The Athenians had a rich ritual life, with over sixty days given over to annual festivals alone (cf. Chapter 12). Rituals provided the most important means in ancient religion of establishing and maintaining a channel of communication with the gods. They also helped keep society healthy by enabling particular groups to gather together, often in ways precluded in ordinary life. At the Kronia, for example, masters and slaves feasted together. We even hear that masters took over the role of servants for the duration of the meal. Women had rich religious lives, including several festivals that provided an opportunity for them to gather together away from their menfolk. At the Adonia, as we have seen, women gathered on the rooftops to mourn Adonis, while at one of the official festivals of the state calendar, the Thesmophoria in honor of Demeter, citizen women spent three days away from their homes camped out on the Pnyx, performing rituals, and - it appears - enjoying themselves with a good deal of laughter, and even obscenity. Indeed, women’s festivals seem typically to have permitted the kinds of behavior normally frowned upon, one of their functions seemingly being to provide a temporary escape from the repetition and potential drudgery of their everyday lives.
Another important function of festivals was to allow particular social and political groups to express their communal identity. The festivals of the Attic demes, for example, enabled the peoples of the various neighborhoods and villages to gather together at local sanctuaries. In addition to this, there were great civic occasions, such as the Panathenaea, and the Dionysia in honor of Dionysus, when large numbers of the population had an opportunity to worship the gods, take part in processions, enjoy a communal meal, or spectate at athletic or dramatic competitions. This section will focus on one of these festivals, the Panathenaea, which not only demonstrates the importance of communality in the lives of the Athenians but enables us to explore in more detail the Athenians’ special bond with their patron deity.
The greatest festival in the Athenian religious calendar, the Panathenaea enabled the people to worship Athena. Indeed, its main ritual event was a procession though the city up to the Acropolis to present a newpeplos (‘‘robe’’) to her statue. The festival also enabled the people to get together in a communal expression of unity. It is all too easy for us to overlook the impact of large gatherings in shaping national identity. Although, as we have seen, Athens was large by Greek standards, it was far smaller than the modern nation-state. A high percentage of the population would have had the opportunity to gather together on this occasion in ways that occur rarely in modern western society.
To understand the significance of a festival, it is always worth exploring the myths with which it is connected; in the case of the Panathenaea, we are dealing with a festival rich in mythic associations. It celebrated two myths which concerned Athena’s relationship with Zeus: her birth out of his head, and the gigantomachy (the battle between the gods and the giants) in which she fought alongside her father. In addition, as we have seen, its founder was none other than Erichthonius. This tradition has major implications for understanding its communal appeal, attributing as it did the establishment of the Athenians’ premier festival to the ancestral hero who had a special relationship with the goddess.
A discussion of the events at the Panathenaea benefits from a chronological approach, because it meant different things in different periods of Athenian history. This takes us to another reason why this festival merits particular attention, namely that it shows how religion was adapted and developed in response to changing needs of the people. As Athens developed into a major power in the Greek world, the festival developed accordingly. In other words, it is a festival with a history, one that forms part of Athenian history of the archaic and classical periods.
The first date of significance is 566 BC, when a major innovation was attributed to Peisistratos. This was a few years before he gained his first period as tyrant, but shows that he was already an influential figure in the city. He introduced a grander version of the festival every fourth year: the Great Panathenaea, an eight-day long event with celebrations and competitions to rival in prestige and display the major quadrennial festivals of the Greek world, such as the Olympic and Pythian Games. It included a full program of sporting contests for athletes from all over Greece including boxing, wrestling, and chariot races. There were torch races too, a male beauty contest, and a regatta in the harbor. It was also a poetic and musical occasion, with competitions for aulos and kithara players, and recitations of the Homeric poems.
The procession of the Great Panathenaea was splendid, involving participants from different walks of life: male, female, citizen, metic and also former slaves. Starting at the Dipylon Gate, the festival wound its way through the city along the Panathenaic Way up to the Acropolis. On reaching the temple of Athena Nike, it paused in order to sacrifice a cow, although the main goal was the altar of Athena Polias for a sacrifice of at least a hundred cows. From a modern western religious perspective, in which animal sacrifice is alien, it is hard to grasp the noise and excitement that would have been generated by this part of the festival. With so many animals to slaughter, the sacrifice would have lasted for several hours, accompanied throughout by ritual screaming and the noise of the animals, while the air would have been filled with smoke from the fat.
What Peisistratos’ motives were in enlarging the festival is unrecoverable, although as we will see presently he was all too aware of the potential of religious spectacle to promote his own ends as a politician. In any case, the festival was from now on the greatest event in the calendar. Having attained this status, subsequent innovations took place in response to major events in the city’s history. After the Persian Wars, a trireme on wheels from the naval victory at Salamis was introduced into the procession, with a sail that seems to have been in the form of a massive peplos depicting the gigantomachy. What this innovation seems to be doing is updating the mythic significance of the battle, making its conflict between the forces of ‘‘good’’ (gods) and ‘‘evil’’ (giants) stand as a mythic precursor of Athens’ encounter with her ‘‘barbarian’’ enemies, the Persians.
Another development occurred around the middle of the century, by which time Athens had grown into great power with a large maritime empire, the ‘‘Delian League.’’ The League’s headquarters had originally been the island of Delos, home of a major cult of Apollo, but in 454 BC they were transferred to Athens. With the city now confident enough to assert itself as an imperial power, Athena was effectively promoted to patron deity of the whole empire. From now on each allied city was required to participate in the festival, and to provide a panoply and a sacrificial cow. This development exemplifies how the major festival of the Athenian state has its own history. Ways of worshiping Athena evolved in accordance with the city’s development. (See Chapter 26 for more on the Panathenaea.)
World History
