The ‘local’ and the ‘universal’ reconsidered: Olympia, dedications and the religious culture of ancient Greece

Abstract

Many are the sights to be seen in Greece, and many are the wonders to be heard: but on nothing does Heaven bestow more care than on the Eleusinian rites and the Olympic games. Pausanias INTRODUCTION In Chapter 1 I discussed the way in which polis religion is construed as extending to what scholars have called the ‘panhellenic’ dimension of ancient Greek religion. I argued that the ‘panhellenic’ is traditionally applied to describe a dimension of the religious in ancient Greece which transcended the level of individual poleis. As such it is frequently contrasted with those religious practices that were specific to a particular polis, that found no extension on the ‘panhellenic’ level, and that are therefore described as representing the ‘local’ dimension of ancient Greek religion. We speak of ‘local’ and ‘universal’ tellings of myth, for example, of ‘local’ and ‘panhellenic’ sanctuaries, of ‘local’ and ‘panhellenic’ festivals and so forth. In the absence of key organising principles of the religious such as a church, a dogma, a holy book and a creed, classical scholarship has conceptualised the fabric of ancient Greek religion around a bipolar model in which ‘the local’ (read: the polis) and ‘the universal’, or ‘panhellenic’ serve as opposing, yet mutually reinforcing, localisations of the religious.