Greek Polytheism: A Historical Subject
Inaugural lecture delivered at the Collège de France on Thursday 7 December 2017
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1Dear Administrator,
Dear pro-Rectors of the University of Liège,
Dear Minister,
Dear colleagues and friends,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
2The Collège de France teaches everything – as per its motto, docet omnia. But this approach can be applied in many different ways, depending on current research. In fact, some chairs were clearly conceived in conjunction with emerging scientific fields. But this is surely not the case for a teaching position rooted in the ancient Greek world. So am I standing before you this evening because of the institution’s loyalty to a tradition that goes back to its origins? Undoubtedly, to some extent. Moreover, my acute awareness of this heritage and of the remarkable scholars who have upheld it, coupled with the solemnity of the place and the moment, would dampen the spirits of a far more valiant person than myself. Yet, beyond me, and perhaps beyond the respect felt for the College’s age-old tradition, it is a certain way of exploring the ancient Greek world that you wished to summon within these walls – or rather revive, as I will explain later. The title of the Chair bears witness to this. And because words tend to weigh on those who choose them, I will begin by explaining these juxtaposed terms: religion, history, society.
3Neither religion nor society were part of the ancient Greek vocabulary. Nor are they strictly speaking disciplines, unlike epigraphy, which has almost always been included in the titles of professorships at the Collège de France, with scholars such as Paul Foucart, Maurice Holleaux, Louis Robert, and Denis Knoepfler, or papyrology, which recently entered the Collège de France thanks to the election of Jean-Luc Fournet. Both religion and society are concepts developed to examine the past, while recognising that they also feed into everyday language, at least in Western Europe.1 The tension that arises from this initial observation is one of the most fascinating but also most delicate challenges for a historian: forging a discourse on the past that is intelligible to current audiences, in speech and writing without yielding or as little as possible, to the cultural determinisms inherent in our linguistic tools and mental frameworks.
4This requirement is expressed in the third term of the Chair’s title, i.e., history, which Paul Veyne, in this very hall and on the same occasion said it “only exists in relation to the questions we put to it”.2 If this were not the case, if the history of a given culture were like a buried continent waiting to be brought to light by clearing away the sediment deposited over time, I would not be standing before you today. Many scholars with greater authority than I would have already settled the score with a past that would be fully quantifiable. But we will never settle this score, because we will never cease to examine, from different angles, the human communities that preceded us.
5While the concepts I mentioned a moment ago are mostly grounded in our current language, the questions that shape history – as a discipline and as a subject – also depend on the present. And therefore on the present of those who will come after us. A historian’s ambition and humility are entirely rooted in this conviction. As Lucien Febvre, another great name of this institution, put it, there is no history other than the present.3 And I would like to take this opportunity to pay a warm tribute to Professor Jean-Pierre Massaut who, at the University of Liège, taught these principles with such passion to generations of students, myself included. He embodied the Liège school of historical criticism, following in the footsteps of Léon-Ernest Halkin.
6So the title of this Chair evokes Greek religion as a historical entity, or the history of Greek communities through the prism of their religious representations and practices – and I will discuss “society” later. But if I agree with Paul Veyne’s point of view on the essential concepts to understand history, how do we approach religion? It does not exist as an immutable reality: there are only historically determined religions, characterised by practices and discourses which the historian tries to account for in the same way as any other cultural element. However, if we are entitled, and even compelled, to define the specific nature of such a subject of study, it is religion as a concept that we must consider. The term designates a set of representations and practices that situate human beings in a dimension that transcends them and remains unknowable. But the way in which this happens is contingent. Each religion deserves a close analysis of the imaginary worlds it has created, and of the discourses and actions they generate and, conversely, that contribute to shaping them.
7In this sense, ancient Greek religion existed, just like Roman religion or the Indo-Iranian religions taught at the Collège de France by John Scheid and Jean Kellens respectively. The complex, fluid aggregates we call “religions” are not mirages, brought about by the hypercritical deconstruction of our analytical categories. This was also demonstrated by the work of Jean-Pierre Vernant, who, forty-two years ago, inaugurated a Chair of Comparative Study of Ancient Religions right here, while devoting most of his teaching to Greek religion. Among the many debts I have incurred during my career, the work of this great and generous scholar figures prominently, as does that of Jean Rudhardt, who taught in Geneva, and Marcel Detienne4, another Liège native whose legitimacy to speak about Greek religion in this institution thirty years ago would undoubtedly have been far greater than mine today. As you know, the gods, be they Greek or otherwise, will never cease to mock human projects and ambitions, however well-founded they may be.
