The Greek island of Delos is rocky and lacks in natural resources. Today its population consists mostly of archaeologists and ruins. But between 900 BCE and 100 CE this island was a major religious center for the ancient Greeks. In Greek mythology Delos was supposedly the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis and therefore Delos housed a couple of large temples for, among others, Apollo, Artemis and Zeus. Especially its Apollo cult was widely known. Through this cult the islands around Delos, and even some places that lay further away, were connected to Delos on a religious level and these connections can be traced from the Archaic through the Hellenistic periods of Greek history. These religious interactions of Delos and its neighbors might be an interesting topic to explore further. In this article, I shall therefore try to elaborate a bit more on this subject.
Temple dedications
The Greeks believed that their gods could influence human affairs and that they responded to acts of worship and piety. The gods were given a human-like body and corresponding characters that included both good and bad elements. The gods got married, they had children and sometimes they fought and intervened in the affairs of the humans. Gods were generally invoked for economic prosperity, good health, safety in war and seafaring, fertility of crops, humans and animals. For these kinds of rewards, a person needed to show piety. In the Greek tradition, this meant the offering of the right honors on the right occasions. Honoring and worshiping the gods usually took place in a temple. Most of the time, these gifts to the gods were a token of respect to a superior power or an expression of thanks for all kinds of things in life. The variety of these gifts had little limits. The material could be perishable (like food items), cheap (wood or terracotta), or more valuable (stone, metals, precious metals). And its type may be anything from the tiniest objects, such as wreath or a candle, to whole buildings. Often these dedications ended up with inscriptions regarding the benefactors and the purpose of the gifts and this knowledge often found its way to the stone inventory inscriptions.
The temple inventories
The temple of Apollo on Delos had such inventories and they number around five hundred and span a period of over two hundred years. However, only six inventories are complete and half of these are situated in just one decade. Most of the data that we have comes from the third century BCE. These temple inscriptions are large slabs of stone that were publicly displayed in the temples on Delos. The inventory of the year 279, for example, measures 1.61 m x 0.77 m. They were produced annually by the hieropoioi, the temple administrators. These inventories reveal a great amount of information on what was dedicated to the gods by whom and when, because the stones give the name of the object and in some cases there is additional information provided, such as the name of the dedicant or the ethnic origin of him or her. One example of such an inscription is a detailed passage on the individual offerings made by queen Stratoninke, the wife of Seleucus I Nicator of the Seleucid Empire:
"All the crowns in the temple of Apollo [are] 22, without [counting] those on the wall. Golden crown on the wall, weight 12 dr; another golden crown [detached] from the wall, weight 47 dr; golden necklace; crown with which the statue is crowned, weight with the linen cloth 144 dr; another golden crown with which the statue is crowned, which queen Stratonike, daughter of king Demetrios, dedicated, weight 109 dr; another three golden crowns, which crown the [statues] of the Charites, which queen Stratonike, daughter of king Demetrios, dedicated, weight 31 dr; golden necklace, which queen Stratonike, daughter of king Demetrios dedicated to Leto with 48 disks, weight 109 dr 4 obols; and a golden ring, which [she] dedicated to Leto, which has a stone with an engraved Apollo, weight 12 dr; and two golden phialai with precious stones, weight 37 dr; and a golden ring which has a stone on which Nike is engraved, which the god possesses, 33 dr; and 20 small shields made out of onyx, [attached] on which there are golden chains, 432 dr; and a Heraclean quiver with golden decorations, which has a bow and a golden band, on which there is an inscription; and three fly swats, which have three handles, one from ivory, the other with gold decorations, and the other from onyx; and a square fan which has an ivory handle.”
Network theoryOne way of looking at these dedicatory practices is with the use of network theory. The idea of ‘network’ is a conceptual approach that originated in research from the social and natural sciences. This approach has been used by historians only recently, but has become popular in studying the ancient Mediterranean world. A network, in its basic sense, refers to the relationships between people or things across and within physical, social or temporal boundaries. The focus lies with connectivity instead of isolation, or interaction rather than separation. This type of analysis sees people as nodes, or hubs, and their relationships as ties in a network. The network approach is useful in the study of ancient Greek religion, because it allows the study of processes and interactions that go across political, cultural or economic boundaries. With the information on the inventory stones and the network theory, we could map the network of the Apollo sanctuary and its dedicants from Delos. When we consider the dedications and the inventories that were set up along with them in terms of a network, we could call perhaps the sanctuary the node and those that came to dedicate the agents, the ones that connected the cities, poleis or families with the sanctuary and with each other.
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The religious network of DelosThe temple inventories give us an interesting glimpse of the religious appeal Delos had within the networks of the eastern Mediterranean world. From the inscriptions one can deduce, in some of the instances, the social, gender and ethnic backgrounds of both communities and individuals that came to the temple on the island. The stone inscriptions represent the spread of the cult, but they also created a community of worshipers themselves. Through the act of communicating with the gods to whom they dedicated the dedicants were so to say, connected with each other. The religion practiced in and around the sanctuary contributed to the creation of a shared social identity through the sharing of religious activity and knowledge. This created and maintained social ties. It brought many identities from the Greek world together in one place and set them in a relationship to each other on many levels: individuals, but also on the level of communities, poleis and in the end: the gods.
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Mapping the network of third century Delos
The inventories from the Apollo temple on Delos regarding the third century BCE will be the ones we use here. An attempt to discuss these inventories with regard to a religious network around Delos has not been made yet and from the third century a couple of complete inventories survive. This century thus provides enough information to attempt such a mapping. However, it should be noted that networks are notoriously difficult to document, even more so for earlier periods, were the overall lack of sources makes any attempt at interpretation precarious. We’ll try none the less.
