There are fashions in the study of festivals as in other branches of scholarship. Contemporary concern with gender and sociology is producing rich insights. Postwar anthropological and comparative approaches focusing on ritual and myth culminate in the important work of Burkert. The agricultural and magical interests of nineteenth-century anthropology are central to the older standard works on Greek festivals. Even this last approach still figures prominently in some recent work, most of which is in fact eclectic - and rightly so, as none of these lines of approach is dispensable. All of them have something to reveal about virtually any festival, and some festivals lend themselves to study primarily by one or other of them.
We know most about the festivals of Athens, but let us break out of our besetting Athenocentricity and consider the Dorian Karneia in honor of Apollo Karneios (‘‘Apollo of the Ram’’), best known for precluding the waging of war and thus for causing the Spartans to arrive too late at the battle of Marathon (for this festival see further Chapter 15). In the second century BC Demetrius of Scepsis (quoted by Athenaeus 141e-f) described the Karneia as an ‘‘imitation [mimesis] of military training [agOges, that is of the famous Spartan form of education]. For there are nine positions and these are called ‘sunshades’ because they have a certain resemblance to tents. Nine men dine in each of them, everything is done at announced commands, and each ‘sunshade’ contains representatives of three phratries [‘brotherhoods’]. The festival of the Karneia lasts for nine days.’’ Hesychius and other lexicographers provide us with further information. Five unmarried men from each tribe (phyle? - the word is missing: there were three tribes) were allotted the liturgy, that is, official responsibility for laying on the festival, for a period of four years, the so-called Karneatai. It seems to have been some of these who took part in a kind of footrace under the name staphylodromoi, ‘‘grape-cluster runners.’’ They chase a single runner festooned with fillets of wool, and it is a good omen for the city if they catch him, a bad omen if they do not - though there is the let-out that he is meant to pray for the good of the city before or as he runs. Mixed dancing by boys and girls and above all choral song and dance also formed part of the program. A number of etiological myths are associated with the festival. The most influential in scholarship has been Pausanias’ story that the cult was established to propitiate Apollo for the murder of his prophet Karnos by one of the Herakleidai, the Dorian descendants of Heracles, when they were conquering the Peloponnesos (3.13.4).
The various interpretations of this festival exemplify trends in the study of festivals over the last hundred years. Wide (1893:73-85), in the long-standard work on
Spartan cults, took the view that the central theme of the Karneia was not military - that is only Demetrius’ arbitrary judgment - but agricultural. Pointing to a European harvest custom of chasing (and sometimes killing) an animal or a man representing an animal and to the clusters of grapes in the name staphylodromoi he concluded that the single runner stood for the Vegetation Daemon, whose pursuit and capture was an act of analogical harvest magic. Farnell (1896-1909:4.261-3) accepts Wide’s basic interpretation, but revises it in the spirit of the ‘‘Cambridge School’’ anthropology of James Frazer and Jane Harrison. On this view the power of the god resides in the runner as counterpart of Apollo’s ram, the ‘‘theanthropic animal’’; his pursuers will touch him with the grape clusters ‘‘so that these being impregnated with his virtue, the whole of the vintage may prosper.’’ Farnell also allows, however, on the basis of a hoplite dance attested for the Karneia at Cyrene and the title ‘‘Leader of the Host’’ (HagetOr) shared by god and priest in the Argive Karneia, that the military theme identified by Demetrius must have been present. Nilsson (1906:118-24) too treats the Karneia as a primarily agricultural festival, but on the basis of the myth of Karnos he also regards it as expiatory. These interpretations have in common a narrow focus on the chase and one of the myths to the almost complete exclusion of the other components ofthe festival, and it is easy to see now that this has everything to do with the dominance of the then fashionable interpretative model.
For Burkert there is at the heart of Greek religion a complex of guilt and atonement for killing that goes back to the earliest human hunters, and his account of Karneia (1985:234-6) is just as clearly driven by his leading interpretative idea as earlier scholars’ interpretations were by theirs. By claiming that the wool fillets will have ‘‘handicapped’’ the single runner - and by ignoring the grape clusters apparently carried by the pursuers, surely a much greater handicap - Burkert makes of him a ‘‘victim’’ who ‘‘displays willing acquiescence.’’ In this way the runner is assimilated to the willing animal victims, such as cattle that ‘‘offer themselves’’ for sacrifice by eating grain on an altar, which on Burkert’s theory play a role in a ‘‘comedy of innocence’’ that displaces responsibility for their destruction from their human sacrificers to themselves. Burkert then equates the runner with the ram sacrificed at the festival - as in Farnell’s interpretation, but on an entirely different conceptual basis. The equation is based on an analogy with a story in Herodotus of the sacrifice of a man ‘‘covered in fillets of wool’’ to Zeus Laphystios in Thessaly; the man was a descendant of Phrixos, who had once been saved from sacrifice through the appearance of the golden ram, to which his complete covering in wool assimilates the human victim. Thus ‘‘the fillet-draped runner at the Karneia and the ram represent each other, as is hinted in the Phrixos myth’’ (Burkert 1985:235). This is all rather arbitrary: the runner at the Karneia is not ‘‘completely covered’’ in wool fillets, which anyway have a variety of ritual functions in the Greek world, and neither Herodotus’ tale of a human sacrifice in Thessaly nor the myth of Phrixos have any connection with the Karneia. Burkert goes on to consider the Karnos myth and other etiological stories representing the foundation of the Karneia as a form of atonement for some crime preceding a military victory. ‘‘Ancient guilt,’’ Burkert concludes, ‘‘is associated with the festival, and is made present in the race and the ram sacrifice, but at the same time the ritual atones for the guilt; and therefore the warriors can march out to conquer all the more freely; the violence and bloodshed of the conquest can no longer be charged to their account. For this reason no war may be waged during the
Karneia: the festival creates the preconditions for unbridled expeditions of war’’ (1985:236). This interpretation has a certain appeal, as there is clearly something in the notion that abstention from war during a festival replete with military motifs must be in a significant rhythmic relationship with the waging of war. Apart from that important insight, however, Burkert’s thesis seems strained. Accounting for the foundation of a cult by representing it as atonement for a past crime against the relevant god - in the case of Karnos, the slaying of Apollo’s prophet - is a very common etiological device. There is by contrast no reason to suppose that such a foundation can atone prospectively for a military triumph, which is not a thing that inevitably requires atoning for, nor that any ritual act can banish responsibility for future acts of bloodshed. Here again, then, the ‘‘comedy of innocence’’ is being imposed by force upon the evidence.