8At the outset, I mentioned the legacy of those within these walls who explored ancient Greece, its language, its literature and its history. However, this is not the only source I will draw from, for in a way I also belong to the tradition initiated by those who, here as well, were involved in the history of religions from 1880 onwards. The title “History of Religions”, in its broadest sense, was adopted by Réville, father and son, by Alfred Loisy and later by Henri-Charles Puech. Admittedly, the history of religions as the first of them understood it still had a long way to go before it could establish itself as a scientific approach that was independent of theology. The question of the scientific study of the biblical tradition and Christianity remained a burning issue for a long time. The very figure of Loisy and the circumstances of his arrival at the Collège de France after his excommunication attest to this. His stated ambition to discuss religions from a comparative perspective was a way of distancing himself from Christianity and situating it among the world’s religions.5 This was a delicate task, and Loisy himself, even though he was most concerned with promoting comparatism, continued to place Christianity at the core of his thinking.6 What happened next? This is an important question, and it is not just a matter of the conventional, inaugural exercise of putting down roots in the local soil.
9Just as it was for Jean-Pierre Vernant’s chair, or John Scheid’s, Michel Tardieu’s “Syncretisms of Late Antiquity” or Thomas Römer’s “The Hebrew Bible and its Contexts”, the title of the Chair which you have entrusted to me does not explicitly refer to the “history of religions”. What might be the reason for this apparent restraint? The history of religions fought hard for its legitimacy and I can easily identify with its approach. But it is precisely an approach and not an all-encompassing field of investigation. The ambition to include all religions in a broad interpretative movement, as dreamt of by Friedrich Max Müller in the mid-nineteenth century, died definitively in 1986, the year of Mircea Eliade’s death. As luck would have it, that year also saw the death of Georges Dumézil, who taught for almost twenty years as Chair of the Indo-European Civilisation at the Collège de France. Many historians of religion will easily recognise themselves in Dumézil’s work, once the key to trifunctional interpretation has been put aside. However, it is more difficult to identify with Eliade’s work, which takes an analogical and mystical approach to religion viewed as an anhistorical essence. Although Dumézil taught for many years in the Religious Sciences section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, he was not officially labelled a “historian of religions”, unlike Eliade, who taught the history of religions in Chicago.
10The understanding of the history of religions that I have adopted, along with many other colleagues who identify with this approach7, is closely linked to the existence of a specific field on which the analysis is based. Admittedly, for a historian, this is not the terrain of first-hand anthropological observation, but it is a field of investigation that the history of religions shares with anthropology, and which I personally apply to the ancient Greek world. But the focus of inquiry in the history of religions is still and always comparative: Loisy argued this over a century ago, Dumézil, as early as 1938, compared the comparable in the Indo-European context, while Detienne, in the early 2000s, advocated comparing the incomparable. Today, the fruitfulness of this exercise is recognised, and the approach is applied in experimental contexts where researchers from different backgrounds agree to sit down together at the same table and ask questions that can in turn enrich their own methods.8 Religions are not the only field for such an undertaking. But the comparison is all the more imperative when addressing this dimension of the human adventure. On this inaugural occasion, I would like to express the hope that the Collège de France Institute of Civilisations will become an ideal laboratory for this kind of cross-disciplinary experimentation, which all too often remains wishful thinking. A “historian of religions” is necessarily part of a collective approach, and the colleagues from the AnHiMA (Anthropology and History of Ancient Worlds) research team here today can attest that we have been pursuing such avenues with curiosity and passion for several years.9
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11I therefore proceed from a specific ground. Greek religion or, to put it differently, Greek polytheism. Polytheism is not a neutral term, no more than religion, because it was coined by comparison. At the very beginning of our era, Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher, contrasted the plurality of gods honoured in the different territories of the Mediterranean of his time with the exclusive uniqueness of the God of the Bible, which he commented on in Greek. He identified the concept of a plural divine world as polytheia or polytheon.10 The Church Fathers who wrote in Greek also adopted this vocabulary, but the Fathers who wrote in Latin preferred the terms idolatry and paganism, which lasted throughout the Western Middle Ages. With the rediscovery of Greek during the Renaissance, polytheia was available once again, and Guillaume Budé, who inspired François I to found the Collège de France, transposed the term into Latin. Shortly afterwards, authors writing in European vernacular languages coined the term polytheism.11 However, it was not until the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment, that polytheism replaced the terms of Latin origin and neutralised, at least in part, their controversial legacy. And if I am willingly to use the term polytheism, despite all its shortcomings – not the least of which is that it limits the identification of religions of this type to the plurality of their gods – it is because it gradually spread in contexts that tried to take non-Christian religions seriously. Speaking of “Greek religion” therefore meets the methodological requirement of considering that the concept of “religion” can be applied, at least on an exploratory and operational basis, to all human societies; speaking of “Greek polytheism” highlights an essential characteristic of this symbolic system (even if it is not the only one): the conception of a world inhabited by a multiplicity of gods.
