125
10
EPIPHANY AND TRANSFORMATION
Dionysos
The traditional view of Dionysos' worship as an import from Thrace or Phrygia was called into question with the discovery of the name Dionysos on Linear B tablets from Pylos, which show that the name, and probably the god, was known to Bronze Age Greeks.
10
EPIPHANY AND TRANSFORMATION
Dionysos
The traditional view of Dionysos' worship as an import from Thrace or Phrygia was called into question with the discovery of the name Dionysos on Linear B tablets from Pylos, which show that the name, and probably the god, was known to Bronze Age Greeks.
Ancient-greek-cults-a-guide
This patronage of the island's main export product by a divine pair throws new light on the mythic (but not cultic) association of Aphrodite with the smith god Hephaistos.
4
Among the numerous Cypriot sanctuaries of the goddess, that at Ama- thous, where the population was of indigenous and Phoenician stock, was noted for its unusual, bi-gendered deity. Here the image of the goddess wore female garb, but was bearded and held a scepter. The locals called this deity Aphroditos, a name that was also known in fifth-century Athens. The
115
APHRODITE
androgyny of Aphrodite at Amathous again points to the Near East, for Phoenician Astarte is likewise known to have had a male aspect, but it is also compatible with Greek ideas of Aphrodite as the goddess born of Ouranos' genitals, who governed male sexuality. 5
The export of Aphrodite
The Greeks thought that the oldest cult place of Aphrodite in their lands was the island of Kythera, where an ancient sanctuary of Aphrodite Ourania was attributed to Phoenician founders by Herodotus (1. 105) and others. Archae- ology provides no support for the hypothesis of Phoenician influence on the island, though the sanctuary itself remains unexcavated, and the murex shells exploited by the Phoenicians for purple dye were locally abundant. Certainly this cult was well established by the time of Hesiod (Theog. 191-99), who mentions Aphrodite's brief sojourn there before her emergence from the sea at Cyprus. The remains of a fifth-century Doric temple survive on the island, and the cult statue was an armed Aphrodite who recalled the warlike god- desses Ishtar and Astarte. 6 The goddess probably made her way into mainland Greece during the tenth and ninth centuries from three locations: Cyprus, Kythera, and Krete. Excavations have revealed that the Kretan sanctuaries are among the oldest after those of Cyprus. At Kato Symi, the Archaic sanctuary devoted to Hermes and Aphrodite had a history of continuous use stretching back to Middle Minoan times, though the Minoan predecessors of the pair must have had different names. Again, at Olous there was a Geo- metric temple of Aphrodite and Ares. (Ares is not attested at the site until the double temple of the Roman period, but in other parts of Krete the pair was worshiped from an early date. ) All over the Greek world, Aphrodite is regularly found with a cult partner, either Hermes or Ares, and this appears to be an archaic feature of her worship rather than a later development. 7
Aphrodite Ourania and Pandemos
At Paphos, Kythera, Korinth, Athens, and many other places, Aphrodite was known as Ourania (Heavenly). For the Greeks, this most widely disseminated of her titles evoked the Hesiodic story of the goddess' birth from the severed genitals of Ouranos, Father Sky. They also associated the title with Aphrodite's putative Eastern origins, perhaps because Ishtar/Astarte was known as the "Queen of Heaven" and was likewise a daughter of the sky god. Aphrodite's abode was the heavens, and artists visualized the goddess transported through the night sky, or descending from heaven on a ladder, an Egyptian and Near Eastern symbol of travel between heaven and earth. 8 Much evidence for the cult of Ourania comes from Athens, and its observance there was attributed to the mythical King Aigeus. The goddess had a sanctuary in the city center near the Stoa Poikile with a statue attributed to Pheidias, and an altar
116
APHRODITE
excavated in the area was constructed around 500. In the vicinity of this altar lay a fragmentary, fifth-century votive relief of Aphrodite descending a ladder and later reliefs of the goddess riding on a goat, her favorite sacrificial animal. The iconography of Aphrodite on a goat must have been popular with Greek women, for it was often used to decorate bronze mirrors and jewelry. We find the goat and ladder motifs combined on votive reliefs from outside Attica, as well as on a silver medallion from a brothel in the Kera- meikos that shows the goddess riding through a starry sky accompanied by Hermes and Eros. 9
The sanctuary of Aphrodite by the Ilissos river, situated in a suburban area known as the Gardens, has not been located and is known only from Pausanias' description (1. 19. 2). Here was an image of Aphrodite Ourania in the shape of a herm, a squared-off pillar topped by a head. This shape was not unusual in the cult of Aphrodite, though it is primarily associated with Hermes or Dionysos. It may have been a sign of Aphrodite's bisexual nature, for the gods portrayed in this way were highly phallic; or it may have been a reminder of the goddess' aniconic image at Paphos. While the herm stood in the courtyard, the temple itself contained the best-known work of Pheidias' pupil Alkamenes, "Aphrodite in the Gardens. " Pausanias called this much- admired statue "one of the most noteworthy sights in Athens," but unfortu- nately failed to describe its appearance, leaving modern scholars to speculate based on minimal clues. A prevailing theory holds that two other Aphrodite sanctuaries in the Athens area are duplicates of the one on the Ilissos. Certainly the small sanctuaries at Daphni and on the north slope of the Akropolis are similar to one another, for both were bounded by stony hillsides with niches cut into the rock, both linked the worship of Eros with that of Aphrodite, and both received offerings of anatomical votives in the shape of male and female genitalia. These charming spots, surely filled with greenery in antiquity, correspond to the vase paintings of the Meidian school that show Aphrodite seated on a rock in a garden setting. Aphrodite's connection with vegetation at these shrines recalls the sacred gardens of Near Eastern Astarte and Cypriot Aphrodite Ourania. 10
Pheidias sculpted an Aphrodite Ourania for the Eleans, sponsors of the Olympic games. This work of ivory and gold showed Aphrodite standing with one foot resting on a tortoise, an animal associated with women in Greek folklore because it was always confined to its home. 11 In the sanctuary at Elis, Pheidias' Ourania was juxtaposed with a bronze statue of the goddess riding on a ram, by the fourth-century sculptor Skopas. This image was called Aphrodite Pandemos (of All the People), another widespread cult title of the goddess. Plato (Symp. 180d-181c) attempted to differentiate Ourania and Pandemos as two distinct goddesses, one the celestial deity of "Platonic love" and the other concerned with fleshly pleasures. There is no evidence, how- ever, to suggest that this distinction reflects cult practices or assumptions. Ourania, as we will see, is by no means aloof from fleshly pleasures, while
117
APHRODITE
Pandemos shares the iconography of the "celestial" goddess who travels through the sky.
The epithet Pandemos had to do with Aphrodite's political function as a goddess who unites the citizens in harmony. An Athenian legend about Pandemos says that Theseus founded her worship with that of Peitho (Persuasion) after he united all the people of Attica into one city. 12 Equally indispensable in matters of ero ? s and politics, Peitho was an important con- cept for the emergent Athenian democracy. It is probable that the cult was established around 500, and helped to promote sunousia, the fellowship of citizens. We hear of Athenian tetradistai, or men who gathered to feast in honor of Aphrodite Pandemos on the fourth of every month, a day sacred to both Aphrodite and Hermes. 13 Remnants of the sanctuary have been excavated on the southwest slope of the Akropolis, including a small fourth- century temple with sculpted doves. A later Hellenistic inscription from the site shows that preparations for the state-sponsored festival (known as the Aphrodisia) involved the purification of the sanctuary with a dove sacrifice and the washing of the statues. The cult of Pandemos was an exception to the rule that Aphrodite's worship tended to be less centralized and state- supervised than that of most other Olympian deities. At Erythrai in Ionia, an oracle solicited by the state toward the end of the fifth century advised that the citizens build a temple of Aphrodite Pandemos and supply it with a statue "for the preservation of the people. "14
Figure 9. 1 Aphrodite with dove, votive bronze from Dodona (? ), c. 450. Athens, National Archaeological Museum. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
? 118
APHRODITE
An analogue to the legend of Theseus' establishment of the cult of Aphro- dite Pandemos and Peitho is found at Thebes, where the city's Phoenician founder, Kadmos, is said to have married Harmonia, the daughter of Aphro- dite and Ares. Thebans believed that Harmonia, whose name connotes the unity of the citizens, dedicated three ancient wooden statues of Aphrodite on the akropolis. These were named Ourania, Pandemos, and Apostrophia (Averter of Evils). According to Xenophon (Hell. 5. 4. 4), the three Theban civil and military officials known as polemarchoi always celebrated a festival of Aphrodite when their term of office was completed. Similar customs are attested for city officials in Megara, Ionia, and the Aegean islands through dedicatory inscriptions, the earliest of which belongs to fifth-century Keos. 15 While the emphasis at Thebes is on Aphrodite's partnership with the war god Ares, many of these dedications pair her with Hermes. In either case, the union of polar opposites (masculine and feminine or war and love) expresses metaphorically the concepts of civic concord and harmonious order.
Spartan Aphrodite
On the Spartan akropolis, we find an arrangement similar to that at Thebes, with a temple of Aphrodite Areia (of Ares) containing at least two Archaic cult statues. Based on inscribed potsherds from the area, one of these was probably Aphrodite Basilis (Queen). In the seventh century, Spartan colon- ists of Taras and Satyrion in Italy chose to carry this cult to their new home. Taras built an akropolis temple for the goddess, and at neighboring Satyrion worshipers deposited huge numbers of terracotta figurines and pots from the seventh to the third centuries, including one inscribed with the cult title Basilis. The choice of Aphrodite as a patroness may be connected with the legend that the settlers were illegitimate sons of Spartan women. 16 A second Spartan temple was unusual in that it had two stories, each containing its own cult statue. The lower level housed Aphrodite Enoplios (Armed), an Archaic type that may have been copied from Kythera. The upper room contained an unusual cedar statue called Morpho (the Beautiful One). Here the goddess, presumably Aphrodite, was shown enthroned, veiled, and wearing fetters on her feet. She belongs to a category of cult statues deemed to be so powerful and dangerous that they required binding and restraint. The veil too fits this interpretation, for such images were often hidden from view. 17
Aphrodite and "sacred prostitution" at Korinth
On Akrokorinthos, the high rocky citadel of Korinth, Aphrodite was installed as a goddess of the city, probably under the rule of the Bakchiad aristocrats in the eighth century. As in other early cults of Aphrodite, she was depicted with weapons and had the title Ourania, signs of her Near Eastern affinities. 18 The
119
APHRODITE
Korinthian cult, however, differed from most other Greek cults of Aphrodite because the goddess owned slaves who worked as prostitutes. According to the traditional scholarly view, the practice of "sacred prostitution" origin- ated as a fertility rite, and is attested in relation to Ishtar and Asherah. For example, a class of women known as ishtaritum is described in a Babylonian text alongside courtesans "whose favors are many" and prostitutes "whose husbands are legion. "19 On the other hand, this interpretation of certain Mesopotamian cultic functionaries has been vigorously criticized as a scholarly construct, overly reliant on nineteenth-century assumptions about "fertility cult" in the ancient Near East. While the vast textual evidence from cuneiform tablets reveals a bewilderingly large variety of female cultic personnel, some of whom are regularly mentioned alongside prostitutes or in contexts that hint of sexuality, they offer no clear-cut example of a "cultic prostitute," and it is likely that this conceptual category simply does not correspond to the more nuanced and complex roles of Mesopotamian women in relation to their goddesses. 20
Not surprisingly, the practice of "sacred prostitution" at Korinth has also been called into question, since it was assumed to derive directly from the cult of Ishtar. In the Greek instance, however, the evidence is much more con- vincing, and it is important to keep in mind that prostitution for Aphrodite need not be an exact imitation of any Near Eastern model. It could have been based on Greek (mis)understandings of the roles of female cultic personnel in the Near East, or it could even be an independent development. Athenaeus remarks (13. 573d) that it was the practice of individuals to "render" hetairai (courtesans) to Korinthian Aphrodite in payment of vows when their prayers were fulfilled. An example was Xenophon, a citizen who vowed one hundred girls to the goddess in return for victory at the Olympic games. He commis- sioned Pindar to write a song (fr. 122 Snell-Maehler) for the thanksgiving sacrifice, attended by the girls:
Young women, hospitable to many, handmaidens of Peitho in rich Korinth, you who burn the golden tears of pale incense; often you fly in your thoughts to Aphrodite Ourania, the mother of Loves. She gave to you, girls, without blame, to pick the fruit of soft youth on beds of desire. With necessity, all is good . . .
