ancient Greek cult practice

From a political point of view, 3 rd century BCE Athens represents a shattered unity. Parts of the Athenian countryside and even the city itself were occupied by foreign troops. This loss of control affected the city's political, economic, social, cultural, and religious life. Since Cleisthenic times, relations between political units and religious communities had become institutionalised through specific cults. Other cult places of relevance to the larger community and therefore with a catchment area that exceeded a deme, e.g. Eleusis, were also affected, as they lay within the occupied territories. This partial inaccessibility of the countryside risked the disruption of religious duties. The project "Cult and Crisis: The Sacred Landscape of Attica and its Correlation to Political Topography" aims to identify potentially affected cult places with no limitations regarding their possible catchment area by analysing their placement in relation to foreign military bases. Alterations in cult practice can plausibly be detected in changes ranging from cessation to the rerouting of ritual movement or the establishment of substitute cult places. As these "solutions" rarely feature in written sources, our GIS-based approach will focus on material remains from sanctuaries. Although an object's use for ritual practice cannot be deduced with certainty, the distribution of finds certainly attests to human activity. This contribution presents a trial of this approach, taking the Sounion area as its case study.

This paper deals with the cult and myths of the daughters of the mythical king of Athens, Erechtheus, who lived on the Acropolis. The myth, preserved in Euripides’ tragedy Erechtheus, establishes the deceased daughters as goddesses who are owed cult by the Athenians. It further equates them with the Hyades, a prominent star cluster in the constellation of Taurus, which they form after their deaths. We examine here the possibility that this myth not only narrates the placement of the girls after their death in the sky in the form of the Hyades, but also may have bound the constellation to certain festivals held on the Acropolis, which through their aetiological myths were connected to the daughters of Erechtheus and in which the participation of young girls (arrhēphoroi) was important. To explicate this cult, we explore its context on the Acropolis as fully as possible, through the visual arts, the literary myth, the festival calendar, and the natural landscape and night sky, so as t...