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12Let us now turn our attention to this field of exploration in terms of its material evidence. For a historian is first and foremost a practitioner of the document, in all its forms, which are potentially as varied and multiple as human experience. Careful examination of all types of traces of the past is an imperative in the history of Antiquity, where evidence has been subject to the gradual wear and tear of the passing centuries, but especially to massive loss, whether accidental or the result of a choice to preserve certain texts rather than others, and this has been the case since Antiquity. When it comes to Greek religion, the traces in question range from the most accomplished works of ancient authors to animal bones that speak of sacrificial division, via epigraphic rules, architectural structures, thousands of dedications and every kind of artefact.
13This is why the contemporary historian who shares my life – and to whom I owe so much – certainly does the same job as I do, but there is hardly any common ground between our respective sources. The fact remains, however, that documents are still at the heart of our practice, despite and sometimes in opposition to the theoretical reflections that have marked the human sciences in recent decades. Roger Chartier clearly showed the abyss that they could open up for historians.12 Fully aware that the edge of the cliff he describes is never far away, I remain confident in the possibility of deciphering the past and transposing this analysis into a discourse which, although it adopts a literary form more than other scientific demonstrations, is not fiction. But working on religions requires a particular asceticism: “In the history of religions, as in love, the ink flows freely”.13
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14But enough of these general considerations. Let us set off for Greece.
15First of all, I would like to transport you to Dodona, in Epirus, in the north-west of Greece, in the venerable oracular sanctuary of Zeus mentioned in the Iliad (XVI, 234). It was in this breathtaking landscape, that a certain Evandros and his wife decided to go and question the local god and goddess, sometime in the 3rd or 2nd century BCE. They scrupulously wrote down the question that had brought them there, or had it written down on a lead tablet. They then probably handed the inscribed item to one of the oracle’s staff. They were given an answer, but we do not know how it was transmitted or what it said. Perhaps Evandros and his wife took the expected answer home, which was also inscribed, although the excavations show that divine injunctions on lead tablets were sometimes left behind.
16This modest document was unearthed in the Dodonean sanctuary a century and a half ago, along with some forty others lying in the ground. Subsequent excavations have unearthed several thousand specimens, which have suffered the effects of corrosion in museum reserves, where these fragile objects have been waiting to be published. Recent work has made available to the scientific community those among these humble items that were still legible.14 Their great simplicity is matched only by their promise of wide-ranging prospects for philologists, epigraphists, linguists, dialectologists and historians of Greek religion.
17At this stage, I have not yet referred to the question asked by Evandros and his wife. They asked “[...] which of the gods or heroes or daimones they could pray to and sacrifice to in order to act in the best and most profitable way for themselves and their family, now and for ever”.15 We know nothing about Evandros, neither the place nor the circumstances of his life. We do not even know the name of his wife who supposedly asked the question with him. In contrast, the wording of the question is well known to those who work with divination. It is comparable to so many other individual consultations, but also to questions of cities. The people of the island of Corcyra, today’s Corfu, opposite Dodona, also asked “Zeus Naios and Dione which god or hero they should sacrifice to and pray to in order to govern their city in the best and safest way possible, and to have a good and abundant harvest, as well as the profits derived from every good harvest”.16
18Faced with the uncertainties of life, individuals and communities turned to the gods. This would be a trivial observation were it not for a subsidiary question that highlights what is, in my view, a central concern in the study of ancient polytheisms: individuals and communities turned to the gods, certainly, but which ones? Amongst the profusion of divine possibilities inherent in a plural divine world, how did the Greeks make their choices? On some of the tablets at Dodona, as we have just seen, the support of Zeus and Dione, his divine companion, is called upon to determine the choice. But the Greeks were far from systematically combining their ritual procedures with preliminary recourse to an oracular authority. The day-to-day management of their relationship with the gods did not necessarily require such means, and many traditional gestures, precisely because they were in some way integrated and incorporated, did not require prior deliberation. However, for those of us who are trying to understand this system, the question of choice is crucial when it comes to understanding the way the ancient Greeks negotiated with the supra-human world.
19This question emerges at all levels and at all stages in the lives of individuals and the groups to which they belonged. Here are a few examples: cities chose the supra-human entities to whom they entrusted their destiny, forming what we call local pantheons; throughout their history, they continued this process by summoning this or that god according to prevailing circumstances, as shown by the example of the people of Corcyra questioning Zeus Naios and Dione; smaller local political entities could also have a pantheon, as shown by the demes of Attica; social groups of all kinds regularly formed around one or more cults; households honoured various gods with a degree of flexibility that was regulated by the ancestral practice of the family group; as for individuals, the case of Evandros and his wife setting off for Dodona shows that they were all concerned about identifying their divine interlocutor correctly and getting the address right.
