evans
W.R. Connor has convincingly documented how the 'public', 'secular' concerns of the classical Athenian polis -
above all the obligations of civic justice and citizenship rights - had 'sacred' acts attached to them. The polis was
consistently concerned with bringing the world of human affairs into alignment with the affairs of the gods. Cultic
behaviors and rituals were the means to bring about this balance. And it can no longer be assumed, as some classical
scholars and ancient historians have done for decades, that these rites and behaviors were empty rituals; nor were
they «taboos or ways of magically assuring divine support.» Cult and ritual were quite simply considered essential
for the continuing existence and health of the Athenian polis. For instance, cult practices that were tied to the rural
countryside of Attica and the calendar of agricultural festivals were of central importance to the state as a whole,
even once Athens grew into a large urban center.

Patricia Springborg
The growth of these cult sites was instrumental in forming the

various social groups of the classical polis. Polignac then
discusses the role of cult in colonization. Most colonies were Page | 10
sent out during the period of polis formation, and the methods
of siting sanctuaries are similar. Urban holy places linked the
colony with its mother city.
Polignac's book, an updated translation of his 1984 La Naissance de la cite grecque, is a ground-breaking study of
the placement of Greek sanctuaries. This English translation allowed Polignac to update and refine the earlier book.
Polignac concentrates on the evidence from the Middle and Late Geo- metric periods of the eighth century, when
there was a great increase in the population of Greece and the number of occupied sites. He notes the rise in
offerings at sacred places at the start of the period. The majority of sanctuaries were new, not built on previous holy
spots, and tended to be standardized, with altar, temple, and dividing wall. Many of them were nonurban and at least
as important as their urban counterparts. Polignac shows that sanctuaries were often situated on the threshold of a
city's territory. Using the worship at the Argive Heraion as his main example, he shows that regular processions
went out from the city center to the extra-urban sanctuary, confirming the importance of the connection. The extra-
urban sites were important in rituals that integrated adolescents into the community and gave a role to marginal
groups, such as women and foreigners. The growth of these cult sites was instrumental in forming the various social
groups of the classical polis. Polignac then discusses the role of cult in colonization. Most colonies were sent out
during the period of polis formation, and the methods of siting sanctuaries are similar. Urban holy places linked the
colony with its mother city. Peri-urban sanctuaries, near walls and gates, anchored the farms and grazing land to the
city. Smaller temples helped integrate natives into the new city. Finally, Polignac discusses the role of hero cults in
the colonies. Hero worship grew at the same time as the colonization movement. The founders of colonies were
often worshiped. These hero cults demonstrated aristocratic prestige and solidarity.
Ethnicity And Early Greek States
Historical And Material Perspectives
Catherine Morgan
'At their origins' - but not only at their origins - 'both the city's territory
as a whole and its urban centre were organized and ordered by its
sanctuaries and religious shrines'. … What we call religion (the Greeks
themselves derived term) was ubiquitous in ancient Greek the
polytheistic Greek view, was 'full of gods', …
Putting the Greek Gods in Their Places
P. A. Cartledge
The Polis, Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis

by Hansen and Raaflaub
Review by: P. J. Rhodes
After noting the difficulty of drawing a line between the time when there was not a polis and the time when there
was, and stressing that changes in religious practice point to a redirection rather than a reduction of expenditure for
religious purposes, he concentrates on developments in Athens and Argos. In Athens during the archaic period
extravagance by the elite of the elite was curbed, to the advantage not of the poor but of members of the elite who
had not been able to sustain the competition; as hill-top cults were abandoned (a phenomenon not peculiar to Attica)
there was a greater concentration on festivals in Athens, in which hoplite farmers from various parts of Attica could
take part together. In Argos the extravagance of the basileis likewise gave way to comparative equality among the
elite; and at the Heraeum and Mycenae we see the attempts of regional centres to mark the extent of their influence.

Greg Anderson Page | 11
Were the poleis of Classical Greece state-based or stateless communities? Do their political structures meet standard
criteria for full statehood? Conventional wisdom maintains that they do not. According to a broad consensus, the
Classical polis was neither state-based nor stateless as such, but something somewhere in between: a unique,
category-defying formation that was somehow both 'state' and 'society' simultaneously, a kind of inseparable fusion
of the two.
… an alternative perspective on this complex but fundamental issue. It questions prevailing views on theoretical
grounds, suggesting that the consensus 'fusionist' position rests ultimately upon a misunderstanding of what Thomas
Hobbes would call the 'personality' of polis political structures. Focusing on the case of Classical Athens, it then
proceeds to present a new account of the Greek 'state', an account that aims to be both theoretically satisfying and
heuristically useful. Even if all those who performed state functions were simultaneously constituents of polis
'society', the state was nevertheless perceived to function as an autonomous agency, possessing a corporate
personality that was quite distinct from the individual personalities of the living, breathing citizens who happened to
instantiate it at any particular time.
Greg Anderson
Thomas Hobbes called the state, among other things, a 'mortal god'. Nietzsche pronounced it 'the coldest of all cold
monsters'. For Lenin, meanwhile, it was a ruthless, oppressive 'machine'. But one will search in vain for any
comparable imagery in the thought of Classical Greece. The Greeks, it seems, knew no equivalent of the standard,
modern idea of the state as a free-standing, superordinate agency, one that can bend and shape society to its will.
And yet, when one looks at, say, Classical Athens, with its intricate skein of demes and tribes, its institutionally
regulated deliberative process and its bewildering array of legal procedures, one does not see a society that is self-
evidently 'traditional' or 'primitive'. One sees instead a highly calculated exercise in the production of social order.
More to the point, one sees a complexity of reason and design that would be entirely foreign to the kinds of 'pre-
state' or 'stateless' societies studied by anthropologists. How, then, ought one to categorize the Classical polis!

Greg Anderson
A growing number of authorities now seem prepared to agree that the political structures in Classical poleis cannot
be considered 'states' in any conventional, full sense of the term. The case has been made most forcefully to this
point by Moshe Berent, a political scientist, who contends in a series of articles that poleis were entirely stateless
entities. Few others would go quite this far. Most seem to prefer a 'softer', more equivocal position, maintaining that
the polis was neither state-based nor stateless as such, but something somewhere in between: unique, category-
defying formation that was somehow both 'state' and 'society' simultaneously, a kind of inseparable fusion of the
two. But for all practical purposes, as I will argue below, the differences between these two positions are of
negligible consequence. Both insist that the polis was essentially a community of self-regulating individuals, a
community that had no evident need for any kind of autonomous, rule-making agency that one might call a 'state'.
Such at any rate is the conventional wisdom, and, to date, the two specific arguments that have been made in its
favour have passed largely unchallenged.
According to one, the rule-making authorities in Greek poleis

cannot be considered true 'states' because they were unable to
exercise a monopoly control over the legitimate means of
coercion.
According to the other, these same authorities fell short of full statehood because they never managed to detach
themselves structurally from polis 'society'. … This not to imply that the Greek form of state was identical in all its
properties to its modern counterpart. But it is to suggest an essential categorical kinship between the two. Even if
Greek political structures did not look much like Nietzsche's 'cold monster' or Lenin's 'machine', this need not
prevent us from speaking meaningfully of Greek 'states'.
Far from being governed by some autonomous rule-making agency, the Athenians were simply administering
themselves. This brings us to the second of the two claims which might seem to threaten the case for a state-based
Page | 12
polis, the contention that Greek political organizations lacked the necessary structural differentiation required for
full statehood. In Athens, as elsewhere in the Greek world, polis institutions were quite simply inseparable from
polis society. The essence of the claim is succinctly expressed by Paul Cartledge: The State, an entity distinct from
both the wider community as a whole and its chosen rulers or government, cannot be found either in ancient Greek
actuality or in ancient Greek terminology. And one does not have to look far to find other distinguished authorities
who are willing to make similar assertions.
Greg Anderson
… Why not just speak of a stateless society, a society that somehow governs itself? The heuristic gain is not at all
apparent. Again, the distinction between the two positions seems purely nominal. Of more significant concern,
though, is the larger assumption made by all those mentioned above. Whence the conviction that states must be
wholly autonomous agencies in the first place? It may well be true that the state tends to appear in the modern
imagination as a unitary, free standing agency, one that is forever separated by a kind of impermeable membrane
from the society over which it holds sway. But there is no timeless societal law which mandates this essentially
binary vision of social order.
Greg Anderson
… for Hobbes, the state proper is not a complex of institutions. Nor is it to be equated with the personnel who might
manage or control such a complex. Nor can it be reduced to a simple 'coercive apparatus', despite Berent's assertions
to the contrary. Rather, for Hobbes, the state is in essence a kind of 'person'. And before turning to look at his
account of this state's formation of Leviathan, we should briefly consider what exactly Hobbes means here by
personhood or 'personality', something which he helpfully explains in the previous chapter. Following traditional
usage in Roman law, Hobbes defines a 'person' essentially as anyone (or anything) to whom responsibility for
speech or action can be attributed. He then discusses three varieties of personality: the 'natural person', the 'artificial
person' and the 'person by fiction'. As for the first of these, one speaks or acts as a 'natural person' when one's words
or actions belong to oneself. Alternatively, one speaks or acts as an 'artificial person' when one's words or actions
really belong to some other party.

Greg Anderson
In other words, to speak or act as an 'artificial person' is merely to serve as a representative. Or as Hobbes himself
would prefer, it is to 'personate' another, to 'bear his person or act in his name'; it is, as it were, to don a mask and
play the role of someone or something else. … But the real focus of Hobbes' interest here is a very particular kind
of 'person by fiction', the fictitious corporate person. For just like a bridge or an institution, a human population,
however large or diverse, can also acquire a fictitious form of personality. Again, it is constituted as a person when,
and only when, it is 'personated' by a representative, whether this representative is a single individual or some kind
of group, like an assembly, that can speak effectively with one voice. Either way, when this representative, as it
were, assumes the corporate 'mask' of the population and speaks or acts in its name, it is as if all the members of this
population were somehow speaking or acting as one, like a single, monadic organism, a single, unitary self. …
The 'state', meanwhile, the 'great Leviathan', is simply a persona ficta, the unitary corporate persona of the
'multitude' that is assumed by the 'sovereign' whenever this agency acts on the multitude's behalf and embodies its
'common power'. And so long as the 'sovereign' keeps this corporate mask, the mask of 'state', firmly in place, it will
always appear as if the multitude is the true 'author' of all that is said and done in its name. It will always seem as if
this population, with a single mind and a single purpose, is actually ruling itself. For Hobbes, then, the 'state', like
any other 'person by fiction', is a kind of legal contrivance, a discursive construct. It is in its purest essence no more
than an idea, an idea of power. But this idea obviously requires physical instantiation if it is to play an effective role
in the world of action. Hence, as a social object, the state is best seen as an ontologically complex entity, a
commixture of material agency and ideational construct.
Page | 13
… the gift also in part represents an acknowledgment of the role of women in
reproducing the city, and a tempering of the patriarchal fantasy to be born
without Woman. … Plato is registering his awareness of the profound malaise
that gender asymmetry brings to the city, a malaise which no ritual can cure.
Athena's Cloak
Bruce Rosenstock
Plato's diagnosis of the radical privatization of public space in the democracy is linked to his characterization of the
city as feminized. Plato's cure for this disorder is the effacement of the female and the elimination of the private
world altogether from the life of his guardians. Ultimately, Plato is unable to conceive of the private space of the
household in positive terms because he understands it (and in this we may perhaps wish to agree with his assessment
of the patriarchal oikos) to be the space of aggrievement. We have seen that when the Athenians celebrate the
Panathenaia they are appealing to the beneficence of Athena, and they offer a gift that comes from the labor of the
women. … the gift also in part represents an acknowledgment of the role of women in reproducing the city, and a
tempering of the patriarchal fantasy to be born without Woman. Perhaps in his renunciation of this whole symbolic
domain, and his return to the dream of a monogendered community of autochthons, Plato is registering his
awareness of the profound malaise that gender asymmetry brings to the city, a malaise which no ritual can cure.
They are not to be divided by their ties to separate mothers, to separate

