Abstract
As the Hellenist Jean-Louis Durand (1939-2016) put it, ancient Greece was a 'sacrificial culture', in the sense that it regularly performed rituals that we call 'sacrifices'. As a general introduction to this year's lectures, we proposed an embryonic definition of the term as 'ritual bringing humans into contact with supra-human powers through the killing of a domestic animal'. By ritual, we mean both a social device and a cultural artifact. As a social practice, sacrifice has effects within the communities that carry it out: this is the horizontal dimension of the operation. As a cultural elaboration, sacrifice places its human actors in the vertical perspective of contact with partner deities. This dual perspective is essential to understanding sacrificial ritual in the ancient Greek world. After closing this general introduction with a brief historiographical overview, the status of the city's "partner deities" was analyzed in Aeschylus' tragedy The Seven Against Thebes, where this theme is omnipresent and interwoven with that of sacrifice.
