Ancient Greek Festivals

.

Antike Griechische Feste

Part 2

Ancient Greek Festivals

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Antiquity had been a civilization of spectacle writes Foucault in Discipline... With spectacle, there was a predominance of public life, intensity of the festivals, sensual proximity. In these rituals in which blood flowed, society found a new vigor and formed for a moment a single great body. ...The enthusiasm that got the possession of the bodies during the religious act was enthousiasmos, which literally means to be inspired or filled with god. ARCHAIC AGE AND METAMORPHOSES OF GREEK CULTURE

Anniversary rites

“Even after the period of mourning had finished, the family still had obligations to the dead. The rituals that followed a death were often the occasion for an adoption, thereby enabling a parent without an heir to ensure that the rituals were properly performed. This shows how important they were. A fair number of these anniversary rites are mentioned in passing by some ancient authors. They had names like Genesia (anniversary), Nemesia (rites for the god Nemesis), Nekysia (corpse rites), Epitaphia (rites at the tomb), Horaia (rites of the Hours), Apophrades (impure days), Miarai Hemerai (days of the curse), Anthesteria (spring-flower rites), and Eniausia (anniversaries). They probably involved a visit to the tomb (during which offerings of flowers, wreaths or fillets were made) and a domestic gathering. “ The burial ritual

All parts of the Parthenon frieze with a description of the individual figures (a Panathenaic procession):

The Parthenon Frieze : See the South Frieze , East Frieze , North Frieze , West Frieze

Image from an Anthestria festival with a girl swinging over smoke from a vessel (not shown here), a ritual maybe to produce a state in trance? Penelope painter, late 5^th century BC.

rederick Lord Leighton's (1830-1896) romantic view of The Daphnephoria, painted for the dining room of his friend the banker James Stewart Hodgson. ( Detail )

The Dionysia and Thesmophoria were two occasions of Greek women to leave their households and to participate in the public life. Especially at the Dionysia they would dance wild, drink wine, shout like animals and even eat raw meat of animals which they killed (omophagia i.e. raw eating). Information can be found in Euripides The Bacchae.

It is interesting that Herodotus writes: "For it was Melam­pus who taught the Greeks the name of Dionysus, and the way of sacrificing to him... But whence each of the gods came in to being, or whether they had all for ever existed, and what outward forms they had, the Greeks knew not till (so to say) a very little while ago; for I suppose that the time of Hesiod and Homer was not more than four hundred years before my own; and these are they who taught the Greeks of the descent of the gods, and gave to all their several names, and honors and arts, and declared their outward forms.”

The Thesmophoria was a fertility festival in honor of Demeter and Aristophanes refers to it in the Thesmophoriazousae. All public business was suspended during the 3 days.

Sparta, Gymnopedia according to Degas

Greek men probably did not like the Dionysia but it was an opportunity for women to escape from their life most confined in the home or at least to be free for a few days to do what was allowed in principle only to men in a men dominated society.

We should finally not forget Theater to which development a tyrant Peisistratos had an important contribution. The archon eponymos selects three Tragedy plays and a Comedy. It is a private sponsored festival. Two days before the event the poets, actors, sponsors are presented to the Athenians. Thousand of Athenians go to the Dionysus theater close to the Acropolis. The theater, a few days contest (agon), actually a religious event in honor of Dionysus.

About sixty stades distant from Pellene is the Mysaeum, a sanctuary of the Mysian Demeter. It is said that it was founded by Mysius, a man of Argos, who according to Argive tradition gave Demeter a welcome in his home. There is a grove in the Mysaeum, containing trees of every kind, and in it rises a copious supply of water from springs. Here they also celebrate a seven days' festival in honor of Demeter. On the third day of the festival the men withdraw from the sanctuary, and the women are left to perform on that night the ritual that custom demands. Not only men are excluded, but even male dogs. On the following day the men come to the sanctuary, and the men and the women laugh and jeer at one another in turn. Pausanias

The list of festivals is too large to be complete, we should not forget also the Olympic, Nemean, Isthmian and Pytheian as festivals.

QUOTES

Some people attend the festival of the god out of curiousity, some for shows and contests, and many bring goods of all sorts for sale, the market folk, that is, some of whom display their crafts and manufactures while others make a show of some special learning---many, of works of tragedy or poetry, many, of prose works. Some draw worshipers from remote regions for religion's sake alone, as does the festival of Artemis at Ephesos, venerated not only in her home-city, but by Hellenes and barbarians.Dio Chrysostom, Or. c. 110 AD

A festival is celebrated every year at Acharaca; and at that time in particular those who celebrate the festival can see and hear concerning all these things; and at the festival, too, about noon, the boys and young men of the gymnasion, nude and anointed with oil, take out a bull and with haste run before him into the cave; and, when they arrive at the cave, the bull goes forward a short distance, falls, and breathes out his life. Strabo, Geographia, c. 20 AD

In other respects the festival is celebrated almost exactly as Dionysiac festivals are in Hellas, excepting that the Egyptians have no choral dances and no plays. They also use phalli four cubits [6 feet] high, pulled by ropes, which the women carry around, and whose male genitalia are operated by strings to go up and down. A piper goes in front, and the women follow, singing hymns in honor of Dionysos. The erection of the phallus, however, which the Hellenes observe in their statues of Hermes, they did not derive from the Egyptians, but from the Pelasgians; from them the Athenians adopted it, and afterwards it passed to the other Hellenes. The Athenians, then, were the first of the Hellenes to have an erect phallus....Herodotos, The Histories, c. 430 BC

Paul Halsall Ancient History Sourcebook: Accounts of Personal Religion, c. 430 BC - 300 AD

The Poseidonians forgot the Greek language
after so many centuries of mingling
with Tyrrhenians, Latins, and other foreigners.
The only thing surviving from their ancestors
was a Greek festival, with beautiful rites,
with lyres and flutes, contests and wreaths.
And it was their habit toward the festival’s end
to tell each other about their ancient customs
and once again to speak Greek names
that only a few of them still recognized.
And so their festival always had a melancholy ending
because they remembered that they too were Greeks,
they too once upon a time were citizens of Magna Graecia;
and how low they’d fallen now, what they’d become,
living and speaking like barbarians,
cut off so disastrously from the Greek way of life.

K. Kavafis, Poseidonians, Trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

QUOTES

1030 BC. Ceres (Demeter) a woman of Sicily, in seeking her daughter who was stolen, comes into Attica, and there teaches the Greeks to sow corn; for which benefaction she was Deified after death. She first taught the Art to Triptolemus the young son of Celeus King of Eleusis.

1007 BC. Ceres being dead Eumolpus institutes her Mysteries in Eleusine. Sir Isaac Newton, A short chronicle: From the First Memory of things in Europe to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great

IMAGES

Ninion pionax—painting of Eleusinian Mysteries; 4^th century BC Athens, National Museum. Credits: Barbara McManus, 1980

Dionysian Mysteries

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