Polytheism and Botany in Ancient Greece. Names, cults, narratives – PolyBota

Ancient Greek cities honored their gods by attributing them botanical names and epithets. Plants served as the foci of cultic activities and as means of anchoring the presence of a god in a territory. Poetical narratives evoked plants to capture a god’s prerogatives and his way of intervening in human affairs. Epigraphical and literary documents attest largely to this phenomenon. Sources span from the archaic period (8th 7th c. BCE) to the to the 5th c. CE and cover the Hellenized coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. However, they have not yet been collected, let alone systematically analysed.

The project “PolyBota. Polytheism and Botany in Ancient Greece. Names, cults, narratives” intends to provide the first collection and study of this evidence. It combines the most recent approaches to Greek polytheism with the growing interest of Humanities and Social Sciences for the role of the vegetal environment in the social life of human societies. It seeks to understand how the vegetal knowledge and environmental practices of the ancient Greeks participated in shaping their religious representations and ritual activities.

A multidisciplinary, bottom-up approach allows PolyBota to go beyond the state of the art and to attain four main goals: (1) Overcome the fragmentary and outdated nature of the existing scholarship; (2) Reconstruct the tacit and shared botanical encyclopaedia according to which Greek men and women may have made sense of the botanical names, cults and narratives of their gods; (3) Access cosmologies that do not correspond to the division between nature and society common in post-industrial societies; (4) Build a more eco-conscious narrative of the Greek past.

PolyBota will be submitted to the panel SH6 – The Study of the Human Past of the ERC-2025-StG.