3. Professionals, Volunteers, and Amateurs: Serving the Gods kata ta patria

Susan Guettel Cole

In the second century AD, a priestess of Demeter Thesmophoros at Miletus consulted the oracle of Apollo at Didyma. A third-person account of her query survives: Alexandra does not identify the gods appearing to her constituents, but we can tell from her question that she is alarmed. The gods are not behaving predictably. [1] Concerned about change, she consults the oracle, aware that any change in divine behavior could be an ominous sign. The priestess assumes responsibility for examining anomalies in divine response because even the gods were expected to behave in traditional ways.

As priestess of Demeter Thesmophoros, Alexandra represents a divinity whose rites were among the oldest the Greeks knew. Because Demeter was considered responsible for regulating food supply and diet, any irregularity in her attention, even in second-century Miletus, could be serious. The other side of the stone block on which Alexandra’s question is paraphrased contains an oracular response describing the functions of Demeter, perhaps part of a reply to a second query of Alexandra: Demeter’s regimen and Demeter’s rites separate her worshippers from savages. The oracle claims for the residents of Miletus a special responsibility to the goddess, maintaining that their founder, Neleus, had brought from Attica the sumbola of the Eleusinian mysteries. These tokens confer on Milesians the privilege of performing Demeter’s Eleusinian orgia, rites so sacred that they could not be described (arrhēta). Apollo’s response enjoins the Milesians to do nothing that could jeopardize this relationship and permanent obligation.

Alexandra’s title identifies her as the priestess of Demeter Thesmophoros, the priestess who officiated for women at the Thesmophoria. The second text calls Demeter’s ceremonies the “rites of Eumolpus,” naming the legendary ruler associated with the founding of the Eleusinian mysteries. In both texts, the main concern is tradition. The first text is concerned with traditional behavior. The second text stakes a claim to a long-established relationship with the divinity by evoking an ancient time and exhorting the Milesians to remember their ties to the Eleusinian rites. A reference to an Eleusinian connection as late as the second century raises several questions. How did communities actually maintain the appearance of ritual continuity? Who judged that rituals were properly performed? Who inspected the process and outcome of female-only rituals and who was responsible for checking up on secret ceremonies? What role did priests and priestesses play in the process? [3] In what follows I am addressing these questions with a focus on female cult officials, and my frequent point of reference will be the rites of Demeter.

Greek ritual was by nature conservative. Relentless repetition, the rigid calendar of festival schedules, and the formulaic patterns of ritual gesture and ritual speech gave to every performance the impression of great antiquity and long history. The experience of each reenactment of ritual implied that what was being done had always been done the same way. Claims of divine mandate for religious practice were simple to make. Such claims could be endorsed by cooperative oracles and were rarely challenged in public. The details of ritual practice were not a concern to historians or even to poets; we know only the barest outline of the rituals actually performed. We can tell from the epigraphical record, however, that practice was shaped by discussion, details were decided by legislative procedures, and disputes were subjected to the scrutiny of experts appointed to oversee public ritual.

Ancient administrators had a phrase they used when they wished to emphasize a solemn occasion or the long life and hallowed origin of a ritual. The expression kata ta patria (according to ancestral custom) was a phrase that made any violation not only an offense against the gods, but also an offense against the collective authority of the population past and present. There were many other ways to express this idea, but kata ta patria is a formula that seems to have carried special weight. The expression surfaces first at Athens and throughout the centuries appears more often in Athenian inscriptions than in all other city corpora combined. The phrase kata ta patria appears in public documents where it is important to imply that everything is as it should be, but it can also appear in contexts where legislation has resolved a dispute, changed a process, or established a new procedure. In the law courts this phrase and other similar expressions were used to register anxiety about proper performance of traditional ritual. [4] Such expressions were meant to soothe the reader or listener. As soon as a claim is made that something is being done kata ta patria, however, we can almost be sure that some kind of a change or challenge is already underway.