wives, returned to a private realm that may raise questions about the
universality of the polis and its goals. Saxenhouse is right to point out
that the myth of autochthony excludes women from the origin of the
city.
Bruce Rosenstock
… an acknowledgment of the role of women in reproducing the city, and a tempering of the patriarchal fantasy to be
born without Woman. Perhaps in his renunciation of this whole symbolic domain, and his return to the dream of a
monogendered community of autochthons, Plato is registering his awareness of the profound malaise that gender

Howard Becker
... that Attic history begins with a period in which the whole people is organized in clans, and that, though in time
the perpetuation of the clan tended to be limited to the Eupatrids, and the "household family" (oikos) supplanted the
clan as the basic unit of Attic society, yet there remain clear traces of the organization of people of craftsman status
in clans, as well as some other non-Eupatrid clans which owed their survival to the fact that they acquired a priestly
function. This conclusion by itself does not validate all the attributes ascribed by Glotz to the clan in the period of its
universality and supremacy; it only establishes the attribute of universality. In fact, one may say that Glotz's whole
conception would be endangered if there were no signs in Attic history that the clan was functionally anything but a
Eupatrid organization, however plausible might be the reasons advanced why what was once a universal
organization would tend to emerge later as a Eupatrid organization.
… in every village-city there were temples with walls, and sanctuaries with space: … The sanctuaries of the agora, Page | 14
the temples on the Acropolis, and the altars scattered through the countryside were all public places, places of
publicity by decision of the council and the assembly, which could thus make known to all and sundry what they
ought to do. Just as there were gods on the agora, on the acropolis, … there were gods for becoming a citizen, …
accepted into a deme, which was a city in miniature, with its own assemblies, its own sacrifices, its own particular
gods, and its own sanctuaries that were used to publicize the decrees passed by the deme members, the demotes.

Howard Becker
Greek kinship is not a matter in which it is possible to reproduce the received opinion of the experts on Greek
history, for there is today no received opinion, and the case was little different in Morgan's time. It is known that in
Athens the sixth century BC there were four main categories of kinship-groupings which an individual might
belong. These were:
(1) the immediate family, household (oikos), consisting of husband, wife, and children;
(2) the extended family (with consanguine extension), in Attic law reaching only as far as the grandchildren of
brothers and sisters and the grandchildren of uncles, which group was called "the near-relatives" (anchisteia);
(3) the patrilineal clan (genos);
(4) the phratry (phratria);
(5) the tribe (phyle).
Now, while Glotz regards the clan, phratry, and tribe as the characteristic social groupings of Greeks in the period
before the city-state, no less an authority than Eduard Meyer regards all of them as comparatively late phenomena,
created after the formation of the city-state or in the process of that formation. Do the clan, phratry, and tribe
represent vestiges of the social organization the Greeks in the period before the formation of the city-state? The
question is crucial importance for Glotz's analysis of the formation and significance of the city-state, for it is
precisely one of these groupings, the clan, which in that analysis is both the primary social organization in pre-city-
state society and also the polar antithesis of the city-state itself. Glotz speaks of the city-state as establishing
supremacy at the expense of the previous autonomy of the clan, of the city-state emancipating the individual from
the umbilical cord that tied him to the clan, etc.
If the views of Meyer are right, and the clan is an organization originating only in the period of the Greek
aristocracies, after the establishment of the state, and originating in response to the specific social situation then
existing, it is difficult to see how much remains standing of Morgan's famous chapters Ancient Society, or of Glotz's
book, generally regarded as a classic, La Solidarite de la famille dans le droit criminel en Grece. If on this question
the judgments of leading historical authorities were evenly divided, it might perhaps be justifiable to state one's own
preference, leave it to the general coherence of the argument and the use made hypothesis preferred to win the
reader's allegiance to one's own side.
The clan was a group of individuals held together by the belief that they were descendants of a common ancestor. In
historical times the (real or fictitious) kinship bond between all the clansmen (gennetai) was so remote that the clan
fell naturally into groups of "kindred" (syngeneis), a term which was distinguished from the term (gennetai)
designating membership in the same clan. The few examples of clan family-trees which we possess are relatively
late; they would indicate that the (real or fictitious) common ancestor was placed about fifteen generations back, in
the ninth century BC. Membership in the clan descended exclusively in the male line. In historical times the function
of the clan centered round two fundamental activities:
(1) the performance of certain ancestral rituals

(2) the maintenance of an authorized membership list, including the admission, on presentation, of the qualified new Page | 15
members, a function which had importance in the city- state in that the evidence of the clan was accepted in the law-
courts, along with other evidence, in determining disputed questions of relationship.
On the internal organization of the clan in the classical period the following facts are known. At the head of the clan
stood a "ruler" (archon), chosen, like the "rulers" of the Athenian state, annually by lot. There was also a treasurer
(tamias or epimeletes), who was in charge of the common property of the clan. This common property consisted in
holy precincts, a meeting-place for the clan, and some cash funds. The affairs of the clan (the regulation of their
priesthoods, the administration of their property, the supervision of their membership list) were directed in
egalitarian fashion by the members of the clan meeting in plenary session.
the ten characteristics of the "Grecian gens"

given by Morgan in his Ancient Society
(1) "Common religious rites." This is obvious and undeniable.

(2) "A common burial-place." There seems to be no unequivocal direct evidence showing this. Glotz maintains that
the Attic clans did have a common burial-place, at least in the earliest period, and quotes some indirect evidence; 18
it has also been claimed that there is indirect evidence to the contrary … In particular, we should have prove that the
Greek family in the narrower sense, in the classical period, represents a breaking-up of an original clan-system.
(3) "Mutual rights of succession to property of deceased members." Here again there does not seem to be any direct
and unequivocal evidence that the members of the clan had any rights of succession to the property of a deceased
member. Contrariwise, the members of the immediate family (genos in the narrower sense) had rights which were
carefully regulated on the basis of degrees kinship.
(4) "Reciprocal obligations of help, defense and redress of injuries." …. Whether we may represent clan as operative
in blood-feuds, etc., after the manner of clans in other depends on the view held about the antiquity and scope of the
clan
(5) "The right to intermarry in the gens in cases of orphan daughters heiresses." It was indeed a part of Attic and
general Greek law that recognized as heiresses in default of male heirs, not only could but should their nearest male
relative (the epiclerate) so as to ensure the transmission property to a male descendant.
(6) "The possession of common property, an archon, and a treasurer." these, as we saw, are directly attested for the
Attic clan.
(7) "The limitation of descent to the male line." This is universally recognized to be true of the Attic clan.
(8) "The obligation not to marry in the gens except in certain cases."
(9) "The right to adopt strangers." Adoption was a well-established custom for all sorts of Greek kinship-groups, and
we have inscriptional evidence for adoption by a clan.
(10) "The right to elect and depose its chiefs."

Howard Becker
Death at the Building Site: Construction Sacrifice in Southeast Asia

Robert Wessing and Roy E. Jordaan
Thus Busolt says . . .families that were bound in close relationship formed a band of blood kin, the anchisteia.
Gradually there arose, in conjunction with economic and social development and the greater prominence of rich and
respected families, alongside of the bands of blood kin, more close-knit clan organizations in which the nobles shut
themselves off and set themselves apart from the commoners. Ferguson says the clans are aggregates of men who
through the acquisition of large estates have achieved for themselves, at the same time with economic pre-eminence,
social, political, military, and religious distinction which they seek to preserve by organization, the fiction of a
common descent, and the formation in this way of exclusive ideal groups.
Page | 16
Glotz begins the analytical part of his City as follows: The first Greeks to arrive in Greece . . . were semi-nomadic
shepherds Balkan peninsula. Since they had spent their lives wandering with their flocks the plains and through the
mountain forests, they had never formed a state. of organization was the patriarchal clan, to which the name of
patria, or more genos, was given, and whose members were all descendants of the same ancestor worshippers of the
same god. The clan is the basic unit of organization for the whole body of the first sight Glotz and Meyer seem to
contradict each other diametrically. however, strictly speaking not so. It is important to realize that they about
different periods in Greek social history. Meyer is speaking of a which
(1) the city-state

(2) marked social differentiation exist. (whether justifiably or not) feels it necessary to take as his starting point
essentially defined as one in which those two features are absent.

Howard Becker
As a fact, Glotz agrees with Meyer that in the period characterized by the formation the city-state and the rise of
social differentiation the clan was identified Eupatrids; he holds that certain factors led to the clan's ceasing to be the
kinship organization, and perpetuating itself only in the form of groups privileged nobility. (We shall show that there
are reasons for believing in this period the clan was not exclusively Eupatrid; this, however, is irrelevant this point.)
In other words, Glotz and Meyer do not differ in their presentation the role of the clan at the beginning of Attic
history; …
Wade-Gery argues in favor of accepting Aristotle's view that Attic history begins with a situation in which there are
clans, but no Eupatrids; since this situation determines the relations of the clan to the Eupatrids at a later date, it
follows that there is no reason for the assumption that a member of a clan was necessarily a Eupatrid. Costello goes
further, and argues in favor of accepting Aristotle's view that Attic history begins with a situation in which the whole
body of the Athenian people are organized into clans.

