Through the Mediterranean and the Black Sea

PRATIQUES CULTUELLES ET DYNAMIQUES RELIGIEUSES ENTRE LE PONT-EUXIN ET LA MER ÉGÉE DANS L’ANTIQUITÉ. ACTES DE LA SESSION ORGANISÉE DANS LE CADRE DU XIIE CONGRÈS INTERNATIONAL D’ÉTUDES SUD-EST EUROPÉENNES, 2–6 SEPTEMBRE 2019. By Vasilica Lungu and Adrian Robu. Bucharest: Bibliothèque de l’Institut d’études sud-est européennes, 19. Brăila: Editura Istros a Muzeului Brăilei “Carol I”, 2022. Pp. 326. This volume is a valuable addition to the wide range of studies concerning ritual practices and religious interactions in the world of ancient Greek poleis. The book, which includes eleven well-documented and thoroughly researched papers, is the result of a session held within the frame of the 12th International Congress of South-East European Studies in 2019 in Bucharest, with the participation of Greek, French, and Romanian scholars. The editors have divided the offerings into two parts, unequal in size; the first is dedicated to religious landscapes and ritual practices, the second to mythical narratives and cultic interactions. The individual papers range between minute examinations of one or several artifacts or epigraphic texts, through discussions of wider issues of topical import, and on to sweeping discussions of religious or cultic trends over vast swathes of space and time. They differ rather widely concerning the geographical areas concerned: from the straits of Gibraltar to the northern Black Sea, passing through Sicily, Laconia, and Thrace, with the main focus on Megara on the one hand and the (Western) Black Sea shore on the other. The time frame stretches from the Archaic period to the end of the Principate. The sources and methods used by individual authors also vary considerably, between textual hermeneutics and comparative studies; ceramics, inscriptions, and sculpture; and funerary rituals and initiation rites. François de Polignac offers a comparative study of the straits in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, which, being a special kind of religious landscape, have common traits in spite of their geographical and cultural differences. Similar deities and heroes were worshipped on both shores of the Bosphorus, in the Strait of Messina, and in Gibraltar. The cult of Poseidon and deities associated with him especially shape the waterways, as both the connection between two shores and the opening of passages. The cults practiced in these areas not only continue the cultural traditions of the times of their foundation, but also offer local novelties and evolutions, such as the cult of Hera on the Bosphorus. In a substantial paper, Adrian Robu discusses the religious makeup of the acropoleis of Megara, Alkathoos (Apollo with his many cult epithets; the three temples of Athena: Polias (probably), Nike, Aiantis), and Caria (Demeter, Asklepios, Dionysios Nyktelios, Aphrodite Epistrophia, Zeus Konios, Artemis Soteira, and Artemis Orthosia), in particular the differences between the cults attested on each, namely civic and nocturnal cults respectively. He attempted to check whether this difference goes back further than the fifth to fourth century BCE, relying on evidence stemming from the colonies of Megara and stressing the importance of the connections between the mother city and apoikiai. He found that the civic nature of the cults and the connection to the mythical past of the city are present in both acropoleis, and that the differences between them cannot be traced back to the city’s origin or even to the Archaic period, but must be later developments. Panagiota Avgerinou discusses the worship of Demeter at Megara. She presents a number of hypogea, two of them well preserved, dated over the course of the Hellenistic period. They are scattered around the city, not part of any one sanctuary, but interpreted as local, specifically Megarian variants of domestic sanctuaries. She discusses these finds in useful detail, especially the ceramic finds—fine ceramics and tableware—and the arguments for the presence of women in these structures. They are presented as small-scale, private versions of the civic cults performed at the Thesmophoria. But before getting to the interesting part, the reader has to wade through an oversized introduction including generalities about the city of Megara, about the cult of Demeter, about the Thesmophoria, illustrated with inscriptions from Athens reproduced verbatim in the original and in translation, all of which offer little that is new or connected to the issue at hand. Laura Favreau examines the cenotaphs in cemeteries around the Black Sea. The cenotaphs here have no special markers and, with the exception of Apollonia, are not placed apart from normal graves. Thus, identifying them as such can pose difficulties. Neither the absence of grave markers is a safe criterion (as these may have been fashioned out of perishable material), nor the absence of bones in itself suffices: traces of ritual are needed. Favreau offers examples from around the Black Sea, both clear and ambiguous cases. Unlike in other areas, no substitutes for the missing body were used here. The longest contribution to the volume comes from Vasilica Lungu. She examines in detail an unusual artifact: a tablet fashioned out of deer antlers, of uncertain discovery place at Istros or in its surroundings, and dated to the early Hellenistic period. After describing the artifact, its state of preservation, and the analyses undertaken, she embarks on a minute and highly erudite examination of the inscriptions and depictions present on the two faces of the tablet. The paper discusses in great detail issues considered necessary to decipher their meaning, such as the context of depictions of kantharoi, the origin, spread, and interpretations of the personal names on the tablet, the possible readings for the other words present, the symbolic meaning of the representations, and the occurrence of other such bone tablets in the Black Sea area. The artifact is interpreted as an amulet or talisman connected to the mysteries of Dionysos. Yannis Chairetakis discusses materiality in the context of magical rituals and chooses inscribed clay vessels for his examination. His samples (one lamp, one cooking pot, four bowls, and three drinking cups), coming