Inscriptions give us some idea of how procedures were supposed to be managed. Here we notice that administrators often relied on written texts preserved in local archives. Political changes were accompanied by an audit of ritual procedures. At Cos, for instance, the fourth-century synoecism required all sanctuaries of Demeter on the island to be managed from the central town. Purification ritual was standardized and the demes mirrored the poleis. [5] All the priestesses of Demeter had to follow the same regulations. Two epistatai were chosen to collect from the nomophulakes and the priests the regulations written down in the sacred laws about purification, and to display these rules in the sanctuaries of Demeter and Asclepius. The goal of the officials was to regularize public rituals according to the sacred and hereditary laws (kata tous hierous kai patrious nomous). Appeals to antiquity made the regulations stronger. At Ephesus, where Demeter Karpophoros was installed in the prutaneion in the imperial period, an inscription of the third century AD gives the regulations for care of the sacred fire and instructions for numbers of sacrificial victims. This late text reproduces two selections from an earlier sacred law. The first selection is called a summary of a hereditary law (kephalaion nomou patriou); the second is called another part (allo meros; IEphesos 10). [6] The first selection directs procedure for rituals entrusted to the prutanis. The hierophant is to lead him around “on the customary day” and teach him exactly what is “customary” for each god. In addition, the hierophant is to explain the singing of the paean at the sacrifice, the procession, and the pannukhia, which “must be performed according to ancestral custom” (kata ta patria). We rarely have such explicit detail about professional training for officials with part-time ritual responsibilities. [7]

As Angelos Chaniotis has shown, for the most part, the day-to-day administration of both public and private cult was left to officials and attendants who were not required to have special training. Those in charge were held accountable to public boards and local political administrators, but procedures for evaluation placed more emphasis on inventory of public property and auditing of accounts than on supervising the content of rituals. There was a great deal of variety in demands of service. Some offices may have required as little as a single day of service in the entire year. Above all, although service could be lifelong or annual, there is no guarantee that longer service implied deeper ties, higher commitment, or even more responsibility.

The evidence for priesthoods associated with Demeter provides an interesting test case for exploring issues of continuity in the context of sanctuary administration and traditional rituals. [8] Sanctuaries and festivals of Demeter were usually organized at the level of the smallest administrative unit, the deme or its equivalent. Demeter’s sanctuaries were usually small and simple. Inscriptions associated with these sanctuaries tend to be short, even terse, and they are rarely informative about procedures of administration. Moreover, Demeter’s ritual was so heavily cloaked in the requirements imposed by seclusion and segregation that we have little direct evidence for what was actually done and who was in charge. Some types of Demeter’s worship required rituals that could not be described. But how much was restricted, how many people had to know the content, and where did the boundary between specialist and consumer lie? The Thesmophoria could not be viewed by males, but the rituals were often administered by legislative bodies made up of men. How were administrators informed about a particular festival? Who was responsible for seeing to it that all was performed kata ta patria?

In any city, Demeter could have more than one priestess. Taking Erythrae as an example, if we look at the epigraphical evidence, on first glance we have what appears to be a full dossier on cult practice: a catalogue of sale prices of the city’s priesthoods, the most detailed and longest calendar of sacrifices outside of Attica, texts conferring honors on priests and priestesses, and records of dedications. When we look a little closer, however, there are, as usual, more questions than answers. The catalogue of sale of priesthoods gives us four separate offices for Demeter, two in her own right (Demeter Chloë and Demeter at Colonae) and two in tandem with her daughter Kore (Demeter and Kore; Demeter and Kore Pythocrestus (LSAM 25). [9] Prices can be compared as follows:

Even the most expensive of these offices (Demeter at Colonae; 1300 dr.), although the price reaches four digits, does not come close to that of Aphrodite in Embates (2040 dr.) or Hermes Agoraios (4600 and 4610 dr.). Does variation in price correlate with variation in prestige and authority? Were female priesthoods less likely than male offices to be considered important? Was Aphrodite more popular than Demeter? Such questions do not really get to the meaningful issues behind accounts such as these. We can notice that the cheapest priesthood at Erythrae (probably assigned to a female) was that of Ge (10 dr.), but the office of the priestess of the Korubantes who served females was priced higher than its partner office for the priest who served male constituents. [10] There was a priestess of Demeter Thesmophoros at Erythrae. A short inscription honors Zosime, priestess of Demeter Thesmophoros, for forty years of service: Forty years implies a lifelong office, dia biou. Zosime apparently lived long enough to preside over the institutional memory of the procedures for the Thesmophoria during a period of at least two generations. The records for the sale price of this priesthood, almost certainly once included in the catalogue, however, do not survive in the extant text.

The calendar of sacrifices at Erythrae lists prices for sacrificial victims designated for public rites, but the list turns out to be, for our purposes, just another dead end (LSAM 26). [11] The beginning and end of the original text are missing, and the list does not even contain the name of a single month. It is therefore impossible to correlate Demeter’s festival program at Erythrae with the timetable of the agricultural year. Finally, although Demeter’s name appears only once (Demeter Eleusinia, an adult sheep; 10 dr.), she and her daughter were probably the ones who received a piglet “for the pannukhis” [12] and she herself was likely the divinity “in Leuce” (a place name) who received two piglets. Sheep and piglets are identified as sacrificial victims for Demeter and Kore elsewhere, and even the mandate to sacrifice to Kore an uncastrated male animal (ram, 10 dr.) is consistent with practice in other cities, where Persephone, Kore, and even Demeter herself could receive adult male victims. [13] Nevertheless, although there is nothing confusing about the evidence we do have, it is clear that we do not have enough to assume consistency of practice across regions and through time.

Eligibility for service seems to have been more a matter of status than a matter of experience, but if most priests and priestesses were in fact amateurs rather than professionals, who set the standards, who decided how ritual should be performed, and who was responsible for seeing that the rules were carried out? What happened on the ground on a day-to-day basis?

The administration of Greek sacrifices, festivals, and sanctuaries was complex, and backstage maneuvers are rarely available for our consideration. The literary record tells us almost nothing about the administration of sanctuaries, and inscriptions tell us only about issues that needed to be spelled out locally. We know little about how worshippers interacted with temple staff and almost nothing about the responsibilities of individual offices. Contracts are more likely to spell out the rewards for priestly service than to give details about the actual duties. We are therefore poorly informed about qualifications for service. Sometimes one office seems to lead directly to another, [14] but family rank, wealth, and status were probably more decisive than experience. Reputation and attitude were not an issue. If hereditary office actually targeted those expected from birth to perform particular ritual service, this could have created opportunities for real training and long-term practice, but there is no indication that potential candidates for hereditary office ever received special training. In fact, Andocides’ description of the private life of Callias indicates that questionable or even scandalous personal behavior did not compromise entitlement to hereditary priestly office (Andocides 1.124–128).

Did it matter that some were professionals, others only amateurs, and that, except for those who held long-term hereditary priesthoods, all others (whether appointed, elected, or competing to purchase) were in some sense volunteers? Like political office in Cleisthenes’ Athens, priestly responsibilities often circulated among a wide group of qualified individuals. Who, then, actually did the work of sanctuary management; who decided what rituals should be performed; and who organized the cleanup of ash, blood, and fat of animal slaughter and roasting of meat after a major festival was concluded? Finally, who was responsible for maintaining the official record and who gave instructions for transmitting the details of cult practice to the next generation?

