1 Introduction
In 307 BCE, the democratic legislative assembly of the city-state of Athens voted to deify Demetrius, a military commander from Macedonia, as a ‘saviour god’ (theos sôtêr).1 Three components of social psychology underlie this deification: (1) reducing and resolving cognitive dissonance, (2) the cognitive science of religion concerning the human conception of divinity, and (3) the attribution theory of religion (see below, section 3). Together they illuminate the motivations and consequences of the deification of a present, intentional human agent as a voluntary, majority-sanctioned innovation in traditional Athenian religion. This innovation and its subsequent anchoring (section 4) took place as a group phenomenon, which makes social psychology an apt lens for examining these developments.2
The decision to deify Demetrius as a saviour god was a group response to his unexpectedly and in person having brought the Athenians salvation when they were experiencing terrible distress, as that is how ‘the many’ (hoi polloi, to plêthos) in the population evaluated their situation (Plutarch Demetrius 8–10).3 The assembly on this occasion also voted to deify Antigonus, Demetrius’ father, because Antigonus, although not present in Athens, was credited with having supported his son’s action. Since Antigonus had no direct interaction with the Athenians before his death in battle six years later, my discussion focuses on the deified Demetrius’ twenty-year relationship with Athens.4
As will be described below, Demetrius was not the first man deified in ancient Greece, but he was the first one who had repeated interactions over time with a human social/political community. And he was not the last, either; over the coming centuries, people’s lived experiences of long-term contact with deified leaders in the Mediterranean world constituted a continuing process that motivated many to reformulate their ideas about the nature, power, and goals of deified human beings and to anchor this evolving development of religious beliefs and practice by associating it with traditional ways.
That the Athenian assembly voted to deify Demetrius in 307 BCE of course does not mean that absolutely every citizen agreed with this decision; on such a complex issue as the nature of divinity as judged by people involved in the case of Demetrius, different opinions would naturally have been expressed because ‘experiential claims [relevant to religion] are invariably contested’.5 But there can be no doubt that a significant majority of Athenians favoured this outcome because the assembly’s decisions were rendered by votes taken in randomly composed meetings whose attendees numbered approximately 6,000, a total that constituted a statistically significant sample of the total adult male citizen population of 20,000 to 30,000 at the time of Demetrius.6
The Athenian assembly determined the official policy of the city-state’s public religious system—the citizens’ distinct socio-cultural package of ideas and practices.7 The views of the adult male citizens who constituted the assembly were influenced by dialogue with the women in their lives, who were concerned with politics and public policy despite their not being allowed direct political participation.8 Therefore, I include both women and men when I refer to ‘the many’ at Athens. The goal of the assembly’s decision-making on religious policy was to maintain mutually beneficial reciprocal relations for the community with the gods who were believed to keep it safe it in return for their being appropriately honoured.9
In keeping with this goal of being saved by divine power while living in a world whose total number of gods no human being could ever be confident of knowing, Athenians could innovate in their religious beliefs and practice because as polytheists they accepted that they might at any time come into contact with a new divinity whom they had not previously worshipped but who, they subsequently discovered, could help them.10 The citizens themselves made these innovations because their religion was a dialogically and communally constructed, open-ended system of representation of the real, rather than a dogmatic top-down system of knowledge.11 It also located the natures and powers of gods, heroes (in the Greek religious sense of a human beings who after death possessed power that could protect living people), and humans along a sliding scale of categories of being; it did not draw impassable boundaries among these categories.12 This characteristic gave the Athenian many the cognitive flexibility to deem it a ‘special thing’, based on their lived experience, that they had been given salvation by a being whose power revealed him to be divine.13 The resultant deification of Demetrius as truly a god occurred as a group phenomenon—that is, as a social-psychological process of representation constructed by conversations and interactions among the many at Athens.14
2 The Historical Background of Demetrius’ Deification at Athens
The deification of Demetrius in 307 BCE had its psychological genesis in events of the past.15 Following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, the Athenians went to war to regain their freedom from Macedonian dominance. They initially achieved tremendous success on the battlefield. During a lull in fighting in the winter of 323–322 BCE, Athens held its traditional ‘Memorial Day’ event, for which a prominent citizen was chosen to address the community with a ‘Funeral Oration’ honouring the war dead and praising Athens. The Funeral Oration of 322 BCE, which has survived in large part, expresses an overtly triumphalist message. Its presenter, Hyperides, proclaimed that the Athenians were now fighting the most important war in their history and were prevailing in this epochal conflict especially because they were doing battle to defend the honours of their traditional gods against those people—he meant Macedonians and their allies—who had neglected the worship of the ancestral deities in favour of worshipping human beings.16
Hyperides’ reference to worshipping human beings refers to the recent case of Alexander (356–323 BCE). Before Alexander’s time, there had been instances of divine honours being conferred on human beings by Greek city-states— the idea of a human being recognized as ‘more than human’ was not new in 307 BCE.17 Lysander of Sparta approximately a century earlier was probably the first living person to have been honoured with an official cult ‘as a god’ (Plutarch, Lysander 18) by a Greek city-state (Samos)—and the only one before Alexander with such a cult.18 In 324 BCE, Alexander let the Greeks know that he wished to be recognized as a god (Plutarch, Apophthegmata Laconica 219E; Aelian, Varia Historia 2.19).19 In response, certain city-states, probably including Athens, established a cult for Alexander’s worship.20 So, his case was a precedent for that of Demetrius, but there were significant differences: Alexander had never saved Athens, his deification had not come as the result of spontaneous enthusiasm by the majority of Athenians following an unexpected salvation but rather at Alexander’s own initiative, and Alexander did not have long-term interactions with Athens in his new divine status because he had been far away in Asia at the time of his request and then died in Babylon in 323 BCE before ever returning to Greece. Whatever cult Athens may have established for Alexander was short-lived.21
Consequently, Alexander’s history as a precedent for deifying human beings could not resolve for the Athenians the question of exactly what type of divine being a deified man was, nor, crucially, the question of what it would mean for Athens as a Greek city-state to have direct interaction with that kind of being for an extended period. In other words, Alexander’s deification gave Athenians no secure guidance about what would actually be involved in successfully anchoring the innovation of a corporeally present saviour god of whatever type it turned out that such a deified being really was.
