From painted embellishments on altars and temples, marble flooring, dyed sacrificial ribbons and even the colouration of ritual animals, colour was an inescapable aspect of religious experience. Polychromy was not only decorative, it created a visual medium with which those navigating sacred spaces could interact, together with the written word and the language of shape and form. Colour could communicate to the ancient viewer associations of its source; the significance of both where its pigment or dyestuff was harvested and the journey it undertook, both in terms of manufacture and simple geography, in order to arrive before the observer. The very conception of ancient sight, with rays reaching from the eyes in a particularly haptic process of sensory feedback, meant that looking at colours was for the ancient viewer an experience in itself. How would visitors to the sacred spaces of the ancient world have ‘read’ the visual cues surrounding them, and how could the design of colours in ritual spaces influence the reactions and emotions of those witnessing sacred activity? This paper seeks to investigate and unpick some of the chromatic language found in religious spaces to better inform an understanding of ritual activity in Greco-Roman society.

At the beginning of the sixth century BC, the Aphaia sanctuary on the island of Aegina underwent a radical transformation. What until then had been a local open-air cult place in the woody mountains of the western part of the island, where a female deity had been worshipped as early as the second millennium BC, became an architecturally structured sanctuary that conformed to the novel Doric architectural order. At the same time, a cult image made of ivory was set up in the newly built temple. The goddess, who had previously “shown herself” in the open grove that was associated with her presence, was now represented through a man-made image. In addition, a wall was built around the temple that separated the sacred precinct from the “profane” land outside the sanctuary. Around the same time, the island of Aegina became one of the most important trade centers in the Greek world. The book argues that the transformation of the Aphaia sanctuary on Aegina is typical of the larger area in which the Doric order emerged. This transformation was characterized by economic growth, urbanization, land reclamation, and colonization and prompted the Greeks to rethink their relationship with the gods who inhabited the land.