Greek cities were at their best in times of festivity, when wealthy citizens achieved the recognition and pre-eminence they craved by funding celebrations for the whole community. There was little to celebrate in Boeotia in the year 37 ce, when it looked for a moment as if its economically depressed cities would have to drop out of the Achaean League. It was time to congratulate the emperor on his accession, but no one had volunteered to join the league’s embassy. A wealthy benefactor named Epaminondas stepped forward to save the honor of Boeotia, and when his home city later elected him Festival Supervisor (agonothetes), he did not disappoint.
Epaminondas revived the games in honor of Apollo Ptoos, which had been in abeyance for 30 years, re-founding them as ‘‘The Great Games of the Ptoia and the
Caesars.’’ The games themselves happened only once every four years, but it is simply astonishing how much good eating Epaminondas was able to cram into this period. He feasted the magistrates and the Council annually, and treated the whole town to breakfast every four years. In the year of the actual festival, he gave every male - citizens, neighbors, and non-citizen property-owners - a measure of grain and half a jug of wine for the impending festivities. He marshaled the Great Procession and piously served as impresario for the Ancestral Dance of the Trailing Veils. He sacrificed a bull to the gods and Caesars and continuously distributed meat, breakfasts, sweet wine, and complete meals. During a ten-day period he invited the citizens to breakfast in groups, including their sons and male slaves that were of age, while his wife Kotila hosted the citizen wives, unmarried daughters, and female slaves. He even invited the booth-holders who had come for the fair and the show crews to a private breakfast. In the theater during the dramatic and musical competitions he treated all present, including guests from other cities, to sweet wine, and tossed party favors into the audience (Oliver 1971; Robert 1969b: 34-9).
Typical here is the fusion of activities honoring the traditional Greek gods and the Roman emperor to maintain the city in harmonious relationship with the superordinate principles that guaranteed cosmic order and prosperity. Also typical is the integration of religious activity with athletic and musical entertainment. What is not typical is the broad social range covered in Epaminondas' benefactions and the lack of discrimination between status-groups in the quality and quantity of gifts provided. At Ephesus, in contrast, certain groups, particularly the ephebes, received bigger distributions than others according to the records of a processional foundation (Rogers 1991a: 44-72). In most cities, festivals began with a procession that articulated the cosmic and social order.
We have detailed records documenting the foundation of a new festival at Oenoanda that show how much the proper composition of this procession mattered. The founder's original idea had been to commemorate himself, Demosthenes, in a festival of musical competitions. His original proposal incorporated two sacrifices to ancestral Apollo, but included no special instructions about the pre-sacrificial procession (Worrle 1988; Mitchell 1990). Imperial permission was promptly secured, but it took a year of negotiations involving the city's Council, the assembly, and the surrounding villages, before the festival plan took final form (Rogers 1991b). What these negotiations added to the program was a procession that included all the local leaders and represented both the emperor and the city's patron god as images to be worn on the head of the festival’s founder in the form of an expensive ceremonial crown. On the first day of the Demostheneia, which took place every fourth year, the founder or his representative, in crown and purple robe, was to lead the procession with a sacrificial bull. The city’s priest and priestess of the emperor were to come next with another sacrificial bull. Then, with varying numbers of bulls, came the three Festival Supervisors, the Secretary of the Council, the five rotating Presidents of the Council, the Market Supervisors, the Gymnasiarchs, the City Treasurers, the Chiefs of the Rural Constabulary, the Supervisor of the Ephebes, the Supervisor of Boys, the Superintendent of Public Works, and headmen representing about 35 outlying villages and farmsteads (grouped by pre-arrangement into clusters for the provision of bulls). Non-complying individuals were to be humiliated by public proclamation.
Why did the Council and people of Oenoanda insist on adding a festival procession that incorporated civic and village officials as well as homage to the emperor into Demosthenes’ foundation? The original proposal, however elaborated its musical prizes, was definitely lacking a gastronomic component, a defect which the revised program would rectify with an abundance of sacrificial meat. The officials who were to provide the sacrificial animals were to receive in exchange a chance to process in a living tableau of the civic hierarchy that included recognition of the economic contribution of outlying rural communities. Apollo was presumably still to be honored on the twelfth and the fifteenth day according to the original plan, but somehow it seemed appropriate to people that a parade of officials initiating a Greek competition should require the authorizing and controlling presence of the Roman imperial image.
World History