Several months after Hyperides’ speech had promised victory because the Athenians were fighting on the side of the gods, however, the tide of war completely turned against them: to their utter shock, they were forced to surrender unconditionally. The consequences were devastating.22 The victorious Macedonian commander, named Antipater, imposed harsh punishments of a kind Athens had never before experienced: the stripping of political rights from the majority of the population, the forced exile of many thousands of families into the dangerous far north, and the installation of a Macedonian military garrison. We can scarcely imagine the depth of the emotional response to these hardships experienced by the many.23
It is critical to emphasize that Plutarch reports (Phocion 28.2–3) that this unprecedented disaster bewildered most Athenians; their defeat and punishment were bewildering because these catastrophes were inexplicable on traditional religious grounds.24 That is, most Athenians had a strongly held belief that the gods would save them from such dangers. Their bewilderment was compounded by the recognition that the imposition of their horrible sufferings took place on the very same day of the year (20 Boedromion) on which, a century and a half earlier in 480 BCE, the gods had unforgettably ensured Athens’ salvation in the face of a giant Persian invasion by favouring the Athenian fleet in the astonishing Greek victory at the Battle of Salamis. For the many, a calendrical synchronicity of this kind was salient.25
It is important to point out that well-known English translations of Plutarch’s description of the bewildered reaction of the Athenians to this disaster are seriously misleading because these renderings say that ‘the many’ (hoi polloi) concluded that ‘the gods looked down with indifference on the most grievous woes of Hellas’.26 In fact, the Greek text means that the many reached the opposite conclusion about the cause of their troubles: they concluded that the gods had not merely been indifferent to their sufferings but in fact had supervised/managed (the operative term in Greek is episkopein) the infliction of these horrors.27 This divine intentional action was totally undeserved in the opinion of the many because, as Hyperides emphasized, Athenians had fought and died to protect the honours of the traditional gods. And this conclusion about disastrous supervision by the gods in 322 BCE was not the only idea that underpinned the many’s bewilderment; it was also going to be incomprehensible to them that their sufferings would continue for the next fifteen years. Certain members of the Athenian elite flourished in this intervening period when a de facto oligarchy headed by a de facto tyrant backed by Macedonian power held power in Athens, but the majority of Athenian citizens experienced hard times.28 In short, the Athenian many continued to have good reasons to be bewildered at the traditional gods’ ongoing failure to relieve their troubles that began in 322 BCE.
With this background in mind, it becomes easier to grasp the overwhelming psychological salience of the total surprise that the Athenian many experienced when the Macedonian Demetrius saved them in 307 BCE and therefore why they decided to deify this particular individual: because it was he and he alone who had demonstrated the power to bring them salvation after a decade and a half of unprecedented oppression, and ‘power is the distinguishing feature of gods’.29
The surprise began with the fact that the many expected that Demetrius was going to attack Athens rather than save it because he was an enemy of Cassander, the leader of Macedonia, who in turn was the patron of Athens’ oligarchic tyrant Demetrius of Phaleron. Therefore, the main Athenian harbour was chained closed specifically to prevent Demetrius’ warships from entering.30 The barrier had been temporarily lowered, however, on the day that Demetrius happened to show up because the Athenians were expecting the arrival of the fleet of Ptolemy, another Macedonian who sided with Cassander against Demetrius.
So, when Demetrius’ warships did sail into the harbour, the Athenians initially thought that these were Ptolemy’s vessels. Very soon, however, they realized to their horrified surprise that they were mistakenly welcoming Demetrius’ fleet; they instantly became terrified that he would now destroy them. Imagine the depth of their continuing surprise when, to the contrary, they heard Demetrius immediately announce that he was liberating Athens and reversing the punishments imposed in 322 BCE. The many who were present at the harbour dropped their weapons, clapped their hands, and shouted for Demetrius to come ashore, hailing him as their ‘saviour and benefactor’. Demetrius of Phaleron then fled into permanent exile in Thebes, with the permission of Demetrius. His departure effectively restored the ability of the citizens to control Athenian policy by majority vote in the assembly, free of oligarchic dominance.
For Athenians, Demetrius’ arrival and surprising actions amounted to an especially notable episode because they took place on yet another calendrically memorable date: only one day after what Athenians regarded as the unluckiest day of their annual calendar, as dramatically demonstrated by the awful luck that the Athenian commander Alcibiades had experienced after he had sailed into the same harbour on that inauspicious day during the Peloponnesian War a century earlier.31 That Demetrius had just avoided that ‘bad-luck day’ was yet another indication to the many that they were correct in deeming this person special for having done what the traditional gods had failed to do for fifteen years: provide (from the many’s point of view) national salvation.
Soon after Demetrius’ astonishing proclamation, the assembly voted to recognize the present and corporeal Macedonian as a saviour god in gratitude for their city-state’s having been saved from a traumatic experience that had for the many been bewilderingly incomprehensible ever since its commencement in 322 BCE. No evidence suggests that Demetrius encouraged or coerced this vote.
As Plutarch reveals, what was markedly innovative in the deification of Demetrius, in contrast to earlier instances, was the Athenians attributing divine agency to a human being because he had saved them after the traditional gods had inexplicably supervised their sufferings in 322 BCE. Moreover, it was a special thing both that he was physically present in the community in incarnate form and also, because he was only about 30 years old, that he might be using his superhuman power to interact with their community for an indefinite period to come. For all these reasons, it made sense to the majority of Athenians to decide to deify him.