Strabo (8. 6. 20) reports that both men and women dedicated sacred slaves, or hierodules, to the goddess, and that the sanctuary at one time owned more than a thousand of these courtesans, who were a major source of income. 21
As a thriving port and trade depot, Korinth was famous for its prostitutes. Sanctuaries were often expected to be self-supporting, and their income usually derived from estates belonging to the resident deity. In this case, the goddess profited from one of the main industries of Korinth, the sex trade,
120
APHRODITE
through her ownership of slaves who worked as prostitutes. Most, if not all of these slaves must have worked near the harbors, rather than on the Akrokorinthos itself. To modern ears, this arrangement sounds incompatible with "the sacred," yet there is further evidence that the prostitutes of Korinth had a special relationship with Aphrodite. It was an ancient custom that whenever the city had great need, it recruited as many prostitutes as possible to participate in the supplication of the goddess. The most famous instance occurred in 480 when, with the Persian invasion at hand, the hetairai of Korinth prayed to Aphrodite on behalf of the Greeks and the Korinthian soldiery. 22 Still, there is no evidence that Aphrodite's prostitutes acted as priestesses of the goddess, or that consorting with them was in itself a religious act, so "sacred prostitution" is probably a misnomer for their role.
Aphrodite in Lokroi Epizephyrioi
A different form of "sacred prostitution" involving temporary service to Aphrodite is attributed to the people of Cyprus, Lydia, and Lokroi Epizephyrioi by late authors including Clearchus of Cyprus, who says that parents prostituted their freeborn daughters. 23 The case for prostitution in connection with Aphrodite at Lokroi is considerably less credible than that at Korinth, for the sources are not considered reliable and the practice described by Clearchus would have been shocking to standard Greek sensibilities. He may have in mind the story that when the Lokrians were under attack from the rival city of Rhegion in the fifth century, they vowed to prostitute their virgins during the festival of Aphrodite if they were victorious. Hieron of Syracuse intervened on their behalf, and the city was saved; it is unclear whether the promised offering of virgins actually took place. 24
The gift of female sexual services in fulfillment of a vow evokes the customs of Korinth, and it is at least possible that the vow was made in a similar context, where prostitutes were a standard offering to Aphrodite. On this hypothesis, the exigencies of war drove the Lokrians to vow not merely slaves but their own daughters to the goddess, just as the Lokrians of mainland Greece devoted citizen maidens to the temple service of Athena. The famous Ludovisi throne, a ritual object of unknown function which originally stood in a Lokrian temple of Aphrodite, is carved with reliefs showing a nude courtesan playing the double flute on one side and a matron burning incense on the other: a reference to the vow, or perhaps to the different modes by which married women and (non-sacred) prostitutes served the goddess. 25
There is no question that Aphrodite's worship at Lokroi was anomalous in some ways. The oldest known structure at Lokroi is a dining complex near the seashore dating to the seventh century, not long after the initial founding of the colony (later, in the sixth century, a three-room temple was added). The U-Shaped Stoa, as it is known, enclosed three hundred and seventy-one separate pits, each with the buried remains of one or more ritual banquets,
121
APHRODITE
including pottery inscribed with Aphrodite's name. The contents of the pits were laid down from the mid-sixth to the fourth century. While dining facilities are not unusual in sanctuaries, this example is particularly early and the careful deposition of the debris - with each pot and figurine deliberately broken - is unparalleled. Whatever the function of the ritual, the early date of the stoa shows that Aphrodite's cult was of crucial importance to the colonists. 26
At Lokroi, Aphrodite's cult was closely intertwined with that of the most important goddess of Magna Graecia, Persephone. The large collection of fifth-century terracotta pinakes from the Persephone sanctuary at Mannella contain a significant number illustrating mythic and cultic scenes involving Aphrodite, including her birth from the sea. Three pinax types show Aphro- dite with her cult partner Hermes, while Eros too seems to have played a role in her worship here. In one type, she stands in a chariot drawn by a winged boy and girl as Hermes steps up beside her; in another she presents Hermes with a flower as Eros sits on her arm. A third shows cult statues of the pair standing in a temple while a young couple pours libations upon an altar decorated with a copulating satyr and deer. The general impression is that while Persephone's cult focused on pre-nuptial rites and the protection of young children, Aphrodite's cult had to do with women's sexual experience, including that of brides. 27
Figure 9. 2 The birth of Aphrodite on the Ludovisi "Throne," probably from the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Lokroi Epizephyrioi, 460-50. Museo Nazionale Romano. Art Resource.
? 122
APHRODITE
Maritime Aphrodite
Aphrodite's sanctuaries were regularly located at port cities along the major trade routes used by Greek and Phoenician merchants, important dissemin- ators of her cult. An anecdote quoted by Athenaeus (15. 675f-76a) illustrates this point. Herostratos, a merchant plying the waters between Cyprus and the Greek trading emporium of Naukratis in Egypt, purchased a small statue of Aphrodite at Paphos and continued south. Buffeted by a terrible storm, all aboard his ship prayed to the goddess to save them. Fresh myrtle sprouted around the statue, permeating the air with its sweet scent and soothing the seasick men as the skies cleared. The crew arrived safely at Naukratis, and Herostratos was moved to dedicate the image at the sanctuary of Aphrodite, and to distribute crowns of the miraculous myrtle to her worshipers. Hero- stratos is supposed to have lived in early Archaic times, and excavation has shown that the temple in the sanctuary of Aphrodite was one of the oldest structures at Naukratis, founded c. 600 by East Greek traders. Several vases were dedicated here to Aphrodite Pandemos, an appropriate choice for a colony composed of immigrant citizens from varied backgrounds. As a god- dess of sea and sky who aided in navigation, Aphrodite was called Euploia (of Good Sailing), Epilimenia (She at the Harbor), and Pontia (She of the Sea). The sanctuary of Aphrodite Euploia at Knidos was famous for its cult statue by Praxiteles, the first Classical sculptor to show the goddess nude. Surrounded by fine gardens, the temple was constructed on a circular plan so that visitors could enjoy the delights of the statue in the round. 28
Aphrodite and Hippolytos
At both Athens and Trozen, which faced each other across the Saronic gulf, Aphrodite's cult was closely linked with that of Hippolytos. Euripides' play Hippolytos tells how the hero incurred the goddess' wrath because of his devotion to chastity, and how Phaidra, the young wife of Theseus and stepmother of Hippolytos, became the tool of Aphrodite's vengeance. The Athenian cult of Hippolytos was an offshoot of that at Trozen, the result of the popularization of Theseus as an Athenian hero. On the south slope of the Akropolis, in the same area as the sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemos (and perhaps identical to it) was a shrine of Aphrodite "at Hippolytos," also known as the Hippolyteion. Here the hero received regular sacrifices at his tomb. 29 At Trozen, on the other hand, Hippolytos was a local god whose sanctuary contained a shrine of the goddess, so that their relative status was inverted. The meaning of his name is not transparent, but it contains the root hipp- (horse), suggesting a relationship with the city god Poseidon (both Poseidon and Aphrodite were responsible for his death according to the myths). He was the principal deity in a large, important extramural sanctuary that included a number of interrelated cults. Here, the debris from the site of
123
APHRODITE
his small temple indicates activity as far back as the Geometric period. 30 Pausanias (2. 32. 1) saw the temple with its ancient statue and reported that a priest was dedicated for life to Hippolytos' service. Before marriage, maidens offered a lock of hair at his sanctuary. The complex also included a stadium, overlooked by a temple of Aphrodite Kataskopia, (She Who Observes). Near this temple was a myrtle tree, sacred to the goddess, and the supposed tombs of Hippolytos and Phaidra.
Aphrodite and Adonis
The cult of Aphrodite's paramour Adonis held a special appeal for Greek women, combining the erotic adoration of a beautiful youth with the emo- tional catharsis of lamentation for his death. The Adonis cult was an early import from the Levant, probably via Cyprus, but while many of the outward forms remained the same, its cultural context and significance changed. Adonis was modeled upon Tammuz, the consort of Ishtar whose death was annually lamented by women, and his name is a direct borrowing of the West Semitic adon, Lord. At Phoenician Byblos there was a sanctuary of "Aphrodite and Adonis," that is, the city goddess Astarte and a consort who corresponded to Tammuz. Whereas the cult of Tammuz (Sumerian Dumuzi) enjoyed near-universal recognition in Mesopotamia and his festival was so important that a Babylonian month was named after him, the worship of Adonis was tolerated by many Greek city-states but rarely gained the status of a state-sponsored cult. Adonis was viewed with some ambivalence, pro- bably because his main adherents were women, and in spite of his popularity in certain areas, he retained a fundamentally "foreign" aura. At the core of the cult lay a ritual with no connection to acknowledged sacred space; in Greek contexts before the Hellenistic period, Adonis only rarely possessed a sanctuary, temple or even an altar, making his rites anomalous.