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20We do not know to whom Evandros and his wife finally sacrificed to obtain the benefits they were hoping for. Nor do we know to whom the city of Corcyra prayed to protect itself from peril and ensure its subsistence. But both had to choose. And if their sacrifices and prayers came to nothing, we can safely assume that they absolved the oracle of any responsibility, blaming it instead on a misdirection based on a misunderstanding on their part. Using a railway metaphor, I would add that there are many switch rails in a polytheistic context. But a railway network also means rigorous layouts in a landscape always determined by local topography. This is just one way of imagining Greek polytheism: a structured set of possible routes in a specific context, to achieve all sorts of objectives.
21And, moving on from railways while holding on to the idea of a network, each supra-human entity in this plural assemblage can also be envisaged as a complex polycentric network, since, thanks to Jean-Pierre Vernant, we have understood that the Greek gods were powers and not persons.17 The metaphor of the network certainly provides food for thought about divine powers and polytheism.18 However evocative it may be, a metaphor can never replace a demonstration. It is not only by questioning the evidence precisely, even if it is as modest as a strip of lead unearthed at Dodona, but also by identifying the irrelevant questions that have plagued the study of Greek religion – and continue to do so – that we can hope to advance our understanding of that most elusive and exotic part of the ancient Greek world.
22For there is something exotic about ancient Greek religion. So much so that, for centuries, admirers of this prestigious founding culture have wondered about such an oddity: how could the inventors of history, philosophy, geometry, politics and democracy, the contemporaries of Homer, Aeschylus, Plato or Aristotle, have embraced such a crude and approximate religious system, once scholars had given up hope of finding in it any foreknowledge of Revelation? The question is anything but innocent, and it is anything but outdated, because it continues to shape our thinking about the birth of rational and philosophical thought in the Greek cities of Ionia, on the coast of present-day Turkey, where many of the so-called “pre-Socratic philosophers” were born.
23Greek religion is still the thorn in the side of those who, in one way or another, continue to think of the fifth century BCE as the irreversible turning point to logos, i.e., the exercise of rational thought free of mythos, or myth. There is something irresistible about the image that the mirror of that Greece holds up to our modern times. But we need to resist, and that means understanding the inextricable intertwining of these categories that modern researchers have erected as opposing principles: myth, reason, the reason for myth and myths and the reasons for believing in them or not. I freely admit to playing with words in this way, but it is not gratuitous: the game is as serious as the work of a researcher like Claude Calame who devoted years of research to these questions19, as part of the “resistance” that I mentioned and that I salute, just like the work of André Motte, whom I thank publicly for his unfailing support for more than thirty years. He realised a long time ago that the gods had not been ostracized by the pre-Socratics, or from Plato’s philosophy, and that a rigid conception of the “Greek Enlightenment” produced blinding anachronisms.
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24Without necessarily going blind, a certain short-sightedness threatens to overwhelm our twenty-first century European vision as soon as we set foot in a polytheistic country. For the gods are there, and their presence has many consequences in a whole range of areas where we are not necessarily prepared to see them. What is more, this place of the gods can only be understood in close relation to the overall vision that the Greeks had of the world of which they were a part, in all its various components. You may have noticed my insistence on talking about the supra-human figures that are the gods, and not about the supernatural. This is no accident. Both gods and humans were part of a cosmos in which there was no radical ontological divide. The dividing line between humans and gods was generally a difference in the quality of being, in the intensity of being, rather than an immeasurable otherness. Beyond a certain way of relating to the gods and expressing their action, the human form that the Greeks readily lent them also had to do with this immanence of the divine. And the category of heroes, so particular to Greek culture, was partly rooted in it.
25The gods were there, as I said, and so were the heroes. So, when defining a Greek city, a polis, we find the following features: first of all, a group of men who formed a society in control of its own destiny within a specific and limited territory, clearly identifiable from other cities; secondly, gods and heroes who shared this territory and even helped to structure it; thirdly, a set of traditions, ancestral customs, in short what we call a “culture”. I have thus placed the gods and heroes on the same level as the other characteristics of the city, rather than immersing them in a reference to cultural traditions. This does not mean that I want to abstract religion from other aspects of the city. Rather, I wish to emphasise its importance in the very definition of Greek cities at any point in their history. The gods were an integral part of the social fabric of these small political communities scattered across the Greek world. Society – we come to this at long last – is precisely the notion that allows us to bring together the material constraints of these cities and their internal power dynamics, all things that can be examined in a different way by paying attention to the supra-human world.
26Such an assessment of what constitutes the ancient city immediately raises issues of authority and power. In this respect, it has long been argued that, in that world, that of the polis, or rather poleis, the absence of an absolute divine transcendence, of a sacred and unified revelation, and of any priestly class had fostered the emergence of a public space shared by all, where a particular political experimentation could take place. Jean-Pierre Vernant wrote some magnificent pages on the neutralisation of the kratos, the “power” which all citizens enjoy without any one of them being able anymore to appropriate it.20 The very wording of collective decisions (“The city has decided [...]” or “It has pleased the Council and the People [...]”) shows that authority is just as immanent as the gods, and that every decision belongs to the citizens who come together to take it.
