Greek priesthood as an office

What is attested

A Greek priest was not a member of a clergy. He or she was the office-holder of one sanctuary, serving one god under one cult title — the priestess of Athena Polias, the priest of Asklepios at Epidauros, the priest of Dionysos Eleuthereus — and the office existed because that sanctuary existed. There was no order to be ordained into, no seminary, no bishop, no congregation to shepherd, and no body of doctrine the priest was responsible for teaching or defending. Inscriptions that regulate priesthoods do so with striking specificity about procedure and money and almost total silence about belief: they say which animals the priest receives a share of, which days he must be present, what he may not do, and what happens if he fails. They do not say what he must think, and they do not require him to instruct anyone.

Appointment ran along at least four documented tracks, and they coexisted in the same city. Some priesthoods were held within a genos, a kin-group that claimed a common ancestor and controlled a particular cult — at Athens the Eumolpidai and Kerykes at Eleusis, the Eteoboutadai for Athena Polias and Poseidon Erechtheus. Some were allotted: the Athenian decrees for Athena Nike, carried on a single stele as IG I³ 35 and 36; the second is securely dated to 424/3, while the date of the first is not settled, provide for a priestess selected by lot from all Athenian women, with fifty drachmas a year plus specified portions of the public sacrifices, the later of the two directing the city's payment officers to hand the money over. This is the earliest surviving Athenian decree providing for a priesthood filled by lot from outside a genos; whether it was the first such priesthood is not stated on the stone. Some were elected. And from the later fourth century onward, across the islands and western Asia Minor, priesthoods were openly sold: inscriptions from Erythrai and from other Ionian and island cities set out the conditions of purchase, the buyer's obligations, and the perquisites that came with the office. Tenure varied just as widely — annual, for a fixed term, or for life.

The material rewards of office are the part of the record we can see most clearly, because they were the part that had to be written down to prevent disputes. Sacred laws itemise the priest's gerē: the skin of the victim, a leg, the tongue, a fixed weight of meat, sometimes a cash fee per sacrifice performed on a private person's behalf. Priests commonly received prohedria, a reserved front seat at festivals and in the theatre; the marble seats of the Theatre of Dionysos at Athens carry inscribed titles of priests and officials, though most of the surviving lettering is of Roman date. In the sale documents the arithmetic is explicit on both sides — the price paid, and the stream of perquisites and exemptions bought with it. These texts read like a contract for a revenue-bearing dignity, which is close to what they were.

Women held major priesthoods in their own right, and their tenure was recorded, paid and commemorated in the same public idioms used for male office-holders; how much authority that standing carried is part of the wider argument about priestly power set out below. The priestess of Athena Polias at Athens is the best-documented case: she was drawn from the Eteoboutadai, served for life, and was visible enough to be named in decrees and honoured with statues. Pliny, in his book on bronzes, lists among the works of Demetrios a portrait of Lysimache, priestess of Athena for sixty-four years (Natural History 34.76), and a statue base from the Acropolis for a priestess of Athena Polias survives independently (IG II² 3453), set up by her family rather than voted by the city. Herodotus tells a story in which the Spartan king Kleomenes, entering the sanctuary on the Athenian Acropolis, is stopped at the door by the priestess and told that no Dorian may go in — a scene that presumes a priestess with authority over access to her own sanctuary and no embarrassment about exercising it.

What the office did not include is as important as what it did. A Greek priest was not required for most sacrifices: heads of households sacrificed, magistrates sacrificed, generals sacrificed before battle, and the physical work of killing and butchering was often done by a mageiros, a specialist who was a tradesman, not a cult official. Divination was a separate expertise, belonging to the mantis. At Athens the interpretation of ritual difficulty — what to do about a pollution, whether an act was permitted — fell to exegetai and, for matters touching Eleusis, to the Eumolpidai, who were credited with custody of unwritten ancestral rules. So the functions a modern reader packages together as "priesthood" — performing rites, interpreting them, teaching them, judging them — were distributed among different people, and only the first of them reliably belonged to the priest.

How the rite worked

Selection procedures were written into the sanctuary's own regulations, and the surviving texts are procedural to the point of dryness. An allotted priesthood was filled by the same sortition machinery the city used for other offices, with eligibility conditions stated up front (citizen status, sometimes an age or a marital condition). A genos priesthood was filled from within the group, and where a genos held several priesthoods the internal allocation could itself be by lot among eligible members. A purchased priesthood was auctioned, with the sale published on stone: the successful bidder's name, the price, the instalment schedule where the sum was payable over time, and the guarantors. The publication itself was part of the transaction — the stone is the receipt and the title deed at once.

The working duties were tied to a calendar and a place. The office-holder had to be present on the days the sanctuary's rites fell, keep the building and its equipment, hold the keys, oversee sacrifices performed there by the city or by private individuals, and take the assigned share. Sacred laws attach fines to specific failures and specify who may enter, in what state of purity, after what interval following childbirth, sexual contact or a death in the household. Some priesthoods carried restrictions on the holder's own life — dress, diet, contact with corpses, sometimes celibacy for the term — but these were stipulations of that particular cult, not the marks of a priestly caste, and they varied from sanctuary to sanctuary with no common pattern.

The money moved in both directions and left the clearest trail. Cities budgeted for victims and for the priest's stipend where one existed; priests collected perquisites in meat, hides and cash; sanctuaries accumulated dedications and, in the larger cases, land, and their treasurers rendered accounts that were themselves inscribed. Where priesthoods were sold, the sale price went to the city, and the transaction is normally found alongside other public revenue measures rather than in a separate religious category. The financial ordinariness of all this is the point: a priesthood was a public office with a public revenue attached, and a Greek city administered it with the same instruments it used for anything else it owned.