To perform the Adonia, which took place in late summer, women ascended to the roof, where they sang dirges, cried out in grief, and beat their breasts. Sappho (fr. 140a LP) mentions that the women tore their garments, a stand- ard sign of mourning. Other features of Adonis' ritual belong to the cult in Classical Athens. A few days before the Adonia, garden herbs and cereals were sown in broken pots. These tender young plants were brought to the rooftops during the festival, to be withered in the hot sun as emblems of the youthful Adonis' death. Another custom involved the laying out of Adonis dolls as for burial. While the traditional Frazerian concept of Adonis and similar figures as dying "fertility gods" has been increasingly criticized, Detienne's analysis of Adonis as the paradigm of illicit sexuality and sterility, to be set against the fruitful union of husband and wife, has not achieved full acceptance, perhaps because it neglects the Adonis cult's Near Eastern background. 31
124
APHRODITE
Aphrodite and marriage
Aphrodite is sometimes associated with weddings, as we saw at Lokroi, but her involvement has to do specifically with the sexual component of marriage, not its social aspects. On the road from Trozen to Hermione, Pausanias (2. 32. 7) noted a sanctuary of Aphrodite Nymphia (Bridal Aphro- dite), which was connected with Theseus' abduction of the young Helen. In Hermione itself, both virgins and widows who wished to "go with a man" had to sacrifice to the goddess before marriage. The inclusion of widows shows that this was not a rite of passage, but an acknowledgment of Aphro- dite's role in successful marriages. Similarly, widows at Naupaktos went to Aphrodite's cave to pray for husbands. The participation of women at vary- ing stages of life is also evident in the venerable cult of Aphrodite at Sikyon, where the temple was served by a female warden (neo ? koros) "for whom it was no longer permitted to go with a man" and by a maiden priestess, consecrated for one year. Whereas the warden had once been married, the priestess soon would be. The cult statue was a gold and ivory image by Kanachos, the Sikyonian sculptor who created other masterworks for the Thebans and Milesians around 500. The goddess was shown seated, wearing a polos and holding a poppy in one hand and a fruit in the other. Access to the temple was restricted, so visitors gazed upon the statue and offered their prayers from the doorway. This cult is similar in nature to those of the old Achaean goddesses such as Hera or Athena and shows few signs of the Near Eastern influences we saw in other cities. Still, it is typically Aphrodisian in its emphasis on fragrance: the sacrifices were burned on juniper wood with a local aromatic herb that had erotic associations. 32
Further reading
Budin 2003 provides a detailed examination of the goddess' journey to the west from Cyprus and her prehistoric roots, with emphasis on the material evidence. MacLachlan 1992 defends the historicity of sacred prostitution against the growing number of skeptics; it should be read with Westenholz 1989, Assante 2003 and the papers collected in Part I of Faraone and McClure 2006. Williams 1986 summarizes the material evidence for Aphrodite's cult on the Korinthian citadel. Rosenzweig 2004 has full coverage of cults in Athens, primarily from an art-historical perspective, while Redfield 2003 offers many insights about Aphrodite's important role in Lokrian culture.
125
10
EPIPHANY AND TRANSFORMATION
Dionysos
The traditional view of Dionysos' worship as an import from Thrace or Phrygia was called into question with the discovery of the name Dionysos on Linear B tablets from Pylos, which show that the name, and probably the god, was known to Bronze Age Greeks. 1 While Dionysiac myths present this most exotic of the Olympians as a literal stranger, an emigrant from foreign lands, they also maintain that he was born in Greece. At the same time, his worship shares features with the cults of Phrygian Kybele, who was likewise celebrated with ecstatic dancing to percussive music, and Egyptian Osiris, a chthonian vegetation god who experienced dismemberment and resurrec- tion. The ecstatic nature of some Dionysiac rites, together with their special appeal to women, set the worship of Dionysos apart from that of any other Olympian deity. Though clearly a god of the vine and its product, Dionysos' identity cannot be so easily delimited. He is also a deity of intoxication and madness, whose followers experience both profound surrender and glad liber- ation; this element of enthousiasmos, having the god within, is anomalous in Olympian worship. From the Archaic period, he offers hope for afterlife salvation through private initiatory rites. He is not a major civic or federal god, though his festivals can become essential to civic identity (as they do in Athens). The archaeological remains of his sanctuaries and temples are not impressive, but their modesty belies his great popularity. With respect to ritual, the most commonly recurring concept is the epiphany or advent of Dionysos and his reception. The dithurambos, often on the theme of Dionysos' birth, was his characteristic hymn. Though the details of the process are unknown, it is clear that Greek tragedy and comedy arose in a ritual context from choral songs performed for Dionysos.
Dionysos has attracted a great deal of critical attention because a profound theology, analogous to certain Christian doctrines, can be extracted from his myths and cults in a way that is not true of the other Olympian gods. A suffering god, an ecstatic religious experience in which worshipers are united with the deity, the consumption of wine as part of the ritual, and the belief in the god's ability to offer salvation from death: all these elements have con- tributed to theories that Dionysiac religion was co-opted by Christianity, on
126
DIONYSOS
the one hand, and attempts to recast the pagan Greeks as Christian precur- sors, on the other. More recently, the psychosocial dimensions of Dionysiac religion have been extensively studied to reveal how the god offered tempor- ary escape from normal modes of being into alternate states such as trance, masquerade, madness, and of course, intoxication, and how he subverted gender roles and other societal norms. These analyses are largely based on the portraits of Dionysiac worship in Greek poetry and myth, above all the Bacchae of Euripides. While they provide a valuable description of the god's symbolic significance and cultural meaning, a study of Dionysos' cults and the historically attested behaviors associated with them yields a picture rather different from what myth and poetry lead us to expect. 2 In practice, the worship of Dionysos was not truly subversive; instead, it offered outlets for physical and emotional self-expression within socially acceptable con- texts. Furthermore, Dionysiac cult was smoothly integrated into Greek civic systems of worship, with ecstatic and private components balanced by state- sponsored festivals and conventional sacrifices.
Dionysiac festivals and the calendar
While drama was a Panhellenic development, the major Dionysiac festivals can be assigned to the Ionian and Athenian Greeks (Anthesteria, Lenaia) or to the Dorians and the Aiolic speakers of Thessaly and Boiotia (Agriania and its variants, Theodaisia). This division also corresponds to two early centers of Dionysiac activity, the Aegean islands and Boiotian Thebes. The islands, particularly Chios and Naxos, were leading producers of wine and propo- nents of Dionysos as the god of viticulture whose sacred marriage with Ariadne ensured prosperity. The rituals and myths that involve Dionysos' arrival from the sea, as in the ship processions of East Greece and Athens, seem to reflect the influence of the islands. The silens or satyrs, who are featured in the vase iconography of several myths set in Naxos (e. g. the return of Hephaistos and the meeting of Dionysos and Ariadne), are also a part of this Aegean Dionysiac tradition. 3 They are conspicuously absent from the myths of Boiotian origin that involve resistance to Dionysos by royal women (the daughters of Kadmos, Minyas, Eleutheros, and Proitos). The Boiotian/ Theban strand of Dionysiac cult, exported to the rest of the mainland and beyond, focused on the god's birth, themes of death and resurrection, and various benefits and purifications obtained through initiation into Dionysiac thiasoi (groups organized for worship). Mainadic activity seems to have been present in both traditions, though emphasized far more heavily on the mainland. The geographical position of Attica ensured that both the Aegean and Boiotian strands played an important role in the Athenian worship of Dionysos.
Dionysos, rather surprisingly, is a winter god. His festivals everywhere take place in the months we call December, January, February, and March:
127
DIONYSOS
the seasons of winter and early spring. The biennial nature of many of these festivals, generally the winter ones with mainadic elements, has never been satisfactorily explained. One theory relates the phenomenon to the need for intercalary periods to reconcile the lunar and solar calendars and keep the months synchronized with the seasons. 4 The Dionysiac festivals of winter have been described as rites by which the quiescent grape vines and other vegetation were recalled to life. While Dionysos is certainly a god who dies or vanishes and reappears periodically, it is difficult to plausibly match his comings and goings with the growth cycles of plants. On the other hand, he unquestionably has affinities with certain trees (pine, fig, plane) and vines (grape, ivy). The ivy, ubiquitous in art, actually eclipses the grapevine as the emblem of the god, perhaps because it retained foliage through the winter and was thus available for ritual use. 5 The spring festivals are more easily explained because they correspond to the tasting of the new wine, but it is notable that no major Dionysiac festival addresses the vintage.
Cycladic Dionysos
On the island of Keos some 40 km from the Attic coast, archaeologists have uncovered the earliest known Dionysos sanctuary. The Cycladic people who occupied the site of Ayia Irini in the Bronze Age built a temple and filled it with large-scale terracotta sculptures of women wearing typical Minoan dress. The statues, produced in large numbers, do not represent the resident deity. Instead, they were placed in the sanctuary for some unknown reason, perhaps as perpetual witnesses of the god's epiphany or as pleasing gifts from worshipers. Eventually the temple collapsed and the town was deserted in the twelfth century. Around 750, votives began to accumulate in the innermost room of the same sacred building the Bronze Age inhabitants had used. The focus of this cult was a terracotta head that originally belonged to one of the Minoan-type statues in the sanctuary, many of which were buried at the site. The new occupants dug up this object or received it as an heirloom, and set it up on the floor of the temple in a specially made ring base, where the excavators found it in situ. With the head were found Geometric kantharoi, the characteristic wine cups of Dionysos; that he was the god of the sanctuary by the end of the sixth century is confirmed by a vase graffito. It has been suggested that the shrine originally belonged to a Minoan goddess, but it is also possible that a Bronze Age Dionysos was the occupant, surrounded by groups of dancing women just as he was in historical times. On the other hand, despite the unusual degree of continuity in the use of the temple at Ayia Irini, the cultic focus on the terracotta head shows that its original function was not well understood. Dionysos was apparently worshiped at Ayia Irini in the Geometric period, but how much earlier remains an open question. 6
The Cyclades were famous for their wines, and Naxos in particular was considered sacred to Dionysos from at least the seventh century. The first
128
DIONYSOS
coins minted there, c. 600, displayed the kantharos, and other emblems of the god followed. The island was the source of a cycle of Dionysiac myths, including tales of the god's birth and nurture by nymphs, and his meeting with Ariadne. 7 Unfortunately, we know little of the cults there. According to Plutarch (Vit. Thes. 20), there were two festivals of two Ariadnes, one a joyful occasion celebrating the bride of Dionysos, and the other a time of sorrow with sacrifices for the dead heroine (Ariadne was also honored as a heroine in Argos and Amathous). The Naxians possessed a pair of sacred masks, objects that signaled the god's presence and served as cult images. One, made of grapevine wood, was known as Bakcheus, and the other, of wood from the fig, was Meilichios, the mild or sweet. The combination of an important god and a secondary female cult figure (Dionysos and Ariadne) is consistent with the finds from the recently excavated sanctuary at Hyria on Naxos, where a temple stood from Geometric times over the remains of a Mycenaean cult site. Later structures at the site included an Archaic dining room and a successor temple. The rich and varied votive gifts included some types, like terracotta female busts, that were typically offered to female deities. 8
Phallic processions and images
Processions including wooden phalloi on poles or large painted phalloi in carts were a common mode of celebration for Dionysos throughout Greece; according to Herodotus (2. 48-49), it was the Argive hero Melampous who first introduced this custom. Processional phalloi were a familiar sight in the rural and city celebrations of the Athenians, while epigraphic evidence starting in 301 shows that every year, the Delians created a winged, brightly colored phallos-bird and drew it through the streets in a wagon. This fanciful object was considered the image of the god himself, and while the direct evidence is Hellenistic in date, it is likely that the phallic parade was practiced from the Archaic period. Excavators found no temple of Dionysos on the island, but there was a deposit of items dedicated to the god including an Archaic stone phallos. 9 The Delian phallos image of Dionysos, like the masked columns seen on Attic vase paintings, was intended to serve as a temporary simulacrum of the god, just as the phalloi used in the Athenian City Dionysia had to be replaced every year. The use of such ephemeral images is typical of Dionysiac cult but rare in other Greek worship.
