Robert Parker, Wykeham Professor emeritus of Ancient History at Oxford, is one of the leading contemporary experts on ancient Greek religion, as demonstrated by the various monographs he has published on the subject. Alongside books such as Polytheism and Society at Athens (2005), On Greek Religion (2011) and Greek Gods Abroad (2017), he has written dozens of articles that enrich his contribution to this field of study. The most important of them are here collected, with an updated afterword when necessary. The four headings that divide them up bear witness to their author’s ongoing concerns: Religion and Society, Divination, Sacrifice, and the close relationship between Gods and their Names. The collection ends with the outrageous ‘small god’ Priapos, who stood in image form in gardens and threatened thieves with a dire punishment inflicted by his giant phallos.

Studies in the cultic honours for Hellenistic leaders and benefactors mainly focus on the ideological and diplomatic features of the phenomenon. Conversely, the papers collected in this volume aim to shift the focus to its material and practical aspects: media, ritual action and space, agency, administration and funding. Specialists in Hellenistic history, epigraphy, papyrology, numismatics, and archaeology provide fresh reassessments of a variety of documentary dossiers concerning both institutional and non-institutional agents (cities, kingdoms; individuals, associations), Greek and non-Greek, across the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean world. Moreover, this interdisciplinary investigation of the materiality of rituals addressed to human benefactors as to, or together with, traditional gods allows us to go beyond a commonly accepted yet methodologically arbitrary separation between cultic honours for deities and for human beings. The latter are often still considered as an isolated and paradoxical feature of ancient Greek polytheism, and as a deviation from ‘traditional’ religion, i.e., the cults for gods and heroes as they were already practised in the archaic and classical polis. Rather, the case studies dealt with in this book contribute to shedding new light on the way ancient people could exploit the ritual and administrative toolkit of their religious system in order to satisfy new needs. In other words, one may state that cultic honours for political leaders do not provide an exception to the way Greek polytheism functioned, but are fully embedded within it, and substantially contributed to its development in the Hellenistic age.

Ritual permeates Greek comedies of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. In Birds and Peace, the performance of sacrifice is central to the plot and its dramatic action; Women at the Thesmophoria is set during the celebration of a religious festival; while the story of Wealth relies on a successful incubation at the sanctuary of Asklepios. Other plays of Aristophanes, as well as fragments from other comic poets, also feature ritual processions, libations, hymns, and prayers. Why and how were these real-life practices of Greek religion represented in comedies? And what did it mean for the audience to laugh at them? This study is the first comprehensive analysis of the comic scenes in which characters perform rituals on stage. These theatrical representations of religious rites are examined not only with regard to their role in the fabric of particular plays, they are also analysed within the broader framework of the competition of dramatic poets at the Athenian festival of Dionysos. The approach chosen allows for a new perspective to develop on the old discussion regarding the religious dimension of Greek theatre. It is argued that comic rituals (and the playwrights behind them) consciously claim to be authentic, and thus transform the performance of a comic play into a significant event which is relevant for the city and its religion.

Purity, and its converse, impurity, formed a versatile metaphor in the ancient Greek world. Constructing a multifaceted investigation, with both complementary and contrastive approaches, the thirteen papers collected in this volume explore the range of these ideas, from Archaic and Classical Greece to the Roman Near East. Different declensions are readily manifest: purity could be defined as a traditional norm or by institutional law, impurity expressed as a substantive crime or as rhetorical slander. A key debate revolves around the ethical sense of purity and impurity: how early and widely was this notion applied; how did it complement concrete ritual practices of purification and abstention; in other words, in a perspective of continuity and change, how were the inner/mental and outer/corporeal dimensions of purity harmonised ?

The present volume celebrates the thirty-fifth anniversary of Robert Parker’s seminal work Miasma: Pollution and Purification in early Greek Religion. Analysing a wealth of documents—inscriptions, papyri, literature—both old and new, the authors reveal compelling case-studies, draw out innovative conclusions, and point in fruitful directions for future research.