Howard Becker

Patricia Springborg
Only if it can be established that the clan in the historical does represent an atrophied vestige of what was once an
institution much pervasive in its influence is it possible even to entertain the very important that there was once in
Greece a system of collective ownership of property clan. For, to return to our initial statement of the problem, there
are those hold that the clan is an institution no older than the rise of the Greek aristocracies. Since it would be agreed
by those who hold the theory of collective ownership property by the clan that in the age of the rise of the Greek
aristocracies property tended to be individually held, it is obvious that the postulate of a primitive, economically,
socially, and morally autonomous and unitary clan must be doned unless it can be shown that the clan is older than
the age of the Greek aristocracies, and that the rise of the Greek aristocracies seriously changed attenuated its
functions.
As such, the polis constituted an aggregate of subordinate forms of association entered into by way of initiation rites,
pacts, seals of blood covenant, etc., which enjoyed secret rites, private festivities, and legal immunity. As orientalists Page | 17
and classicists now concur, kinship or tribal organizations were, in the last analysis, voluntary forms of association
rather than primordial networks. Recent work on tribalism in both classical antiquity and the modern Middle East
suggests that tribe and clan are socially constructed entities that bear a tenuous relation to real blood lines, while
trading off the moral resources of family and other forms of in-group loyalties. Thus the designation of the tribe,
named after a heroized ancestor, a mythical historical homeland, or an ancient totemistic sign, usually represents at
the same time territorial claims, ethnic identification, and status, financial, or other aspirations on the part of the
living association.
Patricia Springborg
The polis was consistently concerned with bringing the world of human affairs into
alignment with the affairs of the gods. Cultic behaviors and rituals were the means to
bring about this balance. And it can no longer be assumed, as some classical scholars and
ancient historians have done for decades, that these rites and behaviors were empty
rituals; nor were they taboos or ways of magically assuring divine support. Cult and ritual
were quite simply considered essential for the continuing existence and health of the
Athenian polis.
In Classical Athens
Nancy A. Evans
differentiated set of common bonds for different purposes. The substantive content of these cults was, curiously
enough, provided largely from the Near East. There is a continuity of mystery and miracle cults, magic practices,
forms of table worship, omen- taking, astrological lore, cultic incantations, and initiation rites that go back in some
cases to Pharaonic and Babylonian practices of the third millennium B.C., and which were taken over and faithfully
incorporated into their own religious practices by successive Semitic, Greek, and Roman invaders (Hooke, 1953)
Patricia Springborg
The City As An Element In The International System

Kenneth E. Boulding
… before the invention of agriculture man was too near the margin of subsistence in most places to have any surplus
left over, either for more elaborate organization or for organized fighting. The domestication of plants and animals
seems to have led at first to a degree of relative affluence in which productive activity paid off better than predatory,
and hence the threat system seems to have been fairly well muted. A great many neolithic villages seem to have
been undefended. As long as population was sparse in relation to agricultural land, this idyllic Garden of Eden could
persist. The rise of cities may well have been associated with population pressure that made simple expansion of the
old way of life impossible. The first cities seem to have been created by internal threat systems. In the early days, Page | 18
this appears to have been mainly a spiritual threat. A charismatic priesthood somehow persuades the farmer to hand
over some of his surplus food, and with this food the priests, the artisans, and the builders of temples, houses, and
walls are fed, but not much comes back to the farmer. The simplest model both of the city-state and of the
international system would suppose each city to have a small agricultural hinterland around it, from which the
surplus of food flows into the city and which receives from the city primarily spiritual goods or threats. At this stage
at any rate, the city would have little in the way of products to export. The spiritual threat of the priest is usually
succeeded by the more material threat of the king who uses the food that he extracts from the farmers to feed
soldiers who can extract the surplus that feeds them by material threat. … A system of city-states is only stable if
what I have called the "loss of strength gradient -that is, the decline in threat capability and (or credibility)' per mile
of distance traveled away from its origin - is very high. Thus, for the system of city-states to be stable, the threat
capability of the city must be exhausted once it has covered an area that is capable of feeding the city from its food
surplus.
The City As An Element In The International System

Kenneth E. Boulding
… in Boltanski’s and Thevenot’s work, where each cité is structured around an

ideal typical form of sacrifice, a “greatness” by which the “worth” of other
sacrifices are measured. and to analyse how these cités are distributed.
Death at the Building Site: Construction Sacrifice in Southeast Asia

Robert Wessing and Roy E. Jordaan
… “discourses” … in a way that lies very close to Boltanski’s & Thevenot’s understanding of “cité”. There may be
differences, of course. Differences that are not quite caught by the English translation, “world”, either. Strictly
speaking, discourses define linguistic aspects of sociality, aspects which I assume have an impact beyond the sphere
of language, but aspects that are, nevertheless, linguistic. Boltanski’s and Thevenot’s concept on the other hand,
seems to imply a structure of thought, which metaphorically can be understood as a confined physical place, as a
walled city, hence the term “cité”.
Cités share two fundamental traits with discourses.
… in Boltanski’s and Thevenot’s work, where each cité is structured around an ideal typical form of sacrifice, a
“greatness” by which the “worth” of other sacrifices are measured. and to analyse how these cités are distributed.
Athena's Cloak:
Bruce Rosenstock
The unity of Athens is grounded in the diversity of its households. Autochthony and
sexual reproduction in legitimate marriage therefore represent the two sides of Athens'
political self-representation: on one hand, the city as a single-voiced and same-minded
body politic and, on the other hand, the city as the lawfully regulated place of
contestation and reciprocal give-and-take for diverse individuals seeking partial and
partisan goals. The peplos of Athena figures as symbol of both aspects of this political
duality.
The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities Page | 19

… the management of public sacrifices, those known as "common" or "ancestral," which were an essential part of
the communal affairs of any city. As all Hellenists know, the ritual calendar, with all its information, relayed about
fifty percent of the so called "laws" of Solon. But the essential point … is that "the affairs of the gods," the first
section of "public matters," were debated, discussed, and decided in the assembly and moreover in the first part of
the assembly.
Being a citizen, especially a male citizen, meant taking part in the cultic democracy, and being at cultic events in the
acknowledged presence of other citizens. The structure of the Athenian polis (perhaps both before and after
Cleisthenes) was based on the demes and the tribes, and the small size of these cultic communities ensured that
citizens could carry out the crucial civic function of vouching for each other's civic status. There was no way for any
citizen to avoid taking part in cultic occasions. Being a citizen necessarily meant taking part in cultic democracy.
Being a good male citizen, especially for those who had wealth, also meant extra obligations, liturgies, and gifts for
fellow citizens.
In Classical Athens
Nancy A. Evans
‘Again, there is our Greekness, since we are of the same blood and the
same language, and have common sanctuaries of the gods and
sacrifices, and have the same customs, which would not make it good
for the Athenians to become traitors.’ (Herodotus, VIII.144.ii)
Ricardo Fortuné
Athenian democracy was cultic in that various functions of the

democracy were committed to upholding the ancestral practices of
public, communal worship. The democratic state accomplished this
goal at the larger scale of the centralized polis, and at the smaller, local
scale of the demes and phratries.
In Classical Athens
Nancy A. Evans
Cultic democracy demanded the ritual fitness of those who performed sacred acts on behalf of the city. Any citizen
who had good evidence of an official's wrongdoing (which would impede that official from carrying out his duties in
accordance with custom) was under obligation to stop the official from acting. Failing to do so put the whole polis at
risk. Such charges of impiety linked the alleged wrongdoer with miasma, the symbolic pollution that had serious
civic and sociological consequences. The political nature of this symbolic pollution was very real to the Athenians,
and those considered tainted with miasma were expressly forbidden from public gatherings, including participation
in the sacrificial community and its public heortai.

In Classical Athens
Nancy A. Evans
The pleasures of feasts, music and drinking should all be associated

with the immortal gods; it is taken for granted that mortal life, even Page | 20
from earliest childhood, is one of pain interspersed with pleasure.
the upkeep of the sanctuary and the funding of festivals.

Thus, it was conventional for cities to allocate part of their own civic
funds to defray part of the cost of festivals (including the sacrifices)
and to pay temple personnel.
On Julian's Pagan Revival and the Decline of Blood Sacrifice.

Scott Bradbury
The Greek city states and public funding of blood

sacrifices. The seeding of civic life and religion, also states
and nations and the function of democracy and government.

Scott Bradbury
The funding of public cults: Euergetism and pagan priesthoods

Every town and city was to have a priest, over whom there stood a provincial high-priest to be selected from those
who were "most distinguished in public life and conspicuous in performing every kind of public service" (Euseb.
HE 8.14.9). Like an imperial governor, the high-priest was granted a bodyguard of soldiers. Lactantius corroborates
Eusebius' account, while providing us with further details: [Maximin] went on to adopt the novel practice (novo
more) of appointing high priests (sacerdotes maximos), one for each city from among its leading citizens.
As Ramsay MacMullen has written of philotimia: "No word, understood to its depth, goes farther to explain the
Greco-Roman achievement." The gods were among the most conspicuous beneficiaries of philotimia, particularly of
the heavy spending of the priests themselves. Traditionally, festivals of the gods in Greek cities had been funded
from three different sources: sacred funds, civic funds, and private benefaction. Within the chaotic finance systems
of Greek cities, sacred funds represented an unusually stable and reliable source of revenue, but revenue whose use
was in theory restricted to sacred purposes, such as the construction and repair of temples, the funding of festivals
(including the sacrifices) and the payment of the temple personnel. Civic magistrates were charged with overseeing
the proper use of the gods' revenues. Rents from temple lands and revenue from the authorized sale of temple
property were insufficient, however, to cover upkeep of the sanctuary and the funding of festivals. Thus, it was
conventional for cities to allocate part of their own civic funds to defray part of the cost of festivals (including the
sacrifices) and to pay temple personnel.
A. H. M. Jones judged that the majority of sacrifices at the festivals were paid for out of public funds. This
combination of civic and sacred funds, however, still fell short of the sums necessary to stage the elaborate festivals
often connected with the most prominent shrines and cities.
… By the Hellenistic and Roman periods, priesthoods in Greek cities, as at Rome, had become assimilated to civic
magistracies. Social prestige and an ability to shoulder the considerable financial burdens were the most important
criteria in the selection of pagan priests, who usually served for a year, sometimes for a fixed number of years.
Priesthoods "for life" were not uncommon, and a few were hereditary, either by ancient custom or because the same
family held the priesthood through successive generations. As we noted above, among the sources of civic revenue,
sacred funds were unusual for their stability and reliability.