Jeanmaire (1939:524-6) had interpreted Karneia as a festival of initiation, which gives due prominence to the primary role of young men in the organization and rites of the festival. We should be inclined nowadays to make much of this sociological side of Karneia. The representation of phratries by the men in the ‘‘sunshades’’ and of the tribes (if that supplement is right) by the Karneatai means that the festival reflects the structure of Spartan society, and so constitutes a religious warrant for that structure. We might say indeed that social and festival organization are mutually warranting; that is generally true, but spectacularly so in Sparta, the author of whose laws, Lycurgus, was worshiped as a god (Herodotus 1.65-6). It is also important that young males, probably adolescents, are the central actors in the ritual and that they rather than the men in the ‘‘sunshades’’ have liturgical responsibility for the festival. Karneia is in fact one of a series of Spartan festivals in which adolescent boys figure prominently. They performed as choristers at the Hyakinthia and Gymnopaidiai, and at a festival (if it was a festival) of Artemis Orthia formed two teams, the one attempting to steal cheeses from the altar while the other beat them back with switches (Xenophon, Spartan Constitution 2.9; Plutarch, Aristides 17.8). All these activities were components of the famous Spartan agoge or ‘‘training,’’ but does it make sense to speak with Jeanmaire of Karneia as a festival of‘‘initiation’’? Initiation worthy of the name ought to effect a definitive transition from one status to another, as it does in mystery cult, but we have no reason to believe that Karneia or any other of the festivals we have mentioned marked such a transition; Karneia cannot have done so, as the Karneatai performed the liturgy for four years. The festivals no doubt functioned as markers on the road from adolescence to adulthood, but the term ‘‘initiation’’ soon ceases to be useful if it is applied indiscriminately to any rite involving adolescents. There is also the problem that very few members of any age cohort can have served as Karneatai, who were only fifteen in number and served four-year terms. It is surely better to think of them not as initiates but as representatives of their age-groups and tribes in a long-running Spartan program of selfrepresentation and self-definition.
Athenaeus preserves a splendid anecdote about a visitor to Boeotia who is puzzled by the local custom of garlanding and sacrificing Copaic eels and asks someone about it. ‘‘The Boeotian said that he knew one thing only about the matter, and asserted that the ancestral customs must be observed and that there is no need to account for them to others’’ (297d). No doubt we would get a similar reply from one of the Karneatai ifwe asked him whether he understood the single runner to be a vegetation daemon or a ram offering himself for slaughter. Ritual appeals primarily by requiring us on grounds of tradition to do this set of special things rather than another, and Athenaeus’ Boeotian was surely not unusual in his lack of interest in the meaning of it all. No doubt the local Boeotian schoolteacher would have been happy to answer the visitor’s question, and it must primarily have been such local antiquarians who preserved and indeed generated etiological stories. Schoolchildren in modern Greece are taught the lore of the local festivals, but teachers tell me that very few of them retain any of it, despite attending the festivals regularly throughout their lives. Of course the etiological stories themselves are generally no more than quaint pseudoexplanations that dress the ritual up in narrative or conceptual clothing for those who want an explanation. Burkert’s notion of etiological myths as ‘‘having grown from the experience of participants at the festival’’ (1985:227), if that means the general run of participants, must rarely apply. The impenetrably obscure origins and meaning of the rites at many Greek festivals must have been precisely what prompted the generation of the many aetia, such as that of Karnos the prophet, that involve no analysis of the rites as such but simply represent the whole ritual complex as coming into being at once as an atonement for some offence or a commemoration of some event or person. This accounts for the rites, but in the sense of authorizing or authenticating rather than (in our sense) explaining them. Sometimes, however, etiological myths have more to tell us about the festival than those of Karneia do, and so become central to interpretation. Let us consider a festival of which this is the case.
World History
