Isis was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. Isis was first mentioned in the Old Kingdom as one of the main characters of the Osiris myth, in which she resurrects her slain brother and husband, the divine king Osiris, and produces and protects his heir, Horus. She was believed to help the dead enter the afterlife as she had helped Osiris, and she was considered the divine mother of the pharaoh, who was likened to Horus. Her maternal aid was invoked in healing spells to benefit ordinary people. Originally, she played a limited role in royal rituals and temple rites, although she was more prominent in funerary practices and magical texts. She was usually portrayed in art as a human woman wearing a throne-like hieroglyph on her head. During the New Kingdom, as she took on traits that originally belonged to Hathor, the preeminent goddess of earlier times, Isis was portrayed wearing Hathor's headdress: a sun disk between the horns of a cow.
Ancient Greece was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity, that comprised a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states and other territories. Most of these regions were officially unified only once, for 13 years, under Alexander the Great's empire from 336 to 323 BC. In Western history, the era of classical antiquity was immediately followed by the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine period.
Religious practices in ancient Greece encompassed a collection of beliefs, rituals, and mythology, in the form of both popular public religion and cult practices. The application of the modern concept of "religion" to ancient cultures has been questioned as anachronistic. The ancient Greeks did not have a word for 'religion' in the modern sense. Likewise, no Greek writer known to us classifies either the gods or the cult practices into separate 'religions'. Instead, for example, Herodotus speaks of the Hellenes as having "common shrines of the gods and sacrifices, and the same kinds of customs."
Cleomenes I was Agiad King of Sparta from c. 524 to c. 490 BC. One of the most important Spartan kings, Cleomenes was instrumental in organising the Greek resistance against the Persian Empire of Darius, as well as shaping the geopolitical balance of Classical Greece.
Pleistoanax, also spelled Plistoanax, was Agiad king of Sparta from 458 to 409 BC. He was the leader of the peace party in Sparta at a time of violent confrontations against Athens for the hegemony over Greece.
Hero cults were one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion. In Homeric Greek, "hero" refers to the mortal offspring of a human and a god. By the historical period, however, the word came to mean specifically a dead man, venerated and propitiated at his tomb or at a designated shrine, because his fame during life or his unusual manner of death gave him power to support and protect the living. A hero was more than human but less than a god, and various kinds of minor supernatural figures came to be assimilated to the class of heroes; the distinction between a hero and a god was less than certain, especially in the case of Heracles, the most prominent, but atypical hero.
Pyanopsia (Πυανόψια) or Pyanepsia (Πυανέψια) was an ancient Athenian festival held in honor of Apollo in Athens on the 7th day of the month Pyanepsion (October/November). Its name literally means "bean-stewing", in reference to one of the sacred offerings given during this time, and is taken from the Greek words πύανος - pyanos "bean" and ἕψειν - hepsein "to boil".
Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de Ste. Croix,, known informally as Croicks, was a British historian who specialised in examining Ancient Greece from a Marxist perspective. He was Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at New College, Oxford, from 1953 to 1977, where he taught scholars including Robin Lane Fox, Robert Parker and Nicholas Richardson.
The Macedonians were an ancient tribe that lived on the alluvial plain around the rivers Haliacmon and lower Axios in the northeastern part of mainland Greece. Essentially an ancient Greek people, they gradually expanded from their homeland along the Haliacmon valley on the northern edge of the Greek world, absorbing or driving out neighbouring non-Greek tribes, primarily Thracian and Illyrian. They spoke Ancient Macedonian, which is usually classified by scholars as a dialect of Northwest Doric Greek, and occasionally as a distinct sister language of Greek or an Aeolic Greek dialect. However, the prestige language of the region during the Classical era was Attic Greek, replaced by Koine Greek during the Hellenistic era. Their religious beliefs mirrored those of other Greeks, following the main deities of the Greek pantheon, although the Macedonians continued Archaic burial practices that had ceased in other parts of Greece after the 6th century BC. Aside from the monarchy, the core of Macedonian society was its nobility. Similar to the aristocracy of neighboring Thessaly, their wealth was largely built on herding horses and cattle.
Lycurgus was a statesman and logographer in Ancient Greece. In the aftermath of the Athenian defeat at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, he became the leading figure in Athenian politics, taking control of Athenian finances and pushing through a range of measures which drastically increased Athens' revenues. This money was used to expand the navy, improve the city's fortifications, develop the temples and religious ceremonies, and to build up a hefty reserve. He also encouraged the restoration of traditional values and prosecuted those who fell short of his expectations of civic behaviour. Because of his leading role, the period from 338 to 324 BC is often known in modern scholarship as the "Age of Lycurgus."
The Adonia was a festival celebrated annually by women in ancient Greece to mourn the death of Adonis, the consort of Aphrodite. It is best attested in classical Athens, though other sources provide evidence for the ritual mourning of Adonis elsewhere in the Greek world, including Hellenistic Alexandria and Argos in the second century AD.
Peter Sidney Derow was Hody Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Wadham College, Oxford and University Lecturer in Ancient History from 1977 to 2006. As a scholar he was most noted for his work on Hellenistic and Roman Republican history and epigraphy, particularly on the histories of Polybius.
Hypsistarians, i.e. worshippers of the Hypsistos, and similar variations of the term first appear in the writings of Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa, about AD 374. The term has been linked to a body of inscriptions that date from around 100 AD to around 400 AD, mostly small votive offerings, but also including altars and stelae, dedicated to Theos Hypsistos, or sometimes simply Hypsistos, mainly found in Asia Minor and the Black Sea coasts that are today part of Russia.
The concept of Hellenistic religion as the late form of Ancient Greek religion covers any of the various systems of beliefs and practices of the people who lived under the influence of ancient Greek culture during the Hellenistic period and the Roman Empire. There was much continuity in Hellenistic religion: people continued to worship the Greek gods and to practice the same rites as in Classical Greece.
Metageitnia was an Ancient Greek festival held in Athens during the month Metageitnion (August/September) in the honor of Metageitnius Apollo. The month of Metageitnion was named after the festival Metageitnia, which celebrated the migration of Theseus from Melite to Diomeia. The celebration of the festival itself declined over time and was replaced by the Apaturia. The festival evolved into a celebration of migrations, immigrations, departures, and colonizations among the Ionians - Metageitnius Apollo presided over the metoikia.
The Pandia was an ancient state festival attested as having been held annually at Athens as early as the time of Demosthenes. Although little that is known of the Pandia is certain, it was probably a festival for Zeus, and was celebrated in the spring after the City Dionysia in the middle of the month of Elaphebolion.
The 'Hiera Orgas', meaning ‘sacred meadow’, was a site which featured in at least two conflicts between Athens and Megara.
Archias of Thurii in Magna Graecia was an actor turned military agent of the Macedonian general Antipater in the 4th century BCE in ancient Greece. He was nicknamed "the hunter of the exiles" (φυγαδοθήρας).
Esther Eidinow is a British ancient historian and academic. She specialises in ancient Greece, particularly ancient Greek religion and magic. She has been Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol since 2017.
Sara B. Aleshire was an American epigrapher and historian of ancient Greek religion, best known for her work on the Asclepieion of Athens, Athenian religious inscriptions, and Athenian prosopography.