Table des matières

Jan-Mathieu CARBON, Introduction: Probing the ‘Incubation Chamber’

Concepts, Continuities, and Changes

Robert PARKER, Miasma: Old and New Problems Angelos CHANIOTIS, Greek Purity in Context: The Long Life of a Ritual Concept, or Defining the Cs of Continuity and Change Pierre BONNECHERE, Pureté, justice, « piété » et leurs contraires : l’apport des sources oraculaires Saskia PEELS-MATTHEY, Moral Purity in the Athenian Theatre

Homicide, Morality, and Society

Hannah WILLEY, Social-status, Legislation, and Pollution in Plato’s Euthyphro Anne-Françoise JACCOTTET, La pureté des tyrannicides ou quand la démocratie lave la souillure Irene SALVO, Blood Pollution and Macedonian Rulers: Narratives between Character and Belief

Rituals, Behaviour, and Abstinence

Stella GEORGOUDI, Couper pour purifier ? Le chien et autres animaux, entre pratiques rituelles et récits Marie-Claire BEAULIEU, Θεῶν ἅγνισμα μέγιστον : la mer et la purification en Grèce ancienne Ivana and Andrej PETROVIC, Purity of Body and Soul in the Cult of Athena Lindia: On the Eastern Background of Greek Abstentions

Contacts and Boundaries, Demons and ‘Magic’

Athanassia ZOGRAFOU, Être pur pour réussir : le conditionnement de l’efficacité rituelle dans les « papyrus magiques grecs » Miriam BLANCO CESTEROS and Eleni CHRONOPOLOU, The Irresistible Attraction of Purity: Accusations of Religious Transgression in Magical Texts from Late Antiquity Moshe BLIDSTEIN, Demons and Pollution in the Ancient Mediterranean: Interactions and Relationships

List of Contributors

Abbreviations and Bibliography

Index locorum

Qu’elles soient propitiatoires ou gratulatoires, les offrandes racontent la vie des donateurs, parfois célèbres mais le plus souvent anonymes, qui sont venus exprimer leurs craintes, leurs maux, leurs joies, leurs espoirs, par le dépôt d’un objet qui les reliait à la divinité. Les sanctuaires de l’île de Délos sont le terrain privilégié par cette étude qui, à la loupe de l’épigraphiste, du philologue et de l’archéologue, scrute les mots décrivant les parures et l’ornementation. Bien plus qu’un simple dictionnaire, cet ouvrage dévoile tout un pan de l’histoire des modes dédicatoires de l’antiquité et atteste le formidable creuset d’expérimentation sémantique que sont les inventaires déliens.

Ce volume est publié avec le soutien financier de l’UMR 8164/Halma-Ipel et grâce au mécenat de la Maison ZOLOTAS à Athènes.

Hedvig VON EHRENHEIM

This study documents and analyses the structure and function of Greek incubation rituals in Classical and Hellenistic times addressing all relevant and extant literary and epigraphical testimonia concerning the rites and rules surrounding incubation. It shows that previous approaches, which treated incubation as a Chthonian phenomenon, as a rite of passage, or as comparable to initiation in mystery cults are not supported by the available testimonia on these rites.

An analysis of the social context of the rites surrounding incubation shows they differed surprisingly little from the rites performed by other worshippers at these sanctuaries. Various ritual factors are explored in order to explain why ordinary, or low-intensity, rites could create a high-intensity experience for the worshipper. Further, the structure of incubation rituals is examined in the light of the origins and development of the practice in Greece. Contrary to previous theories on the origins of incubation, it is argued that the phenomenon began as an exclusive consultation technique for priests, magistrates and select worshippers and was a natural variant of oracular techniques in Archaic and Early Classical Greece. When incubation became accessible to everyone in Classical society as a part of the cult of Asklepios, rituals for the masses were then created.

The ritual did not have one, coherent structure across all the sanctuaries which offered it; rather, the ritual practice adapted to local customs and factors such as the size of the cult. Some rites for intermediaries were kept, but new motivational factors were added, which resulted in very popular cults.