Another important aspect of time in Greek religion is simple sequence. The fact that Artemis’ day precedes Apollo’s informs and is informed by the pervasive tradition that she was the first of the twins to be born. Fourth-born Eros is born fourth in sequence in Hesiod’s Theogony (120). Zeus Soter is honored on the last day of the year and in the last of three toasts/libations which began the symposium. The heroes are honored in the second libation and on the second day of each month. Sequential values can be ascribed according to some basic principles, which might of course contradict each other: that the gods or the divine precedes the mortal, that the undifferentiated precedes the differentiated, that the simple (e. g. roasting, fourstringed lyre) precedes the elaborate (e. g. boiling, seven-stringed lyre), that what’s underneath precedes what is on top of it, that an initial act precedes the re-enactment. A special set of sequences involves natural process, morning to night, birth to death, fresh to rotten meat.
Moreover, it is characteristic of the Greeks to construct the ‘‘world as it is’’ as a ‘‘world as it has become,’’ and almost any feature of that achieved world, its things (fire, honey, the lyre, stars), its practices and institutions (agriculture, charioteering, sacrifice, marriage, theft), its inhabitants (women) could be unthought, especially through narratives of origin, which often focus on the first discovering (heurein), or the first divine gift or epiphany, thus projecting sequence onto the mythistorical level by postulating a prior epoch devoid of this thing. This kind of unthinking of the status quo could be quite radical. At various times myth (and ritual) imagines a time without labor, homosexual erOs, the division between free and unfree or between mortals and immortals, and even, in the context of the divine dispute over Attica, without the disfranchisement of women: ‘‘to appease Poseidon’s anger, the women.. .should no longer have a vote’’ (Varro at Augustine City of God 18.9). An especially resonant category of discoveries involves the discovery of manufacturing processes: the process of turning grapes into wine, wheat into bread, wool into cloth. These items contain two lots of time, the processing of the item from raw material to finished product recapitulating the discovery of the process in mythistorical time.
It was always possible, therefore, for ancient commentators to make, and for modern scholars to infer, a connection between a particular ritual or cult practice and a particular superseded epoch. The wedding ritual in which a boy with a crown of oak leaves offered bread from a winnowing-fan, saying ‘‘I/They fled the bad; I/they discovered the better,’’ a formula also intoned in Bacchic initiations (Demosthenes 18.259), was interpreted as marking the ‘‘change in life’’ from the agrios (‘‘wild’’) and akanthodOs (‘‘thorny’’) to the alolesmenos (‘‘ground’’) bios (Oakley and Sinos 1993:29). Using this parallel we might also agree with Brelich (1969:143), that the ban on bread on Day 1 of the Spartan Hyacinthia ceremonially evoked a primordial time when bread had not yet been invented.
There are numerous examples of these localized alignments of before-after, early-late sequences. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes paints an incongruous image of the new god Hermes doing all his ‘‘firsts’’ - inventing the lyre, fire, herding, thieving, sacrifice - on his very first day as a newborn baby. The ‘‘fled the bad, found the better’’ formula assimilates the processing of initiates (into marriage or mysteries) to the processing of grain from winnowing-fan to bread and further with the historical progress of mankind from ‘‘thorny’’ to ‘‘ground way of life.’’ First thing at dawn, and first in sequence, the Hellanodikai solemnly inspected the athletes for the stadion sprint, the first event, supposedly, at the dawn of the Olympic Games. The Anthesteria commemorated Dionysus’ gift of wine, the time when wine was new, by interrupting the fermentation process, and by ritual drinking of must, or ‘‘new wine,’’ at a shrine said, by Thucydides (2.15.4), to be the earliest of his shrines in Athens. Just as we have come to understand that myths about Dionysus’ ‘‘coming’’ do not (necessarily) reflect the god’s historical arrival, but rather project onto the historical level an essential quality of his divine personality as ‘‘the coming god,’’ so earliness and lateness, priority and posteriority, should also be seen as symbolic sequential values with their own rhyme and reason which need not have anything to do with a real historical progression (Sourvinou-Inwood 1987:216). Hyacinthus might seem to precede Apollo at Amyclae, not necessarily because of some memory of the fact that his cult is more ancient at the site, as, indeed, it may well have been, but because Apollo’s throne sits on top of Hyacinthus, literally superseding him. Accordingly, in the three-day Hyacinthia, Hyacinthus’ day precedes Apollo’s, and his cult is marked by another symbol of earliness, namely a ban on invented/end-product bread.
Perhaps the most elaborate use of manufacturing processes as models for time, from start/invention to finish, is to be found at the Panathenaea, in which two end-products featured prominently, a finished peplos presented to the goddess and olive oil used as prizes for the Games, just as the olive’s leaves were used for victory crowns ([Aristotle], Athenaion Politeia 60). Both were ‘‘gifts of Athena,’’ which had been manufactured according to strict ritual protocols in the preceding year. The warp for the weaving was set up almost exactly nine months before the Panathenaea at the Chalkeia on the last day of Pyanopsion, a festival which celebrated ‘‘the discovery of techniques.’’ The finished cloth features prominently on the Parthenon, on the centerpiece of the lintel which stood over the entrance, probably indicating an originary peplos, woven by Pandrosus, daughter of Cecrops, ‘‘first to prepare woolen clothing for mortals.’’ The oil was produced from branches of ‘‘sacred olives’’ from all over Attica, descended from the very first tree believed still to be growing by the shrine of Pandrosus within the ‘‘Erechtheum,’’ a gift celebrated on the back of the Parthenon. Moreover, an olive branch was fixed to the front of a house in which a new Athenian male had been born, raw wool if it was a girl; and indeed the first Athenian, Erichthonius, founder of the Panathenaea, had been born from a piece of raw wool impregnated with craftsman Hephaestus’ sperm and dropped onto the earth. Therefore, through ritual practices, myths, and images, the processing of olive into oil and wool into cloth provided a model sequence for the foundation of Athens as Athena’s city, for the first Athenian and for each Athenian.
Of course festivals could play games with sequence. In Athens, the three-day Thesmophoria on 11-13 Pyanopsion, was linked to the story of Persephone’s rape and return and Demeter’s teaching of the secret of wheat, this triduum recapitulating the tripartite division of the year into three seasons, the middle day of fasting, Nesteia, linked to Persephone’s saison en infer and Demeter’s mourning. But the rotten pigs linked to the pigs of Eubouleus swallowed up by the earth along with Persephone, were first retrieved from the underworld ‘‘halls’’ ( megara), it seems, before fresh pigs were deposited to be retrieved next year, and the first day was called Anodos, which refers to the wives’ ‘‘going up’’ to the temporary encampment for the duration of the festival, but also, inevitably, to Persephone’s ‘‘going up’’ from Hades, and the last day Kalligeneia ‘‘Beautiful Birth’’ seems to invoke the birth of Persephone, the festival thus reversing the sequence of the myth: return, loss, birth. Likewise the Anthesteria, 11-13 Anthesterion, seems to have begun by commemorating the discovery of safe drinking with unusually sober toasts of wine mixed with water on Day 1, followed by Choes, a day of dangerous drinking - ‘‘I have poured in unmixed wine again and drained it without taking a breath’’ (Aristophanes, Acharnians 1229) - anti-socially, without speaking, and straight from the jug {chous), as if in the course of the festival, the Athenians ‘‘unlearned’’ how to drink well.
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