Terracotta kylix drinking cup Attributed to the Amasis Painter. Terracotta Panathenaic prize amphora Attributed to the Euphiletos Painter. Terracotta amphora jar Signed by Andokides as potter. Terracotta Panathenaic prize amphora Attributed to the Kleophrades Painter. Terracotta statuette of Nike, the personification of victory.
Terracotta lekythos oil flask Attributed to the Tithonos Painter. Terracotta kylix drinking cup Attributed to the Villa Giulia Painter. Terracotta lekythos oil flask Attributed to the Nikon Painter.
Terracotta stamnos jar Attributed to the Menelaos Painter. Terracotta lekythos oil flask Attributed to the Sabouroff Painter. Terracotta lekythos oil flask Attributed to the Phiale Painter. Marble head of a woman wearing diadem and veil. Terracotta oinochoe: chous jug Attributed to the Meidias Painter. Gold ring. Ganymede jewelry. Set of jewelry. Gold stater. Marble head of Athena. Bronze statue of Eros sleeping. Overview Vocabulary. Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.
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Interactives Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. Related Resources. Ancient Greece. View Collection. The Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Rome. View Article. The result was a mix of innovation and continuity. The most conspicuous continuity was in traditional Greek religion, which permeated public and private life. For most people, their religious beliefs and practices remained largely the same as they had always been. One of the most striking cultural changes of the period, on the other hand, come with the development of tragic drama as a publicly supported art form performed before mass audiences.
Artists as well as dramatists were experimenting with new techniques and approaches in this period, too, and artistic developments in free-standing sculpture 1 provide the clearest demonstration of the innovation and variety in the depiction of the human form that characterized Greek art in the fifth century.
Those honors consisted of sacrifices, gifts to the gods' sanctuaries, and festivals of songs, dances, prayers, and processions. A seventh-century B. Gods did not love human beings, except sometimes literally in mythological stories of gods taking earthly lovers and producing half-divine children.
Rather, gods supported humans who paid them honor and avoided offending them. Gods whom humans offended sent calamities in response, such as famines, earthquakes, epidemic diseases, or defeat in war. The Nature of the Gods The Greeks believed that their gods lived easy lives, sometimes exposed to pain in their dealings with one another but essentially care-free in their immortality. The twelve most important of the gods, headed by Zeus, were conceived as assembling for banquets atop Mount Olympus , the highest peak in mainland Greece.
They as well as some other, lesser deities were conceived in anthropomorphic form, both female and male. Like the human aristocrats of the stories of Homer, the gods were much concerned with slights to their honor.
Offenses could be those of omission, such as forgetting a sacrifice, or of commission, such as violating the sanctity of a temple area or breaking an oath or sworn agreement made to another person. The gods were regarded as especially concerned with certain transgressions such as oaths 5 , but as generally not bothering with common crimes, which humans had to police for themselves.
Homicide, however, the gods were thought to punish by casting a state of pollution 6 miasma, as it was called upon murderers and upon all those around them as well. Unless the members of the affected group took steps to purify themselves by punishing the murderer, they could all expect to suffer divine punishment such as bad harvests or disease. The Gods and Human Behavior The greatest difficulty for humans lay in anticipating what might offend a god.
Fortunately, some of the gods' expectations were codified in a moral order with rules of behavior for human beings. For example, the Greeks believed that the gods demanded hospitality for strangers and proper burial for family members 7 and that the gods punished human arrogance 8 and murderous violence.
Oracles, dreams, divination, and the prophecies of seers were all regarded as clues as to what humans might have done to anger the gods. Offenses could be forgetting a sacrifice, violating the sanctity of a temple area, or breaking an oath or sworn agreement made to another person.
Sacrifices and Offerings Humans made sacrifices 9 and offerings to sanctuaries to honor and to thank the gods for blessings and to propitiate them when misfortune struck and was interpreted as a sign of divine anger at human behavior. Offerings could consist of works of art, money, and other valuables. Private individuals could offer sacrifices to the gods at home with the members of the household gathered around, sometimes including the family's slaves.
