Samothrace

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The gods of Samothrace had names, and the names were not to be spoken. In a sanctuary on a single island in the north Aegean, alone among the great mystery seats, their rite was conducted in two tongues — Greek, and a sacred language older than Greek that the spade has since pulled out of the ground. Mount Fengari — Saos to the ancients — lifts a mile of rock above the shipping lanes, midway between the Troad and Mount Athos, and from this summit, in the thirteenth book of the Iliad, Poseidon watches the fighting at Troy. At the mountain’s northern foot, pressed into a cleft between two torrent ravines and facing the water, lies the Sanctuary of the Great Gods: three narrow terraces immediately west of the ancient city’s ramparts. Every pilgrim came by ship, and what the gods of this place gave, before anything else, was safety on the sea that brought them.

Who those gods are, the sanctuary itself refused to say. Its own inscriptions name them only as the Theoi Megaloi, the Great Gods; the literary record, beginning with Herodotus, calls them the Kabeiroi; their proper names were not to be spoken. The third-century BCE writer Mnaseas set down the guarded names — Axieros, the Great Mother, whom the Greeks recognized as Demeter; Axiokersos and Axiokersa, matched with Hades and Persephone; the attendant Kadmilos, identified with Hermes. At the center sits the Mother, enthroned with a lion on Samothracian coins; the magnetic iron of her island was worked into rings for her initiates.

The cult is older than the Greek spoken in it. Thracian tribes settled the island’s highlands between about 1100 and 900 BCE; Greek colonists arrived by the Archaic period, and the two peoples lived side by side. Diodorus Siculus records that the first inhabitants used an ancient language peculiar to themselves, many words of which still sounded in the ritual of the sacrifices in his own day, the first century BCE — and the spade bears him out, for ceramic fragments of the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, from the island and from its mainland station at Zone, carry the Thracian tongue written in Greek letters. Alone among the great sanctuaries of the mystery cults, Samothrace performed its rites in two languages: Greek, and something older than Greece.

Initiation here ran on terms no other mystery seat offered. Eleusis bound its rites to the calendar — the civic procession from Athens in Boedromion, the year’s wait before the higher grade. Samothrace initiated on demand, whenever enough pilgrims had come off the ships, any day of the sailing season from April through October. Its two degrees — myesis, which made the mystai, and the rarer, optional epopteia — could be taken in sequence even on a single day, as the inscriptions attest. Nor was there any screening by station. “If you could make it to the island and bore no bloodguilt — whether enslaved, free, Greek, non-Greek, male, or female — you had the right to be initiated,” says Bonna Wescoat, the excavation’s director. The one examination was moral: the priest asked each candidate the worst deed of his life. Sparta supplied the famous answers — one commander replied that if any such deed existed, the gods themselves would know it; Lysander asked whether the demand came from the priest or from the gods, and, told it came from the gods, said, “Then do you take yourself out of my way, and I will tell them in case they inquire.”

The reward was concrete. The Great Gods appear to those of their initiates who call upon them in the midst of perils, above all the perils of the sea — a promise with weight on every deck in the Aegean. Initiates, Diodorus adds, came away more pious, more just, better than before. The tokens of the compact were a crimson sash knotted around the waist and a ring of magnetized island iron — rings excavators have lifted from the stoa and central valley, left as thank-offerings for safe passage.

Of the central act, nothing. “The details of the initiatory rite are guarded among the matters not to be divulged,” Diodorus writes, “and are communicated to the initiates alone.” The oath held across a thousand years; no ancient author set down what the night showed. Herodotus, who writes of the Samothracian rites as a man who has passed through them, will say only that whoever has been initiated “understands what my meaning is.” What survives is the rite’s apparatus. It happened at night: lamps and torch supports litter the ground. Candidates went blindfolded; din and darkness loosened them from themselves on the torchlit descent down the Sacred Way. In the cult buildings are bothroi, channels for pouring libations into the earth; tens of thousands of conical drinking bowls lie across both hills, many snapped in half, one half left for the god. Boundary stones in Greek and in Latin warn the uninitiated away. One report claims a glimpse inside: Hippolytus, transmitting a Gnostic source, says that in the temple of the Samothracians stood two bronze images of naked men, hands stretched toward heaven — the ithyphallic figures whose sacred story, Herodotus notes, the mysteries told.

Myth makes the island a hinge of the world’s genealogy. Here Zeus and the Atlantid Electra had their children: Dardanus, who crossed to Asia and founded the line of Troy; Iasion, the first to initiate strangers into the mysteries; and Harmonia — in the Samothracian account Iasion’s sister — whom Cadmus, initiated while searching for Europa, married in the first wedding for which the gods themselves provided the feast. Jason, the Dioscuri, Heracles, and Orpheus took the rites in their turn. And through Dardanus the Great Gods became ancestral to Rome itself: Aeneas, and the Penates he carried out of Troy, descend from this island — a genealogy Rome remembered.

