Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

202 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
that no vegetarian could participate fully in the civic, social, and
religious life of the polis.)
In addition to festivals that were financed by the state, each of
Athens’s demes funded festivals in which all the citizens of that
deme participated. The religious calendar belonging to the deme
of Erchia, which is preserved in an inscription dating to the fourth
century b.c.e. , records that sacrifices took place on 25 days of the
year and that the total annual cost was about 547 drachmas (estimated
to be equivalent to $54,700). Erchia was a medium-sized
deme. Many were considerably larger and would have conducted
more and larger sacrifices.
It was the civic responsibility of every citizen and demesman to
participate in the festivals, because the goodwill of the gods was
dependent in part on a good turnout. When Sokrates was brought to
trial in 399 b.c.e. , one of the charges against him was “not acknowledging
the gods whom the state acknowledges.” This was not a
charge of atheism. It was a charge of nonparticipation in the major
festivals.
The Olympians
The Greeks worshiped a pantheon comprising Zeus and 11 other
deities who were thought to inhabit the peaks of Olympos, a mountain
on the borders between Thessaly and Macedonia some three
thousand meters high that is perpetually shrouded in cloud. The 11
were all siblings or offspring of Zeus. It may have been Homer who
first constituted them into a family—it was certainly he who first
gave them their vividly delineated personalities. The Olympian
gods were not, however, identical everywhere in the Greek world;
nor indeed were they held in equal honor. Later the hero Herakles
was admitted into their ranks—a distinction never accorded
Asklepios, the god of healing, notwithstanding his importance.
Arrogant, fickle, cruel, and treacherous, the Olympians have been
aptly described as superhuman in power and subhuman in morality.
Neither good nor evil in themselves, they constituted a dangerous
and unstable combination of both elements.
Because the gods were extremely jealous, the Greeks took
extreme care not to succumb to hubris or overweening pride. Those
who did so were punished with nemesis or vengeful destruction.
Herodotos depicts a Persian noble giving this warning to Xerxes
as he is contemplating invading Greece (7.10e): “It is always the