Divine Visitors: Articulating Space and Presence in Ancient Greek Sanctuaries

In her 1989 book *Greek Gods and Figurines,* the scholar Brita Alroth coined the term “visiting gods” to describe the puzzling phenomenon where travelers to the most popular sanctuaries in the Greek world would dedicate a votive image of one god to another. Drawing on the work of materiality theorists, I argue that these votives can be understood as a means of expressing and instantiating spatial relationships in the ancient Greek landscape. For the ancient Greek pilgrim, “visiting god” votives may have been a way to articulate particular cosmological and mythological connections between the divine resident of the sanctuary and the home community of the human visitor. Complementing this approach, I aim to show that the polysemous iconicity of the image allowed the pilgrim to not only materially mediate the presence of the visiting god, but also their own presence before the residents of the sanctuary.