3 Three Insights from Social Psychology
3.1 Reducing and Resolving Cognitive Dissonance
In the 1950s the psychologist Leon Festinger and his research team proposed what has become known as the theory of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance concerns the changes in people’s beliefs and behaviour when they experience contradictions between strongly held cognitions (ideas, thoughts, beliefs). Above all, people become strongly motivated to reduce and resolve the psychological dissonance created by the perceived contradictions. This phenomenon helps explain why the majority of the voters in the Athenian assembly decided that they needed to take action to revise their conception of the nature of their city-state’s relationship with the divine.32 As with any significant and complicated set of ideas affecting members of a large group, there could hardly have been complete agreement among all Athens’ citizens about this significant policy decision. But with traditional ‘popular democracy’ now once again fully functional, the vote clearly did represent a majority view.
The initial focus for Festinger’s research was a field investigation into the psychological effects on the members of an apocalyptic sect in the US of the disconfirmation of the group’s strong belief that extraterrestrials would save them from being destroyed in an imminent global catastrophe by flying them away in a spaceship. Festinger also cited the nineteenth-century Millerite religious movement for the effects of cognitive dissonance on a large group when its belief in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ was disconfirmed.33 Later investigators have confirmed, expanded, and refined the theory over decades of study and experimentation.34 The scholarly consensus about the theory of cognitive dissonance is that it is ‘reliable’.35
The incontrovertible reality of the experience of unprecedented and inexplicable sufferings by the many at Athens in 322 BCE and then for fifteen more years must have generated cognitive dissonance. The dissonance motivated changes in thought and action to resolve this contradiction. The particular cognitions that clashed to generate dissonance for the Athenian many concerned their religious beliefs. Specifically, the troubles of the mass of citizens disconfirmed their cherished belief regarding the protective role of their patron deities. Their city-state’s defeat in 322 BCE and their subsequent punishments created dissonance between their focal cognition that if their community behaved piously it would be protected by divine favour and their strong cognition that they had been behaving piously by sacrificing lives in a war fought to protect the gods’ honours. As the theory also predicts, the arousal of dissonance generated a pressing desire to find relief by reducing or alleviating the contradiction that had been generated by irrefutable new information— namely, that the Athenians could not always count on their traditional gods to save them from unjustified suffering.
The dissonance that the many at Athens experienced was relieved by the generation of a consonant new cognition explaining their national salvation. This innovative cognition was that a divine being of the sort that Demetrius evidently was could save them when, contrary to all expectations, the traditional gods had originally supervised just the opposite. The assembly consequently verified the cognition of the many by approving the public recognition of Demetrius’ innovative status. Cognitive dissonance helps explain the psychological process that led to this new policy, in contrast to the explanation offered by some scholars that the decision to deify Demetrius was motivated by hypocrisy on the part of the majority at Athens, asserting that the voters in the assembly simply wanted to flatter Demetrius for their own advantage and did not genuinely believe in his divinity.36 In fact, the cognitive dissonance experienced by the Athenian many as a group meant that they now needed to construct new knowledge about their representation of this reality—that is, they had to revise their religious beliefs.
3.2 The Cognitive Science of Religion
The cognitive science of religion (CSR), the second of the three aspects of social psychology informing the argument of this chapter, helps clarify the psychological context of the revision of belief accompanying the decision at Athens to acclaim Demetrius as somehow divine.37 Insights from CSR reveal that this revision would have taken place through a ‘communally shared shaping of the world’ by the many to generate new cognitions about the possibility of the existence in their midst of a deified human being with soteric power, and that these beliefs had ‘truth by virtue of fit and generativity’ within the community at Athens that had experienced bewildering loss—that is, the many—when, as they judged the situation, the old gods had not saved them.38 That Demetrius had saved the Athenians—or at least the many—from their sufferings fit with the communal belief that he must be a saviour god because, as previously said, events proved that he possessed the power to achieve what was believed to be the domain of the divine—the salvation of their city-state.
CSR makes clear how this revision of belief aligns with the human conception of divinity: people tend to conceptualize deities as anomalous, minimally counterintuitive agents with intentionality who observe reciprocity in their relationship with human beings and who are anthropomorphic in their form.39 Demetrius in 307 BCE met these criteria. He was attributed an anomalous nature differing from that of the traditional gods because he had been able to do what none of them had done for fifteen years—provide national salvation for Athens through military victory and the restoration of democratic political self-direction. He was minimally counterintuitive in his divinity because, aside from his divine-level of power, he was otherwise recognizably human. He was reciprocal because he rewarded the Athenians’ gratitude with huge gifts of food and supplies. That this revision of belief about the nature of Demetrius occurred in the context of near constant warfare conferred salience on the developing process of reciprocity between successful leaders and Greek city-states whereby ‘power, victory, and protection [of a city-state’s population] gave a monarch divine properties.’40
None of this is to say that it was a simple task to undertake this revision of religious belief, that is, to complete the formation of a new cognition to relieve cognitive dissonance in consonance with the characteristics of divinity evidenced by the tenets of the cognitive science of religion. To quote Lara O’Sullivan from her study of the case of Demetrius, ‘The recognition of a god manifest on earth was … a complex cognitive task.’41 It was an especially complicated challenge for Athenians to figure out what sort of god Demetrius was because he certainly was not a traditional Greek god.42 As already mentioned, he was obviously incarnate, human in his form and daily activities. Traditional gods, as least as people learned from the epics of Homer, also ate food, drank liquids, went to sleep, had sex, and so on. But Demetrius was clearly not an Olympian dining on ambrosia and nectar, as the Athenians could readily observe, nor was he an occasional visitor to the earth only assuming a temporary corporeal reality while apart from other gods. He was constantly present, though presumably he would at some point die. In short, the characteristics of his divinity compared to those of the old gods remained unsettlingly but necessarily underdetermined.
