Democritus said that ‘‘a life without festivals is a long road without inns’’ (B 230 D-K). The Thucydidean Pericles says of the Athenians in his funeral oration that ‘‘we have provided the greatest number of opportunities for the relief of the mind from its toils, establishing the custom of holding contests ( agones) and sacrifices throughout the year’’ (2.38.1). Plutarch speaks of Pericles ‘‘giving the reins to the people.. .always devising some festival spectacle or feast or parade in the city and ‘entertaining them like children with not unrefined pleasures’ (a quotation from a comedy)’’ (Pericles 11.4). Relaxation, jollification, entertainment are the keynotes, not heightened religious consciousness or feats of energetic piety.
Aristophanic comedy sounds the same note. The women who went apart from the men around the time of the autumn sowing to celebrate Thesmophoria must have been aware that they were not only worshiping Demeter but somehow fostering the regeneration of living things, the ‘‘Fasting’’ (Nlsteia) of the second day of the festival promoting by contrast the ‘‘Fair Birth/Generation’’ (Kalligeneia) sought or celebrated on the third. They may have interpreted the obscene jokes and insults they exchanged in the same way, though their functional role was no doubt to foster female bonding: there is a Russian tradition that two people switching to the use of the second person singular ritualize the change by drinking a toast with linked arms and whispering obscene words in one another’s ears. Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae (‘‘Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria’’) treats the festival merely as an opportunity for women to drink and to conspire against the tragedian Euripides, who gives away their secrets and stratagems; likewise Aristophanes’ ‘‘Women in Assembly’’ (Ecclesiazusae) have conspired at the women’s festival Skira to seize political power in Athens. That is undoubtedly a male, not merely a comic, perspective, but festivals in general are treated with a persistent light-heartedness that it seems unjustified to attribute solely to the comedic context. In Peace Theoria, the attractive female personification of ‘‘state delegation to international festivals’’ is restored to the members of the Athenian Assembly amid much sexual humor as a pledge of the delights of peace. In Acharnians Dikaiopolis celebrates his separate peace with the Spartans by organizing his own rural Dionysia. It is not just, then, that festivals are mentioned in a light-hearted way, but that festivals are an obvious symbol of peace, of fun and food. Aristophanes and the Thucydidean Pericles, each in his own idiom, are saying the same thing about festivals, and it is rather different from the sort of thing one gathers from the handbooks.
Scholarly discussion of non-ritual activities at festivals is never proportionate to what the evidence we have been examining suggests is their centrality to the experience of festivals. There is only so much one can say about people eating and drinking, dancing and flirting, watching parades and contests and shows - ‘‘a good time was had by all’’ was the formula in the social columns of the old small-town newspapers. For most of those attending a festival its primary attraction will not have been what made it unique but the kind of thing that it had in common with others. To give a full account of a festival is no more possible than to write the history of a ball, but we can try to right the balance a little by paying closer attention to the common elements.
Dramatic, choral, and athletic contests are the most obvious common features. The works composed for the choral and dramatic competitions at Athens generally have little or nothing to do with the festival’s god or ritual, though it has been popular in recent decades to expand the definition of ritual to encompass these works - an expansion that for some of us makes the term ‘‘ritual’’ as unhelpfully vague as ‘‘initiation’’ has become. These works are concerned with the cultural inheritance, including the religious inheritance, as a whole, which is another indication that a narrow focus on their distinctive ritual and etiological particularities may distort our perception of festivals. Athletic competitions, like dramatic and choral ones, rarely have more than a superficial relationship to the distinctive religious concerns of a festival - the victor in the torch race, for example, lighting the altar of Athena at Panathenaea - and generally have none. Though contests have little or nothing to do with the cultic elements of a festival, they are nevertheless of enormous cultural importance, and R. Osborne (1993) is surely right to stress that their competitive aspect is valued by the polis for the impetus it gives to ambition.
Contests are always at least mentioned in studies of the festivals, but other activities and entertainments often go unnoticed altogether, understandably only in the sense that they are rarely noted by the ancient sources. ‘‘One might judge a market or a festival as poorly or well organized,’’ says Demosthenes, on the basis of ‘‘the abundance and cheapness of the things for sale’’ (10.50), which must mean that people regularly sold things from booths or barrows at festivals; no doubt it was from one of these that Strepsiades bought Pheidippides’ toy at Diasia. There is also a good deal of scattered evidence for performances and shows of one kind and another that were not organized as competitions, such as Plutarch’s mimes at Diasia. Most of the bustling activity at festivals has however left almost no trace, though comedy is a good guide to imaginative reconstruction - Menandrean comedy, with its maidens impregnated and abandoned at festivals, as well as Aristophanic. It will have mattered to almost everyone that the traditional rites were properly performed, but how they were to be interpreted must have mattered much less than the range of stimulating activities they gave occasion to. Athenaeus’ Boeotian ‘‘asserted that the ancestral customs must be observed and that there is no need to account for them to others’’ - and nor, it is surely implied, to ourselves.
World History
