Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Participation in the hiera and hosia of the polis concomitantly applied to male and
female citizens alike.
6 Blok 00; the debate on the meaning of hiera kai hosia, Mafi 98; the importance of the con-
cept hiera kai hosia for the polis, Connor 988.
7 Holocaust sacriice was consumed by the gods in smoke, whereas some sacriices were consu-
med by the gods or heroes below earth, such as piglets thrown into a pit for Demeter during the
Thesmophoria and blood sacriice for the dead heroes. For types of sacriice in Greece, Burkert
98 and the contributions to Hgg 00; for Athens in particular Parker 00.
8 Van Straten 99, ; Parker 00, 79; Lambert 00, 89.
9 Citizenship as participation in cult: Sourvinou-Inwood 990; Rosivach 99, 9 and passim;
Jameson 999; Blok 007; handling the treasuries of the gods at Athens, Linders 97, Samons
II 000; lists of personnel in charge of the gods property, Garland 98; landed property of the
gods, Horster 00.
0 Jameson 999, Evans 00; different festivals catering meat to either small or to large groups of
citizens, Rosivach 99, 08.
On the proceedings and all foodstuffs consumed in the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Co-
rinth, Bookidis 999. According to Jameson 988, 06, (sacriicial) meat made up only a small
portion of the entire average Athenian diet (ca. kg. per person per year); Rosivach 99, 60,
78 inds estimating the amount of meat practically impossible due to uncertain factors such
as the size of animals, but arrives at an estimated 0 times per year for the average male to re-
ceive a portion. Beside immediate consumption, sacriicial meat could be taken home raw or be
Sozial versus Politisch: divergierende Rollenbilder
9
All this evidence suggests that being a citizen of Athens principally meant
participating in Athenian cults, religious festivities and sacriice. Considering that
Cleisthenes political reorganization of Athens emphasised legitimate birth in
an Athenian oikos, ritually conirmed by the phratry and in the case of men also
scrutinised in the deme, and that it increased male citizens active participation
in political life, we can expect this comprehensive change to have affected the
Athenians awareness of their citizenship.
, Patterson 998;
Gherchanoc 998; Cleisthenes revolution changing awareness of citizenship in political partici-
pation of men: Manville 990, 709; Ober 99; Walter 99; Jones 999.
On reading visual evidence as a system in its own right, Sourvinou-Inwood 99, ; Sour-
vinou-Inwood 99b.
For the debate on the meaning of the Parthenon frieze, Neils 00, 70; Woodford 00,
09; the frieze as polis ideal, Maurizio 998; comparison with epigraphical evidence on Little
Panathenaia, Brul 996.
Citizenship in Action: Reading Sacriice in Classical Athen
9
refers to but does not copy the historical world. Understanding this representation
requires reading it in the visual language inherent in these images, before comparing
them with representations in written texts.
Compared with a unique object like the Parthenon frieze, vase paintings are
an even more promising source for the visual mentality of the observers due to
their sheer quantity and functions. Vase paintings were a generic genre: innovation
and variety notwithstanding, they predominantly tended to create and use stock
motifs, and, some clear exceptions apart, were made with an unspeciied, general
audience in mind.
96, A 8, .
Sozial versus Politisch: divergierende Rollenbilder
97
Gebauer, dismissing Van Stratens criteria, sees no clear iconographical
indications to decide on the status of the occasion.
Public cults igured in the sacriicial calendars of the polis and of the demes
regulating the gifts owed by the community to the gods. The calendars ordered
and ixed in writing the days of the year, kinds, prices, revenues and ways in
which these gifts were to be offered.
6
The actual performance of these regular
sacriices fell to priests and priestesses, often assisted by citizen hieropoioi. The
calendars listed occasions when animal sacriice was the main or only event, and
it depended on the divinity and the rules of the cult whether men or women or
men and women were involved. Some of the vase scenes with processions could
evoke such festivals with either one single sex or both sexes as participants.
