Between Heaven and Earth: a World Full of Gods

Anyone who travels through the lands once occupied by the civilizations of Greece and Rome will be struck by the profusion of temples that dot the landscape. Such edifices may be grand, like the Doric temples of Athens or of Paestum in southern Italy, or the sanctuary of Jupiter Heliopolitanus at Baalbek in Lebanon; equally they may be humble, like the tiny temple of Mithras near the fortress of Carrawburgh on Hadrian’s wall in the north of England. There were other sorts of religious places in addition to temples. Some might comprise little more than an altar, such as that in honor of Zeus on Mount Lykaion in Arcadia (Paus. 8.38.7), or the wayside shrines of the Lares Compitales (neighborhood spirits) in Rome. Private space too had its sacred spots, ranging from the hearth, a focus of rituals in Greek households, to the elaborate domestic shrines found, for instance, at Pompeii.

The ubiquity of temple buildings and shrines can sometimes obscure the particular significance that many of them possessed. The curious building on the Athenian acropolis called the Erechthion provides an eccentric, but telling, example (Hurwitt 1999: 200-209). Its unusual plan was designed to encompass a number of sites of religious significance, such as the primeval olive tree planted by Athena, a salt-water spring created by a blow from Poseidon’s trident, and a fissure left by a thunderbolt hurled by Zeus. Moreover, the building linked the world of the gods with that of humankind, since within its precincts lay tombs of the mythical Athenian kings

Erechtheus and Kekrops. The Roman world provides similar examples. When town planners established new colonial settlements in territories brought under the Rome’s control, they sought out for the temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva (the patron deities of the Roman state) a high vantage point that mirrored the location of the gods’ temple at Rome itself (Vitr. 1.7.1). The gods themselves could exercise choice in the matter. When the cult of Asclepius was brought to Rome from Epidauros in Greece in 291 bc, it was thought that the god, in the form of a snake, slithered ashore on the island in the River Tiber near the middle of the city, and there a sanctuary was built for him (Livy, Per. 11). Certain gods had temples located where they could oversee activities with which they were particularly associated. Thus Hephaistos, the god associated with metal working, had a temple overlooking the blacksmiths’ workshops in the Athenian agora (Camp 2001: 102-3). Elsewhere in Attica, at Cape Sounion, a large sanctuary rose in honor of the sea god Poseidon: its location on a promontory made it an important landmark for sailors, whose activities were under Poseidon’s care (Mikalson 2005: 3-5).

Like Poseidon at Sounion, many gods had sanctuaries in the countryside. Among the most spectacular of ancient religious sites are the temple of Apollo at Bassae, in the rugged terrain of the western Peloponnese, and the sanctuary to the same god located at Delphi, on the flanks of Mount Parnassus in central Greece. Neither site was too far from local settlements, but the choice of mountains in both cases reminds us that it was not just urban centers that were associated with the gods, but also the landscape in general (Buxton 1994; Jost 1994). Indeed, the whole ancient conception of the world was influenced by religious ideas: while Greeks and Romans often regarded their immediate neighbors as barbarians, they also held that at the remote edges of the inhabited world there existed fortunate peoples who still enjoyed an intimate relationship with the gods of a kind that had otherwise departed from humankind after the prehistoric Golden Age (Romm 1992).

The omnipresence of the gods in physical terms reflected their omnipotence in all aspects of life. However much we might be impressed by the scientific advances made by the Greeks and Romans, it is important to remember that they knew little about such everyday perils as the incidence of disease or changes in the weather. These were regarded as unpredictable, and power over them was held by the gods, whose goodwill might be sought out through prayer, sacrifice, and votive offerings. It is little wonder, then, that religious rituals punctuated the life cycles of ordinary men and women, whether in their participation in public ceremonies at major sanctuaries, or through the assiduous observance of rituals of the gods who oversaw the well-being of individual households.