Supervisors info:
Ανδρέας Χέλμης, Επίκουρος Καθηγητής, Τμήμα Νομικής, ΕΚΠΑ
Summary:
What motivates Pausanias in the climate of his time is the search for religion, and especially for him personally, of the old religion of the Greeks. A deeply religious believer, he does not seem to be particularly attracted by the syncretism environment of the time and the Eastern religions that were already very popular, or the abstract deities and deified values. In a journey of personal religious nostalgia, he seeks the legends, traditions, folk worship of the ancient gods of the twelfth century of Ancient Greece, which gradually lost their popularity and their appeal to the Great Panhellenic of the Greco-Roman world. And among them heroes, archetypal figures, mythical creatures, appearances of the sanctuary, cults, historical figures, monuments of both the religious and everyday civilization and the world of the dead, which also drives our interest.
Burial customs and cults are largely unwritten rules of behavior, action and share of man in the unity of the world, where the world of the divine and the world of people acquires unity. Rules of sharing in the holy and the unholy, the sacred and the sacrilegious, the world and the chaos. It is part of the sacred, religious law of Greek antiquity. And the sanctuary has its ambiguity: it is synonymous with union, unity, unification, sacryfication, holiness, but also with the separation, delimitation, disacryfication, secularization of the world. Religion differentiates to unify and unify to differentiate. The national and cultural unity of the Greeks is guaranteed by the religion and the concept of the sanctuary.
