Recent anthropological and sociological studies of processions in the early modern and modern periods have emphasized their binding nature: formal movement through cities, whether in Baroque Rome or nineteenth-century Philadelphia, linked the topography of the city and created an intense sense of community between the processors, the observers, and the setting. Processions are said to reenact a cognitive map of a given territory and assert spatial dominance. In some periods and places, such as twentieth-century Belfast, such processions acted as aggressive statements about contested territorial and historical claims.1 Classical scholars also have long recognized the central importance of processions in Greek religion: together with sacrifice, processions are key rituals that recalled interactions with gods in the past and marked space and time. In ancient Athens, festival processions also linked the countryside with the urban sanctuaries and enhanced civic identity and unity.
The significance of processing in antiquity, and of entering and leaving a sanctuary, is marked by the prominence in Greek architecture of entrance gates.2 They served as termini for processions, less formal pilgrimages and individual visits, and framed their beginning and end. In this chapter, I examine the distinctive entrances built in the Roman period that connected the famous Eleusinian processions. The gateways (propyla) to the sanctuary at Eleusis are well preserved, while in the City Eleusinion in downtown Athens, fragmentary remains suggest at least one similar, corresponding gateway into the innermost part of the sanctuary. I discuss the reconstruction of this entrance, the symbolic significance of the entrances to Demeter’s sanctuaries, and the social climate of the Second Sophistic that encouraged a retrospective, nostalgic ordering and commemoration of the famous old rituals.
World History
