While all the Athenian festivals of Dionysos included dramas or dithyrambs, the City Dionysia was transformed during the sixth century into the premier dramatic festival of the Athenian year, and, with the Panathenaia, played a crucial role in the construction of Athenian civic identity. Originally the urban version of the winter festivities held in the demes, the City celebration was moved to the spring month of Elaphebolion for the convenience of spectators and visitors traveling to Athens. Unlike the ancestral rites of the Lenaia and Anthesteria, which were the responsibility of the King Archon, the City Dionysia was treated like a newer festival and placed under the jurisdiction of the eponymous Archon. A preliminary to the festival was the “bringing in (eisagcige) of Dionysos from the altar,” the ceremonial torch-lit escort of the god’s image from a temple near the Academy to its permanent home in the theater precinct. Dionysos Eleuthereus was the god of this festival, and tradition held that a man named Pegasos had first brought the image to Athens from the town of Eleutherai on the border with Boiotia. When the Athenians failed to receive the god with honor, they found themselves stricken with a disease of the male genitals. An oracle advised the Athenians to make model phalloi and honor the god with them. Scholars view the eisagcige ritual either as a re-enactment of Dionysos’ original advent in Athens, or more specifically as a commemoration of the Athenian annexation of Eleutherai and adoption of its Dionysiac cult. Our main sources for the eisagcige are Hellenistic inscriptions, but it is likely that this complex of myth and ritual dates to the sixth century, when the modest temple of Dionysos Eleuthereus was built beside the theater at the foot of the south slope of the Akropolis.16
The main ritual of the Athenian festival was a relatively inclusive pompe or procession which, like the Panathenaic parade, featured women and scarlet-robed metics as well as male citizens. A kanephoros (basket-bearer), a maiden of noble birth, led the procession with a golden basket, followed by people carrying loaves and libations of water and wine, or guiding sacrificial animals. (The goat was probably the preferred victim, given that tragedy seems to have the root meaning of “goat song.”)17 The colonies of Athens were required to send phalloi for the festival and presumably had their own representatives in the parade. The most colorful participants were the choregoi or sponsors of the plays, who wore elaborate robes embroidered with gold and golden crowns. The procession traveled through the agora, pausing at various altars to allow choruses to perform. Perhaps that evening was the time for the kcimos, a male-oriented, wine-soaked revel. The competitions included ten dithyrambic choruses made up of boys and ten of men, as well as comedies, tragedies, and satyr-plays. Before they began, the theater was purified with piglets’ blood and libations were poured for the god, whose statue was present during performances. The crowds in the theater also witnessed the proclamation of crowns for honored citizens, the display of tribute from Athens’ subject states, and the introduction of citizen youths reared at public expense because their fathers had fallen in battle.18
World History
