The Cave Sanctuaries of the Acropolis of Athens are the natural fissures in the rock of the Acropolis hill that were used as sites of worship for deities of the Panhellenic pantheon in antiquity. Traditionally a sharp distinction has been drawn between the state religion practised on the summit of the Acropolis and the cult practice of the shrines on the lower slopes.[1] Recently, however, interest has burgeoned in the individual religious experience or personal piety in Greek society of which these cult sites may be the expression.[2] The proceeding description follows the order of the shrines from the Klepsydra at the northwest face of the Acropolis clockwise via the Peripatos round to the foot of the Nike bastion.
^Oscar Broneer typifies this view: “Very little is known about the obscure cults that continued to be practiced by lower classes of Athenian society after the Maiden Goddess of Reason had been housed in her proud temple on the citadel, but there is ample evidence that the enlightened leaders of the state did not look with too much favor upon the crude practices connected with the worship of these early deities.” Hesperia, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1933) p.347
^C. Sourvinou-Inwood, Further Aspects of Polis Religion in Oxford Readings in Greek Religion, 1994, notes that while the Polis mediated all religion private sacrifice could be performed by an individual p.39.
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