Table Of ContentCivic Priests
Religionsgeschichtliche
Versuche und Vorarbeiten
Herausgegeben von
Jörg Rüpke und Christoph Uehlinger
Band 58
De Gruyter
Civic Priests
Cult Personnel in Athens from the
Hellenistic Period to Late Antiquity
Edited by
Marietta Horster and Anja Klöckner
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-025807-3
e-ISBN 978-3-11-025808-0
ISSN 0939-2580
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Civic priests : cult personnel in Athens from the Hellenistic period to
late antiquity / [edited by] Marietta Horster, Anja Klöckner.
p. cm. — (Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten, ISSN
0939-2580 ; Bd. 58)
English, German, and French.
Chiefly proceedings of a workshop held in Mar. 2010 in Berlin,
Germany.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 978-3-11-025807-3 (hardcover 23 x 15,5 : alk. paper)
1. Priests — Greece — Congresses. 2. Greece — Religion — Congresses.
I. Horster, Marietta. II. Klöckner, Anja.
BL795.P7C58 2012
292.6' 109385 —dc23
2011039555
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen
Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet
über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.
© 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Druck: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
co Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
Contents
MARIETTA HORSTER AND ANJA KLÖCKNER
Introduction 1
MARIETTA HORSTER
Priests, priesthoods, cult personnel – traditional and
new approaches 5
ANJA KLÖCKNER
Tradition – Repräsentation – Distinktion. Eine Fallstudie zu
Reliefweihungen von Priestern im späthellenistischen und
römischen Attika 27
STEPHEN D. LAMBERT
The social construction of priests and priestesses in
Athenian honorific decrees from the fourth century BC
to the Augustan period 67
ERIC PERRIN-SAMINADAYAR
Prêtres et prêtresses d’Athènes et de Délos à travers
les décrets honorifiques athéniens (167-88 a. C.) 135
MARIETTA HORSTER
The tenure, appointment and eponymy of priesthoods and
their (debatable) ideological and political implications 161
ERKKI SIRONEN
Heidnische Priester in Attika vom dritten bis zum fünften
Jahrhundert nach Christus 209
JAN N. BREMMER
Athenian civic priests from classical times to late antiquity:
some considerations 219
Indices 237
Introduction
MARIETTA HORSTER AND ANJA KLÖCKNER
Social relations within society in the Greek cities can be investigated
through the example of religious functionaries, by tracing their social
and political identities. Modern attempts in the sociology of religion to
give a systematic account of religious authority and religious symbols
have in recent years taken their cue from the approach developed by
Clifford Geertz in 1966, which stressed the reciprocal influence between
a religious system and its (social, political) codes and systems of
meaning. In this account, any act by a religious functionary or in
reaction to one is a social action, oriented towards the behaviour of
others and part of a semantic system of social relations.
In the present volume and in a second, planned one, a number of
the contributions take this approach as a heuristic basis to investigate
the interactions between social, cultural, and political systems and their
religious symbols or actors, in our case the priests and priestesses.
This dialectical relation can be traced very clearly in the post-classi-
cal poleis. A common denominator in polis cultures from the Hellenistic
period to Late Antiquity is the construction of an exemplary, imagined
past as a point of reference paradigm. These phenomena are especially
visible in the area of cult and ritual. The explicit references to tradition
in texts and images in fact create new forms of expressing religious
identity in the Hellenistic and Roman poleis, a process that can occur
with various speeds and dynamics.
The focus of analysis in our project is on two geographical areas for
which a generous amount of well-documented and informative mate
rial evidence survives. This first volume will look exclusively at Athens
and Delos under Athenian rule, while the planned second volume will
offer an extensive examination of the poleis of the Aegean and Asia
Minor, including Kos, Rhodes, Pergamon, Priene or Smyrna. Because
these two areas – the Athenian one and the one in and around Asia
Minor – were strikingly different from each other in their social struc
tures, political conditions, religious traditions and material culture, and
remained so long into the imperial period, two separate studies on each
area will be carried out of which the volume in hand is the first one.
2 Marietta Horster and Anja Klöckner
It is above all monuments, both images and inscriptions, that com
municate the social, cultural, and political identity of religious func
tionaries in their polis. Dedications, foundations and the honours that
they earned are evidence of these individuals’ financial power. This
display of power and resources may manipulate the urban space just as
honorary statues for cult personnel, set up by citizens, family members
or communities, shape the cities’ appearance in varying intensity and
form.
The studies in the present volume approach the material in dif
ferent ways, from both historical and archaeological perspectives, ana
lysing the cultural manifestations through which we can trace the
social construction of priestesses and priests. These social constructions
are tied to the functionaries’ sacral duties for the city, but also to their
perception by themselves and others as a part of the citizen body. Some
of the articles place in the foreground the priests’ and priestesses’ roles
in their cities’ religious politics, as well as economic and gender-specific
aspects (Anja Klöckner, Stephen D. Lambert, Eric Perrin-Saminadayar).
The studies on late Hellenistic, Roman and Late Antique Athens (Eric
Perrin-Saminadayar, Marietta Horster, Erkki Sironen, Jan N. Bremmer)
also examine the influence of changing political conditions – Hellenistic
monarchies, the Roman empire, Christianity – on priestly offices and
on the identity and public image of the people who held them.
Most of the studies in the present volume were presented and
intensively discussed at a workshop on Athenian priests in Berlin in
March 2010. With their thoughtful and critical contributions as respon
dents at the Berlin workshop, Uta Kron, Ralf von den Hoff and Sarah
Hitch played an important part in the improvement of the papers
which are published in this volume. Two workshop contributions have
not been included in our collection of published papers: the lecture by
Tony Spawforth on ‘Cult and priesthood in the late-first century BC
Greece: the influence of Rome?’ will be published as part of his mono
graph Reflections of the Augustan Programme of Cultural Reform (in press);
and Thoralf Schröder (FU Berlin) presented one aspect of his doctoral
dissertation in progress on Attic portrait sculpture in a paper entitled
‘Bekränzte Porträts im römischen Athen. Darstellungen von Priester-
innen und Priestern’.
Both the workshop and this collection of papers on ‘Civic Priests in
Hellenistic and Roman Athens’ were financially supported by the
German Science Foundation (dfg). The workshop was part of the dfg-
‘Schwerpunktprogramm 1209’ Die hellenistische Polis als Lebensform.
Introduction 3
We were hosted by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences
and Humanities and were especially welcomed by Klaus Hallof,
research coordinator of the Inscriptiones Graecae.
We are also indebted to the editors of the series Religionsgeschicht-
liche Versuche und Vorarbeiten for accepting our project for publication
and to the publishing house de Gruyter, Berlin for its generous sup
port.
The process of editing the texts and the final publication would
never have come to an end without Anika Strobach’s diligent and
patient work as proof-reader and copy editor, Orla Mulholland’s care
ful and time-consuming handling of the non-native English texts and
Melanie Winter who indexed all the papers and produced the indices at
the end of this volume.
Bibliography
Geertz, C. (1966) ‘Religion as a Cultural System’. In: Anthropological
Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. by Michael Banton, London,
1-46 (reprinted in: C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected
Essays. New York, 87-125).