27However, one cannot simply subordinate the creation of this common space to the absences and shortcomings that might have characterised Greek religion. This negative assessment does not do justice to the way polytheism functioned in its Greek version, nor to the way the Greeks pushed the autonomy of politics to a remarkable degree. The close interweaving of these two spheres of city activity does not necessarily reflect what was lacking in Greek religion, but rather what it was as a polytheistic system, i.e., a fundamentally plural, flexible and adaptable system, in which channels of authority were also plural according to the level of decision-making.21 We still have a long way to go if we are to understand polytheism for what it was, and not just in contrast to what it was not.
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28In this respect, several key themes can be identified when developing a teaching programme. They are rooted in the research I have been pursuing for a long time.
29Several of these can be seen against in the way the Greek world was structured throughout its history. By the end of the classical period, in the fourth century BCE, there were just over a thousand cities spread along the Aegean Sea, Black Sea and western Mediterranean coasts. There were also other kinds of political systems interwoven with a thriving polytheism. Such an array of systems did not form a political unit until the emergence of the Hellenistic kingdoms and the arrival of Rome. As for cultural unity, there seems to be no doubt about it. The Greeks seem to have embraced both a shared Hellenism and a myriad of political centres. Their culture extended far and wide across the seas, while their political identities remained limited to the narrow borders of their many cities, to the extent that a Greek arriving in a polis other than his own was effectively a foreigner. He therefore had no access to the civic institutions of a city other than his own unless he was represented by a citizen. But this contrasting picture of political fragmentation and cultural unity needs to be nuanced, particularly when it comes to religion. The underlying premise is questionable in that it distinguishes between political institutions and religious activities. Now, the same Greek we have just portrayed in his wanderings to another city could just as easily be refused access to one or other of the sanctuaries of that city on the grounds that he was a foreigner.22 However, while he certainly recognised the general principles of government of his own polis in a city other than his own, the names of the local deities might also have sounded familiar through the recitation of epics, and he might have recognised some of the gestures involved in the sacrifices performed to honour the gods. Thus, there are many gradations in the assessment of what brought Greeks together and what separated them at all levels of city life and relations between cities.
30The case of colonial foundations is symptomatic of this situation. When a group preparing to set sail into the unknown was made up of Greeks from different cities, establishing the habits and customs – the nómaia – of the new settlement was certainly not an easy task, even if we lack information on the subject.23 In the end, however, it was possible to achieve a synthesis through pragmatic management of the general and the particular. Exploring Greek polytheism from this point of view enables us to refine our understanding of what the ancient Greek world was, between unity and diversity, at each stage of its history, following constantly redefined articulations.
31Against this background, the first question concerns the relationship between the narrative traditions that speak at length of gods and heroes and the cults of the cities that honour these same gods and heroes. In other words: what remains of Artemis, Apollo or Aphrodite, of Zeus, Hera or Hermes when these divinities move from the epic literature – a widely shared heritage among the Greeks – to the sanctuaries of the hundreds of cities where they received one or more cults? Another question concerns the way in which these gods were honoured: what was the basis for the chosen ritual norms? In both cases, whether it was the representation of the divine or the ritual norms, multiplicity prevailed at a local level. In the cities, the gods were given cult titles that expressed the range of their power in the world, and local hero cults were firmly implanted in the territory by the dozen. As for the rituals, they made full use of the sacrificial language that enabled the Greeks to communicate with their gods, while in fact they reveal so much about humans.
32Beyond the shimmer of individual motifs, there was an underlying framework, a sort of “family resemblance” that implied a mutual recognition and shared references. When the city of Corcyra went to question the oracle of Dodona, as mentioned previously, or even the city of Athens, despite being several hundred kilometres away from the site, this meant that the Zeus of Dodona spoke to both cities. And the case of the Apollo of Delphi is even clearer. Of course, some might argue that these sanctuaries had a special panhellenic dimension, as did the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia. But that is precisely the point! The fact that such places emerged in the religious landscape of cities as early as the Archaic period shows that the tension between the general and the particular, was inherent in the polytheistic system, which developed at the same time as the birth of political communities and evolved with them well into the Roman Empire.
33Remember that in the beginning, the adoption of alphabetical writing led to the consolidation of epic traditions, of which only snippets have survived, even if they are as sublime like the Iliad, the Odyssey or the Theogony. Hence the question I have just asked, and which I would like to clarify: what remains, for example, of the figure of Hera when we move on from the Iliad to the city of Argos or Corinth? This goddess was not chosen lightly, as my colleague Gabriella Pironti and I have shown, having spent quite some time trying to render to Hera the things that are Hera’s. Beyond what might appear to be the umpteenth monograph on a Greek god, we conducted an experiment in polytheism, the methodological implications of which go beyond this single divine figure.24 The aim was to understand how the Iliad’s shrew, the angry wife and troublesome mother-in-law related to the tutelary figure of cities such as Argos and Samos. We fought against a certain prevailing myopia, as I mentioned earlier: the one that fails to recognise the close links between narrative traditions and cults, and that credits the Greeks with an entertaining mythology in presumed contrast to their ritual practice.
