Religion, Myth, and Community
Religion provided the context for almost all communal activity throughout the history
of ancient Greece. Sports, as in the Olympic Games held to honor Zeus, took place in the
religious context of festivals honoring specific gods. War was conducted according to
the signs of divine will that civil and military leaders identified in the
sacrifice1 of animals and in omens derived
from occurrences in nature such as unusual weather. Sacrifices themselves, the central
event of Greek religious rituals, were performed before crowds in the open air on public
occasions that involved communal feasting afterward on the sacrificed meat. The
conceptual basis of Greek religion was found in myth (
mythos
2, a Greek word meaning
“story” or “tale”) about the gods and their
relationship to humans. In the eighth century B.C., the Greeks began to record their
myths in writing, and the poetry of
Hesiod3 preserved from this period (there was at this date not yet any
Greek literature in prose) reveals how religious myth, as well as the economic changes
and social values of the time, contributed to the feeling of community that underlay the
creation of new political structures in Greece.
