Thucydides (2.15.4) notes that the “older Dionysia,” which takes place at Athens in the month of Anthesterion, is a festival also celebrated by the Ionian cities. Post-Classical inscriptions confirm that this was the case in Ephesos, Priene, Miletos, and Smyrna, and scholars have therefore included this festival among those that predate the Ionian migration of c. 1000. The month name Anthesterion is even more widely attested, from Eretria in Euboia to the Ionian colonies of Massilia and Kyzikos. Sometimes the celebration is called the Anthesteria (Festival of Blooming); otherwise it is the Dionysia or the Katagogia (Bringing Home) of Dionysos. The latter most likely refers to the advent of the god in a ship on wheels similar to a parade float and ultimately derived from Egypt; Attic vases illustrating this ritual scene suggest that it was an element of the Archaic and Classical Athenian festival, probably one of the initial events of the ritual sequence.
Whereas the vintage took place in the fall, the true advent of Dionysos as the wine god came in the early spring, when the casks of new wine were broached for the first time. This first day of the festival, 11 Anthesterion, was known at Athens as the Pithoigia (Cask-Opening). The second day, called Choes (Jugs), was a day of revelry and feasting even for slaves. It also included what has been described as a rite of passage for little boys who had reached the age of three, the usual age of weaning. They were crowned with spring flowers and given presents, including miniature versions of the wine jugs called choes, a shape produced for about fifty years during and after the Peloponnesian war. Infants who died before they could participate were sometimes buried with these jugs, which are gaily painted with scenes of chubby boys, naked but for their amulet strings, playing with small dogs, riding in carts, or making offerings of libations and cakes.11 As we learn from Aristophanes’ Acharnians (959-1234), adult males too looked forward to the Choes, when serious drinking was the order of the day. Each man was supplied with his own chous, a container which held about three liters of wine. (This custom was explained by reference to the hospitality shown Orestes when he came to Athens to be tried for matricide: to avoid sharing his pollution, all drank from separate jugs.) If we can take Aristophanes’ comic description as an accurate reflection of ritual, the archcin basileus (King Archon) conducted a drinking competition with a skin of wine as the prize for the first man to empty his chous. In any case, numerous private contests and festive dinners were held around the city. At the end of the day, the revelers wrapped their choes in the garlands they had won and headed to the Limnaion, or sanctuary of Dionysos at Limnai (the Marshes), where they poured libations from whatever was left of the wine in the presence of a priestess.12
The Choes was the only day of the year when the Limnaion was open, and the sanctuary now witnessed an ancient and venerable rite: the sacred marriage of the King Archon’s wife (the basilinna or Queen) and Dionysos himself. A law stating that the basilinna was required to be of Athenian birth and a virgin at the time of her wedding to the King Archon was inscribed on a stone set up in the Limnaion. In a speech preserved in the Demosthenic corpus (Against Neaira 59.73-78), Apollodorus is indignant that an alien woman of questionable virtue was permitted to assume the title of basilinna and perform the sacred acts on the city’s behalf; he stresses the great antiquity and solemnity of the rite. This part of the festival was carried out in secret, and little is known of what actually constituted the “marriage.” Perhaps there was a wedding procession from the Limnaion to the old city center east of the Akropolis, where the sacred union is said to have taken place in the so-called boukoleion (cattle shed), the headquarters of the King Archon. Modern scholars have speculated that the King Archon himself played the role of Dionysos in order to consummate the marriage. He further chose fourteen women attendants known as the gerarai (Reverend Ones), who assisted with offerings at fourteen altars, witnessed the secret things, and were apparently present at other Dionysiac rituals during the year. According to Apollodorus, they took the following oath: “I lead a holy life and I am pure and chaste from intercourse with men and other polluting things, and I will hallow the Theoinia (Wine God’s Feast) and the Iobakcheia for Dionysos according to ancestral custom and at the appointed times.”13
The third day of the Athenian celebration was also named after a type of vessel: Chytroi (Pots). Unfortunately, there are no detailed contemporary sources for the events of this day, nor do the sources make a clear distinction between Choes and Chytroi. It is logical that the pots, like the casks and jugs of the first two days, should have something to do with wine, and they have been connected to Phanodemus’ account (FGrH 325 F 12) of Athenians mixing sweet wine with water for Dionysos Limnaios. The mixing of wine and water is attested for other Dionysiac festivals (below), and while mixing vessels came in a wide variety of specialized shapes, they were all essentially wide-mouthed pots. The scholiasts on Aristophanes and various lexicographers, however, give a different account, characterizing the Choes (or the month Anthesterion) as a time when ghosts rose from the underworld. They derive the name Chytroi from the cooking pots in which the Athenians prepared a mixture of grains as an offering to Hermes Chthonios (of the Underworld), with special reference to those who perished in the Flood. The sources portraying the Choes/Chytroi as a Halloween-like festival of the dead are late and somewhat confused accounts. On the other hand, Aristophanes’ Frogs places Dionysos’ visit to the underworld in the context of the Limnaion and the Anthesteria, lending plausibility to the connection between this festival and the dead.14 It should be noted that while the celebration of Dionysos’ advent in the month of Anthesterion seems to have been widespread among the Ionian peoples, the details of the Choes and Chytroi are apparently unique to Athens.15
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