34This mythology is part of what Bernard de Fontenelle called “the extravagances of the Phoenicians and Greeks”.25 at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Three centuries have passed since then, and methods of interpretation have been refined, but it remains as difficult as ever to reconcile the gods of Olympus and those of the cities. We no longer consider the Greek to be extravagant. The vocabulary has changed. They are now attributed with inconsistencies that our modern thinking should not seek to resolve on the pretext that human cognition accommodates inconsistencies.26 Yet rather than blaming our difficulties in understanding other cultures on the workings of the human mind in general, it would be wise to explore every tool available to us in a contextual approach and historical anthropology. The inconsistency of others may well be, in whole or in part, no more than a veil thrown over our own ignorance and the cultural determinisms that continue to weigh on our reading of the past.
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35I mentioned sacrificial language and ritual norms, and I shall now come back to them. Each city had its own sanctuaries, its own cults, its own gods and heroes, and its own festivals organised into a calendar that marked various sacrificial and festive occasions. This locally determined ensemble formed what the Greeks called the nómima, or “traditions”, which gave each local community its own character in the way it handled its interactions with the supra-human sphere. It was precisely the development of these nómima that the previously described founders of colonies from different cities, had to undertake.
36These nómima allow us to return to the issue of choice that I mentioned in connection with Evandros and his wife when consulting the oracle of Dodona. In several cases, the structuring nature of traditions, whether it was family, community or civic traditions, meant that the question of which god to honour and how to honour him or her in a given circumstance was resolved even before it was raised. Other cases were more delicate, requiring some exploration and then codification. But even when tradition was invoked, it was by no means an immutable, intangible system, even if its strength lay in the fact that it appeared to be such despite the novelties and changes it inevitably integrated. Perhaps one of the most persistent traps set by our evidence is precisely the constant reference to the long term and the depth of time to mull the ephemeral actions of men and to justify them.
37We also need to agree on the very notion of tradition. In Greek, it is often what is handed down from their fathers: the pátria. But it is also, and perhaps above all, what belongs to the nómos – the nómima, the nómaia, as I said, the nomizómena and the nómoi, a term that will come to designate the laws themselves. The semantic field of nómos is etymologically one of division and distribution. It is within this context that what we call a “culture” is determined, in the sense of the specific tones and character of the practices and mindset of a human group. There were many variations, including – but not limited to – what we call “religion”, amidst the tension between the general and the particular mentioned previously. In this Greek world, which the Collège de France has chosen to maintain as part of its teaching programme, most of the evidence on religious life comes from inscriptions prescribing rituals and determining the conditions under which they were held. The epigraphic record is continuous in this respect, and in recent years has yielded some astonishing new discoveries and, consequently, some of the most fruitful insights into our understanding of Greek polytheism throughout its history.
38Take sacrifice, for example, our understanding of which has undoubtedly been refined over the last forty years by a careful reading of inscriptions to examine the details of how animal carcasses were handled and an increasingly detailed analysis of the bones of these same animals on archaeological sites. The treatment of bones and flesh is a remarkable indicator of both the communication that sacrificers established with their gods and the social hierarchy that they asserted in the distribution of their shares. Access to meat raises the question of the status of the participants, whether they were men, women, citizens, metics, priests or magistrates: the detailed, in-depth interpretation of the inscriptions helps to elucidate problems that the interpretation of the so-called “literary” texts tackled by applying literary analytical grids.27 This is why the project entitled “Collection of Greek Ritual Norms” and its website, which was launched a few months ago28, is one of the tools that I intend to continue honing in this new workshop, with the help of the researchers and collaborators that I have been able to bring on board.
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39My inaugural lecture is slowly coming to a close, and I have not yet said a word about how this teaching is relevant to present-day issues. A century ago, Alfred Loisy asserted that “the impartial and serene study of the religious past of humanity is not indifferent to finding solutions to the serious problems faced by contemporary society”.29 He was obviously thinking of the modernist crisis in the Roman Catholic Church, which led to his own excommunication. Today, on a different scale, serious problems continue to plague our world, and religions land on the news every single day. But while the history of religion is not indifferent to these problems, it does not aim to solve them. It is an instrument for putting religions at a critical distance and offers an ongoing reflection on what we mean by “religion”.