This was not because Demetrius’ deification was a complete innovation—as described above, Greeks had previously deified human beings—but because never before had deification become a lived religious experience ‘on the ground’ for a Greek community for any length of time. Now, for the first time, a Greek city-state (and, as it would turn out, not only Athens) had to puzzle out how to live up close and personal—often in close contact and for long periods—with the complicated and confusing nature of this new kind of divinity. They were going to have to hold multiple concepts of the nature of God all at the same time—but, as modern research demonstrates, that is indeed what people regularly do.43
3.3 The Attribution Theory of Religion
The attribution theory of religion, the third aspect of social psychology being considered here, expands our understanding of the process of creating the innovation in religious belief and practice that came as a result of the Athenians learning to live with their new kind of god. It does so by illuminating the tendencies of human beings in constructing schemes of cause and effect to make sense of their experiences, a cognitive task that people are strongly motivated to perform.44 As this theory specifies, the most attention-getting agent in a situation gains perceptual salience, a cognitive heuristic that encourages attribution. Furthermore, traumatic life events can cause people’s ability to explain to break down, which can in turn lead to creative new ideas. In particular, people in non-stereotypical situations of inexplicability and ambiguity tend to revise their mental models of cause and effect, to over-attribute agency in the interest of securing safety, and to introduce radical changes in beliefs and practices.
These insights apply to the Athenians’ situation in several ways. First, their prediction error in originally misidentifying Demetrius’ role during the tense scene in the harbour of Athens in 307 BCE made them focus cognitively on the novel event that they now realized was unfolding—their being unexpectedly saved by an intentional agent with special powers instead of being destroyed. This focus therefore predisposed them to revise their understandings and belief.45 Then, primed both by their prior religious beliefs and expectations about the traditional gods’ role in protecting them and also by their interactions with each other as a group experiencing this novel situation, the Athenian many were stimulated to ascribe an innovative religious significance to the nature of Demetrius, who despite looking and acting like a human being nevertheless evidently possessed a power and an intentionality deserving of the status of divinity.
In these circumstances, it seems likely that the social psychological attitude of the Athenians as a group about Demetrius—that is, their mental model, their beliefs about him—reflected the effects of informational influence, by which people use the responses of others in their group to a new situation to guide themselves in reshaping their own beliefs and practices. Since informational influence is more pronounced in situations of high uncertainty, it certainly would have exercised substantial power on the interactions and discussions of the members of the group constituted by the Athenian many during the dangerous and confusing events of 307 BCE and the years following. Informational influence would have promoted an attitude change genuinely accepting and upholding the concept and the reality of deification; it would not have supported attempts just to ‘fit in’ socially by publicly mimicking the attitude change without truly believing in it, as can happen when normative influence is psychologically dominant. The important consequence of this conclusion for analysing the case of Demetrius’ deification is that the Athenian many’s attitude change should be regarded as a conversion, in which private mental models align with public behaviour, rather than as a compliance, in which people give the public appearance of accepting a mental model without actually believing it in private.46
In fact, as attribution theory emphasizes, that the Athenians in 307 BCE and thereafter keenly realized that they were living in a dangerous and unpredictable world strongly motivated them to construct an explanation for how they had been saved. Being able to explain their salvation to themselves allowed them to satisfy human beings’ fundamental psychological need to have faith that they understand their world and are therefore in the best possible position to be able to predict and to control what might happen to them going forward.47 To construct that much-desired explanation, the Athenians invoked the most readily available meaning system and the one of the greatest familiarity, in this case their traditional expectations of the salvific role of divinity.48
4 Anchoring Deification at Athens
The comforting effects that many Athenians felt from creating and accepting this explanation in turn motivated their anchoring the innovation of deification by connecting it to well-established civic traditions. This anchoring was achieved at the group level through numerous modifications of long-standing institutions (Plutarch, Demetrius 10–13, 23). For reasons of space, these institutionalized anchorings cannot be discussed here in any detail for the most part.49 They included the annual election of a priest associated with a cult of the saviour gods; this priest may have become the eponymous official whose name was used to designate the civic year, replacing the name of the annually chosen political official (the eponymous archon), whose name had traditionally served this important calendrical function. Additionally, the great Athenian festival celebrated to honour the Olympian god Dionysus was associated with a festival for Demetrius.50 Another anchoring was the building of an altar like those for traditional gods that was consecrated to Demetrius on the spot where he had first set foot on the ground in Athens. Two new administrative divisions (phylai) of the citizen body were added to the current ten divisions and named for Demetrius and Antigonus, in the same way that the pre-existing divisions had been named after legendary ‘more-than-human’ entities from Athenian ancient history. Also, Athenian ambassadors dispatched to Demetrius and Antigonus were now designated as sacred envoys (theôroi), just like those sent on official missions to the shrines of traditional gods such as Apollo at Delphi and Zeus at Olympia. On one such occasion, Demetrius was asked to deliver an oracle. After he had saved Athens a second time (see below), Demetrius was given living quarters in the Parthenon, Athena’s most conspicuous temple. The name of one of the months in the annual civil calendar was changed to ‘Demetrius’ Month,’ while the designation of the last day of the lunar months used at Athens was changed to ‘Demetrius Day’.
Two other anchorings merit more explanation as support for my argument. The first of these was the decision to add portraits of Demetrius and Antigonus to the very prominent, publicly displayed tapestry (peplos) that was employed in the city-state’s rites honouring the goddess Athena.51 The images woven into this large sacred cloth depicted a battle between Athens’ traditional protective deities and supernatural beings intending to destroy the human world. This now-redesigned work of art therefore visually joined the new saviour gods to the old gods in a shared exertion of the salvific powers that Athenians prayed that divine beings would together employ to allow their city-state to survive and flourish. Significantly, this official imagery visually and publicly communicated that the innovation of deification was going to revise and complement, not replace, the worship of traditional gods, who, the many evidently wanted to believe, would now resume their protective role for Athens.
