Time in Greece is not an abstract entity, but the cycles of stars and luminaries (Sun and Moon). Hence, when Plato in Statesman imagines a time when time went backwards he describes a change in the universe: ‘‘I mean the change in the rising and setting of the sun and the other heavenly bodies, how in those times they used to set where they now rise, and rise where they now set’’ (269a). Each polis had its own ‘‘lunar-solar’’ calendar organized around the annual Sun cycle of solstices and equinoxes and its twelve (and a third) moons. Helios (Sun) was an important figure in Corinth, and a reconstruction of Corinth’s calendar from those of her colonies reveals a summer month called ‘‘Of the [festival of the?] Solstice,’’ Haliotropios (tropai = ‘‘solstice’’). Meanwhile at Olympia, ‘‘on the summit of ‘Cronus’ mountain,’ the so-called ‘Basilae’ sacrifice to Cronus at the spring equinox’’ (Pausanias 6.20.1), and the quadrennial Olympic festival itself was scheduled to coincide, it has been calculated, with the second full moon after the summer solstice, a date which had to be known, and publicized well in advance. A quadrennial Olympics means a festival every fifty moons, which informs the myth of Endymion, the ancestral king of Elis, who had a tomb at Olympia: ‘‘And they say the Moon fell in love with Endymion and bore him fifty daughters’’ (5.1.4).
Moons change noticeably over a few nights. In just a week ‘‘the circle of the full moon which divides the month in two’’ (Euripides, Ion 1155-6), will wane into a half-moon; a week later into a fine C-shaped closing moon, before virtually vanishing only to reappear a few nights later as a new moon, )-shaped, now waxing each night for two weeks, until it becomes full once more. Judging from the Athenian example, Greek religious festivals were almost always celebrated on the same day of the same moon each year. A festival around the 15th, sometimes called the ‘‘split-month’’ (dichomlnia), ought therefore to be a full-moon festival. The regular alternation of full thirty-day months with ‘‘hollow’’ months, which skipped ‘‘day 29,’’ kept the calendar attuned to the lunar cycle. An extra ‘‘intercalary’’ month was regularly inserted to keep the lunar cycle roughly aligned to the solar year, to stop the high summer Panathenaea turning into a spring and then a winter festival. In Athens this extra month was normally added in midwinter (a second month of Posideon), in accordance with Delphi’s practice, but we know of extra months inserted at other times of year.
The detailed workings of Greek calendars are highly controversial, but it is clear that these seemingly haphazard adjustments nevertheless produced great overall stability. Greek months and festivals seem to have stayed more or less where they were supposed to be within the solar year in harmony with natural cycles, and, although Greek cities did not generally coordinate their intercalations, over time they seem to have kept roughly in phase, so that one can ‘‘translate’’ Attic Hecatombaeon into Ephesus’ Clareon, Priene’s Panemos, etc. and normally those translations would be accurate. Indeed the first month-name in Greek literature, Lenaeon (Hesiod, Works 504) seems to be a translation of a Boeotian month-name into the ‘‘Ionian’’ calendar, more appropriate to Hesiod's panhellenic dialect. That so many fiercely independent poleis, acknowledging no overarching religious authority, managed, nevertheless, quietly to keep their ‘‘moons’’ and festivals more or less in step with each other over long periods is in itself quite remarkable, and it gives us a tangible illustration of how there is an ‘‘ancient Greek religion'' to speak of, without there being a unitary ‘‘ancient Greece.’’
Helios and Eos (Dawn) seem to be, along with Zeus, the only Greek deities with ‘‘impeccable Indo-European lineage both in etymology and in their status as gods’’ (Burkert 1985:17); yet classical Greeks could consider the worship of Sun and Moon a distinctly barbarian practice (Aristophanes, Peace 406-13). Certainly, Helios’ descendants - Medea, Circe, Pasiphae - are a decidedly outlandish bunch, and cults of luminaries were somewhat anomalous, though not necessarily (in the case of Helios) rare. Although important divinities were associated with luminaries from an early date, for example Apollo with the sun, they were never identified with luminaries; that had come to seem alien. Helios, Eos, and Selene were not just sidelined; persisting on the sidelines seems to have been their main function, namely to be ‘‘minor’’ deities that other more important deities were not the same as; thus they too helped to keep Greek religion ‘‘Greek.’’
The relentless cosmic timekeeping of stars and luminaries is one of the pillars of Greek religion, a bio-clock for mortals to be subjected to and for gods to rise above. The gods avoided disrupting that clock, save under exceptional circumstances, though they might be tempted to push the envelope occasionally: Athena delays dawn and extends the night so that Odysseus might tarry a while with Penelope (Odyssey 23.241-6), and after the death of Patroclus Hera ‘‘sent’’ Helios into the ocean unwillingly, i. e. she hurried him up and shortened the day (Iliad 18.240). But when Helios discovers that Odysseus’ companions have eaten his beef, and threatens of his own accord to shine in Hades, even Zeus must try to placate him (Odyssey 12.377-88).