Scott Bradbury
Page | 21
In theory these funds were the property of the god, but cities frequently found creative ways to tap them. No practice
reveals more clearly the economic aspects of priestly appointments than the outright sale of priesthoods, attested in
Asia Minor (particularly Ionia) from the fourth century B.C. to the second century A.D. By selling a priesthood and
then awarding the priest's salary from a combination of civic and sacred funds, cities might effectively tap sacred
funds for secular purposes. But the sale of priesthoods was merely the formalization of the well-attested process of
"pollicitation," by which a notable's "promise" of a specific benefaction might, after negotiation, lead to the bestowal
of a prestigious office. Pollicitation preceded the granting of priesthoods as well as secular offices, as we see in
inscriptions in which a notable boast of having bestowed benefactions "in accordance with his promise."
Epigraphical evidence from the Hellenistic period through the third century A.D. records the wide variety and
stupendous scale of benefaction in which priests might engage: the construction or repair of public and sacred
monuments; the funding of festivals, including grants to the citizens of money, oil, wine, grain, perfumes, and
unguents; the funding of sacrifices by remitting to the city or private worshippers the hides, animal parts, taxes, and
fees rightfully owed to the priest; the feasting of the magistrates or, in some cases, the whole citizenry; the provision
of entertainment, such as singers, actors, horse races, and gladiatorial combats. Priests and priestesses derived
conspicuous benefit from the possession of priesthoods, since lavish expenditure on the gods was traditional, it built
up the religious and social life of the community, and, as Peter Brown has pointed out, it was well suited to deflect
the envy of one's peers.
The system of funding public festivals through a combination of sacred funds, civic funds, and private benefaction
lasted well into the third century, despite the rise of serious competitors for the largesse of civic benefactors,
particularly the festivals of the imperial cult and agonistic festivals. The imperial cult quickly became one of the
most dynamic cults in Asia Minor (and elsewhere), if we measure dynamism by a capacity to attract competitive
zeal and financial resources. The similarities among these festivals imperial, agonistic, and divine-were greater than
their differences: they all employed the processions, sacrifices, banquets, distributions, and contests that had come to
be a central feature of Greek culture and sustained a characteristically Greek style of civic life. These various
festivals would continue so long as civic finances permitted and, in particular, so long as the "sheer willingness"
(MacMullen's phrase) of the notables to fund them held firm. However, the third century's drastic economic decline,
accelerated by military anarchy and barbarian invasions, dealt a serious blow to this style of civic life. Although the
impact of these factors varied from region to region, it is clear that when prosperity began to return under the
Tetrarchs, resources were much reduced and the scale of public and private
Scott Bradbury
But why and how did mortals, human beings, gain such a holdover "the affairs of the gods"? It turns out that among
these people, "our" Greeks, the gods, the gods of Olympus and the whole world, never thought of inventing such a
thing as a "city." Cities were an invention of men, of mortals, and one fine day the gods woke up to this fact. In no
time, they were jostling at the gate, clamoring for the privileges of a so-called poliad deity as it were, a better paid
"chair" than an ordinary seat in the pantheon.

city. … But the essential point … is that "the affairs of the gods," the first section of "public matters," were debated,
discussed, and decided in the assembly and moreover in the first part of the assembly. The assembly decided by a
majority vote how the new calendar should be organized and the order in which the various gods would be honored. Page | 22

The pleasures of feasts, music and drinking should all be associated with the
immortal gods; it is taken for granted that mortal life, even from earliest child-
hood, is one of pain interspersed with pleasure.
… the polis of Athens evolved from a group of independent towns in Attica, each with its own town hall and local
magistrates, into a single polis with a centralized government and prytany (public dining hall) in Athens. The
Athenians celebrated the Sunoikeia as the annual polis-wide commemoration of the political unification of their
state. Within this newly centralized state organization, the inhabitants of smaller demes and villages throughout the
countryside of Attica were still allowed to honor their local ancestral customs. Thucydides records that the
Athenians were reluctant to change this traditional pattern once the Peloponnesian War broke out and everyone
was forced to move into the urban center of Athens. They did not wish to leave behind their homes, temples and
localized, ancestral ways.
During the fifth century when Thucydides was writing, Athens was said to be different from all the other Greek
states in how often it provided even poor men with the opportunity to feast at lavish, publicly funded banquets.
Athens and her democracy was said to be great precisely because of … the ancestral customs that demanded
sacrifice to the gods and heroes, and the public banquets that followed.
In Classical Athens
Nancy A. Evans
There was no way for any citizen to avoid taking part in cultic
occasions. Being a citizen necessarily meant taking part in cultic
democracy. Being a good male citizen, especially for those who had
wealth, also meant extra obligations, liturgies, and gifts for fellow
citizens.

In Classical Athens
Nancy A. Evans
The polis was consistently concerned with bringing the world of human affairs into alignment with the affairs of the
gods. Cultic behaviors and rituals were the means to bring about this balance. And it can no longer be assumed, as
some classical scholars and ancient historians have done for decades, that these rites and behaviors were empty
rituals; nor were they «taboos or ways of magically assuring divine support.» Cult and ritual were quite simply
considered essential for the continuing existence and health of the Athenian polis. For instance, cult practices that
were tied to the rural countryside of Attica and the calendar of agricultural festivals were of central importance to
the state as a whole, even once Athens grew into a large urban center.
Cultic democracy was expressed at the polis level, and in the many functions of
the polis' subgroups of deme, tribe, and phratry (brotherhood) which oversaw
transitions in the human life cycle. These life-cycle occasions were also times of
public feasting.
Coming-of-age provided another important opportunity to celebrate in the civic community with feasts. When male
youths reached the age of legal majority and officially became citizens, sacrificial rites and heortai were again held
for the phratry at the Apatouria. Officially enrolling as a citizen in the deme happened separately from this festive
tribal occasion. Adoption of adult (or nearly adult) male citizens also presents an interesting case that further Page | 23
illustrates how both civic and personal concerns were ritually combined in Athens. Like biological sons, adoptees
were introduced into the phratry, and enrolled on the list of clansmen at the Apatouria. Registering with the deme
was distinct from joining the phratry for adoptees (as it was for biological sons), though the presence of fellow
demesmen alongside phratry members was necessary for an adoption to be considered fully legitimate.
Isaeus provides us with some interesting reasons for why the Athenians believed that adoption was a good thing for
their society, and this perhaps best highlights the ties between 'private and public' interests (or 'sacred and secular').
An adopted son would not only someday inherit the estate of the citizen who adopted him, but he would also have
access to his adopted father's ancestral altars, and would perform all the customary rites after the father's death for
all the forefathers. In brief, it was the obligation of an adopted son to carry on as a partner in the full range of cultic
and civic acts. It is interesting to observe how, in a society without a long tradition of written records, it was the
ritual practice of feasting that helped Athenian citizens determine and verify civic status and membership in the polis
group.

In Classical Athens
Nancy A. Evans
Being a citizen, especially a male citizen, meant taking part in the cultic democracy, and being at cultic events in the
acknowledged presence of other citizens. The structure of the Athenian polis (perhaps both before and after
Cleisthenes) was based on the demes and the tribes, and the small size of these cultic communities ensured that
citizens could carry out the crucial civic function of vouching for each other's civic status. There was no way for any
citizen to avoid taking part in cultic occasions. Being a citizen necessarily meant taking part in cultic democracy.
Being a good male citizen, especially for those who had wealth, also meant extra obligations, liturgies, and gifts for
fellow citizens.
In many ways this is the most elegant and colorful expression of cultic democracy and Athenian citizenship.
Citizens were acknowledged cultic actors in their polis; they participated jointly at sacrifices, feasts, and holy rites.
These occasions for cultic activities are mentioned on an equal footing with education and military service. Even
dancing together was considered a sign of being a good citizen. Above all, being a citizen meant «sharing in» their
common activities. There is no notion of the individual or individual rights, another hallmark of early modern
Europe and the Enlightenment. For an Athenian, the first things to come to mind when appealing to an audience of
fellow citizens are communal cultic behaviors, sacrifices and feasts above all. The combination of feasts, dancing
and citizenship occurs in other classical texts as well.
… the tribal system which formed the very foundation of aristocratic power in Attica. The four tribes that had been
bound together by ancient kinship ties were abolished and replace by ten new tribes organized along territorial lines.
The building-blocks of the system were self-governing local communities called demes, each of which chose its own
mayor and town council, kept registers of citizens, conducted elections, and managed recruitment for the army
and navy as well as other local matters.
For state purposes these demes were combined into geographical blocks called tritties, which were then combined in
groups of three to form the new tribes. Each tribe was thus composed of three tritties, one encompassing districts
from the rural interior of Attica, one coming from a coastal region, and one from the city. The significance of these
divisions is that they cut across the boundaries of traditional lineage authority. The composition of each new tribe
was in effect gerrymandered in such a way as to weaken the hold of the tribal elite upon local affairs. By building a
new and artificial hierarchy of political organization based upon territorial rather than blood lines, Cleisthenes
created a new structure that the aristocracy could no longer so easily control.
In Classical Athens
Nancy A. Evans
The point is not that one cannot generalize safely about politics in classical Greece, but
that aspects of social, economic and political life in the Greek city-states were sufficiently Page | 24
various to require caution.
Politics in Classical Greece:
The Nature of the Polis and the Origins of the Rule of Law
Thomas D. Curran Ph.D.
What, then, were the common features of the political life of the Greek city-states? The first thing that comes to
mind is the physical orientation of the Greek community toward an urban center, the city proper, which was
fortified, provided a market (agora) and a place of assembly, and served as the seat of justice and government. This
should not be taken to mean that the polis was a strictly' urban institution. In fact, in most-cases the majority of the
citizenry was composed of inhabitants of rural areas outside the city walls.
So cherished was the independence of a typical Greek city-state, and so jealously was it guarded, that the political
history of classical Greece might easily be viewed in a series of parallel columns, one for each polis, rather than as a
continuous narrative that attempts to weave together the threads of a single story.
Politics in Classical Greece:

To give the term polis itself too precise a definition is thus to risk losing sight of the city-states' great diversity.
There were roughly 700 city-states in Greece, ranging in size from small towns claiming no more than a few
hundred citizens to metropolises offering citizenship to tens of thousands.
Perhaps symbolic of the urban roots of Greek community life were the festivals and religious celebrations that city
states held on traditional dates in honor of the gods. … The whole affair was a great communal celebration, both
solemn and festive, in which the entire citizenry was invited to participate. It was organized and administered
by priests who were city officials, and the religious and patriotic character of the occasion acted to reinforce the
solidarity of the entire community.
… in historical times city walls had almost entirely practical functions

and for the most part were not associated with shrines, altars, and the
ceremonies performed at them. The traditional symbolism of walls was
now attached to the acropolis, conceived of as the original city (a
conception made easier by the use at Athens into the fifth century BCE
of the word polis for the acropolis as well as in the general sense of
'city').
Sacred space and the city
Michael H. Jameson
Religion and the Polis

Julia L. Shear
… individual institutions and practices, there were some features to the majority of the poleis. The first common
rather than being spread across small communities. Also designated for temples, public assembly, agora, theatre or a Page | 25
gymnasium. It is said that ‘if the Greek was not within a day’s walk of his political centre, his life was something
less than the life of a real man’.
… polis religion is intimately linked to the formation of religious, civic,

and cultural identities and it focuses on the dominant group, rather than the individual.
Religion and the Polis - The Cult of the Tyrannicides at Athens
Julia L. Shear
According to Herodotos, the Gephyraoi had shrines and rituals which were
restricted to members of the group; ...Such religious rituals at the level of both
the family and the genos, consequently, must have provided one of the primary
settings for repeating the histories of these groups and (re)creating the members’
identity.
Julia L. Shear
In addition to these traditions, there were also stories about the end of tyranny which were promulgated by specific
families and celebrated the actions of their ancestors. In the case of the Alkmeonidai, we have not only the hostile
version(s) in Herodotos’ narrative, but also the family’s own tradition about its role in the events, as we learn from
the younger Alkibiades, who was related to the family through his paternal grandmother, Deinomache, the daughter
of Megakles of Alopeke. He begins his recitation of their history with Alkmeon, who was the first Athenian to win a
chariot race at Olympia, and then refers to the family’s goodwill towards the people which it demonstrated in the
time of the tyrants. He continues: For the Alkmeonidai were kinsmen of Peisistratos and, before he came to power,
they of all the citizens were especially close to him; they refused to share in the tyranny, but they chose to go into
exile rather than to see the citizens made into slaves.