The second anchoring provides more evidence for this development.52 This anchoring modified Athenian communal religious practice by offering an official ceremony of greeting to Demetrius each time he visited Athens. These public ‘welcomings’ (xenismata) for him were designed to be like those traditionally performed to greet the gods Dionysus and Demeter when they were believed to visit Athens for religious events held in their honour. One central aspect of such ceremonies was the performance of ‘a song for a god’, called a hymn.53
The Athenians commissioned hymns to be performed to welcome Demetrius on his visits to their city-state.54 An author contemporary with Demetrius, Duris of Samos (ca. 350–after 281 BCE), reports the version of the song publicly presented by specialized performers on the occasion of a visit to Athens by Demetrius in the later 290s BCE.55 There is much more in this extraordinary text than I can discuss here. Since its wording assumes the religious significance of Demetrius’ bringing salvation to the city-state, it recalls Demetrius’ first arrival in Athens in 307 BCE, celebrating it as an epiphany.56 This demonstrates that Demetrius remained a religious special thing for the Athenians and is now being asked to provide salvation from yet another external danger.57
Moreover, this song specifically links the Athenians’ innovation in deeming Demetrius a saviour-god to their traditional belief in the protective role of patron deities.58 It does so by associating his current presence at Athens with the presence of Demeter at the same time in the calendar, namely at the time of the year when the goddess’ internationally famous initiatory rites known as the Mysteries were celebrated at Athens.59 Those rites promised initiates a better fate both in this world and after death, and the ceremonies took place at the very period in the year when Athenians believed they had received divinely-provided salvation in 480 BCE.
This same anchoring effect of connecting the new to the old is produced by the references made in the song to Demetrius’ familial relationship with the Olympian gods Poseidon and Aphrodite. The specialness of Demetrius’ status is additionally emphasized by lines that describe his genial appearance and characterize some other gods (though not all) as distant, or not listening to humans’ prayers, or having no actual presence, or having no concern for the Athenians.60 Demetrius, the song says, is real, is true, and therefore the Athenians pray to him to bring them peace and salvation.
For these reasons, Demetrius’ tangible, responsive presence sets him apart from those of the traditional gods who have not resumed their roles as civic protectors. At the same time, the hymn provides additional evidence that belief in the existence and importance of at least some of the traditional gods both continued and was also compatible with the simultaneous existence of the different kind of divine being represented by a deified human being.61 This diversity of belief and practice aligns with the open-ended nature of ancient Greek religion.
One final point about this song is meaningful in considering the issue of whether the deification of Demetrius represented emotion that was hypocritical or sincere, if in fact that is a type of question that can even be meaningfully posed about human emotion.62 The point is that the Athenians reportedly not only had this song performed in public but also sang it ‘at home’, presumably in intimate groups gathered for meals or religious rituals. The ancient source for this report expresses a negative attitude toward the Athenians on the grounds that they were excessive in flattering Demetrius, but the detail about the hymn being sung at home is added only to denigrate the Athenians as lacking courage, not to accuse them of being insincere. Even though the hymn is flattering, the fact that Athenians sang it in private speaks against the view expressed by some modern scholars that the song was nothing more than a manifestation of public hypocrisy; if that were true, why bother to sing it privately?63 Rather, the pragmatic desire—and religion is above all pragmatic—to predict and control, an essential feature of the compelling human drive to survive and to flourish, propelled the many at Athens to make this innovation and to anchor it.64 In my judgement, the complex of ideas contained in the song reveals a significant step in the evolution of Greek religious beliefs and practices at the group level about the diverse natures of divinity, a process, as has been noted, with a history before 307 BCE, and with a history going forward influenced by Demetrius’ deification.
The vicissitudes of the two decades of interactions between Demetrius the saviour god and the Athenians following his deification reveal how contentious the process became of anchoring the innovation of learning to live as a community that had to interact with this kind of present divine being.65 As noted above, disputes occurred over specific honours and privileges granted to Demetrius, and perhaps even over the deification itself.66 As a result, the Athenians underwent a diachronic process during which their attributions concerning the special category in which they had placed Demetrius were modified in the light of their experiences with his agency.67
This process should not surprise us. Since, to repeat an important point made earlier, ancient Greek religion had no dogma, no scripture, and no authorized leaders to compel unity of belief, everything was always and everywhere subject to argument. One crucial issue emerged when events after 307 BCE showed that the new divine being’s powers were inconsistent—that is, like traditional gods in Homer’s Iliad, he could be defeated in battle, and especially by other powerful leaders whom Greeks were now acclaiming as divine, such as Seleucus and Ptolemy, former generals of Alexander the Great who after his death had carved out kingdoms for themselves.68
So, while Demetrius succeeded in saving Athens a second time, by repulsing an attack by a hostile Macedonian force several years after his deification, a couple of years after this success he was defeated by a coalition of rivals in Southwest Asia. As a result, the Athenians tried to reduce their connection to him—could it be, we might ask, that they wondered if his powers were only effective when he was present with them? In any case, when he subsequently won spectacular victories outside of Athens, the Athenians welcomed him back. And then he saved Athens for a third time, liberating it from a new tyrant.69 But when Demetrius once again suffered a major military setback abroad at the hands of a coalition of rival kings, the Athenians cut their ties with him, now preferring to seek salvation from Ptolemy, who as king of Egypt had been officially deemed a saviour (sôtêr) by other Greeks.70 Still, they agreed to peaceful terms with Demetrius, who then left Europe for Asia, never to return, apparently to the Athenians’ relief. In short, Demetrius’ effect on human affairs proved to be disconcerting, even to the point of leading to ruptures in relations between the community and its first officially anointed saviour god. As the Athenians learned, the power of a deified human being, like that of a traditional god, was ambiguous in its effect on Greek city-states: it could be wielded by a divinity who was capable of becoming both a ‘welcome liberator and a feared assailant’.71
Nevertheless, I maintain that the ascription of specialness to Demetrius persisted. This reflected the psychological impact on the Athenians of the highly negative memory of their fifteen years of sufferings and the immense feeling of relief that they had experienced when they had finally been saved.72 As for Demetrius’ own attitude concerning his ontological status, no statements of his survive, but his coins from the 290s BCE portraying him with the bull’s horns of Dionysus do publicize him as divine at that date nearly two decades after he had saved Athens for the first time.73
In the aftermath of Demetrius’ deification, the growing cadre of deified human rulers such as Seleucus and Ptolemy could and would come into conflict with each other, as well as with Greek city-states. This volatile situation produced unpredictable results for those people who regarded these ambitious men as religiously special things. This complex interaction continued even after the death of Demetrius in the 280s BCE. At Athens, the assembly dropped the eponymous priesthood to him, but they kept the two civic divisions named after him and his father. Two decades later, they recognized his son Antigonus Gonatas as a god.74
Eventually, the process of communities learning to live with this perplexing kind of human / divine being while continuing the worship of traditional gods led to the institutionalization of what is now labeled ‘ruler cult’, in which deified human beings ruled as kings.75 This development in turn promoted further innovations in Greco-Roman beliefs concerning how the long-term impact of the rule of a saviour god affected the administration and autonomy of large-scale political entities. In the very long run, this process contributed to the development in Christianity of the concept of a corporeal saviour god who was not directly concerned with assuming power over the political structures of the present, but rather with the eternal salvation of individuals after death, if they rejected the worship of other gods.76
5 Conclusion
Social psychology contextualizes the process through which the Athenians created and anchored their innovation of deifying a present human being in 307 BCE, continuing the long-term evolution of this concept. This process was motivated by the desire of human beings living in the perilous and changing world of the Mediterranean region in this period to form consistent cognitions about the new diversity that deification represented along the sliding scale of the concept of divinity and its exercise of power over people in the here and now of the world.
