The Penguin Handbook of Ancient Religions by John Hinnells

Author:John Hinnells
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141956664
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

Civic rituals

Every polis had its own collection of deities, every city centre was adorned with the sanctuaries and altars of its own divinities, and each polis had its own calendar of festivals. One of the Greek words for ‘festival’ was heorte, a word that connoted festivity, pleasure and relaxation. Months were named for traditional civic festivals and the year followed a cycle that recognized major divinities. At Athens seven days of each month were set aside for sacrifices to Agathos Daimon (‘Good Demon’), Athena, Herakles, Hera, Aphrodite, Artemis, Apollo, Poseidon, and the local Athenian hero, Theseus. Almost half of the days in the Attic year were targeted for a special celebration or sacrifice. Religious festivals provided the only interruption of the civic calendar, vacation from business responsibilities or break from the work schedule of the agricultural year.

Funerals and festivals provided one of the principal opportunities for young men to see young women in public, but it is not absolutely clear that women regularly attended all great public festivals. Aristophanes’ Strepsiades bought a tuppenny cart for his son at the Diasia, a festival of Zeus, but we hear nothing about fathers taking their daughters. Females participated in some events designated for males, but only to perform a specific, limited ritual function. In such cases sexual status and sexual purity were strictly regulated. At the Dionysia the only female in the procession was the young girl who carried the basket of ritual objects required for sacrifice. Inscriptions that commemorate such service are careful to indicate status because basket carriers had to be a parthenos (unmarried). Few scholars believe that women attended the theatre in Athens, but we do not even know that females were welcome in the crowds that lined the streets for the rowdy rituals of the parade that preceded the dramatic events.

Most cities began their year as closely as possible to the summer solstice, which corresponded roughly with the conclusion of the grain harvest. At Athens the solstice also marked the beginning of the annual term of office for most city magistrates. Here the festival called Dipolieia ended the year and set the stage for the year’s new administration. The celebrations, honouring Zeus Polieus, god of an open precinct high on the acropolis, had two parts: celebration of the first field ploughed (the Field of Hunger behind the prutaneion) and a ritual dilemma resolved in the prutaneion with a trial for murder after the ox was killed in sacrifice. Bouzyges, in Athenian myth the first man ever to plough a field, was represented in the first part by an official who uttered a series of curses as he walked up and down the furrows. His list represents the reverse of the Cyclops’ priorities. Condemning those who did not respond to social obligation, he cursed those who refused to share water, those who refused to share fire and those who refused to give directions to the lost.

Sacrifice of the plough-ox could be staged as a murder, because the plough-ox, a working animal, was an unusual victim for sacrifice.

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