Julia L. Shear
During the forty years of civil strife (stasis), they were hated by the tyrants so much more than everyone else that,
whenever they were in power, the tyrants not only demolished their houses, but they also dug up their graves, and
thus they were so trusted by their fellow-exiles that, for the whole time, they continued to be leaders of the demos.
Finally, Alkibiades and Kleisthenes, my father’s greatgrandfathers on his father’s and mother’s sides respectively, as
generals of the exiles, brought back the demos and drove out the tyrants and they established that democracy.
As presented here, the family’s history stresses the democratic credentials of its
members, even before the democracy had been invented.
Julia L. Shear
These family traditions were put to use in legal speeches where they were certainly helpful for speakers burnishing
their credentials in the law courts. Legal cases, however, cannot have been the primary setting for telling and
disseminating these histories. Handing on such traditions from one generation to the next requires a setting in which
family members communicate with each other in an orderly way, that is through ritual, so that they remember their
past together and pass it on to future members. Telling stories of a shared past in this way articulated the group and
gave it identity, as Sourvinou-Inwood has noted. The primary contexts in which families gathered to celebrate their
continued existence were in religious rituals marking birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. Such rites, Page | 26
consequently, are the most likely occasions when these family histories were repeated and transmitted. Although no
inscribed list of sacrifices for any Athenian family is known, we can identify a number of occasions when such
stories would have been appropriate. The most obvious are the rituals connected with the dead: burial and the
subsequent feast, later commemorative ceremonies, and annual rites, all of which offered scope for repeating the
family’s history.

Julia L. Shear
From the late fifth century, the existence of family tomb periboloi containing inscribed stelai which commemorated
the family’s dead over a number of generations may have encouraged further repetition of these traditions whenever
the graves were visited for post-funeral rituals.
Multiple Traditions and the Polis… The cult, in contrast,

flourished and it continued to articulate what it meant to be a
citizen in democratic Athens and how that citizen should act.
Embedded in a ritual of the city, this imagery and tradition were shared by all Athenians and so served to unify
them. Other stories about these events came from individual families. In contrast to the cult version, they focused on
the actions of members of the family and they articulated what it meant to be a member of that particular subgroup
of the city.
This repetition together with the authorisation of the polis made the cult’s version far more powerful than the stories
of any individual family. These alternative versions would have been told in various settings, including family
rituals, but these occasions in the fourth century would not have been as numerous as the sacrifices in all the
sanctuaries and these histories may well not have been reinforced by physical monuments.
… The cult, in contrast, flourished and it continued to

articulate what it meant to be a citizen in democratic Athens
and how that citizen should act.
The end of tyranny and the institution of democracy was now the story of the whole city and not the possession of
individual families. After the early fourth century, these families would have to (re)create their histories and
identities in other ways so that they did not compete with the city and its religious rituals.
Julia L. Shear

Ricardo Fortuné
The ancient Greek world was composed of a cluster of city-states that identified as Greek. To be Greek was merely
defined by speaking the same language (Greek) and worshipping the same gods. The regional differences make it
very difficult to discuss a particular matter in depth and then make applications to the whole Greek world.
‘Again, there is our Greekness, since we are of the same blood and the
same language, and have common sanctuaries of the gods and
sacrifices, and have the same customs, which would not make it good
for the Athenians to become traitors.’ (Herodotus, VIII.144.ii) Page | 27

Ricardo Fortuné
Herodotus, in this citation, is describing what makes a panhellenistic Greek identity. Religion was one of the major
criteria that made an individual distinctively Greek and the Athenians had to consider this before making an
important political decision such as joining the Persians in war. Even when the Greeks were at war with each other,
because of their common religious beliefs, agreements were made to ensure that access to the temple would not be
restricted. This sense of being part of a wider Greek world is called panhellenism, but city particularism, the sense of
belonging to one Greek community rather than another, was also another component of the Greek identity that was
tethered to religion.
Greeks of antiquity worshipped the local god of their community and

the choice of worshipping a god over another was only the consequence
of being born in a certain city rather than another (Alcock & Osborne,
2012, p.252).

Ricardo Fortuné
In certain communities, the state would require its citizens to participate in the rituals that took place in state shrines.
The states also expressed their city particularism by building permanent monuments such as temples and sanctuaries
to which the archaeological record bears witness. In these buildings, the cities expressed their sense of identity but it
also reveals the state rivalry that was going on at the time.
Parker said: “The people decides what gods are to be worshipped by what rituals at what times and places and at
what expense; it regulates too the duties and terms of office of priests and priestesses and creates new priesthood at
need.” (2005, p.89). There was no Church government in control of the flock, religious affairs were not
administrated from the top down, but from the bottom up.
There was no objective standard of morality. The gods were themselves very immoral and could not be the standard
by which virtue is measured. They did not even require men to behave in a certain way, all they wanted was
sacrifice from them. What the Athenians all recognized to be objectively good, were the ancestral traditions (ta
patria) that they all adhered to. The people in office as well as the citizens, were all very committed to keeping these
traditions. Not because they were superstitious and feared reprisals from the gods, but rather because they took great
pride in demonstrating the prosperity of the city through public rituals (Evans, 2010, p.44). By upholding the old
ways of the fathers, they ensured the future prosperity of the city.
Animal sacrifice (thysia) was at the center of these ancestral traditions, and they demanded specific offerings for
certain gods at certain festivals (Evans, 2010, p.54). … Animal sacrifice was not just a religious ritual for them, it
was also a political statement. They asserted their citizenship and their willing inclusion in the political body by
consuming sacrificial meat (Evans, 2010, p.66). These ancestral traditions were an outward expression of their social
and political principles. They expressed their Athenian pride and honored the city’s patroness in a politico-religious
way.
Religious offices:
Some of the priestly offices showed signs of their pre-democratic origin. Though rules were changed so that some
priesthood could be held by any citizen, others that were more ancient continued to be held for life. These
priesthoods were inherited through the paternal line and remained within the tribal lineage (Evans, 2010, p.53). …
priests were paid for their duties and received a share of the sacrifices and dedication (Shipley et al, 2015, p.249).
This office came with a lot of honor. Those having held it were given the temple key for women and the sacrificial
knife for men, showing that both genders could be proud of having held such office. Furthermore, they regularly
benefited from the practice of the vote of honours by the council and the assembly.
How closely linked was religion linked Page | 28

Ricardo Fortuné
The gods of the Greek religion were intricately interwoven in the political affairs of the state. The people were very
careful to honor them at the appointed time and in the appropriate way. The archaeological record speaks more
abundantly of their practice than their beliefs, but we’ve been able to infer from their offering practices that
democracy might have influenced the way they made offerings to their gods. However, their high regard for their
ancestral tradition didn’t allow for too many changes. These traditions that had animal sacrifice at its center were
rigid and to be respected by all citizens.
It was the polis which incorporated every kind of people whether it be tribesman or city dwellers. The polis was
beyond the meaning of territorial grouping. It incorporated the realms of political justice for all the members of the
Ekklesia. It also had a meaningful derivative for the sub stratum which gave a new hope of voting in the public. This
aspect revolutionized the idea of political democracy once again (Demand, 1990).
The Greek City States
and the Genesis of Political Culture of the West
Jonali Sarma
As Thucydides puts it: ‘it is the men that are the Polis’; meaning the
citizens. … the body of citizens came to be the most important
meaning of the term polis in ancient Greek. … However, the original
polis was formed based not on trade but on a self-sufficient and self-
contained group of villages around ancient Greek. It is the
amalgamation of various small communities of similar economics and
religion through the process of synoecism, which is the specific Greek
way of urban development. …
The Emerging City of Greek polis
Raymond Chua
“Thus it is for religion not just to embellish, but to shape all essential
forms of community. The definition of membership is participation in a
cult. This begins with the family, for which Greek has no special word:
one speaks of house and hearth, thus consciously designating the
domestic sacrificial site.”
Greek Religion
Walter Butler

Ricardo Fortuné
There was no objective standard of morality. The gods were themselves very immoral and could not be the standard
by which virtue is measured. They did not even require men to behave in a certain way, all they wanted was
sacrifice from them. What the Athenians all recognized to be objectively good, were the ancestral traditions (ta
patria) that they all adhered to. The people in office as well as the citizens, were all very committed to keeping these
traditions. Not because they were superstitious and feared reprisals from the gods, but rather because they took great Page | 29
pride in demonstrating the prosperity of the city through public rituals. By upholding the old ways of the fathers,
they ensured the future prosperity of the city.

Nausithoos. In the past, he had lived in the neighborhood of the rowdy and violent Cyclopes, who despised the gods
and their altars and had no conception of what an assembly, an agora, was. They exasperated Nausithoos, who
decided to move away and eventually came to found the city of the Phaeacians. He did so as a proto-founder of what
we, using a Latin word, came to call the "colonies" of Sicily and elsewhere. To be on the safe side, Nausithoos built
great ramparts of stone around his city; he shared out parcels of land, for which lots were drawn; and he designed a
magnificent agora, made of well-hewn stone, flanked by a temple for Poseidon. It was as if this god had an
unquestionable right to the rank of poliad (or city) deity.
The future city was plotted out on virgin soil by its founder around 730 BC. In its center, a space was immediately
marked out for the agora, the public area that would be completed one century later. Another site, close to the agora,
seems to have been chosen to accommodate several sanctuaries, which were then gradually built. The land of the
city founded by Megara was initially divided up into more or less regular allotments, according to the method
followed by Nausicaa's grandfather.
Two divine powers were always directly involved in the planning of a new city. First Apollo, known as a founder,
an Archegetes. And hard on his heels came Hestia, the Greek Vesta, with her sacrificial fire. Apollo was the god of
Delphi. Any would-be founder had to go to consult him. Apollo was revered as a god of paths and reliable plans,
and he liked to accompany human founders, keeping an eye on them. As an architect and a geometrician, Apollo the
Founder was the patron of the art of city-planning, dividing the territory into allotments of land, building roads and
sanctuaries (temene), and marking out the space for the agora.
There could be no city without an agora, no city without altars and sacrificial fire. In many cases, immediately upon
disembarking the founder would consecrate an altar to his own Apollo. But an altar was not enough to make a city.
There was also a need for sacrificial fire that had been brought from the central altar of the founder's native city. So
Hestia, the deity of fire in general and sacrificial fire in particular, always came along too on the voyage, bringing a
seed of fire kept in a cooking pot.