The calendars, combined with other epigraphical evidence on public sacriice at
festivals such as the fourth-century Regulations on the Little Panathenaia (IG II
My discussion is based on votive evidence from IG I
07.
0 IG I
7bis.
Inscribed votives to Asklepios and other gods are dated to the fourth century and later, Aleshire
989; copies of records of votives to Artemis Brauronia were kept on the Akropolis, but the
objects were at Brauron, Linders 97.
Sozial versus Politisch: divergierende Rollenbilder
0
behaviour. Among the inscribed dedications made by one person alone, 6 were
made by a single man and 0 by a single woman. Small groups can also be classiied:
6 male groups of two or a few more, often identifying themselves as brothers or
a father with his sons, and small female groups, consisting of two women, often
including their children (and once a husband) in the favour asked of the goddess.
Robert Parker, listing nearly all these votives in his recent study, rightly observes
that some family connection between the dedicators is also highly likely in the cases
where no family relationship is mentioned. Similarly, a single dedicator can also be
offering on behalf of others, notably of his or her family.
In
the fourth century, the number of joint dedications by entire families increases
greatly.
The dedications made by single men or women can be compared with the
vase scenes of igures at altars on the one hand and libations on the other. As we
saw, the occurrence of women and men together in this group of scenes is rare,
though less rare than in the epigraphical evidence. The proportions of men and
women in visual scenes at altars is far closer to equal (6 : ) than in the epigraphical
record of private dedications. Assuming that the vase painters relected practices
considered general and normal, we may deduce that womens sacriicial behaviour
was more frequent than the epigraphical record indicates. The differences between
the two types of evidence may be explained, irst of all, by the fact that womens
access to writing in stone and costly votives was more limited than mens due to
constraints on womens spending of money.
80 (brothers), 80, 0;
on the votive statues Keesling 00.
IG I
70.
Parker 00, 79; not all votive gifts (reliefs, igurines) carry inscriptions.
In law, women were not allowed to spend more than the value of a medimne barley of the oi-
kos wealth without its kyrios consent, although the effects of this law may have been slight in
practice, Schaps 979, 8. Foxhall 989 shows that the wealth of an oikos was common pro-
perty under supervision of the male head of the household rather than his private property. A
womans own wealth usually consisted of her dowry, which could range from just a few trinkets
to extensive land property, money and herds (Harrison 97, I, 67). Stelai ordered by the
polis with much larger inscriptions than the average votive gift would cost 00 dr. (Loomis
998, ), a modest grave stele with inscription would cost 00 dr. (Oliver 000).
Citizenship in Action: Reading Sacriice in Classical Athen
0
votive inscriptions concerns pots instead of stone or other less expensive gifts.
6
Many offerings at altars, moreover, were small or perishable gifts, such as sacriicial
cakes (pelanoi), wreaths, boughs, terracotta igurines and textiles. Most gifts were
burned and thus left no trace. Many of womens sacriices, inally, would concern
small offerings at the home altars they would be a familiar sight to all Athenians,
but not likely to be remembered in stone.
7
Libations could also be offered at an altar, but were a different kind of sacriice
than animal sacriice or cakes and similar modest gifts at altars. The liquid could
be wine, oil, milk, or water; libations could be part of a larger ritual or just a quick
sign of reverence to the gods. Among the most common occasions in a private
context were spending a little wine for the gods before dinner, ritual cleansing with
water after pollution due to birth or death, and the observance of death rituals by
pouring libations at the grave. Precisely the latter two were predominantly again,
not exclusively the responsibility of women. They, too, are the kind of sacriices
which would leave no trace in the epigraphical record, but are represented profusely
in vase paintings.
8
Libations as part of a larger ritual were performed by men or
women, depending on the occasion. The most prominent public event in which
women performed this role were the Panathenaia, as we saw above, a festival for
both men and women. The public burial of the war dead, on the other hand, would
probably feature men pouring libations on the common polis grave, although no
evidence tells us so unequivocally.
