HUMANITY AND DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY
“Sexual generation, in the Hesiodic theogony, is the agency that produces sovereignty among the gods. The foregoing discussion also suggests that the sexual activity of some divinities and the asexuality of others defined significant conditions of the relationships between gods and mortals, particularly affecting those mortals who assume the trappings of sovereign power. In the popular understanding of Hesiod’s day and after, the sexual unions of gods and mortals were accepted features of the heroic age, when Heracles was fathered by Zeus, for example, or Achilles was borne by Thetis. Hesiod’s picture of the passing of the age of heroes encourages the view that such things had ceased to be by his day. But it would be a mistake to take this impression as an absolute rule, as scholars sometimes do, and to assume that, after Hesiod, Greeks did not believe that gods could ever interact with humanity in the same way. There was no discontinuity between present reality and the marvelous past; marvels could happen. As with the repudiation of tyranny, and the restraint imposed upon the quest for kudos, divine generation became a rare commodity among men in the classical world, but it was not extinguished.
[Paul Veyne, in his Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? (translated in 1988), insists that Greeks of the historical era judged tales of the past “by means of what we would call the doctrine of present things. The past resembles the present, or, in other words, the marvelous does not exist” (14). Veyne must often admit, however, that this distinction was upheld only by those whom he calls “thinkers” (18, where he names Thucydides, Hecataeus, Pausanias the Periegete, and Saint Augustine as examples), while many “who were not thinkers” (e.g., Pindar) allowed their imaginative faculties to transgress this boundary of present reality. Even Veyne’s “thinkers” allow themselves to slip into “popular credulity” from time to time.]
The readiness of a wide public to accept the possibility of intercourse between a god and a human is attested in a story told by Plutarch, on the authority of an earlier source, who was probably the fourth-century historian Ephorus. Lysander the Spartan, the man responsible for destroying the Athenian empire, conspired by various means to secure divine authorization for his revolutionary goal of transforming Spartan kingship. Lysander learned of a woman from Pontus, in Asia Minor, who claimed to be bearing Apollo’s child. Her claim had wide popularity, and when a son was born to her, he attracted much attention. Lysander devised ways to spread her story through reputable sources, involving even the Delphic Oracle, so that not even Spartan authorities could discount it out of hand. Lysander’s scheme, once this child was grown, was to have the boy summoned to Delphi in order that priests there (who were conspirators with Lysander) could test his claim to be the son of Apollo. For Lysander had prepared secret oracles in writing at Delphi, pertaining to the kings of Sparta, and these oracles were to be read only by a son of Apollo. Lysander died before the plot could be accomplished, and the conspiracy was revealed by one of Lysander’s collaborators. But the fact that such a plot could be carried so far reveals just how strong conventional piety could be as a force in public opinion, having the potential of shaping official action regardless of the presence, as Plutarch notes, of skeptics, doubters, and calculating manipulators.
The marvelous possibility of a divine birth may have been given credence on this occasion in part because its premise, that gods could mate with mortals, was regularly enacted in ritual contexts. Ritualized intercourse of gods and mortals was not populating the world with demigods, however, but was legitimizing civic institutions. Like other divine endowments still recognized in the classical era, the benefits of sexual communion with gods were disbursed over a community at large through rituals ministered by public and priestly officials. At Athens this was done in the Anthesteria festival, when the union of Dionysus with the “queen” of Athens (Basilinna, actually the wife of the archon basileus, “king archon”) was celebrated in a Sacred Marriage (hieros gamos) on behalf of the city. The Athenians also celebrated a Sacred Marriage in honor of Zeus and Hera in a festival called Theogamia, “Divine Marriage,” and the union of Zeus and Demeter was said to play a part in the Greater Mysteries performed in the Anaktoron, or “House of the Anax [Sovereign Lord],” at Eleusis. We have no clear indication how the significant act may have been represented in each of these ritual events (a mystery in the truest sense), but it is clear that, in all of them, sexual intercourse was accepted as the basis of communion between humanity and the divine. When a human participated in that intercourse, as the Basilinna did with Dionysus, he or she played the role of royalty.”
- Mark Munn, The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia: A Study of Sovereignty in Ancient Religion. University of California Press, 2006. p. 37-39.