Very early on, Hestia, the virgin deity of fire that was never extinguished, was set up to preside over a very public
edifice known as the Prytaneion, what some might call a town-hall, the center of the executive department for
Communal Affairs. Hestia represented what you might call "a particular idea of the city." Symbolically, she
embodied the unity of the multiplicity of individual domestic hearths and altars… "Political" authority thus came
from Hestia; not from Apollo the Founder, nor from any god known as a god "of the city," a poliad god, polias-
polieus. In this eminently "public" place, Hestia reigned over the complex interplay of what I earlier called
"sameness and equality." For this was the place where the multiple configurations of "citizenship" were constructed,
all the rights and obligations of those who came forward to speak. By observing the assembly practices of these
early cities, it is not hard to see that they take place in a space in the shape of a circle, or a semi-circle, and that they
are peculiar to a space called an agora, a fixed space that is common to the greatest possible number of citizens. It is
a space that is both common and public, demosion, as the Greek puts it.
Inscribing words on stelae and writing on walls were the constitutive practices of "the political domain" in the
village-cities that engaged in various forms of assembly. But what with all this talk of public space, publicity, and
public opinion. …
Long before the printing press and the wide diffusion of debates in our eighteenth-century Europe of only yesterday,
in every village-city there were temples with walls, and sanctuaries with space: and it was there, in the temples of Page | 30
Apollo, Artemis, Hera, Poseidon, and others, that the public documents such as the rules of sacrifice and the
decisions of the assembly were published, that is to say exhibited, posted up. Temples and sanctuaries were public
places, open to all. There was no Holy of Holies; and the so-called "priests" were annually elected magistrates who
were expected to give an account of the spending of public money. The sanctuaries of the agora, the temples on the
Acropolis, and the altars scattered through the countryside were all public places, places of publicity by decision of
the council and the assembly, which could thus make known to all and sundry what they ought to do. Just as there
were gods on the agora, on the acropolis, in the Prytaneum, and in the Council chamber, there were gods for
becoming a citizen, for all males born from parents who lived in the city territory. Such youths had to be presented
to the altars and members of their phratry, and then be accepted into a deme, which was a city in miniature, with its
own assemblies, its own sacrifices, its own particular gods, and its own sanctuaries that were used to publicize the
decrees passed by the deme members, the demotes.
In a polytheistic society, the gods are everywhere, for sure. But not in a random manner. There are certain domains
in which they seem to be concentrated, certain types of experience in which they are organized in unusual or
improbable ways. The multiplicity of gods seems to make it possible to think through and form an image of a large
number of the activities and problems that men encountered in their social lives. I think we should try to discover
whether or not gods, particular gods, were directly involved in "the autonomy of the political domain in itself."

city. As all Hellenists know, the ritual calendar, with all its information, relayed about fifty percent of the so called
"laws" of Solon. But the essential point for me is that "the affairs of the gods," the first section of "public matters,"
were debated, discussed, and decided in the assembly and moreover in the first part of the assembly. The assembly
decided by a majority vote how the new calendar should be organized and the order in which the various gods would
be honored. So the sovereignty of the group over itself clearly also covered its gods and their affairs. I should
perhaps interject, in passing, that there was a hierarchy in the way that things were ordered: the affairs of the gods
were dealt with first, and by this select circle of citizens from long-established families.
But why and how did mortals, human beings, gain such a holdover "the affairs of the gods"? It turns out that among
these people, "our" Greeks, the gods, the gods of Olympus and the whole world, never thought of inventing such a
thing as a "city." Cities were an invention of men, of mortals, and one fine day the gods woke up to this fact. In no
time, they were jostling at the gate, clamoring for the privileges of a so-called poliad deity as it were, a better paid
"chair" than an ordinary seat in the pantheon.
Of all the human activities, politics was thus the one that was specifically constructed by human beings: politics, the
government of men by men, a government with full sovereignty and, what is more, which sought to affirm that
autonomy, in other words was "a law unto itself." The autonomy of the political domain did not simply fall from the
sky. It was problematic, fragile, had to be invented by whatever available means. To come back to this field in
which so much still remains to be done, I would like, finally, to suggest that a number of important aspects of action,
decision, and the strategies of politics took shape and were analyzed with reference to the divine powers.
It would be mistaken to take either the combination of politics and religion or that of theology and politics or even
that of politics and ritual as some kind of universal standard. "Politics" and "Religion" are no more than dry
encyclopedia entries.
Page | 31
Polis Religion – A Critical Appreciation

Julia Kindt
Christiane Sourvinou Inwood coined the term “polis religion” to describe the “embeddedness” of Greek religion in
the polis as the basic unit of Greek social and political life. Significantly, however, her definition of polis religion
transcends the level of the individual polis. Polis religion operates on three levels of Greek society: the polis, the
“world of the polis system,” and the panhellenic dimension.
During the Archaic and Classical periods, Greece was a conglomerate of largely autonomous city states with no
overall political or administrative structure. In the sphere of religion the polis provided the major context for
religious beliefs and practices. The reach of Greek religious cults and festivals with their public processions and
communal forms of sacrifice and prayer mapped onto the reach of polis institutions, such as the demes, the phratries
and the genē.
At the same time, the religious inventories of the individual city states resembled each other because of their shared
past and the spread of epic poetry throughout the Greek world. … Religion thus offered a common set of
ideologies and values, such as shared notions of purity and pollution, sacred and profane, human and divine, which
were a reference point throughout the Greek world. Herodotus has the Athenians refer to the temples of the gods and
the sacrifices as part of a shared feeling of Greekness. Greek religious beliefs and practices provided a strong link
between the individual polis and the rest of the Greek world.
As the polis constituted the basic unit of Greek life, the panhellenic dimension of Greek religion – the religious
institutions situated beyond the polis level, such as the large panhellenic sanctuaries or amphictyonies and religious
leagues – was accessed through constant reference to the polis and its symbolic order.
The ‘Embeddedness’ of Greek Religion

Greek religion was religion in practice and Greek religious practices permeated all spheres of life. The
embeddedness of Greek religion in the polis means that religious practice formed an integral part of the larger
network of relationships within the polis.
… the socio political structures of the polis are reformulated and

maintained through their representation in religious ritual.
… “each significant grouping within the polis was articulated and given identity through cult,” as Sourvinou Inwood
has argued. The important subdivisions of the polis, such as the demes and phratries, were all represented in specific
cults and even politically marginalized groups, such as women, had their own festivals and religious services
specifically reserved for them.
As Burkert rightly remarked: “Polis religion is a characteristic and representative part of Greek religion, but only
part of it. There is religion without the polis, even if there is
no polis without religion.”
‘Beyond the Polis’ in the Other Direction –
The Look from the Polis Level Up

When it was first published in 1984 Francois de Polignac’s influential study Naissance de la cite grecque (published
in English as Cults, Territory and the Origin of the Greek City State) triggered a widespread debate concerning the
links between religious identity and polis identity. De Polignac’s claim that the city came to define itself first and
foremost as a religious community inspired various case studies further exploring the religious landscape of Greece
as a bipolar geometrical plane, in which the city was shaped in a dynamic tension between centre and periphery. …
Other socio-political units besides the polis, such as the ethne, were seen as remnants in a larger evolutionary Page | 32
scheme that culminated in the polis.
Most notably, perhaps, in his rich and comprehensive investigation of the genesis of the Greek temple between the
11th and the 8th centuries BC, Mazarakis Ainian has variously pointed to the existence of other worshipping
communities above and below the polis level: “The worship of the gods could be carried out on various levels of the
society’s structure: it could be a matter of the initiative of a single individual, of a household, of one or more kinship
groups, of the polis or even of a confederation of poleis. Before the creation of the polis, however, cult practice
would have been either a matter of private initiative of an individual or a household, or that of a kinship group.”
The picture that emerges from such research suggests that from about 700 BC onwards, the polis provided an
important organising principle of Greek religious beliefs and practices. At the same time Greek religion remained a
vehicle for the communication of other, larger identities, most notably that of ethnic identity. For the late Archaic,
Classical and Hellenistic periods, there is plenty of evidence of ritual activity administered by the ethne, not the
poleis.

Patricia Springborg
Only if it can be established that the clan in the historical does represent an atrophied vestige of what was once an
institution much pervasive in its influence is it possible even to entertain the very important that there was once in
Greece a system of collective ownership of property clan. For, to return to our initial statement of the problem, there
are those hold that the clan is an institution no older than the rise of the Greek aristocracies. Since it would be agreed
by those who hold the theory of collective ownership property by the clan that in the age of the rise of the Greek
aristocracies property tended to be individually held, it is obvious that the postulate of a primitive, economically,
socially, and morally autonomous and unitary clan must be donne unless it can be shown that the clan is older than
the age of the Greek aristocracies, and that the rise of the Greek aristocracies seriously changed attenuated its
functions.

Stephen Lambert
Before the law polis priests were supplied by the gene, institutions which had specific attributes suiting them for the
task: they traced their descent straight back to the heroic and mythical time in which Athens came into being; and
they traced that descent in the female line as well as the male. In requiring Athenians to be of citizen descent in both
the male and female lines, therefore, Pericles' law in effect made a genos of the whole Athenian people, paving the
way to the creation of new priesthoods for which all Athenians (of the appropriate gender) would be eligible. It was
a "democratising" measure in that it opened up access to polis priesthoods, but an "aristocratising" measure in that it
did so by reshaping the citizen body on a more exclusive model, embedding aspects of genos ideology, including
autochthony, in the ideology of citizenship.
Athenian polis priests are those that served Athenian polis cults, but what is a "polis cult"?
New cults were introduced in classical Athens, but such introductions had to be approved by the polis. … The issue
is complicated since even some household cults came within the city's purview (e.g. Zeus Herkeios) and associations
might be involved with the administration of "polis cults", as well as their own "private" cults. There is no single
definition of "polis cults" in this stronger sense available to the historian.
… that funding for the rite was included in the city's "sacrificial calendar". We possess a very few fragments of this
calendar in its original Solonian version, quoted in later sources, a little more in the inscribed version which was
produced as part of the wholesale revision of Athenian law at the end of the fifth century (by chance this happens to
include the part of the calendar which provided for the Synoikia); but there are also other ways that we can identify Page | 33
"publicly funded" sacrifices and festivals:
In this context polis funding applies not to the cult as a whole, but to individual rites. The polis does not, for
example, fund all sacrifices made to Demeter and Kore at Eleusis, it funds specific sacrifices at specific festivals. In
addition to the funding of sacrifices, the polis might also take direct responsibility for the physical property of a god,
and this is visible to us above all in the appointment of polis officials to exercise this responsibility.
As with the polis-funded sacrifices, some of these cults were in central Athens, others elsewhere in Attica (in this
case none is known to be outside Attic territory). Apart from explicit evidence for the "other gods", there are other
inscriptions which show us the polis exercising responsibility for the physical property of gods, in particular public
leases of sacred property; and a law of the Lykourgan period providing for new kosmos for a number of cults. A
number of priests and priestesses enjoyed proedria, i.e. allocated seats in the theatre of Dionysos in Athens, mostly
known from surviving inscriptions on the seats.

