Des magistrats, des femmes, une déesse : réflexions sur les contextes de l’offrande

In the city of Corinth, after the battle of Salamis, the goddess Aphrodite receives an offering representing the women who made a supplication in her honour: the true protagonist of this offering is the city itself. In Hellenistic Crete, some magistrates of Lato set up a metric dedication accompanying the consecration of a temple to the goddess: in carrying out this ritual, they were acting both in the public sphere and with a more personal agenda. These two examples, supported by literary sources in the former case and epigraphic evidence in the latter, lead us to consider the offering in its context instead of reducing it to the object itself. Indeed, the reconstruction of the ritual strategy allows us to consider in its specificity the relationship established between the actors of worship (and their gender, status, expectations) and the divine recipient. In such a relationship, ritual practices find their meaning. In reconstructing votive strategy, the identity of the divine recipient also needs to be taken into account, in order to understand how the ancient Greeks established effective communication with their gods