The representation of the phallos in art and poetry is linked in sacred narratives with the proper reception of Dionysos. In Athens, for example, the men who failed to receive Dionysos Eleuthereus with honor made model phalloi in order to regain the god's favor, while an inscription from Paros tells a similar, presumably apocryphal story about the poet Archilochus. When his attempt to introduce obscene Dionysiac poetry was rebuffed, the men of Paros were rendered impotent until they accepted the new mode of
129
DIONYSOS
worship. Paradoxically, though the phallos has an important role in many Dionysiac cults, the god himself is rarely portrayed nude or in a state of sexual excitement; in fact he remains detached from sexuality except in the context of the sacred marriage. The Dionysiac phallos does not signify male sexuality or masculinity per se but the exuberant, animating force that makes arousal and procreation possible. 10
The Anthesteria
Thucydides (2. 15. 4) notes that the "older Dionysia," which takes place at Athens in the month of Anthesterion, is a festival also celebrated by the Ionian cities. Post-Classical inscriptions confirm that this was the case in Ephesos, Priene, Miletos, and Smyrna, and scholars have therefore included this festival among those that predate the Ionian migration of c. 1000. The month name Anthesterion is even more widely attested, from Eretria in Euboia to the Ionian colonies of Massilia and Kyzikos. Sometimes the celebration is called the Anthesteria (Festival of Blooming); otherwise it is the Dionysia or the Katagogia (Bringing Home) of Dionysos. The latter most likely refers to the advent of the god in a ship on wheels similar to a parade float and ultimately derived from Egypt; Attic vases illustrating this ritual scene suggest that it was an element of the Archaic and Classical Athenian festival, probably one of the initial events of the ritual sequence.
Whereas the vintage took place in the fall, the true advent of Dionysos as the wine god came in the early spring, when the casks of new wine were broached for the first time. This first day of the festival, 11 Anthesterion, was known at Athens as the Pithoigia (Cask-Opening). The second day, called Choes (Jugs), was a day of revelry and feasting even for slaves. It also included what has been described as a rite of passage for little boys who had reached the age of three, the usual age of weaning. They were crowned with spring flowers and given presents, including miniature versions of the wine jugs called choes, a shape produced for about fifty years during and after the Peloponnesian war. Infants who died before they could participate were sometimes buried with these jugs, which are gaily painted with scenes of chubby boys, naked but for their amulet strings, playing with small dogs, riding in carts, or making offerings of libations and cakes. 11 As we learn from Aristophanes' Acharnians (959-1234), adult males too looked forward to the Choes, when serious drinking was the order of the day. Each man was supplied with his own chous, a container which held about three liters of wine. (This custom was explained by reference to the hospitality shown Orestes when he came to Athens to be tried for matricide: to avoid sharing his pollution, all drank from separate jugs. ) If we can take Aristophanes' comic description as an accurate reflection of ritual, the archo ? n basileus (King Archon) conducted a drinking competition with a skin of wine as the prize for the first man to empty his chous. In any case, numerous private contests
130
DIONYSOS
and festive dinners were held around the city. At the end of the day, the revelers wrapped their choes in the garlands they had won and headed to the Limnaion, or sanctuary of Dionysos at Limnai (the Marshes), where they poured libations from whatever was left of the wine in the presence of a priestess. 12
The Choes was the only day of the year when the Limnaion was open, and the sanctuary now witnessed an ancient and venerable rite: the sacred marriage of the King Archon's wife (the basilinna or Queen) and Dionysos himself. A law stating that the basilinna was required to be of Athenian birth and a virgin at the time of her wedding to the King Archon was inscribed on a stone set up in the Limnaion. In a speech preserved in the Demosthenic corpus (Against Neaira 59. 73-78), Apollodorus is indignant that an alien woman of questionable virtue was permitted to assume the title of basilinna and perform the sacred acts on the city's behalf; he stresses the great antiquity and solemnity of the rite. This part of the festival was carried out in secret, and little is known of what actually constituted the "marriage. " Perhaps there was a wedding procession from the Limnaion to the old city center east of the Akropolis, where the sacred union is said to have taken place in the so-called boukoleion (cattle shed), the headquarters of the King Archon. Modern scholars have speculated that the King Archon himself played the role of Dionysos in order to consummate the marriage. He further chose fourteen women attendants known as the gerarai (Reverend Ones), who assisted with offerings at fourteen altars, witnessed the secret things, and were apparently present at other Dionysiac rituals during the year. Accord- ing to Apollodorus, they took the following oath: "I lead a holy life and I am pure and chaste from intercourse with men and other polluting things, and I will hallow the Theoinia (Wine God's Feast) and the Iobakcheia for Dionysos according to ancestral custom and at the appointed times. "13
The third day of the Athenian celebration was also named after a type of vessel: Chytroi (Pots). Unfortunately, there are no detailed contemporary sources for the events of this day, nor do the sources make a clear distinction between Choes and Chytroi. It is logical that the pots, like the casks and jugs of the first two days, should have something to do with wine, and they have been connected to Phanodemus' account (FGrH 325 F 12) of Athenians mix- ing sweet wine with water for Dionysos Limnaios. The mixing of wine and water is attested for other Dionysiac festivals (below), and while mixing vessels came in a wide variety of specialized shapes, they were all essentially wide-mouthed pots. The scholiasts on Aristophanes and various lexicogra- phers, however, give a different account, characterizing the Choes (or the month Anthesterion) as a time when ghosts rose from the underworld. They derive the name Chytroi from the cooking pots in which the Athenians prepared a mixture of grains as an offering to Hermes Chthonios (of the Underworld), with special reference to those who perished in the Flood. The sources portraying the Choes/Chytroi as a Halloween-like festival of
131
DIONYSOS
the dead are late and somewhat confused accounts. On the other hand, Aristophanes' Frogs places Dionysos' visit to the underworld in the context of the Limnaion and the Anthesteria, lending plausibility to the connection between this festival and the dead. 14 It should be noted that while the celebration of Dionysos' advent in the month of Anthesterion seems to have been widespread among the Ionian peoples, the details of the Choes and Chytroi are apparently unique to Athens. 15
The City Dionysia
While all the Athenian festivals of Dionysos included dramas or dithyrambs, the City Dionysia was transformed during the sixth century into the premier dramatic festival of the Athenian year, and, with the Panathenaia, played a crucial role in the construction of Athenian civic identity. Originally the urban version of the winter festivities held in the demes, the City celebration was moved to the spring month of Elaphebolion for the convenience of spectators and visitors traveling to Athens. Unlike the ancestral rites of the Lenaia and Anthesteria, which were the responsibility of the King Archon, the City Dionysia was treated like a newer festival and placed under the jurisdiction of the eponymous Archon. A preliminary to the festival was the "bringing in (eisago ? ge ? ) of Dionysos from the altar," the ceremonial torch-lit escort of the god's image from a temple near the Academy to its permanent home in the theater precinct. Dionysos Eleuthereus was the god of this festival, and tradition held that a man named Pegasos had first brought the image to Athens from the town of Eleutherai on the border with Boiotia. When the Athenians failed to receive the god with honor, they found them- selves stricken with a disease of the male genitals. An oracle advised the Athenians to make model phalloi and honor the god with them. Scholars view the eisago ? ge ? ritual either as a re-enactment of Dionysos' original advent in Athens, or more specifically as a commemoration of the Athenian annex- ation of Eleutherai and adoption of its Dionysiac cult. Our main sources for the eisago ? ge ? are Hellenistic inscriptions, but it is likely that this complex of myth and ritual dates to the sixth century, when the modest temple of Dionysos Eleuthereus was built beside the theater at the foot of the south slope of the Akropolis. 16
The main ritual of the Athenian festival was a relatively inclusive pompe ? or procession which, like the Panathenaic parade, featured women and scarlet- robed metics as well as male citizens. A kane ? phoros (basket-bearer), a maiden of noble birth, led the procession with a golden basket, followed by people carrying loaves and libations of water and wine, or guiding sacrificial ani- mals. (The goat was probably the preferred victim, given that tragedy seems to have the root meaning of "goat song. ")17 The colonies of Athens were required to send phalloi for the festival and presumably had their own repre- sentatives in the parade. The most colorful participants were the chore ? goi or
132
DIONYSOS
sponsors of the plays, who wore elaborate robes embroidered with gold and golden crowns. The procession traveled through the agora, pausing at various altars to allow choruses to perform. Perhaps that evening was the time for the ko ? mos, a male-oriented, wine-soaked revel. The competitions included ten dithyrambic choruses made up of boys and ten of men, as well as comedies, tragedies, and satyr-plays. Before they began, the theater was purified with piglets' blood and libations were poured for the god, whose statue was present during performances. The crowds in the theater also witnessed the proclamation of crowns for honored citizens, the display of tribute from Athens' subject states, and the introduction of citizen youths reared at public expense because their fathers had fallen in battle. 18
Dionysos in Attic Ikarion
The Country Dionysia of Attica, as its name implies, was a decentralized celebration that focused on Dionysos as an agricultural deity. Throughout the winter month of Posideion, villagers in the various demes of Attica organized processions such as the one described in Aristophanes' Acharnians (237-79), which includes a basketbearer with a sacred cake, slaves holding a large phallos on a pole, and the protagonist Dikaiopolis as a reveler, sing- ing a ribald hymn to Phales, personification of the phallos. According to Aristotle (Poet. 1449a), comedy developed from these phallic songs. Many of the demes had their own theaters and presented comic and tragic per- formances. Ikarion, a wine-producing village at the northern foot of Mt. Pentelikon, had a unique status among the Attic demes as the first to receive Dionysos. According to legend, Ikarios welcomed the god and received the gift of wine, which he offered to his unsuspecting fellows. When they passed out from overindulgence, their relatives thought Ikarios was a poisoner and killed him. His daughter Erigone discovered the body with the help of Ikarios' faithful dog, and in her grief, she hanged herself from a tree. As a result of their impiety toward Dionysos, the villagers were struck with a plague, and the Delphic oracle directed them to hang up a female effigy to swing in the trees as an appeasement of Erigone. This story was connected with a purifi- cation ritual called the Aiora (Swinging), during which girls sat in swings suspended from trees. It has sometimes been assigned to the Anthesteria, though similar rituals involving boys and girls may have taken place at other times in the year. 19
Its material remains show that Ikarion was indeed the home of a venerable Dionysiac cult. Beneath a Byzantine church were found the fragments of a massive cult statue once housed in the Dionysion. This marble image is dated to about 520, making it one of the earliest known cult statues in stone (most early examples were sculpted in wood or ivory). The seated, draped god held a kantharos and originally measured 2 m from head to foot. His history can be tentatively reconstructed with help from several inscriptions detailing the
133
DIONYSOS
? Figure 10. 1 Head of Dionysos cult statue from Ikarion, Attica, c. 520. Athens, National Archaeological Museum. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
cult and the system of liturgies for the presentation of dramatic performances in Ikarion. A fifth-century inscription (IG I3 254) mentions that the chore ? goi, the demesmen organizing the dramas for the Country Dionysia, were sworn in with one hand on a statue - presumably that of Dionysos. Ancient repairs to the statue are suggested by the present state of the head (which has some- times been mistaken for a mask) and confirmed by a fourth-century inscription (IG II2 2851). When first sculpted, this statue would have been one of the most impressive in Attica. It was certainly housed in a temple, though the extant architectural remains are not complete enough to tell us more. 20
The Lenaia
Like the Anthesteria, the Lenaia was a widespread festival among the Ionians, to judge from the appearances of the winter month name Lenaion in inscrip- tions. At Athens, the festival was celebrated in the corresponding month Gamelion, and was overseen by the King Archon and officials connected with the Eleusinian mysteries, who organized a procession and musical con- test, later expanded to include dramas. These competitions, at which several of Aristophanes' comedies debuted, were held in the Lenaion, a sanctuary
134
DIONYSOS
that has left no trace but was probably located in the agora. Little is known about the ritual activities of the Lenaia, except that Dionysos was invoked as "Iakchos, son of Semele, giver of wealth. " In a custom common to the Lenaia and Anthesteria, scurrilous gibes were cast at the spectators by young men in the processional wagons. 21
The name Lenaia is usually derived from the Ionic term le ? nai (wild women or mainads), though an alternative theory links it to le ? nos (a vat for treading grapes). If the former etymology is accurate, it points to an early mainadic element in the festival. Mainads (also known as bakchai) worshiped Dionysos in a "maddened" state of ecstasy, which was expressed primarily through physical movement: energetic dancing performed out of doors, particularly on the mountainsides. They wore distinctive animal skins over their dresses, left their hair unbound, and carried ivy-tipped staffs called thursoi. Their activities simulated those of the female half of Dionysos' entourage, the band of nymphs who reared him in Nysa. Archaic and Classical sources have much to say of these madwomen who leave the confines of their homes for the wild mountains, but rather surprisingly, there is no unambiguous evidence of real- life mainads as opposed to mythic ones before the Hellenistic period. Still, the wealth of literary evidence strongly suggests that mainadism was practiced in at least some areas (Boiotia, the Peloponnese, and Delphi) from an early date. Again, the literary accounts often focus on mainadic transgressions (those who reject the god are driven to crimes such as the dismemberment of their own children) or tell of superhuman invulnerability and strength (e. g. the rending of a bull in Euripides' Bacchae). It is difficult to separate the mythic elaborations from the authentic ritual core in these accounts.
