ABSTRACT
Textual and archeological remains show that children's religious learning shaped future adults, and that adult recollections of religious participation with one's family often reveal a considerable measure of approval, sentiment, and pride. Children were trained in bodily comportment, an important aspect of which included corporeal engagement with objects, images, and other materials. Visual culture depicting children as they participated in such religious activities reinforces how they learned to imitate adults in their lives. Many artifacts in sanctuaries and shrines, such as terracotta figurines, exhibit repetitive, ubiquitous forms and iconographies, used over generations, meaning that Greeks repeatedly engaged these same images over the course of their lives, from childhood on. I also consider these repeatedly encountered objects in terms of ancestral tradition (ta patria). The Greek discourses on ta patria reflect the process of religion-in-the-making emphasized in studies of lived religion, while also coinciding with “personal experience” in interesting ways. Considering ta patria in terms of personal biography, lived experience, and familiar material culture provides a compelling way to align the Greeks’ “right way” to do things and “how things have always been done” to people's own life stories, their emotionally powerful memories, and their perceptions of past religious activities.
