In September, I said that the religious structures of the city replicated the socio-political structures, and proposed that a more detailed analysis would bear me out.  As usual, this generalization was basically true but a bit overstated, and today I would like to fill in some of the pieces.  I will focus initially on two aspects of civic organization:  deme and phratry. 

The etymology of both terms will perhaps be a good place to start. Demos means in a general sense "land" or the "people" in that land, and only in a more technical sense "deme". Phrater would, based on Indo-European cognates, mean "brother" but always means "member of a phratry".  Phratries had subdivisions, for example the genos, which for Aristotle (perhaps) was a kinship group.  As we might expect, then, a study of demotic and phratry religion will tell us a lot about the religion of the Greek people.  Unfortunately, the answers that it provides will probably not be answers to the questions we are most inclined to ask.

One final caveat before we begin.  When I will  use terms like "public" and "civic", it should be understood that the disctintion between public and private must conceived differently for ancient Greece than it is for the modern period.  In a sense, phratries were private associations, yet the examples to follow of phratry altars are clearly public in an important sense.  Similarly, an altar dedicated by a private person might say "anyone who wishes may sacrifice on it after achieving benefits" (Parker, p. 6). 
 
 

In the Cleisthenic reform, deme came to be the major building-block of the polis.  Larger structures existed (tryttes and phyllai), but the latter were mobilized only for particular functions such as warfare.  It is not surprising, then, that a large percentage of the local cultic activity of Attica was performed under the aegis of demes.  The best source for understanding the range of rituals are the so-called "sacred calendars",  inscriptions that list all of the annual sacrifices financed by the deme.  These texts no doubt omit any number of other rituals that do not fall into this category of sacrifices, and thus might give us a misleading view of the whole religious picture; nevertheless, they provide valuable information.  Thus far, five such inscriptions have been found.  Mikalson provides a useful summary of the content of the best preserved sacred calendar (pp. 424-5):
 

Phratry membership cross-cut deme membership; all citizens were members of a deme and a phratry.  It is not entirely clear why such (apparently unnecessary) duplication appears here, although such overly full structures have plenty of analogues in other social forms, for example in natural languages. There is only one phratry document (the inscriptional evidence for demes is much more extensive than for phratries) that focuses primarily on the regulation of cult; Lambert's translation is as follows (p. 295):
 

It appears that individual phratries engaged in very few rituals of their own, in contrast to the demes.  Instead, phratry connections are most common in the case of two gods at Athens, Zeus Phratrios and Athena Phratria.   Here the epithet indicates the connection with phratries, but not with any particular phratry; "Zeus . . . can probably be taken to represent the panhellenic aspect of phratry membership", as Lambert says.  While wemight perhaps disagree with this formulation, it gets the essential issue, that Zeus Phratrios is somehow the god of an Athenian or Greek collective, and not a regional god.  Both these gods of the phratry, along with Apollo Patroos, "ancestral Apollo", are frequently mentioned in phratry documents.  For example, an altar found in the central marketplace of Athens is inscribed "Of Zeus Phratrios and of Athena Phratria"; the same text occurs on an altar in the deme of Skambonidai, in the northern part of the city.   A marker stone in the central marketplace holds the inscription "Sacred to Zeus Phratrios and Athena".
 
 

The problems that face anyone trying to make sense of such evidence are daunting.  Clearly the cultic system changed substantially over time, though our evidence comes mostly from a finite and relatively later period (see the earlier lecture).  Thus, any attempt to trace this evolution over time is problematic, though a consistent model of change would be invaluable for interpreting the extant sources.  As in many other areas of classics, then, scholars engage in a circular process of interpretation that they hope is not vicious. Whitehead, for example,  sees the Cleisthenic reforms as centralizing in the demes earlier cults that had previously been entrusted to, e.g., phratries, and believes that the phratries, as indicia of Ionian descent, takes many of these rituals to be quite ancient.  Positive evidence, however, is completely lacking in most cases, and readers of the secondary literature are warned to take all conclusions they read with care.

Having said this, let me then ask:  what do we make of this evidence?  Well, first of all, our evidence is largely conditioned by the genres into which our inscriptions fall.  Public inscriptions in Athens fall into a small number of categories:  they most often record laws passed by the assembly, information (e.g., calendrical data) useful to the masses of citizens; they record services rendered to the state or to associations within it; or they serve to identify what objects are (like boundary stones or altars). It would appear that the ancient Athenians were mostly concerned with the financing of cult, and not particularly with the details of it, given that we do not have anything approaching a liturgical text, but plenty of inscriptions that either thank an individual for a donation or else that prescribe who will pay for what sacrifical animals.  But this is not necessarily a reflection of the nature of Greek piety; rather, it is an indication of what was felt worthy of continued remembrance. 

On the other hand, we do learn from these inscriptions something of the role that different subsections of the Athenian polis played in local and city cult, at least for the late classical and early Hellenistic periods.  Some city cults were in the hands of the local (deme) officials, whereas other deme cults replicated city cults (for example, the relation between the City and Rural Dionysia).  Some gods like Athena, the patron of Athens, were, like the citizen body itself, "of the phratry":  in other words, the gods belonged to the same social organization as the citizens themselves, though they participated differently in it.

By way of analogy, it is perhaps worthewhile to consider one of the Linear B texts that has religious content, to show that these issues apply well beyond Athens itself:  Kn02 (Ventris-Chadwick).
 

Jones, Nicholas, Public Organization in Ancient Greece, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Association, 1987.

-----, The Associations of Classical Athens, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Lambert, S. D., The Phratries of Attica, 2nd ed., University of Michigan Press, 1998

Mikalson, Jon, "Religion in the Attic Demes", American Journal of Philology 98 (1977) 424-435.

Osborne, Robin, Demos:  The Discover of Classical Attika, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Parker, Robert, Athenian Religion, Clarendon Press, 1996.

Traill, John, The Political Organization of Attica, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1975.

Whitehead, David, The Demes of Attica, Princeton University Press, 1986.