The deification of Demetrius at Athens constituted a significant step in this process because it was the first time that a Greek social and political community had the lived experience of close contact with a deified human being over an extended period of time and of the complex challenges, from cognitive to political, that this experience entailed. This psychological process endured for so long and had such direct consequences on social and political action by people living in Greek city-states (and eventually elsewhere, too) because it served the overriding human goal of securing salvation in every sense of that word, beginning with being saved from physical danger. As Max Weber said, ‘At all times and in all places, the need for salvation—consciously cultivated as the substance of religiosity—has resulted from the endeavour of a systematic and practical rationalization of life’s realities’.77
The historical realities described in this chapter changed the ways in which the Athenians in the early Hellenistic period conceptualized their communal possibilities and responsibilities in a world directly affected by external forces, which now included the perceived presence of a new form of divine power present among them. Social psychological insights from cognitive science help us to grasp how they accommodated themselves intellectually, emotionally, and politically to the dramatic change in their lives made necessary by what they had experienced. At the same time, their history also informs our understanding of the depth and complexity of the effects on human thought and behaviour exerted by the desire to reduce and resolve cognitive dissonance. In this way, the story of the deification of Demetrius emphasizes the value of exploring the relationship between the social sciences and the historical humanities as something ‘good to think with’ in the context of the cognitive science of religion.78
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For clarity in reference, it should be pointed out that this Demetrius came to be known as Poliorcetes, meaning ‘City-Besieger’; modern historians commonly use this epithet to distinguish him from other prominent figures of the same name.
As Crisp (2015: 45) says, ‘social psychology is all about groups’. See Fagan 2011: 3–4, 39–48 on the applicability to ancient history of the social psychology of groups.
On deification in ancient Greek religion, see Petrovic 2015; O’Sullivan 2017 (focusing on Demetrius and Athens). Sôtêria (‘salvation’) was the Greek term describing what the many at Athens believed they had received from Demetrius, indicating their cognition of having been saved as a community by an intentional agent who was in this case a theos sôtêr. For relevant instances of sôtêria in Athenian texts, see, among very many examples, Plato Laws 4.715d; on its frequent appearance in official decrees, see Oliver 2007: 212. For a contemporary example from another Greek city-state, see lines 8–9 in the inscription from Colophon dating from between 311 and 306 BCE whose editio princeps is Merritt 1935a. See Kearns 1990 on the relationship between a city-state and its divine saviours, and Mikalson 1998: 110–113 on the Athenian cults for Zeus Soter and Athena Soteira. Some scholars do not accept this usage of the word ‘salvation’, restricting it to the religious beliefs of individuals; see Smith 2017: 13. However, Caneva 2017 employs ‘salvation’ in the same sense that I do. For the ongoing debate on the applicability for ancient religions of the notion of belief, see Davies 2019; for a recent thorough overview of belief as conceptualized in the cognitive science of religion, see White 2021: 24–48. I use ‘belief’ here to refer to ancient Athenians’ cognitive concepts about the relationship between themselves and their gods.
See Wheatley and Dunn 2020: 145–405 for the most comprehensive analysis of the evidence for this period of Demetrius’ history. Mikalson 1998: 75–104 and Habicht 2017: 31–39 discuss the deification in the context of the diversity of Hellenistic Greek religious thought and practice; Dreyer 1999: 17–95 argues that Athenian democracy remained active in its internal affairs in this era and did not become subordinate to foreign pressure on issues of domestic politics; Thonemann 2005 explores the overtly performative aspects of Demetrius’ presence in Athens; Oliver 2007: 113–126 analyses the economic troubles inflicted on the Athenian countryside and its many inhabitants during this period; Bayliss 2011: 94–186 investigates the internal political stresses and conflicts that plagued Athens during Demetrius’ period of influence; Shear 2012 shows that after 286 BCE Athenians remembered their split from Demetrius as a response to a foreign enemy and not as the result of internal disagreement on an issue of political policy; O’Sullivan 2017: 82–90 situates Demetrius’ story in the context of early Hellenistic history; Seaford 2022 argues that the deification is the community’s response to a perception of transcendence understood as comprehensive power from beyond.
Taves 2009: 55. For disputes (whose dates cannot be firmly determined), see Plutarch Demetrius 12, 24, 26. The hostile words that Philippides included in a comic play to criticize Stratocles for supporting Demetrius’ deification (Plutarch Demetrius 12.7–8, 26.5) may well have expressed the opinion of some at Athens, though this incident belongs chronologically at least several years later than the assembly vote in 307 BCE. Moreover, Luraghi 2012: 360–362 shows that the strife between Philippides and Stratocles had more to do with a political rivalry than with controversy over deification. Bayliss 2011: 152–186 provides an extensive review of the evidence on Stratocles.