A different type of evidence for Classical mainads are the so-called Lenaia vases, which depict women moving about a temporary, outdoor cult image of Dionysos, a draped column or pole topped with a bearded mask. This masked column appears first on black figured vases, mostly lekuthoi, where the presence of satyrs suggests that the female figures in attendance are to be understood as nymphs. Red figured examples (mostly stamnoi produced for export) include vases showing ecstatic, mainad-like females dancing around the column and altar of the god. On one side, we typically see stately women ladling wine from twin stamnoi set up on a table before the masked column; the other side shows women walking or dancing and holding drinking cups. Whether any of these scenes can be assigned to a specific Attic festival has been the subject of debate since the early twentieth century, with one camp opting for the Lenaia as the "festival of madwomen," another for the Anthesteria, and a third suggesting that the scenes are generic or mythical. It is probable that the use of the masked column was not limited to a specific festival, for the vases do not form a coherent group. The scenes of dancing women are consistent with the hypothesis of cultic mainadism in Classical Attica, but they cannot confirm it in the absence of other evidence. 22
135
DIONYSOS
? Figure 10. 2 "Lenaia" vase: women ladle wine before an image of Dionysos (a masked and draped pole).
Among the numerous Cypriot sanctuaries of the goddess, that at Ama- thous, where the population was of indigenous and Phoenician stock, was noted for its unusual, bi-gendered deity. Here the image of the goddess wore female garb, but was bearded and held a scepter. The locals called this deity Aphroditos, a name that was also known in fifth-century Athens. The
115
APHRODITE
androgyny of Aphrodite at Amathous again points to the Near East, for Phoenician Astarte is likewise known to have had a male aspect, but it is also compatible with Greek ideas of Aphrodite as the goddess born of Ouranos' genitals, who governed male sexuality. 5
The export of Aphrodite
The Greeks thought that the oldest cult place of Aphrodite in their lands was the island of Kythera, where an ancient sanctuary of Aphrodite Ourania was attributed to Phoenician founders by Herodotus (1. 105) and others. Archae- ology provides no support for the hypothesis of Phoenician influence on the island, though the sanctuary itself remains unexcavated, and the murex shells exploited by the Phoenicians for purple dye were locally abundant. Certainly this cult was well established by the time of Hesiod (Theog. 191-99), who mentions Aphrodite's brief sojourn there before her emergence from the sea at Cyprus. The remains of a fifth-century Doric temple survive on the island, and the cult statue was an armed Aphrodite who recalled the warlike god- desses Ishtar and Astarte. 6 The goddess probably made her way into mainland Greece during the tenth and ninth centuries from three locations: Cyprus, Kythera, and Krete. Excavations have revealed that the Kretan sanctuaries are among the oldest after those of Cyprus. At Kato Symi, the Archaic sanctuary devoted to Hermes and Aphrodite had a history of continuous use stretching back to Middle Minoan times, though the Minoan predecessors of the pair must have had different names. Again, at Olous there was a Geo- metric temple of Aphrodite and Ares. (Ares is not attested at the site until the double temple of the Roman period, but in other parts of Krete the pair was worshiped from an early date. ) All over the Greek world, Aphrodite is regularly found with a cult partner, either Hermes or Ares, and this appears to be an archaic feature of her worship rather than a later development. 7
Aphrodite Ourania and Pandemos
At Paphos, Kythera, Korinth, Athens, and many other places, Aphrodite was known as Ourania (Heavenly). For the Greeks, this most widely disseminated of her titles evoked the Hesiodic story of the goddess' birth from the severed genitals of Ouranos, Father Sky. They also associated the title with Aphrodite's putative Eastern origins, perhaps because Ishtar/Astarte was known as the "Queen of Heaven" and was likewise a daughter of the sky god. Aphrodite's abode was the heavens, and artists visualized the goddess transported through the night sky, or descending from heaven on a ladder, an Egyptian and Near Eastern symbol of travel between heaven and earth. 8 Much evidence for the cult of Ourania comes from Athens, and its observance there was attributed to the mythical King Aigeus. The goddess had a sanctuary in the city center near the Stoa Poikile with a statue attributed to Pheidias, and an altar
116
APHRODITE
excavated in the area was constructed around 500. In the vicinity of this altar lay a fragmentary, fifth-century votive relief of Aphrodite descending a ladder and later reliefs of the goddess riding on a goat, her favorite sacrificial animal. The iconography of Aphrodite on a goat must have been popular with Greek women, for it was often used to decorate bronze mirrors and jewelry. We find the goat and ladder motifs combined on votive reliefs from outside Attica, as well as on a silver medallion from a brothel in the Kera- meikos that shows the goddess riding through a starry sky accompanied by Hermes and Eros. 9
The sanctuary of Aphrodite by the Ilissos river, situated in a suburban area known as the Gardens, has not been located and is known only from Pausanias' description (1. 19. 2). Here was an image of Aphrodite Ourania in the shape of a herm, a squared-off pillar topped by a head. This shape was not unusual in the cult of Aphrodite, though it is primarily associated with Hermes or Dionysos. It may have been a sign of Aphrodite's bisexual nature, for the gods portrayed in this way were highly phallic; or it may have been a reminder of the goddess' aniconic image at Paphos. While the herm stood in the courtyard, the temple itself contained the best-known work of Pheidias' pupil Alkamenes, "Aphrodite in the Gardens. " Pausanias called this much- admired statue "one of the most noteworthy sights in Athens," but unfortu- nately failed to describe its appearance, leaving modern scholars to speculate based on minimal clues. A prevailing theory holds that two other Aphrodite sanctuaries in the Athens area are duplicates of the one on the Ilissos. Certainly the small sanctuaries at Daphni and on the north slope of the Akropolis are similar to one another, for both were bounded by stony hillsides with niches cut into the rock, both linked the worship of Eros with that of Aphrodite, and both received offerings of anatomical votives in the shape of male and female genitalia. These charming spots, surely filled with greenery in antiquity, correspond to the vase paintings of the Meidian school that show Aphrodite seated on a rock in a garden setting. Aphrodite's connection with vegetation at these shrines recalls the sacred gardens of Near Eastern Astarte and Cypriot Aphrodite Ourania. 10
Pheidias sculpted an Aphrodite Ourania for the Eleans, sponsors of the Olympic games. This work of ivory and gold showed Aphrodite standing with one foot resting on a tortoise, an animal associated with women in Greek folklore because it was always confined to its home. 11 In the sanctuary at Elis, Pheidias' Ourania was juxtaposed with a bronze statue of the goddess riding on a ram, by the fourth-century sculptor Skopas. This image was called Aphrodite Pandemos (of All the People), another widespread cult title of the goddess. Plato (Symp. 180d-181c) attempted to differentiate Ourania and Pandemos as two distinct goddesses, one the celestial deity of "Platonic love" and the other concerned with fleshly pleasures. There is no evidence, how- ever, to suggest that this distinction reflects cult practices or assumptions. Ourania, as we will see, is by no means aloof from fleshly pleasures, while
117
APHRODITE
Pandemos shares the iconography of the "celestial" goddess who travels through the sky.
The epithet Pandemos had to do with Aphrodite's political function as a goddess who unites the citizens in harmony. An Athenian legend about Pandemos says that Theseus founded her worship with that of Peitho (Persuasion) after he united all the people of Attica into one city. 12 Equally indispensable in matters of ero ? s and politics, Peitho was an important con- cept for the emergent Athenian democracy. It is probable that the cult was established around 500, and helped to promote sunousia, the fellowship of citizens. We hear of Athenian tetradistai, or men who gathered to feast in honor of Aphrodite Pandemos on the fourth of every month, a day sacred to both Aphrodite and Hermes. 13 Remnants of the sanctuary have been excavated on the southwest slope of the Akropolis, including a small fourth- century temple with sculpted doves. A later Hellenistic inscription from the site shows that preparations for the state-sponsored festival (known as the Aphrodisia) involved the purification of the sanctuary with a dove sacrifice and the washing of the statues. The cult of Pandemos was an exception to the rule that Aphrodite's worship tended to be less centralized and state- supervised than that of most other Olympian deities. At Erythrai in Ionia, an oracle solicited by the state toward the end of the fifth century advised that the citizens build a temple of Aphrodite Pandemos and supply it with a statue "for the preservation of the people. "14
Figure 9. 1 Aphrodite with dove, votive bronze from Dodona (? ), c. 450. Athens, National Archaeological Museum. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
? 118
APHRODITE
An analogue to the legend of Theseus' establishment of the cult of Aphro- dite Pandemos and Peitho is found at Thebes, where the city's Phoenician founder, Kadmos, is said to have married Harmonia, the daughter of Aphro- dite and Ares. Thebans believed that Harmonia, whose name connotes the unity of the citizens, dedicated three ancient wooden statues of Aphrodite on the akropolis. These were named Ourania, Pandemos, and Apostrophia (Averter of Evils). According to Xenophon (Hell. 5. 4. 4), the three Theban civil and military officials known as polemarchoi always celebrated a festival of Aphrodite when their term of office was completed. Similar customs are attested for city officials in Megara, Ionia, and the Aegean islands through dedicatory inscriptions, the earliest of which belongs to fifth-century Keos. 15 While the emphasis at Thebes is on Aphrodite's partnership with the war god Ares, many of these dedications pair her with Hermes. In either case, the union of polar opposites (masculine and feminine or war and love) expresses metaphorically the concepts of civic concord and harmonious order.