40It thus makes available to everyone “what history can do” – to paraphrase the title of Patrick Boucheron’s inaugural lecture. In the context of the Chair that you have entrusted to me, “what history can do” is to contribute to a better understanding of the many ways in which social human beings have found their place in a world conceived as magical. It is probably not much, given the scale of contemporary challenges. But it is a great deal if we conduct this investigation whilst respecting differences and specificities, like John Scheid – whom I thank for his trust and support – has regularly demonstrated in his studies of Roman religion.
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41At the end of the inaugural lecture of his Chair in National Antiquities in December 1984, Christian Goudineau greeted archaeologists in the field by expressing the somewhat embarrassing impression of looking down from the Garden of Eden on those who toil by the sweat of their brow. I could easily adopt this impression and adapt it to the current research landscape. I feel very privileged to be joining the Garden of Eden, given the restrictions and reforms that are hitting higher education institutions, given the precarious situation of young researchers, given the inflation of tasks of all kinds, particularly evaluations, that are piling on my teaching and research colleagues, all of whom are with me today.
42Research requires resources, of course, but it also longs for calm, time, freedom and trust; it needs the favourable conditions that I know this house creates for those who live here, the same conditions that many key scholars are being deprived of by their own universities because of an increasingly corporate approach. The Collège de France is an exceptional place, but it is rooted in the fertile soil of hundreds of research centres and laboratories. The future is bound to be shared, whatever it may be.
43By welcoming me among you, dear colleagues, you are extending me your trust which I hope to be worthy of. I hope to be just as deserving of the trust of the institutions that have created the favourable conditions for my scientific career, namely the Fonds de la recherche scientifique of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles and the University of Liège. I would like to honour all the collaborations I have forged over the years with French colleagues, because I am aware that I am being welcomed in one of the most prestigious institutions in France. And for a Walloon, and a Liégeoise at that, being called to France has a very special resonance.
44Pending the future, which we will all contribute to collectively, I have come to the end of this inaugural lecture, which I would like to thank you for attending.
Notes de bas de page
1 Le Tour du monde des concepts, edited by Pierre Legendre (Paris, Fayard and the Institut d’études avancées of Nantes, coll. “Poids et mesures du monde”, 2014), includes “religion” and “society” among the nine concepts chosen and tested in nine non-Western languages.
2 Paul Veyne, L’Inventaire des différences, Paris, Seuil, 1976, p. 9.
3 This is not a literal quote, but a recurring consideration that we find under his pen in the Annales: e.g. Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, vol. 1, 1929, p. 99 : “[…] we will never separate the study of the past from the careful examination of the present”; Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations, vol. 1, 1946, p. 8: “[…] History questions the past according to humanity’s present needs”.
4 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Œuvres, Paris, Seuil, 2007; Jean Rudhardt, Opera inedita, Liège, Presses universitaires de Liège, 2008 (coll. « Kernos suppléments », 2013, doi : 10.4000/books.pulg.514); Marcel Detienne, Les Grecs et nous. Une anthropologie comparée de la Grèce antique, Paris, Perrin, 2005, to which I could add the contributions of Philippe Borgeaud, Pierre Brulé, Claude Calame, and so many others from outside the French-speaking world, including Walter Burkert, Fritz Graf, Robert Parker and Henk Versnel.
5 Alfred Loisy, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire religieuse de notre temps, t. III (1908-1927), Paris, Nourry, 1931, pp. 101-102.
6 Ibid., p. 102.
7 On this subject, see Philippe Borgeaud’s fine article, “Qu’est-ce que l’histoire des religions?”, Equinoxe, no. 21, 1999, included in Exercices d’histoire des religions. Comparaison, rites, mythes et émotions, collected and edited by Daniel Barbu and Philippe Matthey, Leiden, Brill, 2016, pp. 47-68.
8 Marcel Detienne, Les Grecs et nous, op. cit., pp. 63-87, 145-176.
9 The project was “FIGVRA. Representation of the divine in the Greek and Roman worlds”, led by Nicole Belayche. Seven collective works came out of this workshop.
10 E.g. De Opificio, 172; De Ebrietate, 110; De Mutatione nominum, 205.
11 Francis Schmidt, “Naissance des polythéismes (1624-1757)”, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, no. 59, 1985, pp. 77-90: this article is still fundamental regarding this process (although he did not mention Budé’s contribution: e.g. Opera omnia, t. I, 18, 33; 137, 25; 143, 20; etc.).
12 Roger Chartier, Au bord de la falaise. L’histoire entre certitudes et inquiétude, Paris, Albin Michel, 2009.
13 Paul Veyne, “Inviter les dieux, sacrifier, banqueter. Quelques nuances de la religiosité gréco-romaine”, Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales, vol. 55, no. 1, 2000, pp. 3-42, quote on page 32: “En histoire des religions comme en amour, la plume glisse facilement.”