from Athens, Salamis, Apollonia Pontica, Olbia, or Chalkis, are confined to whole vessels, excluding ceramic fragments. The limitations he has imposed upon himself by his choice of topic force him to search for similarities in geographically far-flung finds stemming from varied discovery contexts, with analogies that are sometimes much later than the finds themselves. Irini Svana presents a paper on sacred trees and plants in ancient Greek religion. She examines myths and rituals, including plants such as the oak, wicker, palm tree, laurel, and olive tree, as they occur in literary sources from Homer down to the Roman period, and discusses their symbolism within Greek mythology and within the religion of the polis. Her scope includes the entirety of Greek religion, without a diachronic breakdown. Luigi Maria Valletta offers a detailed discussion of the sources concerning the coming of the Minyans to Laconia, their place in the ethnic framework of the Peloponnese and among its mythical dynasties, and their genealogical and matrimonial connections to Boeotia and Thessaly. The part they played in the quest of the Argonauts and their connection to the construction of Minyan identity highlight the modalities by which various groups of people were able to relate to each other over time. Maguelone Bastide examines the cultic exchanges between the Thracians and Greek cities on the Black Sea and the northern Aegean. After discussing such cults as are common for Milesian colonies, the Apollo Ietros or the Syrian Aphrodite, for which Thrace played no part as a connection path from metropolis to apoikiai, she passes on to Thasos, whose political and economic influence was noticeable over Aegean Thrace, while the cultic one, less so. In the Hellenistic period, she argues that the site of Seuthopolis, which holds the oldest mention of a Samothrakion outside of Samothrace proper, stimulated the diffusion of the cult in the Western Pontic cities in the political context of the age of the Diadochi and the rule of Lysimachus over the area. This seems a rather risky leap to take. Iulian Bîrzescu examines the non-Ionic Archaic inscriptions of Istros, which are few in number and mostly graffiti and dipinti. He examines the artifacts, their context of discovery, their date, and especially the alphabets used (chiefly Attic and Corinthian-Megarian). Maria Alexandrescu Vianu returns to the topic of the treasure of sculptures from Tomis, which she had already tackled elsewhere. Here, she concentrates on the issue of the provenance of the twenty-four statues and reliefs representing fourteen different deities. She examines each of them in detail and argues for their coming from a single sanctuary (not, as previously suggested, from various places, brought together in order to protect them from harm). Such an interpretation had already been advanced, with the identification of the sanctuary as one of Glykon, which would explain both the variety of gods shown and the burial of the sculptures (once the popularity of Glykon had waned). AV opts for a Hekataion, simply because the representations of Hekate are, with five, the most numerous (although those of the Thracian Horseman, with four, are not far behind). The issue of how the various deities with representations in the treasury fit together is not thoroughly explored. The book has been carefully edited and nicely illustrated, in B/W and color. Somewhat bewilderingly, the quality and texture of the paper vary throughout the volume. The editors have chosen to place the bibliographical list for all the papers together at the end of the volume, which is handy. They have also chosen to employ a somewhat antiquated style for the footnotes, dispensing with a list of abbreviations and using instead truncated title citations, which force the reader to constantly look back in search of the first quotation. Over the past several decades, we have all become used to collective volumes with broad and sometimes slightly misleading titles, whose contributions are linked together by a common topic. Some such offerings are melded into a more coherent whole by the efforts of the editors to strengthen the links between the individual papers and the common topic. Here, this would have been impractical. The volume is the result of a side session of a much larger international congress, and it is salutary that, in this framework, it was possible to set these contributors apart and not allow the smaller topic to get diluted within the larger one. The session and the volume also illustrate an additional issue concerning collaboration between scholars. The question of ritual practices and religious interactions was always a central theme for scholarly preoccupations with ancient Greece, but the fall of the Iron Curtain has put an end to the unnatural separation between scholars in the West and East and has made collaborations such as this possible, to fruitful effect. The papers are held together by the commonalities announced by the title: the religious life of Greek cities on the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Accordingly, the editors wisely eschewed the attempt to shoehorn the volume into more of a unity than would have been possible and even necessary to achieve: the Introduction presents the papers and lets them speak for themselves. They show how scholars coming from varied backgrounds and using various methods with the same high degree of professional expertise approach with competence and enthusiasm a common interest and achieve an end result that is coherent and stimulating. Overall, the volume is a notable addition to the range of studies concerning ancient Greek religion, as it offers new and enticing perspectives on a number of research interrogations and brings into focus a wide range of issues regarding cultic dynamics and their complex role in society. The very fact of its addressing issues of such diversity in space and time has the potential of conferring it additional interest for a variety of readers. As the book brings together not only different types of artifacts and research questions, but also different methods and approaches to address them, it can make scholars aware of developments across their field

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