ABSTRACT
Cult-sites need to be accounted for even more than landscape, towns and peoples. Here the sacred intrudes into an otherwise profane world and disrupts the uniformity of the land and its people. The explanation is a logos (‘account’) and in particular a hieros logos (‘sacred account’). They tell us the circumstances which led to the cult-site’s foundation, they give its ‘reason’, its aition, and are therefore said to be aetiological. The hieroi logoi I look at in this chapter talk about the ‘arrival’ of various gods in order to achieve this explanation, but as they are not historical accounts we may find that in telling us how the site was supposedly founded they tell us something of what the site is actually about.
