Abstract
Nearly half of all poetic occurrences of hieros associate it with a place name, be it a city such as Troy or Thebes, or an island. Any polis is likely to be described in this way in the poets' verses, as a social space and, consequently, a privileged place of interaction between a human community - a koinon - and its gods. This is also true of the walls that surround it or the contingent that stands guard, underlining the inviolability and protection hoped for, as also attested by a differential comparison with the terms sacer and sanctus in Rome applied to realia of the same type. But protection is not only required in relation to the outside world. The " cercle hieros ", formed by the elders who compete in a judicial oratorical joust in Canto XVIII of theIliad, constitutes another type of protection, this timeagainst internal dissensus. Finally, the sacrificial culture that infuses relations between the human and superhuman spheres is irrigated by the semantic field of hieros, whose various expressions are analyzed.
