Question: Is there a separate pantheon that the Dorian Greeks worshipped on the mainland? I know the Minoans of Crete had a separate religion and I have heard rumours that the Dorians (notably those of Sparta) did not worship Ares but some other war god that the Hellenic Greeks mislabelled as Ares. I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter as I have found little about the rumour on the net.
There is no separate Dorian pantheon, but this is a good opportunity to talk about Greek mythology and how it's not nearly as simple as we usually tend to think of it!
Ancient Greece, as a whole, is not really a thing. At best, it's a general geographic area linked to specific Greek ethnic groups and shared cultures. Its borders changed many times during successive wars and expansions and changes of power, and often there was no overarching contiguous power, with individual city-states controlling their own territories, connected only by alliances or treaties. Ancient Greek people were likely to identify themselves as citizens of whatever city they lived in; if they didn't live in the city, they weren't likely to identify themselves as part of any larger group except for their ethnicity, which might be Aeolian, Attic, Mycenaean, Dorian, Ionic, Macedonian or others even less well-known. It wasn't until the Hellenic period that the many disparate parts of the ancient Greek kingdoms became universalized and homogenized, becoming close to what you could actually call a single unit.
This of course looks bizarre to us now, and that's because Europe invented the concept of nationalism in the nineteenth century. Nationalism, boiled down to very simple terms, is the concept of a single country having an identity that is shared by all its citizens - that is, it's nationalism in action when someone says they're proud to be Canadian, or that such and such is part of the national tradition or heritage of Germany. Before this idea of the country as an independent entity that provides an identity to its people, those concepts didn't really exist in that form; people would identify with their ethnic group (I'm an Arab), with their religion (I'm a Buddhist), with their specific home (I'm a Trojan) or with their family (I'm one of the Julii). They probably knew who was in charge of their home - Celts were perfectly well aware that the Roman Empire technically owned their land, for example - but it didn't make much difference to them, and certainly didn't convert them into Romans as a result.
So, yeah, nationalism is a relatively young concept; it's so deeply ingrained in most modern cultures now that it's difficult to see around, but it didn't take the same form for ancient people, and we're really just projecting our modern idea of what a country and people are onto them when we think of ancient Greece as a single country with a unified vision and people. This is also why movies like 300 or Braveheart that give impassioned speeches about defending one's country are exceptionally silly, since that concept wouldn't have made much sense to the people of that time. (They'll defend their homes, sure, or their people or their possessions, but a country? What the hell is that?)
But, anyway, the point of all this rambling is that, while we tend to look at ancient Greece as a single place with a single idea about religion and politics, in point of fact this just ain't true. The Hellenistic "unification" of Greece brought a lot of its scattered elements together, but there are still unique characteristics throughout the different lands and ethnic groups of the place.
To get down specifically to the Dorians, however: no, they do not have a separate pantheon, and there are no uniquely Dorian gods that are not shared by the Greek pantheon as a whole (although some of them may have begun with the Dorians - Apollo, in particular, probably spread to a lot of Greece thanks to their influence). One of the reasons it's so easy to generalize about ancient Greece is that it shared a great deal of its culture, starting around the time of the Myceneaens who spread their language and religious ideas around thoroughly enough to start a trend. The general core religion of most ancient Greeks is basically the same; Zeus is in charge everywhere, though he takes slightly different forms and attributes based on different populaces' needs, and the general tenor and practice of the religion remains the same. There are no separate, purely Dorian gods that we know of (though there are quite a few purely Dorian Scions and mortal heroes, for your gaming pleasure!), and it's likely that Sparta's patron was indeed Ares, albeit Ares worshiped in different style than he was in Athens or Olympia. This is very common for religions around the Mediterranean in that time period - Canaanite gods had specific cities dedicated to them but were still worshiped in others with slightly different attributes, Mesopotamian gods were spread all throughout the successive empires but still remained largely the same and so on. The presence of different ethnic groups does not always automatically indicate the presence of different religions, especially when those ethnic groups have been trading linguistics and culture for millennia.