14 Éric Lhôte, Les Lamelles oraculaires de Dodone, Genève, Droz, 2006; Sotiros Dakaris, Ioulia Vokotopoulou and Anastasios-Phoivos Christidis, Τὰ χρηστήρια ἐλάσματα τῆς Δωδώνης τῶν ἀνασκαφών Δ. Ευαγγελίδη, Athens, Société archéologique, 2013.
15 Éric Lhôte, Les Lamelles oraculaires de Dodone, op. cit., tablet no. 8A: Θεοί. Τύχαν ἀγαθάν. Ἐπικοινῆται Εὔβαν|δρος καὶ ἁ γυνὰ τῶι Διεὶ τῶι Νάωι καὶ τᾶι Δι|ώναι τίνι κα φεῶν ἢ ἡρώων ἢ δαιμόνων | εὐχόμενοι καὶ φύοντες λῶιον καὶ ἄμεινο|ν πράσσοιεν καὶ αὐτοὶ καὶ ἁ οἴκησις καὶ νῦν | καὶ ἰς τὸν ἅπαντα χρόνον.
16 Ibid., tablet no. 2 : [Θ]εός. Ἐπικοινῶνται τοὶ Κορκυ|ραῖοι καὶ τοὶ Ὠρίκιοι τῶι Διὶ τῶι Ναί|ωι καὶ τᾶι Διώναι τίνι κα θεῶν ἢ ἡ|ρώων θύοντες καὶ εὐχόμενοι τὰ|νͅ πόλιν κͅάλλιστα οἰκεῦεγ καὶ ἀσφα|λέστατα καὶ εὐκαρπία σφιν καὶ πο|λυκαρπία τελέθοι καὶ κατόνασις παν|τὸς τὠγαθοῦ καρποῦ.
17 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Œuvres, op. cit., p. 567.
18 On this issue and others, the work of Gabriella Pironti is indispensable, particularly Entre ciel et guerre. Figures d’Aphrodite en Grèce ancienne, Liège, Presses universitaires de Liège, 2008 (coll. “Kernos suppléments”, 2013, doi : 10.4000/books.pulg.236).
19 Most recently: Claude Calame, Qu’est-ce que la mythologie grecque?, Paris, Gallimard, 2015.
20 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Œuvres, op. cit., pp. 233-234, 436-485. See also Marcel Detienne, Les Maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque [1967], Paris, Pocket, 1994, pp. 131-157 (“Le procès de laïcisation”).
21 On this topic, see Robert Parker, On Greek Religion, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2011, pp. 1-63.
22 The most famous case is that of Cleomenes of Sparta, whom Herodotus explains was refused entry to the sanctuary of Athena Polias on the acropolis of Athens by the local priestess (Herodotus, V, 72). See Robert Parker, Cleomenes on the Acropolis: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 12 May 1997, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998.
23 Irad Malkin, “‘Tradition’ in Herodotus: The foundation of Cyrene”, in Peter Derow and Robert Parker (eds.), Herodotus and his World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 153-170, esp. pp. 164-170.
24 Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge and Gabriella Pironti, The Hera of Zeus: Intimate enemy, ultimate spouse, Cambridge, University Press, 2022 [French original: L’Héra de Zeus. Ennemie intime, épouse definitive, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2016].
25 Bernard de Fontenelle, De l’origine des fables [1724], in: Œuvres complètes, t. III, Paris, Fayard, 1989, p. 202.
26 On the application of a cognitivist approach to Greek religion, see the study by Jennifer Larson, Understanding Greek Religion, New York, Routledge, 2016. Inconsistencies are at the heart of Henk Versnel’s thinking in several absolutely essential books, the latest of which is entitled Coping with the Gods: Wayward Readings in Greek Theology, Leiden, Brill, 2011.
27 On the contribution of zooarchaeology to our understanding of Greek sacrifice, the research of Gunnel Ekroth is essential. See for example “Meat, men and gods. On the division of the animal victim at Greek sacrifices”, in Angelos P. Matthaiou and Irene Polinskaya (eds.), Μικρός Ιερομνήμων. Μελέτες εις μνήμην Michael H. Jameson, Athens, Benaki museum, 2008, pp. 259-290.
28 Jan-Mathieu Carbon, Saskia Peels-Matthey, Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, Collection of Greek Ritual Norms (CGRN), 2017, url: http://cgrn.ulg.ac.be; doi: https://doi.org/10.54510/CGRN0. See Jan-Mathieu Carbon and Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, “Beyond Greek ‘Sacred Laws’”, Kernos, no. 25, 2012, pp. 163-182, doi: 10.4000/kernos.2115. The idea for this project was conceived in Rennes at the instigation of Pierre Brulé. I hope that he recognises himself in it, even if the premises have been profoundly modified.
29 Alfred Loisy, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire religieuse de notre temps, op. cit., p. 102 : “L’étude impartiale et sereine du passé religieux de l’humanité n’est pas indifférente à la solution des graves problèmes qui s’agitent au sein de la société contemporaine.”
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