Religion and Reconciliation in Greek Cities by Robertson Noel

Author:Robertson, Noel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2010-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

Harvest Rites in Western Athens

Selinus inherited the cults of Zeus milichios and Demeter from Megara, no doubt by way of Megara Hyblaea. They were evidently common to Megara and her colonies. We are bound to suspect that such harvest celebrations were a widespread pattern, like the anxious rites of early spring. Again, we must go to Athens in search of evidence denied us elsewhere. Athens has a pair of shrines on a western hill that belong to Zeus milichios and to local Nymphs (not Demeter) and are likewise set apart for harvest celebrations. Zeus milichios is visited privately, and the Nymphs are the object of a grand procession. The two observances are referred to by a locative term, Δημίασι “at dêmosrites,” which is rather like “in the land of Euthydamos.”

At Athens as at Selinus there are contrasting areas on opposite sides of the city. Let us recall the setting of Athens’ rites of spring (chapters 8–9). The spring festival of Zeus milichios takes place in the district Agra, which lies outside the city at the southeast, beyond the Ilissus. It is important to remember that the original city was no more than the Acropolis and a lower settlement to the south, a small area permanently visible as a concentration of early shrines. When the community began to increase in numbers by recruiting fictitious kinsmen farther off in Attica, a central agora or muster ground was marked out for the warrior “brothers.” Yet this old agora, as it is called by contrast with the Classical Agora, was still at the heart of the original area, on somewhat sloping ground at the southeast foot of the Acropolis.19 Thucydides describes the early city just so, insisting that even in his day most Athenians felt rooted in the far-flung Attic countryside.20

Almost everything else within the great Themistoclean wall is later. A considerable area west of the Acropolis had its use, but not for habitation.21 It is the area bounded by the Areopagus and Colonus hills and the stream Eridanus, in early days occupied by extensive cemeteries and by potters with their unpleasant industrial activity.22 Over a long period, cemeteries sometimes alternated with potters’ workshops. This picture of western Athens has now been firmly demonstrated, and earlier misconceptions of “villages” all round the Acropolis can be set aside. Both burials and wells used to be taken as evidence of habitation, refuting Thucydides or convicting him of false emphasis—as if he and his Athenian readers, unlike the inhabitants of any other European city, had no authentic recollection of change.

As in Agra, so in western Athens we find a few old cults that were placed apart from the settlement for some special purpose.23 Two of them, on the Hill of the Nymphs, match our two cults on Gaggera. The hill takes its modern name from a cult of Nymphs on the summit; the ancient name, likewise bound up with these Nymphs, is Hyakinthos. They are approached at the time of Athens’ Skirophoria, a harvest festival like the Malophoria, though it is unique to Athens and honors Athena and Poseidon rather than Demeter.

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