Archaic and Classical Period

Worship

The most widespread public act of worship in ancient Greece was sacrifice, whether of grain or the blood sacrifice of animals. In general, the Greeks distinguished open-air sacrifices of burnt offerings given to the Olympian gods from those given to chthonic (from chthôn "earth") or earth-bound gods (like Hades, Hekate, and so on). The Olympian sacrifices were categorized as therapeia, the "service" due to the Olympian gods. "This therapeia" Socrates urges, "must be of the nature of service or administration." (Plato, Euthyphron, 15), a proposition which he reduces, to the discomfort of his interlocutor, to a business transaction, do ut des ("I give that you may give") a kindly transaction quite free from fear. Here, as Jane Ellen Harrison observed (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion pp 3ff) "there is no question of sin, repentance, sacrificial atonement, purification, no fear of judgement to come, no longing after a future complete beatitude." The other, darker, nocturnal, fearful and primitive aspect of Greek cult practice was informed by deisidaimonia, the "fear of spirits", or of the supernatural and weird, in its true sense. By the fourth century the deisidaimon had been reduced to the role of the "superstitious man" who is even later described by Plutarch (De Superstitio); but in the archaic period, and even in the fifth century, the more vital and immediate reality of Greek religion was in its apotropaic magic that turned away or averted (as in "averting the Evil Eye") the chthonic spirits, among whom were the heroes who must be propitiated.


"Those of the gods who are the source to us of good things have the title of Olympians, those whose department is that of calamities and punishments have harsher titles; to the first class both private persons and states erect altars and temples; the second is not worshipped either with prayers or burnt-sacrifices, but in their case we perform ceremonies of riddance" (Oration v.117, quoted in Harrison, Prolegomena p 8)
The ceremonies of riddance were known to the Greeks as apopompai, "sendings away", with a meaning akin to exorcism.

Sacrifices served multiple functions: one sacrificed before important undertakings, to introduce a new-born child to the phratry or district, to introduce a young man on the verge of manhood into the society of those engaged in politics. The temples of the Greek religion generally were not public gathering places where people gathered socially for collective indoor prayer; most temples held little more than a cult image of the deity and the accumulated votive gifts, which might amount to a treasury. A few venerable archaic wooden aniconic idols survived even to the time of Pausanias. When we are told in mythology that "horses are sacred to Poseidon" or roosters to Hermes, what this meant first and foremost was that these animals were customarily offered as sacrifices to those gods. Most sacrificial victims were food animals; for these, the usual practice was to offer the god the blood, bones, and hide of the victim, while the worshippers kept and ate the rest.

Altars were not inside the temples but generally in front of them in the temenos or sacred fane. The altars often preceded the temple building and were set up upon the ashes of innumerable previous sacrifices since time immemorial. One of the difficulties in establishing a Greek colony was identifying the new place that would be grateful to the deity brought, as with live coals from the communal hearth, from home.

Glimpsed through the practice of animal sacrifice are the traces of an older practice, abandoned by the increasingly civilized Greeks - that of human sacrifice. Indications for this remain in the myths of heroes such as Tantalus and Pelops or Agamemnon and Iphigenia, and in comments that forbade such practices, ascribed to the teachings of Orpheus, himself a victim of the maenads (or bacchantes), ecstatic women followers of Dionysus, who tore their ritual victims limb from limb.

Votive gifts were offered to the gods by their worshippers. They were often given for benefits already conferred or in anticipation of future divine favors. Or they could be offered to propitiate the gods for crimes involving blood-guilt, impiety, or the breach of religious customs. They could be given either voluntarily or in response to demands by the cult's priesthood that the donor fulfill a religious vow or honor some religious custom.

Votive gifts were kept on display in the god's sanctuary for a set period of time and then were usually ritually discarded. Bronze tripods, prize cauldrons and figurines, terracotta tablets and figurines, lamps, and vases are typical examples. Armor, weapons, jewelry and other more personalized items were dedicated in large numbers, along with marble statuettes and reliefs. Some of the healing sanctuaries housed replicas of body parts donated in thanks for or in hope of cures. Large sculptural monuments in bronze, marble and other costly materials were routinely dedicated by either private donors or individual city-states in the great Panhellenic sanctuaries like Olympia and Delphi.

The Roman formula expressed the attitude of worshippers to their gods in the formula do ut des; "I give that you may give". Public worship was aimed at pleasing the gods so that the gods would send rain, good harvest, military victories, and other public blessings. Private sacrifice was offered for personal goals. Prayer was highly formulaic and ritualized. Most places did not have professional or full-time clergy; priests were local officials whose priesthoods were not full time jobs. Major religious sites such as the oracles of pilgrimage brought in enough spiritual tourism to need a full time clerical staff.