Genesia (Γενέσια)

City : Athens

Date : 5-th Boedromion

Festival in honor of the dead.

And the Issedonians are said to observe laws like these: whenever a man’s father dies, all his relatives bring forward cattle and thereupon, having sacrificed those and cut up pieces of meat, cut up the one who received them’s dead father; then, having mixed up all the pieces of meat, they put forward for themselves a banquet. Finally having made bare and cleaned out his head, they gild it utterly and thereupon use it as if an image by bringing to completion great yearly sacrifices. So son does that for father, just as the Greeks “the Genesia”. Herodotus

Natal Day

Festival of the Naked Youths, held at Sparta from about the 6th to the 10th of July in honour of Apollo, Artemis, and Leto (Pausan. iii. 11. 7). It was an exhibition of all kinds of accomplishments in gymnastics, music, and dancing, given by boys, youths, and men for the benefit of the citizens and of the numerous strangers who flocked to Sparta for the occasion, and were hospitably entertained there. Excluded were so called agamoi, not married men without children (probably only sons were counted) as required by the Spartan state.

But besides all this, to promote it yet more effectually, those who continued bachelors were in a degree disfranchised by law; for they were excluded from the sight of those public processions in which the young men and maidens danced naked, and, in wintertime, the officers compelled them to march naked themselves round the market-place, singing as they went a certain song to their own disgrace, that they justly suffered this punishment for disobeying the laws. Moreover, they were denied that respect and observance which the younger men paid their elders; and no man, for example, found fault with what was said to Dercyllidas, though so eminent a commander; upon whose approach one day, a young man, instead of rising, retained his seat, remarking, “No child of yours will make room for me. Plutarch Lycurgus