1, sports.
In the eyes of the ancient Greeks, it is the lofty duty of every citizen to train tenaciously for many years and learn various skills to be competent for war. The purpose of martial arts of the ruling class is to cultivate citizens' courage and fighting spirit, and to select strong, agile and skilled soldiers to serve their city-state. This form of military sports is deeply reflected in traditional religious customs.
As a pantheistic country, people in ancient Greece revered gods and thought that everything in the world was created by gods and heroes. When the ancient Greeks were still in the primitive stage of social development, due to low productivity and lack of knowledge, they could not correctly understand and understand all phenomena in nature.
2. Festival activities to worship ancestors.
In the eyes of the Greeks, the best life is the life closest to God, that is, the activities in religious ancestor worship festivals. Whenever there is a bumper harvest in agriculture or olives and grapes are ripe, people will get together to celebrate the sacrifice to God. At first, this activity of offering sacrifices to the gods was just a grand ceremony, with simple dance movements to express reverence and gratitude to the gods. Later, this activity of offering sacrifices to the gods became a grand festival.
3. Competition and war.
According to the records about gods and wars in Homer's epic, we found that in the eyes of the ancient Greeks, the gods on Olympus were so closely related to the victory or defeat of the Greek war, so they were bound to show their full loyalty to the gods in various forms of fierce competition, and they were eager to get the full help of the gods in the war and win. The victory of sports competition is only the omen and epitome of the victory of strength contest in war.
Therefore, winning the game is another manifestation of the ancient Greeks' desire to win the war. This is the so-called "the highest honor is to win the war with ability." In order to ensure the victory of the war, we must gain the full support of the gods with reverence and sacrifice to the gods. In this way, the competitive activities of sacrificial ceremonies were widely carried out on the pan-Greek land.