Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

212 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
tablet was inscribed with a text identifying the person being cursed
and the parts of the body (e.g., tongue, hand, belly) to be affected by
the curse. Sometimes the tablets were rolled up and pierced with a
needle, and sometimes a small figure resembling a voodoo doll was
included. Common targets were rivals in an athletic competition, a
lawsuit, or a love triangle. Although we have no way of knowing
what percentage of the population resorted to such measures, it is
a fact that conditional curses (i.e., “If X does so-an-so, may suchand-such
happen to him or her”) were utilized by Greek communities
to encourage conformity to their expectations and regulations.
For instance, the oath that the Athenians took before the battle of
Plataiai in 479 b.c.e. and later administered on an annual basis to
ephebes is inscribed as follows: “If I remain faithful to the inscribed
oath, may women give birth to children who resemble their parents.
If I do not, may they give birth to monsters.”
The most memorable appearance of chthonic deities in literature is that of
the Furies at the opening of the Eumenides, the third play in Aeschylus’s
Oresteia, who are in pursuit of Orestes to Delphi for the crime of murdering
his mother. They are described as follows: “They are women—no,
not women but Gorgons rather. And yet they are not quite Gorgons
either. . . . They are wingless, black and they snore. Evil pus oozes from
their eyes” (lines 48–54).
Later Apollo orders them from his sanctuary with the following menacing
words: “Go to where heads are chopped off and eyes gouged out,
to justice and slaughtering, to destruction of seed and of young men’s
pride, to mutilations and stoning, and to the lamentations of people
being impaled” (lines 186–90).
Priests and Priestesses
The Greek word hiereus, which is roughly translated as priest,
denotes an official who supervised the hiera (i.e., sacred objects)
stored within a sanctuary and who conducted sacred rites connected
with cult. The chief task was the supervision of sacrifices and the
performing of other cult acts, particularly in connection with festivals.
No Greek, as far as we know, ever regarded the priesthood
as a vocation in the way that a Christian priest does. Eligibility to
office was based on external qualifications rather than intellectual
or moral attributes, though it is no surprise to learn that prostitutes,
army deserters, and debtors were disqualified. The principal qualification
seems to have been the absence of any physical blemish,
because this was thought to constitute proof of divine disfavor. As