Spartan Aphrodite
On the Spartan akropolis, we find an arrangement similar to that at Thebes, with a temple of Aphrodite Areia (of Ares) containing at least two Archaic cult statues. Based on inscribed potsherds from the area, one of these was probably Aphrodite Basilis (Queen). In the seventh century, Spartan colon- ists of Taras and Satyrion in Italy chose to carry this cult to their new home. Taras built an akropolis temple for the goddess, and at neighboring Satyrion worshipers deposited huge numbers of terracotta figurines and pots from the seventh to the third centuries, including one inscribed with the cult title Basilis. The choice of Aphrodite as a patroness may be connected with the legend that the settlers were illegitimate sons of Spartan women. 16 A second Spartan temple was unusual in that it had two stories, each containing its own cult statue. The lower level housed Aphrodite Enoplios (Armed), an Archaic type that may have been copied from Kythera. The upper room contained an unusual cedar statue called Morpho (the Beautiful One). Here the goddess, presumably Aphrodite, was shown enthroned, veiled, and wearing fetters on her feet. She belongs to a category of cult statues deemed to be so powerful and dangerous that they required binding and restraint. The veil too fits this interpretation, for such images were often hidden from view. 17
Aphrodite and "sacred prostitution" at Korinth
On Akrokorinthos, the high rocky citadel of Korinth, Aphrodite was installed as a goddess of the city, probably under the rule of the Bakchiad aristocrats in the eighth century. As in other early cults of Aphrodite, she was depicted with weapons and had the title Ourania, signs of her Near Eastern affinities. 18 The
119
APHRODITE
Korinthian cult, however, differed from most other Greek cults of Aphrodite because the goddess owned slaves who worked as prostitutes. According to the traditional scholarly view, the practice of "sacred prostitution" origin- ated as a fertility rite, and is attested in relation to Ishtar and Asherah. For example, a class of women known as ishtaritum is described in a Babylonian text alongside courtesans "whose favors are many" and prostitutes "whose husbands are legion. "19 On the other hand, this interpretation of certain Mesopotamian cultic functionaries has been vigorously criticized as a scholarly construct, overly reliant on nineteenth-century assumptions about "fertility cult" in the ancient Near East. While the vast textual evidence from cuneiform tablets reveals a bewilderingly large variety of female cultic personnel, some of whom are regularly mentioned alongside prostitutes or in contexts that hint of sexuality, they offer no clear-cut example of a "cultic prostitute," and it is likely that this conceptual category simply does not correspond to the more nuanced and complex roles of Mesopotamian women in relation to their goddesses. 20
Not surprisingly, the practice of "sacred prostitution" at Korinth has also been called into question, since it was assumed to derive directly from the cult of Ishtar. In the Greek instance, however, the evidence is much more con- vincing, and it is important to keep in mind that prostitution for Aphrodite need not be an exact imitation of any Near Eastern model. It could have been based on Greek (mis)understandings of the roles of female cultic personnel in the Near East, or it could even be an independent development. Athenaeus remarks (13. 573d) that it was the practice of individuals to "render" hetairai (courtesans) to Korinthian Aphrodite in payment of vows when their prayers were fulfilled. An example was Xenophon, a citizen who vowed one hundred girls to the goddess in return for victory at the Olympic games. He commis- sioned Pindar to write a song (fr. 122 Snell-Maehler) for the thanksgiving sacrifice, attended by the girls:
Young women, hospitable to many, handmaidens of Peitho in rich Korinth, you who burn the golden tears of pale incense; often you fly in your thoughts to Aphrodite Ourania, the mother of Loves. She gave to you, girls, without blame, to pick the fruit of soft youth on beds of desire. With necessity, all is good . . .
Strabo (8. 6. 20) reports that both men and women dedicated sacred slaves, or hierodules, to the goddess, and that the sanctuary at one time owned more than a thousand of these courtesans, who were a major source of income. 21
As a thriving port and trade depot, Korinth was famous for its prostitutes. Sanctuaries were often expected to be self-supporting, and their income usually derived from estates belonging to the resident deity. In this case, the goddess profited from one of the main industries of Korinth, the sex trade,
120
APHRODITE
through her ownership of slaves who worked as prostitutes. Most, if not all of these slaves must have worked near the harbors, rather than on the Akrokorinthos itself. To modern ears, this arrangement sounds incompatible with "the sacred," yet there is further evidence that the prostitutes of Korinth had a special relationship with Aphrodite. It was an ancient custom that whenever the city had great need, it recruited as many prostitutes as possible to participate in the supplication of the goddess. The most famous instance occurred in 480 when, with the Persian invasion at hand, the hetairai of Korinth prayed to Aphrodite on behalf of the Greeks and the Korinthian soldiery. 22 Still, there is no evidence that Aphrodite's prostitutes acted as priestesses of the goddess, or that consorting with them was in itself a religious act, so "sacred prostitution" is probably a misnomer for their role.
Aphrodite in Lokroi Epizephyrioi
A different form of "sacred prostitution" involving temporary service to Aphrodite is attributed to the people of Cyprus, Lydia, and Lokroi Epizephyrioi by late authors including Clearchus of Cyprus, who says that parents prostituted their freeborn daughters. 23 The case for prostitution in connection with Aphrodite at Lokroi is considerably less credible than that at Korinth, for the sources are not considered reliable and the practice described by Clearchus would have been shocking to standard Greek sensibilities. He may have in mind the story that when the Lokrians were under attack from the rival city of Rhegion in the fifth century, they vowed to prostitute their virgins during the festival of Aphrodite if they were victorious. Hieron of Syracuse intervened on their behalf, and the city was saved; it is unclear whether the promised offering of virgins actually took place. 24
The gift of female sexual services in fulfillment of a vow evokes the customs of Korinth, and it is at least possible that the vow was made in a similar context, where prostitutes were a standard offering to Aphrodite. On this hypothesis, the exigencies of war drove the Lokrians to vow not merely slaves but their own daughters to the goddess, just as the Lokrians of mainland Greece devoted citizen maidens to the temple service of Athena. The famous Ludovisi throne, a ritual object of unknown function which originally stood in a Lokrian temple of Aphrodite, is carved with reliefs showing a nude courtesan playing the double flute on one side and a matron burning incense on the other: a reference to the vow, or perhaps to the different modes by which married women and (non-sacred) prostitutes served the goddess. 25
There is no question that Aphrodite's worship at Lokroi was anomalous in some ways. The oldest known structure at Lokroi is a dining complex near the seashore dating to the seventh century, not long after the initial founding of the colony (later, in the sixth century, a three-room temple was added). The U-Shaped Stoa, as it is known, enclosed three hundred and seventy-one separate pits, each with the buried remains of one or more ritual banquets,
121
APHRODITE
including pottery inscribed with Aphrodite's name. The contents of the pits were laid down from the mid-sixth to the fourth century. While dining facilities are not unusual in sanctuaries, this example is particularly early and the careful deposition of the debris - with each pot and figurine deliberately broken - is unparalleled. Whatever the function of the ritual, the early date of the stoa shows that Aphrodite's cult was of crucial importance to the colonists. 26
At Lokroi, Aphrodite's cult was closely intertwined with that of the most important goddess of Magna Graecia, Persephone. The large collection of fifth-century terracotta pinakes from the Persephone sanctuary at Mannella contain a significant number illustrating mythic and cultic scenes involving Aphrodite, including her birth from the sea. Three pinax types show Aphro- dite with her cult partner Hermes, while Eros too seems to have played a role in her worship here. In one type, she stands in a chariot drawn by a winged boy and girl as Hermes steps up beside her; in another she presents Hermes with a flower as Eros sits on her arm. A third shows cult statues of the pair standing in a temple while a young couple pours libations upon an altar decorated with a copulating satyr and deer. The general impression is that while Persephone's cult focused on pre-nuptial rites and the protection of young children, Aphrodite's cult had to do with women's sexual experience, including that of brides. 27
Figure 9. 2 The birth of Aphrodite on the Ludovisi "Throne," probably from the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Lokroi Epizephyrioi, 460-50. Museo Nazionale Romano. Art Resource.
? 122
APHRODITE
Maritime Aphrodite
Aphrodite's sanctuaries were regularly located at port cities along the major trade routes used by Greek and Phoenician merchants, important dissemin- ators of her cult. An anecdote quoted by Athenaeus (15. 675f-76a) illustrates this point. Herostratos, a merchant plying the waters between Cyprus and the Greek trading emporium of Naukratis in Egypt, purchased a small statue of Aphrodite at Paphos and continued south. Buffeted by a terrible storm, all aboard his ship prayed to the goddess to save them. Fresh myrtle sprouted around the statue, permeating the air with its sweet scent and soothing the seasick men as the skies cleared. The crew arrived safely at Naukratis, and Herostratos was moved to dedicate the image at the sanctuary of Aphrodite, and to distribute crowns of the miraculous myrtle to her worshipers. Hero- stratos is supposed to have lived in early Archaic times, and excavation has shown that the temple in the sanctuary of Aphrodite was one of the oldest structures at Naukratis, founded c. 600 by East Greek traders. Several vases were dedicated here to Aphrodite Pandemos, an appropriate choice for a colony composed of immigrant citizens from varied backgrounds. As a god- dess of sea and sky who aided in navigation, Aphrodite was called Euploia (of Good Sailing), Epilimenia (She at the Harbor), and Pontia (She of the Sea). The sanctuary of Aphrodite Euploia at Knidos was famous for its cult statue by Praxiteles, the first Classical sculptor to show the goddess nude. Surrounded by fine gardens, the temple was constructed on a circular plan so that visitors could enjoy the delights of the statue in the round. 28
Aphrodite and Hippolytos
At both Athens and Trozen, which faced each other across the Saronic gulf, Aphrodite's cult was closely linked with that of Hippolytos. Euripides' play Hippolytos tells how the hero incurred the goddess' wrath because of his devotion to chastity, and how Phaidra, the young wife of Theseus and stepmother of Hippolytos, became the tool of Aphrodite's vengeance. The Athenian cult of Hippolytos was an offshoot of that at Trozen, the result of the popularization of Theseus as an Athenian hero. On the south slope of the Akropolis, in the same area as the sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemos (and perhaps identical to it) was a shrine of Aphrodite "at Hippolytos," also known as the Hippolyteion. Here the hero received regular sacrifices at his tomb. 29 At Trozen, on the other hand, Hippolytos was a local god whose sanctuary contained a shrine of the goddess, so that their relative status was inverted. The meaning of his name is not transparent, but it contains the root hipp- (horse), suggesting a relationship with the city god Poseidon (both Poseidon and Aphrodite were responsible for his death according to the myths). He was the principal deity in a large, important extramural sanctuary that included a number of interrelated cults. Here, the debris from the site of
123
APHRODITE
his small temple indicates activity as far back as the Geometric period. 30 Pausanias (2. 32. 1) saw the temple with its ancient statue and reported that a priest was dedicated for life to Hippolytos' service. Before marriage, maidens offered a lock of hair at his sanctuary. The complex also included a stadium, overlooked by a temple of Aphrodite Kataskopia, (She Who Observes). Near this temple was a myrtle tree, sacred to the goddess, and the supposed tombs of Hippolytos and Phaidra.
Aphrodite and Adonis
The cult of Aphrodite's paramour Adonis held a special appeal for Greek women, combining the erotic adoration of a beautiful youth with the emo- tional catharsis of lamentation for his death. The Adonis cult was an early import from the Levant, probably via Cyprus, but while many of the outward forms remained the same, its cultural context and significance changed. Adonis was modeled upon Tammuz, the consort of Ishtar whose death was annually lamented by women, and his name is a direct borrowing of the West Semitic adon, Lord. At Phoenician Byblos there was a sanctuary of "Aphrodite and Adonis," that is, the city goddess Astarte and a consort who corresponded to Tammuz. Whereas the cult of Tammuz (Sumerian Dumuzi) enjoyed near-universal recognition in Mesopotamia and his festival was so important that a Babylonian month was named after him, the worship of Adonis was tolerated by many Greek city-states but rarely gained the status of a state-sponsored cult. Adonis was viewed with some ambivalence, pro- bably because his main adherents were women, and in spite of his popularity in certain areas, he retained a fundamentally "foreign" aura. At the core of the cult lay a ritual with no connection to acknowledged sacred space; in Greek contexts before the Hellenistic period, Adonis only rarely possessed a sanctuary, temple or even an altar, making his rites anomalous.