Stars were also important. In the course of the night, the heavens seem to move, new stars rising in the east, while in the west others set. It looks like a giant hemisphere revolving, so that stars around the North Pole, for example the Great Bear, Callisto, never rise or set, but simply go round and round a central point. And each morning a star will rise a bit higher over the horizon, before dawn arrives, until eventually, after many months it reaches the other side and can be seen setting. The Greeks were especially interested in two dates in a star’s annual cycle: the first time you saw a star set just before dawn, and its annual weeks-long holiday, its vanishing, followed by a sudden reappearance in the east just before dawn: its ‘‘heliacal’’ rising. These dates varied, of course, depending on the landscape and latitude: a Spartan in the deep valley of the Eurotas will have seen stars rising later and setting earlier.
Unlike moons, the ‘‘sidereal’’ star cycle stays 99.99 percent synchronized with the solar year. Hesiod in Works and Days uses the movements of stars to time the work of the agricultural year, and the late July reappearance of Sirius before dawn was long linked to the heat of the ‘‘dog days,’’ a time of drought and pestilence. Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (1-8) begins with Agamemnon’s sighting of this star before dawn -‘‘What is this star which makes its crossing?’’ - thereby dating the action of the play, the sacrifice of his daughter, and the ensuing (Etesian) wind, to a particular time of year, late July/early August. Plato’s ‘‘Athenian’’ puts astronomy on the curriculum of his ideal city to ensure ‘‘the proper ordering of days into monthly periods, and of months into a year, so that times [horai], sacrifices, and feasts may each be assigned their due position, according to nature [kata phusin]’ (Laws 809d). As in other aspects of their culture, the rowdy throng of Greek communities kept in time with each other by tracking universal supra-cultural facts.
Most extant star myths (‘‘asterisms’’) are first attested in a later(?) epitome of Eratosthenes’ Katasterismoi (third century BC) which has led to a popular but implausible assumption that Greek religion ignored constellations until the early hellenistic period; in fact, the author often cites earlier authorities (e. g. Euripides) and the first attempt to collect asterisms, the lost Hesiodic Astronomia, may have been composed as early as ca. 600 BC. At any rate, the Greeks identified stars with (mortal or formerly mortal) heroes and heroines from an early date, as if stars, unlike divinities, were subject to the passage of time, even sojourning in the nether regions of the underworld, i. e. partaking of death. Odysseus actually sees Orion on his visit to the underworld (Odyssey 11.571-4) and in winter months the very bright constellation called Tortoise or Lyre sets and rises again in one night; hence it came to be linked with (or informed) Orpheus’ journey into and return from the underworld, and with Hermes, son of the Pleiad Maia, who guides the souls of the dead.
The popularity of night festivals (pannychides) and the practice of sacrificing to heroes at night will have given plenty of opportunity for the links between heroes and stars to resonate during festivals. Moreover, the Greeks often located entrances to the underworld at seaside lakes or lagoons, such as Lerna or the Acherusian lake at the northwestern end of the Corinthian Gulf, the dead coming up to the still surface which reflected the night sky. These giant mirrors at the entrances to the underworld will have served further to blur the boundaries between the night sky and Hades. Polygnotus’ painting of Odysseus’ visit to the underworld, sometimes located at the Acherusian lake, showed at least one constellation, Callisto, the Great Bear, which never sets (Pausanias 10.31.10). For catasterism, translation to the stars, is not the same as apotheosis. In fact the heavens represented a kind of halfway zone in the cosmos between Hades and the realm of the Olympians, a zone perfectly suited to the halfway status of heroes.
Some of these catasterized heroes featured in important festivals, but the point is not that the manifestation of stars during a particular festival explains away certain myths and rituals, but rather that it represents a spectacular circumstance on the occasion of certain rituals and festivals, an integral and dynamic part of the sacred landscape, its sparkling vault: the stars marking the festivals, the festivals flagging up the stars.
There is evidence for some ‘‘immovable feasts,’’ rituals closely tied to the reappearance of stars or their vanishing rather than to days of the moon. The Keans, we are told, awaited the arrival of the dreaded Dog each year on a mountaintop under arms like the Achaeans awaiting a wind at Aulis, so that sacrifice could be made to conjure the assuaging ‘‘Etesian’’ winds. The Dog appears on Keos’s fourth-century coinages, rays emanating from its head. The ritual was said to have been inaugurated by Aristaeus, father of dog-plagued Actaeon, thus confirming other hints that he too was identified with Orion: ‘‘The man who saw his son killed by dogs put a stop to that star which of the stars in heaven has the same title’’ (Diodorus 4.82.3). In the agora of Phlius in the Peloponnese, meanwhile, Pausanias noted a bronze she-goat partly covered in gold: ‘‘the star they call the Goat (Aix) on its rising [mid-May onwards], ravages the vines without pause. In order that nothing disagreeable comes of it, the Phliasians honor the bronze goat in the agora, especially by adorning the image with gold’’ (2.13.6).
