Growing Gods?

Why would a temple in swampy ground be dedicated to Artemis?

There was an extremely interesting paper in a recent edition of Antiquity, Rocks, views, soils and plants at the temples of ancient Greece by Gregory J. Retallack. He’s been looking at the topographical setting of Greek temples, along with their orientations and the local geology. What he’s concluded is that if you want to understand Greek temples you need to get to grips with the local soils. Along the way he dismisses an idea which is pretty central to my thesis, so bear in mind the commentary below may be tainted with my own bias.

As it happens if I want to dismiss Retallack’s work then I’ve got quite a task. He’s examined eighty-four classical Greek temples, eighty-three in Greece and one in Paphos, Cyprus and examined the soils associated with the temples. This is an extremely good idea, and I’m surprised that someone hasn’t done it before. Geology might me easily overlooked, but soil is essential for agriculture. In the case of the development of farming in Europe it initially spread over löss soils as part of a package we call the Linearbandkeramik Culture. Retallack shows that the ancient Greeks were keenly aware of various types of soil and their properties. So looking for correlations between cults and soils is a worthwhile project.

What must then have been a large amount of work is tabulated into about a page and a half of results, though there are extensive supplementary materials. Along with the deity and the location there’s also the geology, topography, soil and vegetation. He notes that there’s no real record of climate change for Greece so the natural vegetation should be inferable from modern observations. If you’re wondering what the difference between geology and soil is, the geology refers to the bedrock and the soil is what overlays it. Bedrocks don’t uniformly underlie the same soils. From all of this he’s able to conclude that certain soils tend to be associated with certain gods.

The soil type which should come as least surprise to anyone is that Hades isn’t associated with a soil at all, but rather rock. Hades is god of the underworld, and his sanctuary at Cape Tainaron, Laconia, is in a sea cave while his sanctuary at the brilliantly named Necromanteion, Epirus, is on a rocky hill-top. What you want from Hades site is a connection with the underworld, so rocky crevices which plunge into the bowels of the earth are just the sort of thing you’re looking for. As I recall there’s a Plutonium (another brilliant name) in Hierapolis, Turkey, built over a geological fault which emits noxious gases, so that seems perfectly sound. He also attributes Persephone to rock crevices, and this is something I’m a bit more wary of.

From the table, the attribution makes sense. It also makes mythological sense. Hades abducted Persephone and took her to the underworld to be his wife. So the queen of the underworld should be associated with rock crevices. However, Persephone isn’t just associated with Hades. She was also the daughter of Demeter and with her she was a vegetation fertility goddess. She was only said to spend a third of the year with Hades. This was acknowledged by the Greeks who didn’t just make temples to Demeter but also to Demeter and Persephone. None of the temples listed by Retallack have this shared attribute in the main paper, which seems a bit odd. On the other hand there is a mention of a sacred grove of Demeter and Kore (another name for Persephone) at Cabirion, Boeotia. This might matter because often the reporting of the dedications of temples can be quite poor. I recently read a paper which attributed Temple F in Agrigento to Juno Lacinia, even though it’s been known for a century that this attribution is wrong. Names have a tendency of sticking. I don’t think this is a serious problem, but it does suggest where more research could be done.

The other factor I find problematic is that Retallack says that the idea that Greek temples faced sunrise on the feast day of their god is falsified by the data he’s collected. I can’t recall Scully saying that this was universal, though I’ll concede Richer may have. The reason I think Retallack is wrong comes from the same data in the table. Where he can discern an orientation, he divides the temples into eight categories for the eight major compass directions. If there was a random scatter then, of the forty-two temples he has directions for, you’d expect around six to face east, as opposed to any of the other seven directions. There might be a few more or less, but the chances of getting more than ten facing east by random chance are around 100-1. In fact from that sample set over half, twenty-six, face east. That doesn’t mean that an astronomical orientation was essential for a temple, but it does indicate a strong bias. Again, rather than undermining Retallack’s case, I think it potentially makes it more interesting. If we do have a bias to point temples towards the range of sunrise, then we can start asking what’s special about the temples where there isn’t this bias.

I’m not convinced it’s a universal solution for all Greek temples. In the case of somewhere like Selinunte there’s temples to (probably) Hera and a temple to Apollo and either Athena or Artemis within a few yards of each other. In the case of the many towns which had just the one temple in contrast it could well explain why they dedicated their temple to one particular deity, like Aphrodite at Akrai or Demeter at Eloro.

For another opinion on Retallack’s work, George Monbiot has beaten me by about three and a half years.

If you want to more about soil, there’s a 50% longer version of the same post at the black site (which has since turned grey).