The sacrifices of public cults were conducted at the open-air altars 10 of the city-state's temples by priests and priestesses, who were in most cases chosen from the citizen body as a whole. The priests and priestesses of Greek cult were usually attached to a particular sanctuary or shrine and did not unite to influence political or social matters. Their special and essential knowledge consisted of knowing how to perform the gods' rites according to tradition.
They were not guardians of theological orthodoxy, as we might describe a function of some clergy today, because Greek religion had no systematic theology or canonical dogma, nor any institutions comparable to today's religious institutions to oversee doctrine. The Character of Sacrifices Different cults had differing rituals, but sacrifice 11 served as their centering experience.
Sacrifices ranged from the bloodless offering of fruits, vegetables, and small cakes 12 to the slaughter of large animals. The tradition of animal sacrifice may have descended from the practice of prehistoric hunters, who perhaps felt that they might somehow suffer retribution from supernatural powers for taking the lives of animals, living creatures like themselves, to feed themselves and their human community. The rite of sacrifice perhaps expressed their uneasiness about the paradox of having to kill animals in order to secure the means to keep themselves alive and their consequent attempt to show respect and honor to the divine forces concerned with animals.
The Greeks of the classical period often sacrificed valuable domestic animals such as cattle, which their land supported in only small numbers. It is therefore proper for us to offer the same sacrifices as they, if only for the sake of the success which has resulted from those rites.
The great majority of sacrifices took place as regularly scheduled events on the community's civic calendar. At Athens, for example, the first eight days of every month were marked by demonstrations of the citizens' piety toward the deities of the city-state's official cults. The third day of each month was celebrated as Athena's 15 birthday; the sixth as that of Artemis 16 ,the goddess of wild animals, who was also the special patroness of the Athenian council of ; her brother, Apollo 17 , was honored on the following day.
Athens boasted of having the largest number of religious festivals in all of Greece, with nearly half the days of the year featuring one, some large and some small. Not everyone attended all the festivals, and hired laborers' contracts would specify which holidays they received to attend religious ceremonies. Major occasions such as the Panathenaic festival, whose procession was portrayed on the Parthenon frieze, attracted large crowds of men, women, and children.
The Panathenaic festival honored Athena not only with sacrifices and parades, but also with contests in music, dancing,poetry, and athletics. Valuable prizes were awarded to the winners. Some festivals were for women only, such as the three-day festival for married women in honor of the goddess Demeter 18 , the protectress of agriculture and life-giving fertility in general.
Large Animal Sacrifice The sacrifice of a large animal 19 both provided an occasion for the community to reassemble to reaffirm its ties to the divine world and, by the sharing of the roasted meat of the sacrificed animal, for the worshippers to benefit personally from a good realtionship with the gods. The feasting that followed a blood sacrifice was especially meaningful in this latter sense because meat was comparatively rare in the Greek diet.
The actual sacrificing of the animal proceeded along strict rules meant to ensure the purity of the occasion. The elaborate procedures required for a blood sacrifice show how seriously and solemnly the Greeks regarded the killing of animals for sacrifice. The victim had to be an unblemished domestic animal, specially decorated with garlands, and induced to approach the altar as if of its own volition.
The assembled crowd had to maintain a strict silence to avoid possibly impure remarks. The sacrificer sprinkled water on the victim's head so it would, in shaking its head in response to the sprinkle, appear to consent to its death. After washing his hands, the sacrificer scattered barley grains on the altar fire and the victim's head and then cut a lock of the animal's hair to throw on the fire.
Following a prayer, he swiftly cut the animal's throat while musicians played flute-like pipes and female worshippers screamed, presumably to express the group's ritual sorrow at the victim's death. The carcass was then butchered, with some portions thrown on the altar fire so their aromatic smoke could waft its way upwards to the god of the cult.
The majority of the meat was then distributed among the worshippers. Hero Cults Greek religion encompassed many activities besides those of the cults of the twelve Olympian deities. In private life, prayers, sacrifices, and rituals marked important occasions like birth, marriage, and death. Ancestors were honored by offerings made at their tombs. Seers were consulted for the meanings of dreams and omens. Magicians offered spells to improve one's love life or curses to harm one's enemies.
Particularly important both to the community and to individuals were what we call hero-cults, rituals performed at the tomb of a man or woman, usually from the distant past, whose remains were thought to retain special power.
