CHRISTY CONSTANTAKOPOULOU Centrality and Peripherality: Insularity and the Appeal of the Religious Networks of Delos and Samothrace in the Classical and Hellenistic Periods

The study of Greek religion is going through a fascinating transformation in recent years. In the last couple of decades, one of the most dominant models for our understanding of Greek religion was Sourvinou-Inwood’s influential model of “polis religion”. Religion was predominantly seen as linked with the life of the city-state, the Greek polis. Indeed, one of the most famous summa- ries of this approach was Sourvinou-Inwood’s statement that “the Greek polis articulated religion and was itself articulated by it; religion became the polis’ central ideology, structuring and giving meaning to all the elements that made up the identity of the polis, its past, its physical landscape, the relationship be- tween its constituent parts”.1 While it is undeniable that a considerable part of religious activity took place within the framework of the polis, recent ap- proaches have underlined that some crucial elements of religious activity took place outside the framework of the polis.2 Within such a new methodological framework, the concept of locality is particularly crucial. Indeed, the im- portance of locality for our understanding of Greek religion tellingly reveals some of the inherent tensions of the “polis religion” model. Locality, in fact, is a pervasive element of Greek religious activity: heroes and gods did not exist in a vacuum, rather, through their cult epithets3, they were linked with specific locales. Similarly, the Greeks celebrated their gods and heroes in local con- texts, festivals and sanctuaries; all these local constituents of Greek religion are manifested in the many local religious calendars that survive from the an- cient world. In other words, religious activity took place on many levels, and most of them were linked with specific places; the geographical spread and appeal of such activities differed considerably in scale. We can classify the

1 Christiane SOURVINOU-INWOOD, What is Polis Religion?, in: Oxford Readings in Greek Re- ligion, ed. Richard BUXTON, Oxford 2000, pp. 13-37, here p. 22. 2 Irene POLINSKAYA, Lack of Boundaries, Absence of Oppositions: The City-Countryside Con- tinuum of a Greek Pantheon, in: City, Countryside, and the Spatial Organization of Value in Classical Antiquity, ed. Ralph ROSEN / Ineke SLUITER, Leiden 2006, pp. 61-92; Esther EI- DINOW, Networks and Narratives: A Model for Ancient Greek Religion, in: Kernos 24 (2011), pp. 9-38; Julia KINDT, Rethinking Greek Religion, Cambridge 2013. 3 Robert PARKER, The Problem of the Greek Cult Epithet, in: Opuscula Atheniensia 28 (2003), pp. 173-183.

76 CHRISTY CONSTANTAKOPOULOU appeal of cults in three broad categories, namely local, regional and panhel- lenic, although these categories are far from being unproblematic themselves.4 I would like to explore the appeal of two cults that transcended their imme- diate regional geographic surroundings and succeeded in creating significant networks of participation and ritual in the Aegean world: The cult of the Deli- an deities (Apollo, Artemis and Leto) on Delos, and the cult of the Great Gods on Samothrace. Both sanctuaries were located on islands in the Aegean Sea. Yet, though insularity was a defining feature for the character of these cults and the later expansion of their cult network in the Aegean Sea, there were considerable differences. Indeed, the insular location of these two sanctuaries contributed to a significant difference in their appeal and even in the nature of the cult. Whereas Delos was understood as the conceptual and religious centre of the southern Aegean world, Samothrace’s defining feature was its relative distance and marginality. I shall examine the development of the cult network of Delos and Samothrace in order to argue that insularity affected the nature of the religious cult practiced on in these two islands and contributed to the con- solidation of regional networks in the south (for Delos) and north Aegean (for Samothrace). The island of Delos and its cult network exemplifies the under- standing and use of islands as central nodes in maritime networks, whereas the island of Samothrace was the archetypical “distant” island, where access through maritime connectivity was perceived as dangerous and difficult. Be- tween the centrality of Delos and the peripherality of Samothrace, the concept of insularity helps to better understand the origins and development of these two important cult places in the ancient Aegean. To do so, therefore, we need to take a short look at the fragmented geogra- phy of the Aegean Sea and its islands, and the role that religious activities in general, and participation in the cult of regional sanctuaries in particular, played in creating networks of interaction. The Aegean is a sea full of islands. It is no coincidence that it was called Adalar Denizi (Sea of Islands) by the Ottomans.5 The presence of so many is- lands had an impact on the development of navigation. Since ancient naviga- tion, on the whole, depended on mutual visibility and sailing close to land, the presence of so many islands made sailing in the Aegean easier than sailing in the open sea.6 Indeed, the importance of maritime connectivity through navi- gation has been seen as a crucial factor for ancient Greek culture, especially since the publication of the monumental work by Horden and Purcell “The

4 Hank VERSNEL, Coping with the Gods. Wayward Readings in Greek Theology, Leiden 2011, p. 110 sees a “multitude of horizons: a local one, a national one and an international one”. 5 Idris BOSTAN, Ottoman Sovereignty in the Aegean Islands and their Administrative Structure, in: The Aegean Sea 2000: Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Aegean Sea, ed. Bayram ÖZTÜRK, Istanbul 2000, pp. 93-98. 6 I have discussed this more extensively in my previous work: Christy CONSTANTAKOPOULOU, The Dance of the Islands. Insularity, Networks, the Athenian Empire and the Aegean World, Oxford 2007, esp. pp. 20-28.