On the size of the population, see van Wees 2011; see Hansen 1987 on the operation of the assembly in this period; see Canevaro 2018 for the debate on whether decisions of the assembly were generally reported as the result of a consensus among the voters rather than as the result of a majority.
For this definition, see White 2018: 45.
See Pabst 2016; Blok 2017.
On reciprocity as a significant theological principle in ancient Greek religion, see Larson 2016: 40–56; on war as ‘central to [reciprocal] interaction between powerful leaders and groups’, see Chaniotis 2005: 74.
For surveys of the Athenians’ adoption of new cults, see Garland 1992; Parker 1996: 152–198. The open-ended nature of polytheism specifically meant that there was no necessity to reject traditional gods in order to begin worshipping new gods; see below on the peplos at Athens and on the hymn to Demetrius. For this point, see Rubel 2014; Anderson 2015; Knapp 2017: 178–179. On sôtêria as a component in anchoring the innovation of new gods in early ruler cult, see Paul 2016.
See Jovchelovitch 2007: 2, 32 for the definition of representation on which I base this interpretation. On the nature of ancient Greek religious systems, see Parker 2011; Kindt 2012; Eidinow 2015. See Versnel 2011: 5, 7, 11, 72–73 on the ‘inconsistencies’ resulting from the non-dogmatic nature of ancient Greek religious systems. On the much-discussed issue of the nature of—or even the existence of—belief in ancient Greek religion, see Harrison 2015a and 2015b, especially 2015b: 170–175; Petrovic and Petrovic 2016. On belief from the perspective of cognitive science, see Van Eyghen et al. 2018; Boyer 2019; T. Martin 2019.
Currie 2005: 177, 187.
On divine entities (‘superhuman agents’) from the perspective of the cognitive science of religion, see White 2021: 180–221. On the terminology of ‘specialness’, see Taves 2009: 17, 19, 28–48; on experiences counting as special things, and on how ‘deeming things religious’ as part of lived experience promotes innovation in religious beliefs and practices, see Taves 2009: 22–27, 99; on Taves’ interpretation, see C. Martin 2016: 535–536. See Anderson et al. 2019 on enactivism and lived experience.
As Currie 2005: 186 says, with Demetrius ‘the title theos [‘god’] is literally meant’. For an introductory overview of group psychological phenomena (‘collective beliefs’), see Hewstone 1989: 205–236. On groups as agents, see List and Pettit 2011. See Boyer 2018: 96 for group belief as a ‘cultural representation’; see Visvardi 2015 on collective emotion in the context of ancient Athens, and Budelmann 2019 on the group being the default context in which mental activity was situated at Athens.
The most detailed ancient sources are Diodorus Bibl. 18–21, and Plutarch Life of Demetrius, on which see Landucci Gattinoni 2008; Erskine 2018; Rose 2011.
See Herrman 2009.
Currie 2005: 172–190, who analyses in detail the evidence for the Greeks’ religious concept and recognition of a ‘godlike man’ (theios anêr).
Flower 1988, esp. 131–134, disputing the conclusion of Badian 1981 that Lysander did not receive a divine cult while he was still alive; Currie 2005: 159–160; Habicht 2017: 1–4, 172–173, 179. Habicht 2017: 4–5 also shows that the evidence for a cult for Alcibiades at Athens is unreliable; Currie 2005: 164–172 demonstrates that the cults and honours for Hagnon, Euthymos, Brasidas, and Gelon were not for them as gods, and that although Empedocles experienced extraordinary treatment from fellow Greeks that evoked identification as a god, an identity that he had himself promoted, he, too, did not receive an official regular cult.
On the much-discussed question of whether Alexander expressed his wish directly or indirectly, see Habicht 2017: 24–26, 165, 173–174.
Anson 2013: 83–120; Siekierka 2016; Habicht 2017: 11–26.
Habicht 2017: 160–161.
Plutarch, Phocion 26–29; Diodorus 18.18 misrepresents the situation by claiming that Antipater treated the Athenians ‘philanthropically’. See Baynham 2003; Landucci Gattinoni 2008: 104–108.
For disparate examples of the depth of modern emotional and intellectual reactions to catastrophes and the consequences for religion, see Schmuck 2000; Gil 2017.
See below on the wording of Plutarch’s report. The bewilderment that many Christians in the US South felt during and after the US Civil war about God’s role in their war-time sufferings and catastrophic defeat presents a useful comparison concerning the powerful social psychological impact of inexplicable defeat. See Wilson 2009.
Grafton and Swerdlow 1988. See Elk et al. 2016 on the human tendency to attribute significance to coincidences, and cf. the chapter by Klooster in this volume.
‘…
See Martin and Sun 2017 for the evidence for the meaning of episkopein, and for other similar English translations as well as in other languages. Textual evidence shows definitively that episkopein does not mean ‘to be indifferent to’ or ‘to ignore’; it signifies intentional, active management and oversight.
See Oliver 2003 and Bayliss 2011 on the oligarchic character of the Athenian regime after 322. Scholars disagree about how to characterize conditions in Athens from 322 to 307, but the ancient evidence reveals that a large majority of the population had good reason to view the situation negatively.
Petridou 2015: 38–39.
For the following events including Demetrius’ deification, see Plutarch, Demetrius 8–9, Diodorus 20.45–46, and the detailed discussion in Wheatley and Dunn 2020: 113–144.
The unlucky day was the 25th of Thargelion, during the Plynteria festival for Athena Polias. The episode is referred to in Plutarch, Demetrius 8 and Alcibiades 34.
For the application of cognitive theory to historical data, see Klocová 2019.
Festinger et al. 1956; Festinger 1957: 248–251. These effects notably included attempts to reduce and resolve the ensuing cognitive tensions.
Nail and Boniecki 2011; Harmon-Jones and Harmon-Jones 2015. Despite the origins of the theory in the study of historical groups, experimental confirmation has focused on individuals in laboratory settings. Festinger 1999: 384–385 pointedly called for more ‘studies in the real world’.