This power was local, whether for revealing the future through oracles, for healing injuries and disease, or for providing assistance in war. For example, Athenian soldiers in the battle of Marathon in B. C reported having seen the ghost of the hero Theseus 20 leading the way against the Persians.
When Cimon in B. The only hero to whom cults were established internationally all over the Greek world was the strongman Heracles or Hercules, as his name was later spelled by the Romans , whose superhuman feats in overcoming monsters and generally doing the impossible gave him tremendous appeal as a protector in many city-states.
The Eleusinian Mysteries The mystery cult 22 of Demeter and her daughter Kore or Persephone was international in a different sense from that the hero cult of Heracles, which had shrines throughout the Greek world. The cult of Demeter and Kore had a fixed center in its major sanctuary at Eleusis 23 , a settlement on the western coast of Attica, to which worshippers flocked from all over the Greek world.
The central rite of this cult was called the Mysteries, a series of ceremonies of initiation into the secret knowledge of the cult. If they were free of pollution, all speakers of Greek from anywhere in the world—women and men, adults and children—were eligible for initiation, as were some slaves who worked in the sanctuary.
Initiation proceeded in several stages. The main stage took place during an annual festival lasting almost two weeks. So important were the Eleusinian Mysteries that an international truce of fifty-five days was proclaimed to allow travel to and from the festival even from the distant corners of the Greek world.
Initiates expected that they would enjoy added protection from troubles in their lives on earth and also a better fate after death. The Mystery of the Mysteries Prospective initiates in the Eleusinian Mysteries participated in a complicated set of ceremonies that culminated in the revelation of Demeter's central secret after a day of fasting. The revelation was performed in an initiation hall telesterion 25 constructed solely for this purpose.
Under a roof fifty-five yards square supported on a forest of interior columns, the hall held three thousand people standing around its sides on tiered steps. The most eloquent proof of the sanctity attached to the Mysteries of Demeter and Kore is that, throughout the thousand years during which they were celebrated, we know of no one who ever revealed the secret.
To this day, all we know is that it involved something done, something said, and something shown. Belief and Ritual The Eleusinian Mysteries were not the only mystery cult of the Greek world, nor were they unique in their concern with what lay beyond death for human beings. Most mystery cults emphasized protection for initiates in their daily lives, whether against ghosts, illness, poverty, shipwrecks, or the countless other everyday dangers of ancient Greek life.
Such protection came, however, from appropriate human behavior, not from any abstract belief in the gods. For the ancient Greeks, gods expected honors and rites, and Greek religion required action from its worshippers. Prayers had to be said, sacrifices had to be performed, and purifications had to be undergone. These rituals represented an active response to the precarious conditions of human life in a world in which early death from disease, accident, or war was commonplace.
Furthermore, the Greeks believed the same gods were responsible for sending both good and bad. For god has given prosperous happiness to many people, but afterwards uprooted them utterly. Their assessment of human existence made no allowance for change in the nature of the relationship between the human and the divine.
That relationship encompassed sorrow as well as joy, punishment in the here and now, with the uncertain hope for favored treatment both in this life and in an afterlife for initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The Development of Athenian Tragedy The problematic relationship that Greeks believed existed between gods and humans formed the basis of classical Athens' most enduring cultural innovation: the tragic dramas performed over the course of three days at the major annual festival held in honor of the god Dionysus.
The earliest tragedies were composed in the late sixth century, but Athenian tragedy reached its peak as a dramatic form in the fifth century. The Nature of Tragedy The term tragedy 28 —derived, for reasons now lost, from the Greek words for goat and song—referred to plays with plots that involved fierce conflict and characters that represented powerful forces, both divine and human.
Written by GreekBoston. Many of the things that we know of today, such as the Parthenon in Athens, the Archaeological site in Delphi, and even the Ancient Olympic Games all have their roots in the religion of the Ancient Greeks. The religion of Ancient Greece was classified as polytheistic, which means that they believed in multiple deities. In fact, the gods and goddesses that we know as the Olympian Gods were something that many religious experts accept as being at the core of their belief system.
Although there were multiple gods and goddesses that existed in Ancient Greece, these twelve represented the core of what most in Ancient Greece believed in. There are other gods and goddesses, however, that may also have been worshipped locally.
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