The troublesome nature of our evidence is best brought out by considering all the sources for a particular festival, and the Athenian Diasia makes a good and representative case study. According to Thucydides, when Cylon was advised by Delphi to seize the acropolis at Athens during ‘‘the greatest festival of Zeus’’ (1.126.4) he attempted to do so during the Olympics and was unsuccessful, ‘‘for the Athenians also have a very great festival of Zeus Meilichios [‘‘Zeus who must and can be propitiated’’], the Diasia as it is called, held outside the city, at which the people en masse make many sacrifices not of ordinary sacrificial victims but of local offerings’’ (1.126.6). ‘‘Ordinary sacrificial victims’’ (hiereia) certainly means animals, and the scholion or ancient commentary on the passage plausibly explains ‘‘local offerings’’ as ‘‘cakes formed in the shape of animals.’’ Hence it is surprising to find that in Aristophanes’ Clouds (408-11) Strepsiades describes the explosion of the haggis (or perhaps black pudding) he was roasting for his relatives at the Diasia, and it was much more surprising when two inscriptions published in 1963 and 1983 clearly attested animal sacrifice at the Diasia. The mid-fourth-century sacrificial calendar of the deme Erchia (Sokolowski 1969: no.18a lines 37-42) contains this prescription: ‘‘In the month Anthesterion, at the festival Diasia, in the city at Agrai, to Zeus Meilichios a sheep, sacrificed without use of wine up to [the point at which] the innards [are roasted], costing 12 drachmae.’’A late fifth-century calendar of the deme Thorikos has a similar entry, also under the month Anthesterion: ‘‘At the Diasia, to Zeus Meilichios a sheep, to be sold’’ (SEG 33 [1983] 147.35). These four passages, together with Strepsiades’ statement that he bought a toy cart for his son Pheidippides on the occasion of the Diasia (Clouds 864), are the sum of our evidence from the classical period. It is a typical dossier: brief allusions in drama and historiography, in the latter with very concise explanation for the benefit of non-Athenian readers, and some mention in inscriptions, typically involving only concrete details of offerings and procedures relevant to the normally quite narrow administrative (often financial) purposes of a state, deme, or private organization in drawing up the document. The Erchia inscription confirmed the old conjecture that the principal celebration of Diasia was at Agrai on the Ilissus, a location ‘‘outside the city’’ from the perspective of the Athenian Thucydides, ‘‘in the city’’ from that of the Erchians. The Thorikians, unlike the Erchians, celebrated Diasia in their own deme rather than at Agrai, which supports the assumption that Strepsiades is recalling a celebration in his own remote deme, Kikynna. As often, however, even this modicum of classical evidence also presents us with a quandary.
Was it or was it not usual to sacrifice animals at Diasia? The apparent implication of Thucydides’ description is that animal victims were not sacrificed, but rather the inexpensive cakes (perhaps, as the scholiast suggests, in the shape of animals) that were a standard offering of those who could not afford animals, many of whom must have been present at this popular event. Perhaps all he means, however - though it is not a very obvious way of saying it - is that, in comparison with cakes, relatively few animals were sacrificed. The deme Erchia and doubtless other demes sent a delegation to Agrai with a sheep which was to be eaten. The procedure was different at Thorikos, where it is specified that the victim is ‘‘to be sold,’’ which must mean (as Parker 1987b:145 suggests) that after the innards are eaten the flesh is not distributed or eaten but sold, presumably to a butcher. At Thorikos only the innards are eaten, and they are highlighted by the Erchian procedure; this perhaps coheres with Aristophanes’ evidence for consumption of innards in the form of a haggis. Distinctive festival foods were certainly known - Athenian festivals such as Pyanepsia, Thargelia, and Galaxia take their names from vegetable porridges - and one might hazard the guess that haggis was the special dish of the Diasia, were it not that the meat of the Erchian offering was apparently eaten.