To perform the Adonia, which took place in late summer, women ascended to the roof, where they sang dirges, cried out in grief, and beat their breasts. Sappho (fr. 140a LP) mentions that the women tore their garments, a stand- ard sign of mourning. Other features of Adonis' ritual belong to the cult in Classical Athens. A few days before the Adonia, garden herbs and cereals were sown in broken pots. These tender young plants were brought to the rooftops during the festival, to be withered in the hot sun as emblems of the youthful Adonis' death. Another custom involved the laying out of Adonis dolls as for burial. While the traditional Frazerian concept of Adonis and similar figures as dying "fertility gods" has been increasingly criticized, Detienne's analysis of Adonis as the paradigm of illicit sexuality and sterility, to be set against the fruitful union of husband and wife, has not achieved full acceptance, perhaps because it neglects the Adonis cult's Near Eastern background. 31
124
APHRODITE
Aphrodite and marriage
Aphrodite is sometimes associated with weddings, as we saw at Lokroi, but her involvement has to do specifically with the sexual component of marriage, not its social aspects. On the road from Trozen to Hermione, Pausanias (2. 32. 7) noted a sanctuary of Aphrodite Nymphia (Bridal Aphro- dite), which was connected with Theseus' abduction of the young Helen. In Hermione itself, both virgins and widows who wished to "go with a man" had to sacrifice to the goddess before marriage. The inclusion of widows shows that this was not a rite of passage, but an acknowledgment of Aphro- dite's role in successful marriages. Similarly, widows at Naupaktos went to Aphrodite's cave to pray for husbands. The participation of women at vary- ing stages of life is also evident in the venerable cult of Aphrodite at Sikyon, where the temple was served by a female warden (neo ? koros) "for whom it was no longer permitted to go with a man" and by a maiden priestess, consecrated for one year. Whereas the warden had once been married, the priestess soon would be. The cult statue was a gold and ivory image by Kanachos, the Sikyonian sculptor who created other masterworks for the Thebans and Milesians around 500. The goddess was shown seated, wearing a polos and holding a poppy in one hand and a fruit in the other. Access to the temple was restricted, so visitors gazed upon the statue and offered their prayers from the doorway. This cult is similar in nature to those of the old Achaean goddesses such as Hera or Athena and shows few signs of the Near Eastern influences we saw in other cities. Still, it is typically Aphrodisian in its emphasis on fragrance: the sacrifices were burned on juniper wood with a local aromatic herb that had erotic associations. 32
Further reading
Budin 2003 provides a detailed examination of the goddess' journey to the west from Cyprus and her prehistoric roots, with emphasis on the material evidence. MacLachlan 1992 defends the historicity of sacred prostitution against the growing number of skeptics; it should be read with Westenholz 1989, Assante 2003 and the papers collected in Part I of Faraone and McClure 2006. Williams 1986 summarizes the material evidence for Aphrodite's cult on the Korinthian citadel. Rosenzweig 2004 has full coverage of cults in Athens, primarily from an art-historical perspective, while Redfield 2003 offers many insights about Aphrodite's important role in Lokrian culture.
125
10
EPIPHANY AND TRANSFORMATION
Dionysos
The traditional view of Dionysos' worship as an import from Thrace or Phrygia was called into question with the discovery of the name Dionysos on Linear B tablets from Pylos, which show that the name, and probably the god, was known to Bronze Age Greeks. 1 While Dionysiac myths present this most exotic of the Olympians as a literal stranger, an emigrant from foreign lands, they also maintain that he was born in Greece. At the same time, his worship shares features with the cults of Phrygian Kybele, who was likewise celebrated with ecstatic dancing to percussive music, and Egyptian Osiris, a chthonian vegetation god who experienced dismemberment and resurrec- tion. The ecstatic nature of some Dionysiac rites, together with their special appeal to women, set the worship of Dionysos apart from that of any other Olympian deity. Though clearly a god of the vine and its product, Dionysos' identity cannot be so easily delimited. He is also a deity of intoxication and madness, whose followers experience both profound surrender and glad liber- ation; this element of enthousiasmos, having the god within, is anomalous in Olympian worship. From the Archaic period, he offers hope for afterlife salvation through private initiatory rites. He is not a major civic or federal god, though his festivals can become essential to civic identity (as they do in Athens). The archaeological remains of his sanctuaries and temples are not impressive, but their modesty belies his great popularity. With respect to ritual, the most commonly recurring concept is the epiphany or advent of Dionysos and his reception. The dithurambos, often on the theme of Dionysos' birth, was his characteristic hymn. Though the details of the process are unknown, it is clear that Greek tragedy and comedy arose in a ritual context from choral songs performed for Dionysos.
Dionysos has attracted a great deal of critical attention because a profound theology, analogous to certain Christian doctrines, can be extracted from his myths and cults in a way that is not true of the other Olympian gods. A suffering god, an ecstatic religious experience in which worshipers are united with the deity, the consumption of wine as part of the ritual, and the belief in the god's ability to offer salvation from death: all these elements have con- tributed to theories that Dionysiac religion was co-opted by Christianity, on
126
DIONYSOS
the one hand, and attempts to recast the pagan Greeks as Christian precur- sors, on the other. More recently, the psychosocial dimensions of Dionysiac religion have been extensively studied to reveal how the god offered tempor- ary escape from normal modes of being into alternate states such as trance, masquerade, madness, and of course, intoxication, and how he subverted gender roles and other societal norms. These analyses are largely based on the portraits of Dionysiac worship in Greek poetry and myth, above all the Bacchae of Euripides. While they provide a valuable description of the god's symbolic significance and cultural meaning, a study of Dionysos' cults and the historically attested behaviors associated with them yields a picture rather different from what myth and poetry lead us to expect. 2 In practice, the worship of Dionysos was not truly subversive; instead, it offered outlets for physical and emotional self-expression within socially acceptable con- texts. Furthermore, Dionysiac cult was smoothly integrated into Greek civic systems of worship, with ecstatic and private components balanced by state- sponsored festivals and conventional sacrifices.
Dionysiac festivals and the calendar
While drama was a Panhellenic development, the major Dionysiac festivals can be assigned to the Ionian and Athenian Greeks (Anthesteria, Lenaia) or to the Dorians and the Aiolic speakers of Thessaly and Boiotia (Agriania and its variants, Theodaisia). This division also corresponds to two early centers of Dionysiac activity, the Aegean islands and Boiotian Thebes. The islands, particularly Chios and Naxos, were leading producers of wine and propo- nents of Dionysos as the god of viticulture whose sacred marriage with Ariadne ensured prosperity. The rituals and myths that involve Dionysos' arrival from the sea, as in the ship processions of East Greece and Athens, seem to reflect the influence of the islands. The silens or satyrs, who are featured in the vase iconography of several myths set in Naxos (e. g. the return of Hephaistos and the meeting of Dionysos and Ariadne), are also a part of this Aegean Dionysiac tradition. 3 They are conspicuously absent from the myths of Boiotian origin that involve resistance to Dionysos by royal women (the daughters of Kadmos, Minyas, Eleutheros, and Proitos). The Boiotian/ Theban strand of Dionysiac cult, exported to the rest of the mainland and beyond, focused on the god's birth, themes of death and resurrection, and various benefits and purifications obtained through initiation into Dionysiac thiasoi (groups organized for worship). Mainadic activity seems to have been present in both traditions, though emphasized far more heavily on the mainland. The geographical position of Attica ensured that both the Aegean and Boiotian strands played an important role in the Athenian worship of Dionysos.
Dionysos, rather surprisingly, is a winter god. His festivals everywhere take place in the months we call December, January, February, and March:
127
DIONYSOS
the seasons of winter and early spring. The biennial nature of many of these festivals, generally the winter ones with mainadic elements, has never been satisfactorily explained. One theory relates the phenomenon to the need for intercalary periods to reconcile the lunar and solar calendars and keep the months synchronized with the seasons. 4 The Dionysiac festivals of winter have been described as rites by which the quiescent grape vines and other vegetation were recalled to life. While Dionysos is certainly a god who dies or vanishes and reappears periodically, it is difficult to plausibly match his comings and goings with the growth cycles of plants. On the other hand, he unquestionably has affinities with certain trees (pine, fig, plane) and vines (grape, ivy). The ivy, ubiquitous in art, actually eclipses the grapevine as the emblem of the god, perhaps because it retained foliage through the winter and was thus available for ritual use. 5 The spring festivals are more easily explained because they correspond to the tasting of the new wine, but it is notable that no major Dionysiac festival addresses the vintage.
Cycladic Dionysos
On the island of Keos some 40 km from the Attic coast, archaeologists have uncovered the earliest known Dionysos sanctuary. The Cycladic people who occupied the site of Ayia Irini in the Bronze Age built a temple and filled it with large-scale terracotta sculptures of women wearing typical Minoan dress. The statues, produced in large numbers, do not represent the resident deity. Instead, they were placed in the sanctuary for some unknown reason, perhaps as perpetual witnesses of the god's epiphany or as pleasing gifts from worshipers. Eventually the temple collapsed and the town was deserted in the twelfth century. Around 750, votives began to accumulate in the innermost room of the same sacred building the Bronze Age inhabitants had used. The focus of this cult was a terracotta head that originally belonged to one of the Minoan-type statues in the sanctuary, many of which were buried at the site. The new occupants dug up this object or received it as an heirloom, and set it up on the floor of the temple in a specially made ring base, where the excavators found it in situ. With the head were found Geometric kantharoi, the characteristic wine cups of Dionysos; that he was the god of the sanctuary by the end of the sixth century is confirmed by a vase graffito. It has been suggested that the shrine originally belonged to a Minoan goddess, but it is also possible that a Bronze Age Dionysos was the occupant, surrounded by groups of dancing women just as he was in historical times. On the other hand, despite the unusual degree of continuity in the use of the temple at Ayia Irini, the cultic focus on the terracotta head shows that its original function was not well understood. Dionysos was apparently worshiped at Ayia Irini in the Geometric period, but how much earlier remains an open question. 6
The Cyclades were famous for their wines, and Naxos in particular was considered sacred to Dionysos from at least the seventh century. The first
128
DIONYSOS
coins minted there, c. 600, displayed the kantharos, and other emblems of the god followed. The island was the source of a cycle of Dionysiac myths, including tales of the god's birth and nurture by nymphs, and his meeting with Ariadne. 7 Unfortunately, we know little of the cults there. According to Plutarch (Vit. Thes. 20), there were two festivals of two Ariadnes, one a joyful occasion celebrating the bride of Dionysos, and the other a time of sorrow with sacrifices for the dead heroine (Ariadne was also honored as a heroine in Argos and Amathous). The Naxians possessed a pair of sacred masks, objects that signaled the god's presence and served as cult images. One, made of grapevine wood, was known as Bakcheus, and the other, of wood from the fig, was Meilichios, the mild or sweet. The combination of an important god and a secondary female cult figure (Dionysos and Ariadne) is consistent with the finds from the recently excavated sanctuary at Hyria on Naxos, where a temple stood from Geometric times over the remains of a Mycenaean cult site. Later structures at the site included an Archaic dining room and a successor temple. The rich and varied votive gifts included some types, like terracotta female busts, that were typically offered to female deities. 8
Phallic processions and images
Processions including wooden phalloi on poles or large painted phalloi in carts were a common mode of celebration for Dionysos throughout Greece; according to Herodotus (2. 48-49), it was the Argive hero Melampous who first introduced this custom. Processional phalloi were a familiar sight in the rural and city celebrations of the Athenians, while epigraphic evidence starting in 301 shows that every year, the Delians created a winged, brightly colored phallos-bird and drew it through the streets in a wagon. This fanciful object was considered the image of the god himself, and while the direct evidence is Hellenistic in date, it is likely that the phallic parade was practiced from the Archaic period. Excavators found no temple of Dionysos on the island, but there was a deposit of items dedicated to the god including an Archaic stone phallos. 9 The Delian phallos image of Dionysos, like the masked columns seen on Attic vase paintings, was intended to serve as a temporary simulacrum of the god, just as the phalloi used in the Athenian City Dionysia had to be replaced every year. The use of such ephemeral images is typical of Dionysiac cult but rare in other Greek worship.
