Abstract
Greek gods are deeply topical, rooted in the land. So what happened, religiously speaking, when a Greek arrived in a city that wasn't his own ? Starting with two passages from Herodotus, which feature Cleomenes of Sparta, respectively in the sanctuary of Athena in Athens (V, 72) and in the Heraion of Argos (VI, 81), we study the sometimes total ban on a foreigner, a xenos, entering a sanctuary, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ban on a foreigner himself sacrificing in a city other than his own, as evidenced by ritual prescriptions. A brief comparison is made with similar prohibitions on women. The restrictions imposed on xenos in religious terms are comparable to those imposed on them in political terms : intermediaries must intervene to give them access to the institutions of a foreign city. It's the status of the individual that's at stake here, which attests to the importance of sacrificial rites in determining membership of a community. The case of Cleomenes, who is forbidden access to the sanctuary of Athena on the Acropolis of Athens because he is Dorian, is indicative of this anchoring of the gods in the territory and the benevolence they bestow on those who have installed them there. But the narrative game Herodotus plays in this passage (V, 72), by placing in the mouth of the Spartan king the line that he is not Dorian but Achaean, also shows the importance of Homeric reference in the representation of the gods. The Athena of theIliad, the Athenian Athena and the Spartan Athena are not mutually heterogeneous entities, and the theonym says something about both the local roots of her cults and the shared imaginary that depicts her.
