The ‘‘new year,’’ which might be defined as the occasion on which annual magistrates or sacred officials took up office, and/or when new citizens were admitted into the citizen body, varied greatly throughout Greece, even between colonies and mother-city. Some cities, such as Thebes, anticipated the modern pattern of a midwinter new year; other calendars began around the spring or autumn equinoxes, Athens, ‘‘around the summer solstice’’ (Aristotle, History of Animals 543b), in accordance with Delphi, or, if we follow Plato’s ‘‘Athenian,’’ ‘‘with the month next after the summer solstice’’ (Laws 767c, cf. 945e).
The changeover from old year to new was not just a single day but the climax of a much longer period, often marked by rituals of cleansing and renewal, veiling and unveiling, passing on secrets, absence and return, by festivals of disorder or of suspension of norms, and of rebirth, festivals which often looked back to the foundation of the city and/or to the start of a new divine order. At Thebes for instance ‘‘the Polemarchs [war magistrates] always celebrate a festival of Aphrodite upon the expiration of their term of office’’ (Xenophon, Hellenica 5.4.4); the three magistrates were joined by three courtesans (hetairai), it seems. The strange ritual could not but recall the adultery of the war god Ares and Aphrodite, which resulted in the birth of Harmonia (i. e. of civic harmony and continuity), who in Theban foundation myths was wife of the founder of the city, Cadmus. Meanwhile, at a secret location, the Theban Hipparch (‘‘cavalry commander’’) was initiating his successor into a secret sacrifice for Dirce, murdered by the founders Amphion and Zethos, just as he himself had been initiated by his predecessor (Plutarch, Moralia 578b).
Magistrates in classical Athens took up office in Hecatombaeon, the month which climaxed with the Panathenaea. The centerpiece of this festival was the presentation on the 28th of a new dress, a peplos, to the city goddess, i. e. the wooden statue of Athena Polias, kept in the ‘‘Erechtheum,’’ a statue believed to have fallen from heaven. But this presentation was simply the crescendo of a series of transitional rites which had begun nearly two months earlier with the stripping of the goddess at the Plynteria (Burkert 1985:228-33): ‘‘The family of the Praxiergidae perform these rites in secrecy on the twenty-fifth day of Thargelion [month 11], removing the goddess’s adornments [kosmos] and veiling the seated idol [hedos]. Because of this, Athenians regard this day as the unluckiest of all days, one on which no business should be conducted’’ (Plutarch, Alcibiades 34.1).
Next, in Skirophorion, the last month of the year, the two little girls called Arrhephoroi performed their last service for the goddess: ‘‘They place on their heads what the priestess of Athena gives them to carry; she does not know what it is she gives them, nor are they any the wiser. In the city, not far from Aphrodite ‘in the Gardens,’ is an enclosure, and running through it, a natural underground passage. Here the maidens descend. They leave the things they are carrying down there, and pick up some other thing, which they fetch back wrapped up. Thereupon they are immediately discharged, and [the Athenians] take other girls up to the acropolis in their place’’ (Pausanias 1.27.3).
The month and the year closed with a sacrifice to Zeus (Lysias 26.6). In Hecatombaeon itself, before the Panathenaea, more foundational/transitional festivals were celebrated. On the 12th there was a feast of Cronus (Demosthenes 24.26), a ‘‘harvest home’’ festival in which slaves and masters celebrated the end of the work of harvesting together. Four days later on the 16th was the Synoikia commemorating Theseus’ unification (synoikismos) of Attica. An important but undated procession (pompe) for Aphrodite Pandemos and Peitho (Persuasiveness) was also associated with this event. A hellenistic inscription dated to the last day ofthe year entrusts to the city magistrates (Astynomoi) of the following year the preparatory task of cleaning Aphrodite’s temple, its altars and images, and the provision of purple, all ‘‘according to ancestral customs’’ (kata ta patria; Parker 2005:461).
New year was the occasion on which the ‘‘tyrant-slayers’’ put their revolutionary plan into action in Athens, while the Theban coup-plotters chose the new year celebrations of the Aphrodisia for theirs. Whether these coincidences of historical-political and sacred-political turning-points are created by revolutionaries skilled in the art of resonant news-making, or by later narrators skilled in the art of resonant legend-making, is a question that perhaps needs more serious investigation, but it underlines the fact that a calendar is a ‘‘live’’ web of significances, not merely a useful index of events.
More insistent than the yearly rhythm was the monthly rhythm. The Greeks divided each moon into three decades, ten of waxing, a middle ten around the full moon, and ten of waning, which, in Athens, were counted backwards from 9. This structure emphasizes the sense of each month reaching a climax, with the numbers diminishing as the moon diminishes. Monthly festivals created or reflected ritual and mythical connections. Artemis’s day - Day 6 - is next to the day of her twin brother Apollo - Day 7. Aphrodite and Hermes are celebrated together on Day 4, which informs and is informed by myths and cults which linked them as a symbol of a happy couple, reflected in their combination son, Hermaphroditos, who was also honored on this day by superstitious types (Theophrastus, Characters 16.10-11). But gods were not merely associated with a particular phase of each moon, but more abstractly with the number of their day. Apollo’s identity as ‘‘seventh-born’’ is linked to other sevens in the god’s imaginaire. We hear of a group of Athenians called ‘‘Fourth-ists,’’ Tetradistai, who celebrated Aphrodite Pandemos (Menander, Kolax, at Athenaeus 659d). Hermes was sometimes represented in the form of the ‘‘tetragonal works’’ we call ‘‘Herms’’ (Thucydides 6.27), as were other ‘‘Fourth-borns,’’ Aphrodite, Hermaphroditos, and Heracles, the shape itself, as it were, encoding a date. Again we must be careful not to mistake symbolic for historical dates. The victory at Marathon was commemorated on Boedromion 6, even though the battle was fought around the time of the full moon (Herodotus 6.120), probably because the festival included a votive sacrifice for Artemis and the 6th was her day.
World History