If new epigraphical evidence turns up it could change the picture as radically as that from Erchia and Thorikos has. Before those inscriptions refuted them, scholars concluded on the basis of holocaust (‘‘whole-burnt’’) offerings to Zeus Meilichios attested by Xenophon (Anabasis 7.8.4), a good classical source, that animals sacrificed at Diasia were burnt whole. They sought support in the later evidence to which we now turn. Two scholia on the second-century AD writer Lucian (107.15 and 110.27 Rabe) and a notice in the probably fifth-century AD lexicon of Hesychius (delta 1312 Latte) tell us that Diasia was conducted ‘‘with a certain grimness.’’ The older standard works on Athenian festivals present this as sound information ultimately derived from an authoritative source and as consonant with holocaust sacrifice for Zeus Meilichios (Mommsen 1898:423-4; Deubner 1932:155-6; and still Parke 1977:120). The second-century AD writer Plutarch, however, speaks of hoi polloi enjoying themselves and reviving their spirits at Diasia as at the Kronia and Panathenaea, ‘‘paying the price of purchased laughter to mimes and chorus-girls’’ (On Contentment 20; Moralia 477d), and Lucian has Hermes recall ‘‘splendid celebration of the Diasia’’ at the house of the rich Timon in the deme Kollytos (Timon 7). A dialogue falsely attributed to Lucian speaks of orators competing for ears of wheat at Diasia ( Charidemus 1-3); this has been doubted, but such a competition might well form part of a program of entertainment such as Plutarch attests. There is no evidence for such entertainment in the classical period, but also no reason to assume that nothing of the kind was then laid on. Lucian himself has Zeus ask ‘‘why the Athenians have not celebrated the Diasia for so many years’’ (Icaromenippus 24). Lucian lived for a long time in Athens, so this should mean that the festival fell into desuetude (temporarily?) in the second century AD.
Some of what later writers such as Plutarch and Lucian tell us about festivals derives ultimately from earlier antiquarian scholarship, as does most of what we are told by scholiasts and lexicographers (who, however, also engage in inference and combination, often false, of their own). Among the richest repositories of such scholarship are the scholia on the comedies of Aristophanes, and a scholion on Strepsiades’ mention of Diasia at Clouds 408 (Schol. vet. Clouds 408c) is our sole source both for the date of the festival (Anthesterion 23) and for the rather startling information that the late second-century BC writer on festivals Apollonius of Acharnae (FGrH 365 fr. 5) ‘‘distinguishes Diasia from the festival of Meilichios.’’ That distinction cannot be justified, but what prompted Apollonius to make it (if indeed the scholion to Clouds is reporting him accurately) may have been a contrast between the jolly mood of Diasia - accurately witnessed or reported from sources by Plutarch and Lucian, with whose descriptions the haggis and toy-buying in Aristophanes seem consonant - and the holocaust and (wholly) wineless offerings attested for Zeus Meilichios on other occasions, and his ambivalent character, as reflected in his epithet, in general. Other antiquarians may have come to the more modest conclusion that, despite the apparent jollity of the festival, it must have been characterized by ‘‘a certain grimness,’’ and Hesychius and the scholia on Lucian will be quoting them. The same scholion on Clouds 408 that gives us the date of the festival and quotes Apollonius of Acharnae concludes with the statement ‘‘but the Diasia are the same as the Dipolieia [the festival of Zeus Polieus],’’ which is wholly unaccountable misinformation. Such a blend of the sound, the baffling, and the absurdly unsound is typical of ancient scholia and lexica, and so alas typical also of a large part of our evidence for Greek festivals.
The testimonia to the Diasia are a typical mix of the various kinds of sources we have for Greek festivals. Newly discovered artifacts and inscriptions often cast light on some aspect of the subject from a quarter apparently unknown to ancient scholarship - though in doing so they also remind us how much is still in darkness and how deceptive our obscured vision can be. Diasia is a relatively simple case. As the quantity of our sources increases so, on the whole, does our knowledge - but so too do the number and complexity of our problems of interpretation. Let us turn to a case that illustrates these.
World History