Other rituals associated with asterisms are undated, but we can make an informed guess at what the relevant stars were up to during the festival. In Euripides’ Erechtheus (fr. 370 TrGF), Athena expounds upon the catasterism of Erechtheus’ sacrificed virgin daughters as the Hyades (the muzzle of Taurus): ‘‘I lodged their spirit in the ether; and I will establish a famous name for mortals to call them by throughout Greece: ‘Goddesses Hyacinthides’ ...I tell my townspeople to honor them with sacrifices each year, never in the course of time forgetting, with slit-throated ox-killings [sphagaisi bouktonois], and decorative dances, sacred and maidenly... and to offer to them first the sacrifice before battle.. .And these girls must have an uninfringeable sanctuary and you must keep any enemy from sacrificing furtively there, a victory for them, but for this land, affliction....’’ In the Katasterismoi their father, Erechtheus/Erichthonius was identified with Auriga, the Chariot-Driver, whose death is described in terms of being ‘‘hidden’’ in a cleft in the earth opened by Poseidon’s trident (Euripides, Ion 281-2; Erechtheus fr. 370.60). Indeed from the end of August, Capella (Aix), the very bright star forming Auriga’s shoulder, reached its apex directly above the Erechtheum and may have been visible through the ‘‘skylight’’ in its north porch, or even reflected in the pool of ‘‘sea water’’ associated with the marks of Poseidon’s trident: ‘‘That there was some connection between the markings in the rocky crypt below and the bright heavens above seems inescapable’’ (Hurwit 1999:204; Parker 2005:254-5; Pausanias 1.26.5). Auriga also sets together with his daughters the Hyades in November, these ‘‘deaths’’ finally resolving the struggle between Athena and Poseidon for Attica, which formed the subject of the western pediment of the Parthenon, the side from which one would view ‘‘Erichthonius’’ and his daughters going down together. Another episode, the ‘‘vanishing’’ of Auriga with Hyades/Taurus in late spring, a time of year closely linked to Artemis, seems to inform the myth of Hippolytus, whom the Troezenians identified with Auriga (Pausanias 2.32), killed when ‘‘a bull from the sea’’ got too close to his horses, who then vanished: ‘‘hidden away along with the dreadful monstrous bull, in the rocky ground, I don’t know where’’ (Euripides, Hippolytus 1247-8).
Hyacinthus was himself depicted as an asterism (being ‘‘led up to heaven’’) on his tomb beneath the late archaic Amyclae Throne (Pausanias 3.19.4), a scene that would probably be read as an image of starry ‘‘Hyacinthus’’ rising into heaven during his festival in Hecatombeus (= Hecatombaeon). There was certainly opportunity for stargazing during the Hyacinthia, for Euripides talks of Helen ‘‘rejoining the revels of Hyacinthus for a night of gladness, he whom Apollo killed with the round discus having contested for the furthest throw, the day of ox-sacrifice in the Laconian land’’ (Helen 1465-74). A nocturnal epiphany would explain the celebrations, which otherwise seem a bit callous.
The handbooks mention yet another identification with Auriga, Myrtilus the Chariot-Driver, son of Hermes, son of the Pleiad Maia. It seems that the chariot he was driving at the time of his death (catasterization) was that of Pelops, during a country ride at Geraestus, at the southernmost tip of Euboea or even crossing the Aegean: ‘‘Myrtilus, sunk in the deep sea, tossed headlong out of the all-golden chariot in grievous outrage... ’’ (Sophocles, Electra 508-12; cf. Euripides, Orestes 988-96). His body was washed ashore and taken inland to Pheneus in Arcadia where Myrtilus received annual nocturnal offerings at his tomb by the temple of Hermes (Pausanias 8.14.10). Many years later Pelops’ shoulder was fished from the Euboean coast and taken to Olympia (5.13.5).
The chariot itselfwas a gift to Pelops from Poseidon, ‘‘a golden chariot, and horses with untiring wings’’ (Pindar, Olympians 1.87), ‘‘so that even when it ran through the sea its axles were not wet’’ (Apollodorus, Epitome 2.3). A golden chariot which comes from the sea and flies sounds already very much like an asterism. The east pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia showed not only the chariot and Myrtilus/Auriga, but Myrtilus’ great aunt, the Pleiad ‘‘star-eye’’ Sterope, wife of Oenomaus. During the Olympic festival Auriga will have risen majestically over the nocturnal celebrations in honor of Pelops. But another figure on the pediment, a mysterious crouching boy, seems, from parallels on coins, to have been Arcas, also called ‘‘Nocturnal’’ Nyktimos, the constellation Bocites, founding hero of the Arcadians, legendary enemies of the Eleans. Bootes would have been seen setting during the festival, preferably right over the mound ‘‘in the west’’ where Pausanias was told Arcadians were buried; they had fled in panic in that direction, away from their homeland, when a heroic baby, Sosipolis, turned into a snake (6.20.6).
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