Our information on the dedications in the Apollo temple on Delos comes from the inventory lists of Richard Hamilton in his Treasure Map: A Guide to the Delian Inventories. One could, with the information from these lists, explore the religious network of Delos. This was a network based around a single sanctuary. It comprises both the sanctuary of Apollo on Delos itself, and the cities and individuals that send representatives or themselves to it and made a dedication. The size of this religious network is hard to determine, given the limited source material, but can partly be recovered by checking the inscribed dedications. These dedications number 208 in total, 73 of which are mentioned only with a name, and 47 dedications mention the city-state or island of origin of the dedicant. Perhaps those who are only mentioned by name came from Delos itself, or were famous enough to be mentioned without a place name, such as the twice mentioned king Ptolemy and queen Stratonike. The places that are cited in the inventories of the treasures of the Apollo temple in the third century are Kos, Rhodes, Kalymnos, Chios, Seleukos, Megalopolis, Epirus, Kasos, Cyrene, Sparta, Sidon, Byblos and Antioch. When placed on a map, these points make visible part of the catchment area of the Delian cult in the third century.
Our information on the dedications in the Apollo temple on Delos comes from the inventory lists of Richard Hamilton in his Treasure Map: A Guide to the Delian Inventories. One could, with the information from these lists, explore the religious network of Delos. This was a network based around a single sanctuary. It comprises both the sanctuary of Apollo on Delos itself, and the cities and individuals that send representatives or themselves to it and made a dedication. The size of this religious network is hard to determine, given the limited source material, but can partly be recovered by checking the inscribed dedications. These dedications number 208 in total, 73 of which are mentioned only with a name, and 47 dedications mention the city-state or island of origin of the dedicant. Perhaps those who are only mentioned by name came from Delos itself, or were famous enough to be mentioned without a place name, such as the twice mentioned king Ptolemy and queen Stratonike. The places that are cited in the inventories of the treasures of the Apollo temple in the third century are Kos, Rhodes, Kalymnos, Chios, Seleukos, Megalopolis, Epirus, Kasos, Cyrene, Sparta, Sidon, Byblos and Antioch. When placed on a map, these points make visible part of the catchment area of the Delian cult in the third century.
The visual representation of the religious network of Delos, based on the mentioned places in the temple inventories, show that the cult of Delian Apollo was rather wide spread and that its nodes reached relatively far into the eastern lands. This map is situated in the Hellenistic period and the eastern and southern nodes represent the larger kingdoms that were the heirs of the large empire Alexander the Great had conquered; and they apparently had stakes in the Greek cults as well. Queen Stratonike and king Ptolemy were already mentioned and can be seen as representatives of the larger Hellenistic kingdoms. Delos was, in this period, one of the many locations where piety towards the gods became a showcase for control and power over the Aegean region by the Hellenistic kings.
Conclusion
The pious dedications that were made by the Greeks to the Apollo temple on Delos in the third century BCE were inscribed on stone inventories that were held and displayed in the sanctuary itself. These inventories displayed the possessions and the dedications that were made to the temple and named the object, and in some cases also the name of the dedicant and his or her hometown. In this short article we tried to use this information to map the religious network of Delos and visually show were the people that dedicated to Apollo came from. This turned out to be multiple locations that were in its vicinity, but there were also places mentioned that lay hundreds of kilometers away from the island itself. This image fits in the period of the third century BCE, however, when a new wave of Greek colonization established Greek cities in Asia and Africa. The leading power dominating Delos was no longer the city of Athens, its temples integrated in the Hellenistic religious spheres of Egypt, Syria, Pergamum, Macedon and Rhodes. The kings of these kingdoms honored the sanctuary on Delos and used it to assert their influence over the Aegean where the island of Delos lay central. When we apply the notion of network to the temple inventories, we end up with a convenient way of representing this phenomenon and some useful terms to define its workings. The temple inventories of Delos show how dedicatory practices could link people from all over the Greek world and were used to further political ends.
By: M.J.C.D.
By: M.J.C.D.
Sources and further reading
- Constantakopoulou, Christy. “The Social Dynamics of Dedication in the Delian Inventories of the Third Century: Audience, Function and Temporality.” CHS Research Bulletin 3, no. 2 (2015). Accessed April 9 2017. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:ConstantakopoulouC.The_Social_Dynamics_of_Dedication.2015
- Constantakopoulou, Christy. The dance of the islands. Insularity, networks, the Athenian empire, and the Aegean world. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
- Eidinow, Esther, and Julia Kindt, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion. Oxford Handbooks Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
- Hamilton, R. Treasure Map: A Guide to the Delian Inventories. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
- Laidlaw, William Allison. A History of Delos. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1933.
- Rutherford, Ian. “Network Theory and Theoric Networks.” In Greek and Roman Networks in the Mediterranean, edited by Irad Malkin, Christy Constantakopoulou, and Katerina Panagopoulou, 24-39. London: Routledge, 2011.
- Taylor, Claire, and Kostas Vlassopoulos, eds. Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World. First edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Mikalson, Jon D. Ancient Greek Religion. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005.
- Figure 1. Inventory ID 154 side B from R. Hamilton, Treasure Map: A Guide to the Delian Inventories (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 182.
- Figure 2. Diagram of the major archeological remains on the sacred site of Delos.
- http://www.mmdtkw.org/GR-Unit11--DelianLeague.html
- Figure 3. Map generated with Palladio (http://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/) and data from R. Hamilton, Treasure Map: A Guide to the Delian Inventories (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
- Heather image: A panorama of the island of Delos today. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Delos_Panorama1.jpg