Stephen Lambert
The cults they served were patently in some sense polis, or at least polis-recognized, cults. Other evidence that
arguably indicates a "polis" cult includes: cults whose priests received a salary from the public purse, or perquisites
from public sacrifices; sacrifices or dedications by polis officials or on the initiative of the polis to the deity in
question; the use of the cult location as a meeting place the Assembly; laws or decrees of the polis regulating the
cult; and decrees of the Council and/or Assembly honoring priests or other cult officials.
A cult might be seen to be important to the polis without necessarily attracting broad participation; and indeed some
of the provisions in the sacrificial calendar of the polis do not look to be for "popular" cults in this sense. The
religion of the city comprehended "the obscure" as well as "the spectacular". Moreover, on the other side of the
equation, there were local cults which attracted wide participation, but did not, so far as we know, count as "polis"
cults, in terms of funding or other criteria (see further below). "Polis" cult is not a simple concept, therefore. Polis
funding is a key criterion; but our direct information about which cults were polis funded is patchy and it is
legitimate to look to other indicators also, while being aware of the limitations of our evidence and the
incompleteness of our picture.
The polis was not only the aggregate of citizens functioning collectively in the central organs of the city such as the
Council and the Assembly, it was also the citizens as grouped in their subordinate descent groups, tribes and
phratries and their subgroups. The rites of some of these groups qualify as "polis cult", as defined above, and, in
some cases at least, gene also supplied priests for the rites of these groups.
The arrangements for priests in phratries are unfortunately rather obscure, but there is no unequivocal case of a
phratry supplying its own priest and there are some indications that phratry priests were supplied by gene within
them. The type of arrangement that existed in the phratries may have provided the model for the Cleisthenic tribes.
Each of the ten tribes had a priest who served the cult of its eponymous hero.
… In the other tribes all securely attested priests of the eponymous came from the "right" tribe, but there is no direct
indication as to how they were appointed. Particularly for eponyms that did not have an established cult when the
tribes were introduced, it is not out of the question that a tribe might have decided, before 451/0, that all tribe
members should be eligible for the priesthood of its eponymous hero, in a limited way anticipating, on a tribal level,
the effects of Pericles' law on a polis-wide level; but it is possible that the priests in these other seven tribes were
also appointed from a genos, … that the genos had members that belonged to the "right" tribe, a perfectly plausible
arrangement.
Stephen Lambert
Page | 34

Patricia Springborg
differentiated set of common bonds for different purposes. The substantive content of these cults was, curiously
enough, provided largely from the Near East. There is a continuity of mystery and miracle cults, magic practices,
forms of table worship, omen-taking, astrological lore, cultic incantations, and initiation rites that go back in some
cases to Pharaonic and Babylonian practices of the third millennium B.C., and which were taken over and faithfully
incorporated into their own religious practices by successive Semitic, Greek, and Roman invaders (Hooke, 1953)

Elites, Elitism, and Community in the Archaic Polis
John Ma
The structures of the Archaic polis are then interpreted as elite practice and networks. Archaic Athens starts to look
less like a state than a chieftain society, shaped and dominated by the power relations of elite groups and families:
the real world of polis politics and its true actors, far from the shadow-world of law and institutions, whose role may
have been to feebly regulate or to legitimize the power-sharing arrangements of the aristocratic families.
By the early seventh century, the huge territory of Attica was integrated as a polis grouping secondary sites around a
major center, Athens. Its unity as a polis is shown by the operation of the constructed, fictive kinship groups of
“phratry” and “tribe,” and its stateness is attested by institutionalization - administrative as well as financial - and by
the emergence of written law later in the same century. These processes of integration created the inclusive context
for prestige-laden claims and uncertainty about status. Wealthy families and groups engaged in competitive display
in the form of large stone sculpture dedications, various forms of spectacular burial ritual, small group dining, and
religious activity on eminent sites - competitive elitist behavior that must have required a heavy outlay of individual
or familial resources
In this view, the political (le politique) appears as a consequence—rather than the cause—of this emergence of the
state, taking on multiple forms depending on the context or the moment: these forms could dramatize access to
public goods, and hence ration this access (uniting a small group but excluding others from the construction of
community), or recognize the unity of a community, or act as the arena for hardball power politics—or simply fulfil
colorful folkloric functions.

John Ma

Patricia Springborg
The city-state in antiquity was itself more in the order of a voluntary association, and not coextensive with the
inhabitants of a territory. One contracted in and out of the polis insofar as qualification for citizenship and formal
admission by ratification of the phratry permitted; departure was marked by ostracism, voluntary exile, or death. As Page | 35
such, the polis constituted an aggregate of subordinate forms of association entered into by way of initiation rites,
pacts, seals of blood covenant, etc., which enjoyed secret rites, private festivities, and legal immunity. As orientalists
and classicists now concur, kinship or tribal organizations were, in the last analysis, voluntary forms of association
rather than primordial networks. Recent work on tribalism in both classical antiquity and the modern Middle East
suggests that tribe and clan are socially constructed entities that bear a tenuous relation to real blood lines, while
trading off the moral resources of family and other forms of in-group loyalties. Thus the designation of the tribe,
named after a heroized ancestor, a mythical historical homeland, or an ancient totemistic sign, usually represents at
the same time territorial claims, ethnic identification, and status, financial, or other aspirations on the part of the
living association.
In a relatively densely populated, commercially oriented city-state (as most Mediterranean and Middle Eastern
societies have been from time immemorial) economic and social viability depend on a considerable volume of
successful transactions of all kinds that is less significant in a decentralized agrarian society lacking the features of
contiguous and mutually dependent existence.

Patricia Springborg
The conclusion of this argument, then, is that homo politicos and homo oeconomicus represent not two phases in a
process of social evolution, but rather alternative and contemporaneous ways of life with distinctive structures and
institutions, differentiated regionally rather than chronologically. Moreover, these two regions have shown an
amazing degree of continuity in their historical form. For instance, the sectarian warfare, institutionalized in the
cultic, clan, and ethnic forms of association of modern Lebanon is reminiscent of the ancient skirmishing of
Phoenicia, its historical parent state, of the agonistic struggles of ancient Greece, and of the civil wars of Rome, all
of which Lebanon experienced historically more or less directly (Khuri, 1976). The ancient class, clan, and cultic
forms of organization, the noble clubs, phratries, hetairies, and gymnasia, have their modern counterparts in the
brotherhoods, professional syndicates, clans, and the religious and sporting clubs of modern Mediterranean society.
For the most part, a founding myth of autochthony suggests the exclusion of
women from the origins of the city. The city and its public space is the realm of
male warriors sprung from the earth. They are not to be divided by their ties to
separate mothers, to separate wives, returned to a private realm that may raise
questions about the universality of the polis and its goals.
Athena's Cloak:
Plato's Critique of the Democratic City
in the Republic
Bruce Rosenstock
The ritual of the Arrhephoria recalls the biological unity of Athenians as children of one mother, the land of Attica.
Both rituals would seem to reinforce the Athenians' self-representation as autochthonous. They also seem to give no
role to the women who in fact are necessary for the reproduction of this allegedly autochthonous people. In a recent
article about how Euripides' Ion reworks the Athenians' myth of origin, Arlene Saxenhouse has emphasized the
patriarchal bias underlying the idea of autochthony: For the most part, a founding myth of autochthony suggests the
exclusion of women from the origins of the city. The city and its public space is the realm of male warriors sprung
from the earth. They are not to be divided by their ties to separate mothers, to separate wives, returned to a private
realm that may raise questions about the universality of the polis and its goals. Saxenhouse is right to point out that
the myth of autochthony excludes women from the origin of the city. One might, however, think that a myth that
attributes human origins to an Earth Mother, far from negating the role of women in reproduction as Saxenhouse
argues, actually gives pride of to the female. But it must be understood that the myth of autochthony denial of sexual
reproduction tout court (not "birth from two" but "birth one") and therefore cannot be construed as an idealization of
motherhood, concept which acquires meaning only within the symbolic framework of family. Page | 36
Plato's Critique of the Democratic City

in the Republic
Bruce Rosenstock
The unity of Athens is grounded in the diversity of its households. Autochthony and
sexual reproduction in legitimate marriage therefore represent the two sides of Athens'
political self-representation: on one hand, the city as a single-voiced and same-minded
body politic and, on the other hand, the city as the lawfully regulated place of
contestation and reciprocal give-and-take for diverse individuals seeking partial and
partisan goals. The peplos of Athena figures as symbol of both aspects of this political
duality.

KM Gentile
While the historical development and role of agnatic groups in ancient Greece may be debated, scholars generally
agree on their existence as a fundamental organizing principle in society. In sum, “agnates are not people
biologically related by descent in the male line who occasionally remind themselves of this sacrificially; agnates are
instead people who sacrifice together - who know they are agnates because they sacrifice together.”
The development of this connection between sacrifice and patrilineality arises because social structures “idealizing
eternal‟ male intergenerational continuity meet a fundamental obstacle in their necessary dependence on women’s
reproductive powers.” Thus, men have an anxiety about women’s reproductive powers due to their reliance upon
women for the continuation of their society. Therefore, in patrilineal societies, men take control and regulate the
reproductive power and rights of women by establishing a lineage system to control inheritance and the means of
production. The emphasis on sacrifice in patrilineal societies allows for the development of social reproduction,
instead of relying on biological reproduction (childbirth); descent becomes social and ritual in nature and, therefore,
is no longer dependent on women.

KM Gentile
While the historical development and role of agnatic groups in ancient Greece may be debated, scholars generally
agree on their existence as a fundamental organizing principle in society. In sum, “agnates are not people
biologically related by descent in the male line who occasionally remind themselves of this sacrificially; agnates are
instead people who sacrifice together - who know they are agnates because they sacrifice together.”
The development of this connection between sacrifice and patrilineality arises because social structures “idealizing
eternal‟ male intergenerational continuity meet a fundamental obstacle in their necessary dependence on women’s
reproductive powers.” Thus, men have an anxiety about women’s reproductive powers due to their reliance upon
women for the continuation of their society. Therefore, in patrilineal societies, men take control and regulate the
reproductive power and rights of women by establishing a lineage system to control inheritance and the means of
production. The emphasis on sacrifice in patrilineal societies allows for the development of social reproduction,
instead of relying on biological reproduction (childbirth); descent becomes social and ritual in nature and, therefore,
is no longer dependent on women.
In order to ensure this separation between descent through sacrifice and biological descent, women are generally
excluded from direct sacrificial practices. In many cultures, this exclusion is achieved through the establishment of
the dichotomy between the purity of sacrifice and the pollution of menstruation and/or childbirth. This opposition
between bloodshed in sacrifice and blood shedding by women excludes women from performing sacrificial acts.
Page | 37
Typically only adult males - those in the position to be fathers - have the ability to sacrifice. Jay notes the rarity of
female sacrificers, and “when women are reported performing sacrifice it is never as mothers, but almost always in
some specifically non-childbearing role: as virgins (or dressed as if they were virgins), as consecrated unmarried
women, or as post-menopausal women.”
…patrilineal "clanship ties are a consequence of sacrificing together".

