Marialilia Cavallaro presents a working paper on 'The Shapes of Spartan Identities in the Traditions of Ritual Practices for Apollo'

The paper reprises one of the main points of my research in Greek history, aiming to underline the plurality of identities in the Greek societies. It is a kind of discussion that tries to show the very contemporary aspects of the research on ancient History, through an anthropological reflection on social behaviors which involves the relationship between religion and politics. Focusing the attention on religious aspects, I intend to analyze a kind of identity that is not necessarily connected with a principle of territoriality, pertaining to the modern so-called “liquid identities”, but that is no less founded on a strong roots of cultural belonging and social identification. 

The discourse on the forms of reception of the divine figure of Apollo, within cults and Greek festivals, finds in celebrations of the Dorian area a fundamental reference to understand the most archaic phases of the cults for the god. The study of the so-called "Dorian area" allows us to investigate a cultural dimension that is not spatially circumscribed but rather composite, specially on social level. If plural dimensions that cross the boundaries of territoriality were recognized from the Greeks by the time of the first colonization (VIIIth century), in the case of the Dorian Migrants, however, the original divergence of the relationship between ethnos and territory assigned to the identity's discussion a central importance: both within the formation of the individual Dorian communities of the archaic age, and, subsequently, with the establishment of the balance of power among the Greek poleis. 

The Spartan festivals preserved very ancient traces of this process of construction and acquisition of identity, that, conveyed by means of religious practices, intended to obtain the fundamental response through the participation of the politai, true agents of the identity. 

At the center of the narrative on the invention of a Spartan tradition it is possible to observe the figure of Dorian Apollo, as a god on which were founded the roots of the Dorian-Spartan community, both on a politic dimension and on a religious agency.