Greek calendars varied from city to city, but the twelve months were most often named after festivals, huge numbers of which were celebrated in the Greek world in the course of a year. Some festivals were common to Doric or Ionian cities, though these might take on a special form in a particular place, while others were unique to individual poleis or subgroups within a polis. A sacrifice and a banquet was normally the central event, and people would gather, often from afar, to attend. The two most common terms for ‘‘festival,’’ heorte, which seems to be related to the word eranos, ‘‘banquet,’’ and paneiguris, ‘‘all-gathering,’’ emphasize respectively these two central features. The particular combinations of divinities, rituals, etiological myths, and other elements that constituted individual festivals were almost infinitely various, but our knowledge of them is terribly limited by the paucity of our evidence. For the most part we have to content ourselves with odd scraps of ancient scholarship, often late - and sometimes confused or misleadingly abbreviated - summary of earlier scholarship, and with earlier and more reliable but almost always tantalizingly terse references in inscriptions and allusions in literature. Serious study of Greek festivals consists largely of painstaking analysis of the sources, and it will be more useful to discuss the reconstruction and interpretation of some festivals in detail than to give thumbnail sketches of many. At the end of the chapter I shall hazard some generalizations about a relatively neglected aspect of the study of festivals, the attitudes and experience of the general run of people taking part in them.
World History