9
In sum, a vase painting showing one man or
one woman pouring a libation may be either a single, independent action or an
excerpt of a larger event, and may be either public or private.
Sacrifice between public and private
The notion private applied to all inscribed dedications by individuals should be
qualiied to some extent. They were private in so far as the giver did not act in an
oficial polis-capacity (for instance, as magistrate or priest(ess)) but as a member
of a family or on his/her own account. Likewise, the intended beneiciaries of the
gift to the gods were ultimately the giver and his or her family. The gifts were
public, however, in being displayed for all to see on a conspicuous place. Moreover,
dedications on behalf of the family may have been made in the context of a polis-
6 IG I
7 (Lambert 998
, 69. In
the grey area between citizen and metic, the acceptance of the cult of Bendis as a polis cult before
Citizenship in Action: Reading Sacriice in Classical Athen
06
who made a dedication to Herakles before the mid-ifth century, and, as their name
indicates, perceived themselves as a strongly knit, quasi-kin group.
6
The degree to
which such religious groups were private or public cannot be ascertained by the
gender of the participants, but by the contingencies of extant documents only. The
vase scenes featuring single sex or mixed groups involved in animal sacriice, with
or without libations, and processions, either with or without elements of animal
sacriice, may well relect the actions of such groups, predominantly private in
nature but not without public overtones.
Conclusions
The increasing importance of citizenship following the reforms of Cleisthenes,
involving a rising number of cultic activities in which legitimate membership of
the polis was put into practice and publicly demonstrated, seems to be relected in
the imagery on Athenian pottery. Attic black-igure and red-igure vase paintings
with men and women in religious activities show a signiicant increase in quantity
and variety in the irst decades of the ifth century. Compared with pottery
exported to Etruria, Magna Graecia and other regions outside Attica, the vases
catered to Athens itself in the ifth century portray a markedly larger proportion
of processions, sacriices and mixed groups of men and women involved in such
activities. Although all Greek evidence clearly points to preferred separation of
the sexes in social events including religious activities, the proportionally higher
frequency of women and men acting together in the Athenian visual material
reveals a commonality superseding or, rather, underlying this separation. This
commonality makes sense in the context of shared citizenship based on legitimate
descent. Membership of citizen subgroups, ranging from families as involved in
the Apatouria to demes and to large-scale subgroups comprising of all men or all
women or indeed the entire citizen population, was deined and celebrated by
participation in hiera, notably sacriice.
Consistent attempts to deine iconographic criteria distinguishing public
and private occasions in this corpus of religious scenes, for instance by using the
participation of men or women in the depicted activities as a yardstick, have not
been successful. Instead, a large proportion of religious citizen activities have been
shown to be essentially neither public nor private, but both or neither. Moreover,
numerous unequivocally public occasions of sacriice and processions featured
men, women or both. The only means to decide on the public or private qualities of
a particular event are criteria attested in written evidence, much of it epigraphical.
9 materialized, sustained by the orgeones of the goddess, Parker 00, 70; Sara Wijma is
preparing a publication on this issue.
6 IG I
06.
Sozial versus Politisch: divergierende Rollenbilder
07
Men and women were citizens, but their roles as citizens differed in some
important respects. No form of participation in hiera was the exclusive prerogative
of one sex, but men were far more frequently involved in animal sacriice, and
women far more in libations. Similarly, men and women were both involved in
public, civic religious activities and in private ones. Yet men were involved far
more frequently than women in public activities. Mens participation in political
bodies, each with their own regime of ritual practices, the increasing inluence
of the polis on existing cult practices by assigning selected hieropoioi and other
male citizen personnel, and the gradual extension of cult practice to political and
military subgroups along the lines of phyle and deme, made the range of mens
public subgroups and concomitant religious practices larger, more frequent and
varied than womens in the course of the ifth century. This divergence in civic
roles is relected in the different degrees of involvement of men and women in
animal sacriice as represented in Attic painted pottery.
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