Heroes, Gods and Demons in the Religious Life of Akrai (Sicily) in Hellenistic Age

Abstract

Entrusting the passage of souls on the other side of Acheron, people places in the ancient tombs a donation for the “ferryman” and a funeral wealth that could somehow serve the deceased in his eternal abode in Hades. Among the most common, as well as pottery, can be found anthropomorphic and zoomorphic clay statuettes, linked by a direct thread to the sphere of the divine. In this paper, we want to pay attention on the small Akrai, sub-colony of Syracuse, where since its founding in the second quarter of the 7th century BC, the religious life of its inhabitants in pursuit of peace, under the watchful eye and detached of the Olympian pantheon, was focused to make benevolent the souls of the dead or to exorcise the evil forces that in the mouth of poets, had taken the monstrous form notes in mythology. The phenomenon of the heroic cult in Akrai had found, especially in the Hellenistic age, a not indifferent political support, in the person of Hiero II, king of Syracuse. The stone quarry (latomeion) on the south-eastern of Acremonte, already active in the late 6th century BC, changes destination towards the end of Agathocles’s kingdom (4th century BC), when we assist its transformation into a worship place whose evidence has also inspired the scholarly name “Templi Ferali”, perhaps attributable to Paolo Orsi. Some materials, finally, from the Judica Collection and from stores of the Archaeological Museum in Syracuse, allow us to glimpse the divine and monstrous forms who, as glimmers of light in the darkness that still reigns on our knowledge of the religious sense and beliefs of Siceliotes, accompanied the earthly journey of the Acrenses.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v4n1p479