Thus speaks Prometheus, as he was most likely staged by Aeschylus in mid-fifth century BC Athens. Portrayed in chains in the outer reaches of the inhabited world, in the far and desert North, the hero addresses the chorus of Oceanids, singing from the orchestra to the public gathered in the theater dedicated to Dionysos Eleuthereus at the foot of the Acropolis. In this famous monologue, Prometheus enumerates and boasts about the different technical arts he has invented for the mortals. Among these tékhnai (τέχναι) he mentions various divinatory practices (mantikḗ [μαντική], line 484): namely (1) the interpretation of dreams, of omens, or of connections and coincidences (sumbóloi [συμβόλοι], line 487) as may happen along the way; (2) the observation of different species of rapacious birds in flight; (3) the examination of the shape and glint of a sacrificed animal’s viscera and liver; and finally (4) the reading of smoke and flames emanating from the sacrificial portion offered to the gods. All these divinatory practices belong to a long list of gifts bestowed by Prometheus: from the invention of numbers and of the alphabet (μνήμην ἁπάντων, μουσομήτορ’ ἐργάνην ‘the tool that enables all things to be remembered and is mother of the Muses’, line 461),3 to the beneficial remedies of medicine, mentioning also the yoke and harness that enable the use of animals, especially for plowing, the reading of the rising and setting of the stars for the sake of agricultural labor, the sailing for navigation, and the working of metals ‘hidden beneath the earth’ (lines 500–501), namely copper, iron, silver, and gold.

OFFICIAL RELIGIOUS DISCOURSES AND MYSTICAL DISCOURSES

French anthropologists studying ancient Greek religion have readily interpreted the theological re-elaborations and religious practices of the Pythagoreans and the Orphics in terms of inversion and subversion: inversion of the path of cosmo- and theogonic creation to return from multiplicity and disparity to unity; subversion of the official sacrificial acts of animals through different forms of vegetarianism. Generally considered as autonomous systems of signification, the corresponding texts have been cut off in their reading and interpretation by modern readers from the circumstances of their production and performance. The attention brought to long poems seen as literary texts has often been accompanied by a certain disregard for the discursive practices of the “sectarians” themselves. In these practices, spoken words often held value as acts of worship, being accompanied by written records which have been restored to us with surprising regularity as the excavations progress, particularly from funerary sites.

Among the texts deposited near the remains of the deceased, there are two that are both from a similar time period (end of the fourth century) and from neighboring locations (Macedonia/Thessaly). One is the well-known “Derveni Papyrus,” excavated in 1962 from a cist-grave of a soldier near Thessaloniki and whose official publication is now finally completed; and the other is the pair of gold lamellae found in 1985 in a grave for a woman on the site thought to be ancient Pelinna.

‘What is a Greek god?’ was the question addressed by Albert Henrichs in chapter 1 of this volume. The question I would like to ask here concerns a group of female divinities belonging to the classical Athenian pantheon all associated with sites characterized as garden sanctuaries. From the perspective of landscape architecture it is this: ‘What would the Greek gods amount to if they were not associated with heroes?’

HEROIC AETIOLOGIES

A significant number of the Attic tragedies that have come down to us end with an aetiological section involving the establishment of a cult. This is particularly true of the tragedies of Euripides. One of the best-known examples comes from Euripides' Hippolytos. Among the consequences of Hippolytos' tragic death is that his tomb at Troezen is to become the focus of a hero cult in which ritual acts will be performed. On the eve of their marriage, the girls of the city will cut off their hair and offer it to the young hero who denied the power of Aphrodite and refused to accept his own adulthood. This prenuptial ritual is attested also in other Greek cities: the memory of the young hero who has died in tragic circumstances is kept alive in performances consisting of musical offerings and the cult associates the hero with the goddess who encompassed his downfall – Aphrodite.

Neither “myth” nor “religion” constitutes a category native to Greek thought. Neither myth nor religion were conceived of as such by the Greeks - neither myth as a corpus of (fabulous) tales of gods and heroes dependent on a frame of comprehensive thought, nor religion as a set of beliefs and practices relative to a divine configuration (not even in the Roman sense of regulated cult observance). But, in the case of the former, we have a series of narratives with argumentative and pragmatic value that describe, in poetic form, the heroic past of Greek cities or of the “Greek” community (experienced as tò Hellēnikón only from Herodotus on), narratives that, recited or sung as palaiá or arkhîa, make reference to the ancient history of Greece and correspond to mûthoi. In the case of the latter, we can think in terms of divine and heroic figures, in terms of civic spaces reserved for them, and in terms of the numerous ritual practices that sought, through offerings of various types, to influence divine intervention in the present: tà hierá ('offerings, victims'), tà nómima ('what is prescribed'; hence 'customs, rites') to cite only terms related to sacrificial offerings and to the implicit rules animating cult practices, and to underscore that these practices are always integrated into the calendar that gives rhythm to the religious and political life of each city, in conjunction with the particular assemblage of gods and heroes who are honored there.