Dionysiac rituals for women were organized by the city or deme and scheduled in official ritual calendars. At Delphi, where the festival was called Thuia, the Thuiades had regular ritual responsibilities (Villaneuva Puig 1986). Pausanias says that they ‘‘raved’’ on the Corycian heights of Parnassus for Apollo and Dionysus (10.32.7), but in fact, their ‘‘raving’’ was officially scheduled to take place in winter every two years.
Officially sponsored festivals often distinguished ritual for females from ritual for males. At Elis the split was spatial as well as based on gender. Here, women called Thuiai engaged in ecstatic dancing at the Thuia for Dionysus at his temple near the theater. Males celebrated wine at a little sanctuary of Dionysus out of town (Schlesier 2002; Scullion 2001). Elsewhere, female worshipers of Dionysus celebrated nocturnal rites that excluded males. They beat drums, performed wild dances (Bremmer 1984), and banqueted together on sacrificial meat.
The evidence for actual Bacchic rites exclusively for females is sparse. An exception is the fourth-century calendar of sacrifices found in the rural Attic deme of Erchia, listing annual sacrifices to Dionysus and Semele for the women of the deme (Sokolowski 1969: no. 18; Henrichs 1990:260-4). The costs were funded by local liturgy: 12 drachmas to purchase the goat for Dionysus and 10 drachmas to purchase the goat for Semele. The meat could not be taken away from the sanctuary, but had to consumed on the spot. The women, therefore, practiced conventional sacrifice, thusia, followed by a ritual banquet. A stone from Methymna preserves a lex sacra that regulates an all-night ceremony (pannukhis) in a sanctuary where no men were allowed (Sokolowski 1969: no. 127, probably fourth century BC). Because the text mentions thursoi, the all-night rituals must have been in honor of Dionysus. Most of the extant fragment is devoted to the requirements for the gunaikonomos, a male publicly appointed to supervise the women at the event. He had to be at least 40 years old and a citizen of Methymna. His primary responsibility was to guard the double doors to the sanctuary and to see to it that no male entered.
Literary sources indicate a variety of local rites, but nothing specifically ‘‘maenadic.’’ At Chaironeia, the women acted out a search for Dionysus before taking part in a sacrifice that was followed by a feast during which they told riddles (Plutarch, Greek Questions 717a). At Brysiai in the Peloponnese the women, with no males present, performed a sacrifice to Dionysus so sacred that it was wrong even to speak about it (Pausanias 3.20.4). Men could view the agalma (statue) of the god outside the temple, but only women could look at the agalma inside. On the road from the eastern frontier of Lakonia to Sparta there was a precinct of a local hero adjacent to a sanctuary of Dionysus. Two groups of females, eleven Dionysiades and eleven Leukippides, offered the first sacrifice to the hero because he had shown the god the way to Sparta (Pausanias 3.13.7).
Women participated in traditional ritual activities for Dionysus. They erected statues of themselves and made dedications in sanctuaries. Fathers, husbands, and sons offered statues of their daughters, wives, or mothers who had served as priestess for Dionysus. Men and women made dedications to Dionysus together, and women also made dedications alone. Simo of Erythrai, a priestess of Dionysus ‘‘Protector of the Polis,’’ said in her dedication that she wanted to be remembered by her children and descendants (lErythrai 201a). Males, however, were more likely than females to be mentioned in epigraphical texts. This bias inevitably distorts any discussion of gender in Dionysiac cult. The evidence from Thasos is a good example. At Thasos an unpublished inscription addresses Dionysus as ‘‘Lord of the Maenads’’ (Daux 1967:172, presented in French translation only). Although the sacred enclosure ‘‘covered with vines’’ mentioned in the text seems intended for rites involving mixed groups, all Bacchic worshipers on Thasian membership lists are male.
At Athens exclusively male rituals for Dionysus were organized around winedrinking and the theater. Several Athenian festivals highlighted grapes and the making of wine: Lenaia, Anthesteria, Oschophoria, Theoinia, and lobakkheia, but the Anthesteria are the only rituals whose events can be reasonably reconstructed. Scheduled to coincide with the earliest hint of spring, the Anthesteria celebrated the first tasting of the previous year’s vintage. A sanctuary of Dionysus Limnaios was opened one day in the year for this event. The three-day festival included several different celebrations. On the first day, the Pithoigia, the storage jars, pithoi, were opened for the tasting of the wine. The second day, Khoes, was a day that began with preparations against pollution and ended with each adult male drinking a pitcher ( khous, pl. khoes) of wine in silence. Fear of pollution was justified because this was a day when ghosts of the dead could return. The third day was called Khutrai, ‘‘Pots,’’ in honor of the simple earthenware pots used for cooking the panspermia, a porridge made up of all sorts of grains. This was a simple meal, without meat, to restore the city to a normal state once the dead were back where they belonged.
Respectable women were not encouraged to drink wine, yet certain qualified females presided over wine rituals during festivals at Athens. At the Lenaia it now seems that women participated in a sacrifice followed by a banquet where they entertained Dionysus in a mock symposium and shared in the wine themselves (Peirce 1998). At the Anthesteria the priestess of Dionysus served wine, and the Basilinna, wife of the Basileus, took part in a skit that must have represented renewal for the city. She waited in the boukoleion in the agora to receive Dionysus himself in sexual union. No one knows what actually took place, but the Basileus probably played, in costume, the part of the god (Parke 1977:112). The sexual status of the women who performed public ritual during the Anthesteria was open to scrutiny. The Basilinna herself had to be in her first marriage and a virgin at the time of her wedding. The fourteen Gerarai, ‘‘Venerable Women,’’ who assisted the Basilinna, had to swear an oath of purity before her to demonstrate that they were qualified to preside at the fourteen altars in the sanctuary ([Demosthenes] 59.73-9).
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