Organization of Demeter’s ritual at the local level is illustrated by deme decrees from Attica. [15] Elsewhere requirements for service were not always uniform. Tradition was cited as the tie that bound one generation to another and created consistency for the decentralized rites of Demeter throughout the Mediterranean, but we are not always able to follow the exact history. Literary sources, especially the comments of Pausanias, indicate more variety than inscriptions do. At Olympia the priestess of Demeter Khamune had special duties and privileges (Pausanias 6.20.9). [16] She partook of the same purification rites as the Hellanodikai, and as the only married woman permitted to observe the athletic contests in the stadium, she watched from a special seat. Pausanias tells us that at the time of the foundation of Thasos from Paros Demeter’s priestess, a young parthenos named Cleiobeia, was responsible for transporting the special ritual objects of the goddess to the new city (10.28.3). At Hermione Demeter’s elderly female attendants regularly slaughtered with sickles four cows let loose in her temple (2.35.6–8). [17]

Inscriptions are concerned with procedure. On fourth-century Cos, as we have seen, deme priestesses of Demeter had to meet the same purity standards as the city priestesses of Demeter Olympia in town (LSCG 154). [18] The effects of synoecism are apparent in other ways. At Antimachia, where annual selection was offered by both purchase and sortition in the late fourth century, the system for selecting priestesses seems to have been spliced together from two different procedures at the time of the synoecism. Several priestesses were chosen at the same meeting, so individual demes of Antimachia must have been represented. The women who served swore an oath on assuming office (SIG3 1006; LSCG 175). [19] Most towns had several priestesses of Demeter because Demeter was worshipped in every neighborhood. At Mantinea there was even a koinon (organization) of priestesses of Demeter and Persephone. The organization held meetings and passed motions to regulate banquets and to vote honors for their colleagues. The procedures guaranteed collective decisions and provided a means of publishing awards of public praise for the accomplishments of individual priestesses (IG V ii 266; IPArk 12, with commentary). Priestesses were required to meet the expectations of the community, and even the smallest divisions of the polis were considered “symbolic representations” of the whole. [20] In the Athenian deme of Melite, Satyra, another priestess of Demeter Thesmophoros, received public honors from the demesmen for her service and for her generosity in contributing more than one hundred drachmas for the annual sacrifices (Broneer 1942:265f no. 51). [21] In addition to commendation by the deme, Satyra is granted a crown of myrtle and the right to set up a painted portrait of herself in the temple of Demeter and Kore, the same privilege granted to other priestesses of Demeter.

Priestly status for females, however, was no guarantee of authority. Although priestesses of Demeter assumed responsibilities that conferred special status, that status was temporary and even a priestess could not act independently of her kurios (guardian). At the scheduled sortition for the priesthoods of Demeter at Antimachia, women unable to attend could be represented by a kurios. Husbands could therefore stand in for wives. [22] In the Attic demes wealthy husbands assumed in turn the obligations associated with the liturgies that subsidized deme banquets for the Thesmophoria (Isaios 3.80; 8.19f). Women’s rituals were embedded in the deme calendar, but women were not deme members themselves. [23]

Local rules were set and ratified by local male assemblies. On Cos it was the husband of the priestess of Dionysus, not the priestess herself, who reported infractions to the local council (LSCG 166.28–30). A deme decree from Piraeus, recognizing the authority of the priestess of Demeter with respect to ritual, denied women the use of the sanctuary of Demeter if the priestess was not present (IG II2 1177). The deme assembly was prepared to recognize women’s rites that could be called traditional, citing the Thesmophoria, the Plerosia, the Kalamaia, and the Skira; and they acknowledged the propriety of further events—“if the women come together on any other day kata ta patria.” Alexandra was not the only priestess of Demeter to worry about precedent and appropriate behavior. The priestess of Demeter at Arcesine, concerned about women making free use of Demeter’s sanctuary at forbidden times, requested that the local council and assembly fix a penalty for asebeia (LSCG 102). [24] She herself had no special jurisdiction. However, priestesses did have prerogatives protected by tradition. Archias, the fourth-century Eleusinian hierophant charged with impiety (asebeia) because he performed sacrifice in defiance of ancestral tradition (para ta patria), was executed for usurping the place of the priestess of Demeter at a sacrifice at the eskhara at Eleusis ([Demosthenes] 59.116; Athenaeus 13.594b). [25] Theano, priestess of Demeter at Eleusis who refused to perform the public curse of Alcibiades, apparently was not punished for her disobedience (Plutarch Alcibiades 22; 33). [26] The rights of priestesses were protected. Nevertheless, the fact that priestesses of Demeter were recognized as women of authority did not grant them special power. The authority of any priest or priestess did not reach outside the boundaries of the sanctuary. [27]