However, it's very true that every part of ancient Greece has different religious influences thanks to being near different other cultures that they also shared with, and the Dorians are no exception. While in the post-Myceneaen age they were firmly entrenched in southern Greece and thus mostly being influenced by other Greeks, most scholars agree that they originally came from further north, around Macedonia and Albania, and therefore likely carried some influence down from that area. Macedonia was and still is influenced not just by Greek culture but by Slavic as well, and the Albanians have their own mythological traditions that could have influenced Dorian thought before their migration.
There is an outside chance that a war deity from a nearby culture could have come south with the Dorians, but it's very unlikely that he could have avoided being completely transformed into Ares by the time we have any records about their worship to look at, and if that happened we would have no way of knowing about it. Everything we know about Spartan Ares points to him as the preeminent Greek deity of war, not an import suffering from the interpretatio graeca.
We would be interested in hearing about where you found this rumor, though - we're always intrigued by scholarly theories that get into the little details of origin and cultural borrowing among gods, and the truly ancient Greek cultures are still fairly poorly understood.
The Minoan Culture was not Greek, though. They were in the same area, but they had their own language, culture and religion until their civilization fell and the Greeks moved in.
ReplyDeleteWe can only read their last language, Linear B, which is related to an extremely old form of Greek. The older, more uniquely Minoan languages can't be read at all and most of what we have from them is just economic records and supply lists. Because we can't read their language very well, we know only a little about them.
Their religion, from what we can guess based on artifacts and paintings, was probably really interesting and more heavily feminized than many surrounding cultures. I dearly hope someday we translate Linear A and dig up a Minoan bible.
We never mentioned the Minoans. The questioner already knew they were a separate religion so we didnt comment on them at all.
DeleteOh, certainly, they were gone long before anyone could try to Hellenize them. I just didn't mention them since the question-asker had already said s/he was aware of their differences and wanted to know about Dorians instead. :)
DeleteWe was some Minoan art on our mad dash through Greece last yet - super neat!
Greece was so amazing you became art? Wow.
DeleteAlso, I always thought that the Roman empire was fairly nationalistic, if in the weird way where everything is just an extension of the city's control
There are definitely the beginnings of ideas that will later become nationalism in the Roman empire. They're mostly rooted in family/aristocracy identity - the bloodlines and noble families are important, therefore their political conquests and who sits in the big chair is important. If Julius Caesar successfully conquers a bunch of stuff, the Julii are enhanced by his badassery. They might say "all Rome", and they mean it in the sense that the Julii are in charge of Rome and therefore all of important Rome, but what they really mean most of the time is "all of the Roman people/families we are currently allied with". John Q. Roman on the street who doesn't have an important bloodline to his name would lack that proto-nationalistic investment, simply because he wasn't part of it.
DeleteThere's also city-state identification within Rome itself, definitely, just as within other cities like Athens or Sparta. And the Roman practice of granting expanded rights to citizens that weren't given to foreigners or conquered people also moves in the direction of nationalism, though it definitely still wouldn't be perceived or used the same way it has been in the past few centuries.
It's important to remember that large swaths of the empire were actually just one Roman dude overseeing a large amount of foreign territory. That Roman guy was probably all about the empire, especially since it being in power meant he wasn't going to get murdered by a horde of peasants, but the people he ruled probably didn't give much of a damn. They wouldn't think of themselves as Romans even if the Romans had been ruling their territory solidly for the past three generations, because they were still a different people who didn't have any use for ephemeral, vague concepts like invisible borders and politics.
I saw that typo after posting it and was like, "Someone's going to come be smartass about that." Didn't have to wait long. :P
DeleteAnother good example of cultural identity vs. national identity is medieval England. It was conquered by the Norman invaders from France and consequently ruled by them, with large numbers of Norman nobility and people moving into it, for several generations (Richard the Lionheart was one of these Norman kings). But the Normans never called themselves English despite living in and ruling England, and the local Saxons certainly didn't think they had suddenly become French. There was no overarching national identity for anyone to apply, just ethnic groups and political powers conflicting and coexisting.
Oh, I know, I just love talkin about some Minoans! They're so fun and they have the best columns. You need to hold up some weight, use an inverted cone painted bright red! They knew how to roll.
Deletethe problem with the Minoans is well alot of what "Everyone knows" about them was kind of made up in the late 19th and early 20th century. Arthur Evans reconstittuted various things in ways that worked with theories he already held rather than an unbiased approach, those Red columns? He painted them.
ReplyDelete