Introduction. What Is a Greek Priest?* Albert Henrichs What is a Greek priest? It might seem redundant, if not preposterous, to raise such a question in a volume of essays devoted to this very topic. For more than two hundred years, students of antiquity and historians of Greek religion have been in the habit of designating some or even all Greek… Read more
1. Priests as Ritual Experts in the Greek World Angelos Chaniotis 1. Who Needs Ritual Experts? In the study of Greek rituals more interest has been paid to the content, context, meaning, and function of rituals than to the persons who performed them—and I should add: for good reasons. [1] As F. Gschnitzer has shown, [2]… Read more
2. Priestly Personnel of the Ephesian Artemision: Anatolian, Persian, Greek, and Roman Aspects* Jan Bremmer The Indo-Europeans had neither a separate priestly class nor a specific term for priests or priestesses. This tradition may be one of the reasons why the Greeks had no clearly defined priestly class either. Every city could develop its own organization and vocabulary, [1]… Read more
3. Professionals, Volunteers, and Amateurs: Serving the Gods kata ta patria Susan Guettel Cole Alexandra Consults the Oracle In the second century AD, a priestess of Demeter Thesmophoros at Miletus consulted the oracle of Apollo at Didyma. A third-person account of her query survives: With good fortune. Alexandra, priestess of Demeter Thesmophoros, puts a question to the oracle, because, since the time when… Read more
4. Greek Priests of Sarapis? Beate Dignas Studying Hellenistic priests is piecework. Given that the main body of evidence comes from inscriptions, the questions, where is the best place to start? and how can this study be structured successfully? seem almost unanswerable. The task is extremely ambitious, but general statements on the character and significance of priesthoods are such a desideratum that even idiosyncratic examples must… Read more
5. Priests—Dynasts—Kings: Temples and Secular Rule in Asia Minor* Ulrich Gotter The aim of this essay is to explore the complex relationship between sacred authority and secular power in Asia Minor, focusing exclusively on cases of personal rule. My dramatis personae will include rulers as priests and priests as rulers. More specifically, I will consider the role of sacred office for… Read more
6. Images and Prestige of Cult Personnel in Athens between the Sixth and First Centuries BC* Ralf von den Hoff In the poleis of ancient Greece, priests and priestesses rarely had permanent political, social, or economic power as a group and outside their sanctuaries. [1] On the other hand, everyone would agree that priests were an… Read more
Chapter 4. Traditions in Flux It is thanks to themthat I live in three dimensions,in a space non-lyrical and non-rhetorical,with a horizon real because movable.They themselves do not knowhow much they bring in empty hands.“I owe them nothing,”love would sayon this open question. —Wisława Szymborska, from Gratitude (trans. M. J. Krynski and R. A. Maguire) … Read more
Chapter 5. In Search of Sappho’s Companions: Anthropological Fieldwork on Socioaesthetic Cultures The postcard on the cover of the book depicts a privileged view of a central street of Mytilene at the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the major Greek Orthodox monuments of the city, the elaborate church of St. Therapon, most prominent in Mytilene until today, dominates the left background of the picture, the… Read more
Abbreviations and Bibliography For the fragments of Sappho and Alkaios I cite Voigt’s critical edition [= V]. For the other melic poets I use Page’s Poetae Melici Graeci [= PMG], while for Alkman, Stesikhoros, and Ibykos I refer to Davies 1991 when necessary. For the elegiac and iambic poets, I cite West’s edition [= W]. For Pindar I use Snell and Maehler [= S-M] and Maehler [=… Read more