Marble came suddenly. For three centuries the cult made do with modest local stone; around 340 BCE the Hall of Choral Dancers rose, earliest of the great marble buildings, wrapped in a frieze of some nine hundred dancing maidens — and Wescoat suggests Philip II of Macedon himself may have commissioned it. The main altar followed within the decade, the Hieron by about 325 BCE, bearing dedications of Philip III Arrhidaios and Alexander IV. Then the successor dynasties competed in devotion. Ptolemy II Philadelphos, lord of Alexandria, bridged the eastern torrent with a monumental gateway; Queen Arsinoe II dedicated a rotunda some twenty meters across, the largest closed round building of the Hellenistic world; an Antigonid king built the Neorion to house a dedicated warship. A theater took a Dionysiac contest into the annual festival around 200 BCE, and above it, in the early second century BCE, a ship’s prow of gray Rhodian marble rose from a fountain bearing a colossal winged Nike alighting on the bow — victory at sea, raised to the gods who govern the sea. The sanctuary also held the right of asylum, and its most famous exercise was its last: Perseus, final king of Macedon, fled here after Pydna in 168 BCE and was taken; with him the island passed under Roman control, and initiation joined the eastern tour of Roman officials.

The end was an ebb, not an edict. An earthquake at the start of the first century CE forced repairs to the rotunda and the Hieron; a second catastrophe in the early second century, probably another quake, razed the eastern hill — never rebuilt — and damaged the Nike’s housing, which was mended. The last securely dated initiate list was cut later that century; lamps, coins, and glass carry life into the third century and perhaps the fourth. No decree closed the Great Gods’ house; the pilgrims thinned, the rite lapsed, and a Byzantine fort eventually rose from the sanctuary’s reused blocks.

Carting off the Nike, gridding the rotunda

The modern recovery began with a humanist’s sketchbook: Cyriacus of Ancona landed in 1444 and drew the reliefs. In 1863 Charles Champoiseau, French consul at Adrianople, dug at Palaiopoli and crated roughly 110 fragments of a headless, armless winged woman in Parian marble; shipped to the Louvre in 1864 and rejoined to the ship-prow base he retrieved in 1879, she has stood at the head of the Daru staircase since the 1880s as the Winged Victory of Samothrace. The Austrian campaigns of 1873 and 1875–76 under Alexander Conze fixed the plan of the sanctuary and published it in two Vienna folios (1875, 1880), among the first archaeological publications anywhere to print photographs; both volumes are digitized at Heidelberg (Conze, Archäologische Untersuchungen auf Samothrake).

After French–Czech seasons in 1923–27, New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts opened the American excavation in 1938 under Karl Lehmann, who uncovered the Anaktoron, hall of the first-degree rite; war stopped the dig until 1948, and in 1956 the team re-erected part of the Hieron’s facade. In 1950 the American campaign, with the Louvre’s participation, found the Nike’s missing right palm — the discovery Phyllis Williams Lehmann made famous in lecture — and the hand rests today in a case on the Daru landing. Lehmann’s Samothrace: A Guide to the Excavations and the Museum (1955; sixth edition, revised by James R. McCredie, 1998) remains the field handbook (American Excavations Samothrace, bibliography). McCredie directed for fifty years, from 1962 to 2012; Bonna D. Wescoat of Emory University has directed since, under the American School of Classical Studies at Athens with the Ephorate of Antiquities of Evros. Her team relocated the theater in 2018 and is re-studying the Nike with Louvre curator Ludovic Laugier, the monument now reading as the commemoration of a naval victory of the early second century BCE, its Lartos-marble prow paralleled on Rhodes (Benjamin Leonard, “Secret Rites of Samothrace,” Archaeology Magazine, September/October 2021).

The cult itself rests on three studies. Susan Guettel Cole’s Theoi Megaloi: The Cult of the Great Gods at Samothrace (Brill, 1984) assembles the literary, epigraphic, and numismatic testimony (Brill). Nora Dimitrova’s Theoroi and Initiates in Samothrace (Hesperia Supplement 37, 2008) publishes the inscriptions — the sacred ambassadors, the initiate lists, the proof of same-day double initiation and of how few went on to the epopteia (Bryn Mawr Classical Review). And Kevin Clinton’s “Stages of Initiation in the Eleusinian and Samothracian Mysteries” (in Greek Mysteries, Routledge, 2003) sets the island beside Eleusis, finding Samothracian usage borrowing Eleusinian words for a structure of access that diverged at every point (Routledge).

The surest record the sanctuary kept is the company it drew. Herodotus writes as an initiate; Spartan commanders stood the interrogation; and in the mid-fourth century BCE the rite arranged a marriage that rearranged the world — “Philip, after being initiated into the mysteries of Samothrace at the same time with Olympias, he himself being still a youth and she an orphan child, fell in love with her and betrothed himself to her at once,” Plutarch records. The parents of Alexander the Great met in the Great Gods’ night. The inscribed rosters run from theoroi of the Greek cities through Roman consuls, shipmasters, merchants, the enslaved and the freed; one stone names pilgrims from Rome and Sicily initiated on September 4, 100 BCE — a date, not a festival, because at Samothrace any date would serve. And in 18 CE the roster registered its most instructive absence: Germanicus, master of the Roman East, “made an effort to visit the Samothracian Mysteries, but was met by northerly winds, and failed to make the shore.” The gods who steadied the sea for their own also kept the door, and the lists are the names of those they let land.

→ Related: Eleusis · Mystery Religions · Initiation · Herodotus · Thrace · Nike