Even though rituals of Demeter were modest, protected by requirements of secrecy, and performed away from the eyes of the male community, ruling bodies and authorities had a stake in seeing to it that the rituals of the goddess were properly carried out. A deme decree from Attica about responsibility for supplying commodities for the Thesmophoria in Cholargus illustrates commitment to precedent: The assembly paid for the inscription; the women who held annual office as arkhousai paid for the ingredients for the ritual cakes. The arkhousai were the women appointed in each deme to take charge of the annual banquet. The menu for Demeter was always prescribed. This particular inscription records the recipe “letter by letter” so that Demeter’s cakes could be reproduced in precisely the same way every time the Thesmophoria took place in the deme. The arkhousai themselves probably served on an annual basis. The responsibility for ritual continuity did not rest on their shoulders because the deme assembly claimed authority to make decisions about the women’s ceremonies and publicly claimed that their decisions were in effect forever. It should be no surprise to find that the men of Cholargos knew the recipe for Demeter’s cakes so well that that their regulation reproduced the shopping list for the arkhousai. [29] The demesmen may have been excluded from the ceremonies of the Thesmophoria, but they were certainly familiar with the festival’s menu.

For a festival of Demeter, Kore, and Zeus Bouleus on Mykonos, preparations were just as complicated (SIG3 1024). Here the hieropoioi paid for the wood and the sacrificial victims. For another festival for a female clientele, priests and archons had jurisdiction. The text issues an invitation to any of the women of Mykonos who wished to attend, as well as any of those women living in Mykonos who had completed the required cycles of special ceremonies for Demeter. No priestess is mentioned for these sacrifices (LSCG 96.15–20), but we may expect that a priestess officiated at the ceremony.

Literature represents priestesses as female first and as sacred officials only second. Stories about priestesses seem to divide them into two groups: good girls and bad girls. Good girls are loyal to their families and city, bad girls are traitors. Alexandra belongs to the first class; Archidamia, a priestess of Demeter at Aegila in Laconia, belongs to the second. Archidamia let her affections for the Messenian leader Aristomenes overcome her loyalty to her own people. [30] Herodotus’ account about Timo of Paros seems on first reading to be constructed on the same model. Timo was the sanctuary attendant blamed for encouraging Miltiades to violate the sanctuary of Demeter at Paros. Herodotus appears to imply that she betrayed her office (and therefore the goddess), and her city. There is, however, another possible interpretation of this episode.

It is instructive to examine the case of Timo closely. Subordinate temple-warden of the chthonic goddesses at the sanctuary of Demeter pro poleōs at Paros, Timo was taken captive when Miltiades laid siege to the city. In an interview with Miltiades she told him that the defense of the city could be broken if he took a shortcut through the sanctuary of Demeter to reach the city gate. Miltiades followed her advice and attempted to examine the sanctuary even though it was off bounds for males. He jumped the precinct wall, but when he tried to open the herkos of Demeter Thesmophoros, he found the doors locked. Herodotus suspects that Miltiades intended to do something in the megaron, either to “move something that could not be moved or do something or other,” but before Miltiades could even begin, a wave of fright and horror came over him, and he turned back the way he had come. In his fear, he hurt his thigh jumping back over the fence and thus incurred the injury that would lead to his downfall and death.