Cooper 2007: 6. ‘Reliable’ is of course not the same as ‘simple’; the effects of and responses to cognitive dissonance manifest themselves in diverse ways, for groups as for individuals.
See the survey in Bartol 2016.
On cognitive science in the study of religion, see Arnold 2012: 6–14, 236–243; Geertz 2016; Panagiotidou with Beck 2017: 3–16; Ambasciano 2019; Petersen et al. 2019: 253–434 (‘Part 3: Cognition’); White 2021 is now the clearest and most thorough survey of this relatively new academic field.
See Cresswell 2018: 31, 108 on these characteristics of belief.
Tremlin 2006 provides a convenient overview of these much-discussed phenomena; see also Benavides 2016 and Barrett 2019.
The quotation is from Chaniotis 2005: 252.
O’Sullivan 2017: 88.
The category of ‘God-man’ in ancient and modern Christian theology provides a provocative comparison that for reasons of space I hope to explore elsewhere.
Barrett 2019: 23.
Krueger 2007; Taves 2009: 14–15, 43, 88–119; Crisp 2015: 3–32; Malle 2011; Smith 2017: 36–189.
On prediction error and the effect of novel events, see Passingham 2016: 104–105.
See Crisp 2015: 49–51 on informational vs normative influence and conversion vs compliance.
On the human cognitive drive to predict and control, see Crisp 2015: 11, 29, 32, 37, 42.
See Taves 2009: 94 and Crisp 2015: 34 on the role of familiarity in explanation.
On the wider context of these various honours for the relationship between Demetrius and Athens, see Rose 2018.
Habicht 2017: 97 argues that Plutarch is mistaken both about the eponymity of the priests of the ‘Saviours’ and in saying that the Dionysia festival was renamed the Demetria festival. On the close association of the festivals of Dionysus and Demetrius, see Currie 2005: 137.
Barber 1992.
That the Athenians still worshipped other gods after the deification of 307 BCE is shown both by the report in Plutarch, Demetrius 24 of an Athenian decree that references Demetrius and ‘the gods’, and also by inscriptions such as Woodhead 1997 nos. 114 and 115, in which definite references are preserved to the ‘Saviours’, meaning Demetrius and Antigonus, and to Athena and Helios, and probably other gods whose names are restored in the damaged texts.
For this meaning of the Greek term ‘hymn’, see Arrian, Anabasis 4.11.2; on the characteristics of hymns see Furley and Bremer 2001: 1–64.
Furley and Bremer 2001: 29. It is not recorded when a hymn to Demetrius was first performed, but Plutarch, Demetrius 12 seems to imply that this occurred during the period when the institutionalized anchoring of his deification first started to take shape, not long after 307 BCE.
Powell 1925: 173–175 = Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 6.253d–f = FGrH 76 F 13. For recent discussions of the hymn, see Chaniotis 2011; Holton 2014; Bartol 2016.
Furley and Bremer 2001: 58, n. 174. See Petridou 2015: 105 on epiphanies as ‘constructing cultural and political identity’.
The enemy is from Aetolia, a region against whose forces Demetrius had previously made war (Plutarch Demetrius 41).
As Chaniotis 2005: 72–73 says in connection with the Athenians’ hymn, ‘Power and protection made Demetrios’ rule acceptable and even gave the ruler divine properties’.
See Clinton 2010 on the Eleusinian Mysteries.
It is important to note that the Greek text’s reference to ‘other gods’ (alloi theoi) does not mean ‘all other gods’ because it is lacking the article ‘the’ (hoi); the hymn’s respectful mentions of Demeter, Poseidon, and Aphrodite make this point clear. Olson’s translation ‘The other gods’ in the Loeb Classical Library (2008: 165) is therefore misleading, as noted by Bartol 2016: 505, n. 20.
Petrovic 2015: 434.
Rosenwein and Cristiani 2017 argue that this is not possible.
For example, Olson 2008: 163 n. 262 calls the hymn ‘a singularly embarrassing incident in Athenian history’.
Here I disagree with Boyer 2018: 100, 119, who argues that a ‘practical’ approach to ‘supernatural practices and ideas’ is characteristic only of pre-modern small-scale societies (and presumably therefore not of large city-states such as Athens) and that this pragmatism rules out the possibility of ‘religion’ or ‘spirituality’. In such societies, he argues, people ‘are not interested in “metaphorical questions”’, focusing on an ‘intensely pragmatic concern’, namely ‘They simply want their crops to thrive and misfortune to fall away’. It seems historically unjustified to conclude that the size of past societies resulted in different attitudes toward pragmatic and metaphorical concerns in religion.
These vicissitudes merit much more attention than can be offered here. As mentioned above (n. 4), Wheatley and Dunn 2020 provide the most detailed discussion currently available.
See n. 5.
See Taves 2009: 98 on this type of process; see Mari 2016 on significant episodes in this process at Athens.
See Habicht 2017: 59–84 on the cults for Seleucus and Ptolemy.
For these episodes, see Plutarch, Demetrius 23, 28–31, and 33–34.
Plutarch, Demetrius 46. See Habicht 2017: 79–84 on Ptolemy as sôtêr, and Luraghi 2019 on Athens’ creation of a relationship with Ptolemy.
O’Sullivan 2017: 78.
See Smith 2017: 40 on the powerful and lasting effects of negative experiences.
See, for example, the silver tetradrachm at the American Numismatic Society no. 1967.152.205 (http://numismatics.org/collection/1967.152.205?lang=en).
Kralli 2003; Landucci Gattinoni 2016.
See, among many studies, Erskine 2014.
Amitay 2010 argues for the long-term impact of Alexander’s deification as related to Christian theology; Litwa 2012: 71–74 discusses the deification of Demetrius as part of the background for Paul’s soteriology; see Martin 2019 for studies applying cognitive dissonance to early Christianity.
Weber 1946: 353. On this general principle, see Riesebrodt 2010; Smith 2017.
See Garber 2012: 97 for the quotation, a frequently used English translation of the phrase bonnes à penser in Lévi-Strauss 1962: 128.