… "agnates" means literally "people who share the meat of sacrifices. "
The affinity between sacrifice and systems of patrilineal descent does
not mean that sacrifice is performed only in societies organized
exclusively by patrilineal descent. Societies may figure descent more
than one way. The Romans recognized two ways: cognation (bilateral
descent) and agnation (patrilineal descent); but only agnation was tied
to sacrificial religion.
KM Gentile

Bruce Rosenstock
The gift of woven work which figures most prominently in Athenian culture as a symbol of the ongoing life of the
social fabric is the cloak (peplos) of Athena. Every year the Athenians celebrated their collective identity as the city
nurtured by Athena in a festival known as the Panathenaia. Every fourth year the festival was significantly enlarged
to include pan-Hellenic elements, and also the ritual of the gifting of Athena with a new peplos. The peplos was
fitted like a sail to a ship on wheels which accompanied a procession of a representative group of the entire Athenian
populace to the Acropolis and the temple of Athena. The gift of the peplos reestablished the relationship of
reciprocity between the goddess and the city; the city "clothes" Athena (i.e., her cult statue or xoanon) and requests
that she in turn preserve her citizens by renewing the bonds of political and biological solidarity which have hitherto
connected them. The weaving of the peplos begins some eight or nine months before the Panathenaia, with two
unmarried girls from prominent Athenian families initiating the work.

Bruce Rosenstock
They are not to be divided by their ties to separate mothers, to separate wives, returned to a private realm that may
raise questions about the universality of the polis and its goals. Saxenhouse is right to point out that the myth of
autochthony excludes women from the origin of the city.
Placed at the beginning of the year, the festival gives pride of place to the political identity of all the citizens as
descendants of one father, Erichthonius. The ritual of the Arrhephoria recalls the biological unity of Athenians as
children of one mother, the land of Attica. Both rituals would seem to reinforce the Athenians' self-representation as
autochthonous. They also seem to give no role to the women who in fact are necessary for the reproduction of this
allegedly autochthonous people. In a recent article about how Euripides' Ion reworks the Athenians' myth of origin,
Arlene Saxenhouse has emphasized the patriarchal bias underlying the idea of autochthony: For the most part, a
founding myth of autochthony suggests the exclusion of women from the origins of the city. The city and its public
space is the realm of male warriors sprung from the earth.

Bruce Rosenstock
Page | 38
They are not to be divided by their ties to separate mothers, to separate wives, returned to a private realm that may
raise questions about the universality of the polis and its goals. Saxenhouse is right to point out that the myth of
autochthony excludes women from the origin of the city. One might, however, think that a myth that attributes
human origins to an Earth Mother, far from negating the role of women in reproduction as Saxenhouse argues,
actually gives pride of to the female. But it must be understood that the myth of autochthony denial of sexual
reproduction tout court (not "birth from two" but "birth one") and therefore cannot be construed as an idealization of
motherhood, concept which acquires meaning only within the symbolic framework of family. Needless to say,
motherhood encompasses far more than gestation, parturition, and lactation, these three being the terms that
establish the metaphorical force of the earth/mother equation in the myth of autochthony. When in his Ion Euripides
represents Kreousa as the embodiment of Athens' autochthonous lineage, he does not show her to be possessed of
exceptional maternal virtue. In fact, as defender of autochthonous racial purity, Kreousa attempts to murder her child
(not yet recognizing him as such), and when Kreousa finally acts the part of mother, she also prepares to step into
the background and permit Athenian history to unfold through the paternal line of Ion and his sons.9 Of course,
autochthony in itself does not idealize fatherhood either. But because the first autochthon is male and is viewed as
the embodiment of the racial identity of the people, the myth of autochthony reinforces patriarchal idealogy by
constructing the image of the city as a brotherhood, marked neither by racial nor by gender differences. In Athens
the myth of autochthony provides only one side of the city's self-representation; the city in its historic identity is also
a collection of families, oikoi, founded on the institution of marriage.
Athena's Cloak
Bruce Rosenstock
In addition (every fourth year), they initiate the weaving of the peplos, and in doing so they are introduced to the
task-weaving the household fabric-which defines the most significant contribution a married women makes to the
economic life of the city. We see therefore that the reverse side of the Panathenaia, which is a celebration of the
political origins of the city, is a ritual which highlights the passage of the city's females from virgin childhood to
sexually mature adulthood. It is true that the political myth of autochthony momentarily suppresses any
acknowledgment of the female, marriage, and heterosexual reproduction. But it is also true that only a few months
after the Panathenaia, and then for nearly the remainder of the year, preparations are being made for a reenactment
of the Arrhephoria, which celebrates how the city owes its present life to the female's successful passage from virgin
daughter to child-bearing wife. As virgin daughters become wives and mothers, the city weaves new relations of
kinship and filiation. With these relations sustaining it, the city can come together and assume its political form in
the assembly of native- born men who, despite the diversity of their filiations, have but one mother, the land of
Attica, and one foster mother, Athena.
Athena's Cloak
The unity-in-diversity which defines the complex political self-representation of democratic Athens is celebrated
during the Panathenaic festival when the assembled population offers the gift of the peplos to its foster mother.
Clearly this act symbolizes Athens in its corporate singleness, but because this peplos is in part the product of the
work of the maidens whose initiation into mature sexuality had only just been celebrated on the Acropolis, this
woven work embodies Athens' acknowledgment that its racial unity is grounded in the reproductive power of
women who must pass from one household (their fathers') to another (their husbands'). The unity of Athens is
grounded in the diversity of its households. Autochthony and sexual reproduction in legitimate marriage therefore
represent the two sides of Athens' political self-representation: on one hand, the city as a single-voiced and same-
minded body politic and, on the other hand, the city as the lawfully regulated place of contestation and reciprocal
give-and-take for diverse individuals seeking partial and partisan goals. The peplos of Athena figures as symbol of
both aspects of this political duality. It would not be too much of an overstatement if we simply said that the peplos
symbolized Athens as a democratic polis."
Athena's Cloak
Plato's Critique of the Democratic City in the Republic Page | 39
Bruce Rosenstock
Perhaps in his renunciation of this whole symbolic domain, and his

return to the dream of a monogendered community of autochthons,
Plato is registering his awareness of the profound malaise that gender
… Plato invites the reader to turn away from the precipice that descends from the democratic city into tyranny and
to join with the philosopher in making a home in the "city in the heavens," the paradigm for the Republic's ideal
polity. This is an invitation to seek a community that will never degenerate from its single, perfect identity, where
there is no division or fragmentation. Plato may not seriously entertain the plan of effacing the female from the city,
but the ideal of a self-purged that is other than Reason remains powerful and alluring. What I have traced in this
article is how Plato's diagnosis of the radical privatization of public space in the democracy is linked to his
characterization of the city as feminized. Plato's cure for this disorder is the effacement of the female and the
elimination of the private world altogether from the life of his guardians. Ultimately, Plato is unable to conceive of
the private space of the household in positive terms because he understands it (and in this we may perhaps wish to
agree with his assessment of the patriarchal oikos) to be the space of aggrievement. We have seen that when the
Athenians celebrate the Panathenaia they are appealing to the beneficence of Athena, and they offer a gift that comes
from the labor of the women. We have seen that the gift also in part represents an acknowledgment of the role of
women in reproducing the city, and a tempering of the patriarchal fantasy to be born without Woman. Perhaps in his
renunciation of this whole symbolic domain, and his return to the dream of a monogendered community of
autochthons, Plato is registering his awareness of the profound malaise that gender asymmetry brings to the city, a
malaise which no ritual can cure.

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‘You cannot make a city of ten men, and if there are a hundred thousand it is a city no longer,’ - Aristotle

… In order to be like God knowledge would have to

… The cult, in contrast, flourished and it continued to

“The worship of the gods could be carried out on various levels

They are not to be divided by their ties to separate mothers, to separate

Feasts, Citizens, And

A Polis and its Priests:

Having secular institutions is a quite modern invention of

Just as there were gods on the agora, on the acropolis,

A temple shall be built as Callicrates will draft, and a

Greek Historical Inscriptions

“agnates are not people biologically related by descent

Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece

The State, an entity distinct from both the wider community

How closely linked was religion linked

The Personality Of The Greek State

The Personality Of The Greek State

Power and Society in Ancient Greece

The brief review of symbolic space in ancient Greece

Fifth-century Athens was a maritime, imperial, city

... it contained many sanctuaries and temples

… hero cults in the colonies. Hero worship grew at

… the mistletoe wherein is stored magic potential, and both magic

The Personality Of The Greek State

… the gift also in part represents an acknowledgment of the role of women in

As orientalists and classicists now concur, kinship or tribal organizations were,

…patrilineal "clanship ties are a consequence of sacrificing together". …

this corporate mask, the mask of 'state',

The Personality Of The Greek State

Placing the Gods

In Defense of Morgan's "Grecian Gens":

Feasts, Citizens, And Cultic Democracy

Politics, Primordialism, And Orientalism:

The growth of these cult sites was instrumental in forming the

The Polis, Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis

The Personality Of The Greek State

The Personality Of The Greek State

According to one, the rule-making authorities in Greek poleis

The Personality Of The Greek State

They are not to be divided by their ties to separate mothers, to separate

In Defense of Morgan's "Grecian Gens":

In Defense of Morgan's "Grecian Gens":

(1) the performance of certain ancestral rituals

the ten characteristics of the "Grecian gens"

(1) "Common religious rites." This is obvious and undeniable.

In Defense of Morgan's "Grecian Gens":

Death at the Building Site: Construction Sacrifice in Southeast Asia

(1) the city-state

In Defense of Morgan's "Grecian Gens":

In Defense of Morgan's "Grecian Gens":

Politics, Primordialism, And Orientalism:

The City As An Element In The International System

The City As An Element In The International System

… in Boltanski’s and Thevenot’s work, where each cité is structured around an

Death at the Building Site: Construction Sacrifice in Southeast Asia

The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities Page | 19

Athenian democracy was cultic in that various functions of the

Feasts, Citizens, And Cultic Democracy

The pleasures of feasts, music and drinking should all be associated

the upkeep of the sanctuary and the funding of festivals.

On Julian's Pagan Revival and the Decline of Blood Sacrifice.

The Greek city states and public funding of blood