The Parians were distressed because Timo seemed willing to betray her patris and reveal to Miltiades sacred things that could not be spoken to the male gonos. When they consulted Delphi about dealing with her, however, they found that there were two sides to the story. The Pythia let Timo off without a reprimand. She would not allow the Parians to punish a priestess who was not the cause of these events, but only the facilitator. [31] According to the oracle, Miltiades was responsible for his own bad end.

Miltiades’ panic and his experience of horror indicate confrontation with divinity. His experience of the goddess was not the experience described in epic, where the hero is overcome by the beauty, fragrance, and glow of a goddess, [32] but one more like Orestes’ waking-nightmare vision of the Erinyes. It is almost as if the Pythia assumed that Timo had tricked Miltiades into walking into a divine ambush in Demeter’s sanctuary. Did the Pythia protect Timo because she had deliberately created a situation where Miltiades could be defeated by Demeter herself? The issue of concern to Delphi is Miltiades’ violation of Demeter’s sanctuary, a violation inspired by arrogance, not Timo’s tactical suggestion. The Parians were bound to accept the word of Apollo because the oracle was the board of final appeal and Apollo had the last word.

At Didyma, Alexandra was worried about an epidemic of epiphanies, but epiphany by day or night was a major mode of communication for Demeter. At Priene a man from Cyprus put up a plaque to memorialize an experience in which the two Thesmophoroi robed in white appeared to him three times in dreams, commanding him to honor the local hero Naulochus as founder of the city (IPriene 196). [33] In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the goddess appears twice in epiphany (188–211, 256–80). [34] The core experience of the Eleusinian initiate seems to have been based on an experience of divine epiphany, an experience that implies a special relationship between a god and a human individual. When Miltiades saw what a man should not see, he destroyed that relationship. Vision is an important element of the experience of Demeter, whatever the ritual, but ritual vision is regulated. Herodotus and Aristophanes both emphasize that the privilege of the ritual gaze could be contingent on gender. Aristophanes, commenting on the Thesmophoria, says, “It is not right for men to see” the rites of the women in the grove at the Thesmophoria (Thesmophoroiazusai 1150).

Demeter could appear in visions to order a temple, demand worship, or request a dedication. Other divinities could stand in for Demeter. At Cnidus a priestess of Demeter named Chrysina dedicated an oikos and a statue of her daughter Chrysogone because Hermes appeared to her in a dream and told her to minister to the two goddesses at Tathne (a place, probably a deme, at Cnidus; IKnidos 131). [35] Epiphanies of Demeter could happen with or without her attendants. In 345 Demeter appeared at Corinth in a dream to her own priestesses to promise that she herself would accompany Timoleon on campaign to Sicily (Diodoros 16.66.4; Plutarch Timoleon 8). Timoleon therefore named his trireme “The Two Goddesses” and when he sailed by night from Corcyra, it was noticed that a light from the sky touched his ship. For the interpreters (manteis) accompanying the general, this phasma, the appearance of light, confirmed the promise that the goddess had made to the priestesses at Corinth. [36]

Demeter appeared to Timoleon as she did to others in wartime to confirm support for those she favored. She was also present in the apparition perceived by Dicaeus and Demaratus on the Thriasian plain in 480 just before the battle of Salamis. These two men saw a cloud of dust moving from Eleusis and heard the ritual cries of the Iacchus song, normally sung by worshippers in procession from Athens to Eleusis. The perceptions of Dicaeus and Demaratus were stimulated by both sight and sound even though this was the year the mysteries could not have been celebrated. With the Persian fleet almost at the harbor of Athens, the Athenians had already abandoned Attica to the gods. The vision seen by Dicaeus and Demaratus, however, was a sign that the gods would protect Attica even when the Athenians themselves were absent. Demeter indicated her concern for the Greeks again the next year at Plataea. Although fighting took place all around her sanctuary, she made her protection manifest by allowing no Persian to fall dead on her sacred ground (Herodotus 9.65).

Finally, at Argos in 272 Pyrrhus is said to have met his death at the hands of a woman who hit him with a roof tile. The slayer was no ordinary mortal, but the goddess herself, disguised as an Argive woman (Pausanias 1.13.8; Plutarch Pyrrhus 34; Strabo 8.6.18). [37] Demeter’s retribution would have been appropriate for Pyrrhus because he was known to have violated a sanctuary of Persephone (Dionysius of Halicarnassus 20.9).

Three aspects of Demeter’s interest in her worshippers stand out. In all three accounts, visions and divine epiphanies are contagious, but the three situations are not identical. Alexandra’s request to the oracle describes clusters of visitations. Demeter’s priestesses at Corinth all report the same dream. In the narrative about the procession to Eleusis, Herodotus gives us an example of the same waking vision experienced simultaneously by two people. From these examples it does not seem that the appearance of a god to a priest or priestess carried more weight than the same appearance to an ordinary person, but accounts of contagious dreams, serial epiphanies, and simultaneous visions make it clear that there was some advantage to a story that claimed a group experience. Finally, a laconic text from the grave of the priestess Ammas at Thyateira, promising visions (horamata) by night or day to those who made a sacrifice on the spot, seems premised on an assumption that divine epiphany could be summoned on demand (TAM 5.1055). [38]

After the battle of Leuctra, the Messenians reclaimed sovereignty over their territory. Pausanias connects the reestablishment of Messenian political power in the fourth century with the continuity of Demeter’s ritual. [39] As he tells the story more than half a millennium later, the Messenians could not legitimate their autonomy until they recovered the physical ritual object that confirmed their identity and validated their history. Dreams play an important part in Pausanias’ narrative. Demeter’s ancient hierophant (or a figure that resembles him) provides the necessary instructions. Direct from Eleusis at the time of the return of the Messenians, he appears in two instructive dreams that underscore the solemnity of the moment. His appearance to Epaminondas establishes the template for a polis (4.26.5–6.). His appearance to Epiteles reveals the hidden location of a text that preserved the ancient rituals of the Messenian people (4.26.7–8).

The Athenian hierophant is a powerful symbol in the narrative as Pausanias reports it. Because Epiteles followed the instructions of the hierophant “to revive the old woman” he was able to discover the vital message the Messenians needed. By excavating where the hierophant instructed in the dream, he found an inscribed sheet of tin rolled up like a bookroll inside a buried bronze hudria. Left by the ancient Messenian king, Aristomenes, the text preserved (and therefore restored to the Messenians) their own sacred rite (teletē) of the Great Goddesses. Because the story constructs an Eleusinian genealogy for this teletē, we can equate these Great Goddesses with Demeter and her daughter, the two goddesses Pausanias associates with the sanctuary in the Carnasian grove near Messene. [40] The Messenians needed the remnant of their cultural memory because exile and Spartan domination had kept them from maintaining the dedications and sanctuaries that would have testified to a historical tradition and validation of their claims to territory. Without this testimony, they had nothing they could claim as kata ta patria.

The integration of the sacred text into Messenian tradition required the cooperation of the hereditary priesthood of the goddesses. Pausanias tells us that the priesthood of Messenian Zeus at Ithome was an annual appointment (4.33.2), but he makes it clear that the priesthood of the Great Goddesses at Andania was controlled by a single genos whose line the Messenians traced back to Aristomenes’ day. The chief Andanian ritual specialist, like the chief priest at Eleusis, had the title hierophant. Survival of the genos depended on a connection to Eleusis. Eleusis was both ancestral home and haven because the Messenians believed that their own mysteries had been brought from Eleusis to Andania by the Eleusinian hierophant Caucon at the time of the original foundation of the sanctuary (4.14.1). As the traditional account makes clear, the genos of priests took refuge at Eleusis during the first Messenian War and did not return home until the Messenian revolt. According to Pausanias, this genos was still marked as special almost three centuries later. The task of recording on papyrus bookrolls the ritual of the teletē preserved on the page of tin belonged to the priests of this genos because only the priests could have anything to do with the content of the ritual outside the performance of the mysteries themselves (4.27.5). [41] The actual rites could not be recalled without the discovery of the instructions on the tin tablet, but the family responsible for conducting those rites could still be identified. The survival of the genos of priests secured Messenian sovereignty over the land.

Even Pausanias admits that 287 years is a long time, but he is confident that the Messenians would have forgotten neither their customs nor their Doric habits of speech (4.27.9–11). Further, he recognizes the Andanian mysteries of the Messenians as belonging to the most sacred rites of all Hellas, surpassed in sanctity only by the Eleusinian mysteries (4.33.5). Like the oracle about Demeter at Didyma, the story Pausanias tells considers the connection to Eleusis a connection to a distant, but formative past. Both Miletus and Messene strove to represent themselves as specially designated ritual heirs in a direct line extending back to Eleusis. Caucon figures in both accounts. The Messenians recognized him in the hierophant who appeared in dreams to Epaminondas and Epiteles (4.26.8), the priest who had instructed them about the mysteries in the first place. He was a descendent of Phlyus, Athenian of the earth-born generation (4.1.5–9). [42] The Neleids at Miletus, who were called Kaukōnes, were said to have arrived at Miletus from Pylos by way of Athens. Both cities have grafted their rituals on an Athenian stem. [43] Pausanias does not believe everything he hears. He introduces the claim for the identification of the “aged hierophant” as Caucon with the qualifying verb form legousin (they say) because, like Herodotus discussing the rites at Samothrace or commenting on the Thesmophoria, [44] he is restrained by his own experience of ritual from disclosing everything he knows (4.33.5). Nevertheless, his Messenian narrative demonstrates that the institution with the strongest claim for preservation was not the mysteries themselves (because they required continuity of place and performance, and both had been lost), but the Andanian hereditary priesthood said to have been preserved with support from Eleusis. Genealogies could be fabricated and traditions conveniently altered. The oral histories recited locally in ceremonies or proudly summarized for tourists did not always have to be corroborated by documents. The prestige conferred on local cults by hereditary priesthoods may have offered enough evidence.

The responsibility for creating and maintaining the appearance of ritual continuity was shared by hereditary priesthoods, public administrative bodies, written records, and, hardest to trace, ritual habit. Connection to a famous and long-lived regional or far-distant sanctuary could also confer prestige. Individual priests and priestesses could only imitate what they knew, and individual experience could not have reached very far. For both Messenians and Milesians, Eleusinian precedents were especially meaningful. Rules and regulations recorded on stone and texts like the one on the page of tin indicate deep confidence in the longevity of the written word. [45] I doubt, however, that the deme arkhousai in Cholargus made an excursion to the stone for autopsy before assembling the ingredients for Demeter’s cakes at every annual deme celebration of the Thesmophoria. Reliance on the written word is a theme magnified again and again in the leges sacrae, but as the disputes surrounding the publication of the Athenian ritual calendar in the late fifth century should remind us, records were neither comprehensive nor always retrievable, and publication on stone was not always a matter of policy.

Narratives of divine epiphany offered models for ritual behavior. Priests took notes on epiphanies and wrote official accounts (epistolai) collected in local archives. [46] Oral tradition lies behind many narratives recounted in our sources. Narratives about divine epiphany are formulaic, many manufactured long after the experience they claim to illustrate, but the attitudes they represent were shaped by tradition. Constructed in response to crisis or to emphasize a special relationship with a god, such narratives give some indication of the attitudes and aspirations that shaped tradition. We can see why people relied on such accounts. Not every priestess was as sympathetic as Alexandra, as reliable as Zosime, or as clever as Timo, but their stories provided an opportunity for public display of collective human response to the divine. Repetition offered consolation and assurance that such responses were acceptable, and above all, kata ta patria.