The representation of the phallos in art and poetry is linked in sacred narratives with the proper reception of Dionysos. In Athens, for example, the men who failed to receive Dionysos Eleuthereus with honor made model phalloi in order to regain the god's favor, while an inscription from Paros tells a similar, presumably apocryphal story about the poet Archilochus. When his attempt to introduce obscene Dionysiac poetry was rebuffed, the men of Paros were rendered impotent until they accepted the new mode of
129
DIONYSOS
worship. Paradoxically, though the phallos has an important role in many Dionysiac cults, the god himself is rarely portrayed nude or in a state of sexual excitement; in fact he remains detached from sexuality except in the context of the sacred marriage. The Dionysiac phallos does not signify male sexuality or masculinity per se but the exuberant, animating force that makes arousal and procreation possible. 10
The Anthesteria
Thucydides (2. 15. 4) notes that the "older Dionysia," which takes place at Athens in the month of Anthesterion, is a festival also celebrated by the Ionian cities. Post-Classical inscriptions confirm that this was the case in Ephesos, Priene, Miletos, and Smyrna, and scholars have therefore included this festival among those that predate the Ionian migration of c. 1000. The month name Anthesterion is even more widely attested, from Eretria in Euboia to the Ionian colonies of Massilia and Kyzikos. Sometimes the celebration is called the Anthesteria (Festival of Blooming); otherwise it is the Dionysia or the Katagogia (Bringing Home) of Dionysos. The latter most likely refers to the advent of the god in a ship on wheels similar to a parade float and ultimately derived from Egypt; Attic vases illustrating this ritual scene suggest that it was an element of the Archaic and Classical Athenian festival, probably one of the initial events of the ritual sequence.
Whereas the vintage took place in the fall, the true advent of Dionysos as the wine god came in the early spring, when the casks of new wine were broached for the first time. This first day of the festival, 11 Anthesterion, was known at Athens as the Pithoigia (Cask-Opening). The second day, called Choes (Jugs), was a day of revelry and feasting even for slaves. It also included what has been described as a rite of passage for little boys who had reached the age of three, the usual age of weaning. They were crowned with spring flowers and given presents, including miniature versions of the wine jugs called choes, a shape produced for about fifty years during and after the Peloponnesian war. Infants who died before they could participate were sometimes buried with these jugs, which are gaily painted with scenes of chubby boys, naked but for their amulet strings, playing with small dogs, riding in carts, or making offerings of libations and cakes. 11 As we learn from Aristophanes' Acharnians (959-1234), adult males too looked forward to the Choes, when serious drinking was the order of the day. Each man was supplied with his own chous, a container which held about three liters of wine. (This custom was explained by reference to the hospitality shown Orestes when he came to Athens to be tried for matricide: to avoid sharing his pollution, all drank from separate jugs. ) If we can take Aristophanes' comic description as an accurate reflection of ritual, the archo ? n basileus (King Archon) conducted a drinking competition with a skin of wine as the prize for the first man to empty his chous. In any case, numerous private contests
130
DIONYSOS
and festive dinners were held around the city. At the end of the day, the revelers wrapped their choes in the garlands they had won and headed to the Limnaion, or sanctuary of Dionysos at Limnai (the Marshes), where they poured libations from whatever was left of the wine in the presence of a priestess. 12
The Choes was the only day of the year when the Limnaion was open, and the sanctuary now witnessed an ancient and venerable rite: the sacred marriage of the King Archon's wife (the basilinna or Queen) and Dionysos himself. A law stating that the basilinna was required to be of Athenian birth and a virgin at the time of her wedding to the King Archon was inscribed on a stone set up in the Limnaion. In a speech preserved in the Demosthenic corpus (Against Neaira 59. 73-78), Apollodorus is indignant that an alien woman of questionable virtue was permitted to assume the title of basilinna and perform the sacred acts on the city's behalf; he stresses the great antiquity and solemnity of the rite. This part of the festival was carried out in secret, and little is known of what actually constituted the "marriage. " Perhaps there was a wedding procession from the Limnaion to the old city center east of the Akropolis, where the sacred union is said to have taken place in the so-called boukoleion (cattle shed), the headquarters of the King Archon. Modern scholars have speculated that the King Archon himself played the role of Dionysos in order to consummate the marriage. He further chose fourteen women attendants known as the gerarai (Reverend Ones), who assisted with offerings at fourteen altars, witnessed the secret things, and were apparently present at other Dionysiac rituals during the year. Accord- ing to Apollodorus, they took the following oath: "I lead a holy life and I am pure and chaste from intercourse with men and other polluting things, and I will hallow the Theoinia (Wine God's Feast) and the Iobakcheia for Dionysos according to ancestral custom and at the appointed times. "13
The third day of the Athenian celebration was also named after a type of vessel: Chytroi (Pots). Unfortunately, there are no detailed contemporary sources for the events of this day, nor do the sources make a clear distinction between Choes and Chytroi. It is logical that the pots, like the casks and jugs of the first two days, should have something to do with wine, and they have been connected to Phanodemus' account (FGrH 325 F 12) of Athenians mix- ing sweet wine with water for Dionysos Limnaios. The mixing of wine and water is attested for other Dionysiac festivals (below), and while mixing vessels came in a wide variety of specialized shapes, they were all essentially wide-mouthed pots. The scholiasts on Aristophanes and various lexicogra- phers, however, give a different account, characterizing the Choes (or the month Anthesterion) as a time when ghosts rose from the underworld. They derive the name Chytroi from the cooking pots in which the Athenians prepared a mixture of grains as an offering to Hermes Chthonios (of the Underworld), with special reference to those who perished in the Flood. The sources portraying the Choes/Chytroi as a Halloween-like festival of
131
DIONYSOS
the dead are late and somewhat confused accounts. On the other hand, Aristophanes' Frogs places Dionysos' visit to the underworld in the context of the Limnaion and the Anthesteria, lending plausibility to the connection between this festival and the dead. 14 It should be noted that while the celebration of Dionysos' advent in the month of Anthesterion seems to have been widespread among the Ionian peoples, the details of the Choes and Chytroi are apparently unique to Athens. 15
The City Dionysia
While all the Athenian festivals of Dionysos included dramas or dithyrambs, the City Dionysia was transformed during the sixth century into the premier dramatic festival of the Athenian year, and, with the Panathenaia, played a crucial role in the construction of Athenian civic identity. Originally the urban version of the winter festivities held in the demes, the City celebration was moved to the spring month of Elaphebolion for the convenience of spectators and visitors traveling to Athens. Unlike the ancestral rites of the Lenaia and Anthesteria, which were the responsibility of the King Archon, the City Dionysia was treated like a newer festival and placed under the jurisdiction of the eponymous Archon. A preliminary to the festival was the "bringing in (eisago ? ge ? ) of Dionysos from the altar," the ceremonial torch-lit escort of the god's image from a temple near the Academy to its permanent home in the theater precinct. Dionysos Eleuthereus was the god of this festival, and tradition held that a man named Pegasos had first brought the image to Athens from the town of Eleutherai on the border with Boiotia. When the Athenians failed to receive the god with honor, they found them- selves stricken with a disease of the male genitals. An oracle advised the Athenians to make model phalloi and honor the god with them. Scholars view the eisago ? ge ? ritual either as a re-enactment of Dionysos' original advent in Athens, or more specifically as a commemoration of the Athenian annex- ation of Eleutherai and adoption of its Dionysiac cult. Our main sources for the eisago ? ge ? are Hellenistic inscriptions, but it is likely that this complex of myth and ritual dates to the sixth century, when the modest temple of Dionysos Eleuthereus was built beside the theater at the foot of the south slope of the Akropolis. 16
The main ritual of the Athenian festival was a relatively inclusive pompe ? or procession which, like the Panathenaic parade, featured women and scarlet- robed metics as well as male citizens. A kane ? phoros (basket-bearer), a maiden of noble birth, led the procession with a golden basket, followed by people carrying loaves and libations of water and wine, or guiding sacrificial ani- mals. (The goat was probably the preferred victim, given that tragedy seems to have the root meaning of "goat song. ")17 The colonies of Athens were required to send phalloi for the festival and presumably had their own repre- sentatives in the parade. The most colorful participants were the chore ? goi or
132
DIONYSOS
sponsors of the plays, who wore elaborate robes embroidered with gold and golden crowns. The procession traveled through the agora, pausing at various altars to allow choruses to perform. Perhaps that evening was the time for the ko ? mos, a male-oriented, wine-soaked revel. The competitions included ten dithyrambic choruses made up of boys and ten of men, as well as comedies, tragedies, and satyr-plays. Before they began, the theater was purified with piglets' blood and libations were poured for the god, whose statue was present during performances. The crowds in the theater also witnessed the proclamation of crowns for honored citizens, the display of tribute from Athens' subject states, and the introduction of citizen youths reared at public expense because their fathers had fallen in battle. 18
Dionysos in Attic Ikarion
The Country Dionysia of Attica, as its name implies, was a decentralized celebration that focused on Dionysos as an agricultural deity. Throughout the winter month of Posideion, villagers in the various demes of Attica organized processions such as the one described in Aristophanes' Acharnians (237-79), which includes a basketbearer with a sacred cake, slaves holding a large phallos on a pole, and the protagonist Dikaiopolis as a reveler, sing- ing a ribald hymn to Phales, personification of the phallos. According to Aristotle (Poet. 1449a), comedy developed from these phallic songs. Many of the demes had their own theaters and presented comic and tragic per- formances. Ikarion, a wine-producing village at the northern foot of Mt. Pentelikon, had a unique status among the Attic demes as the first to receive Dionysos. According to legend, Ikarios welcomed the god and received the gift of wine, which he offered to his unsuspecting fellows. When they passed out from overindulgence, their relatives thought Ikarios was a poisoner and killed him. His daughter Erigone discovered the body with the help of Ikarios' faithful dog, and in her grief, she hanged herself from a tree. As a result of their impiety toward Dionysos, the villagers were struck with a plague, and the Delphic oracle directed them to hang up a female effigy to swing in the trees as an appeasement of Erigone. This story was connected with a purifi- cation ritual called the Aiora (Swinging), during which girls sat in swings suspended from trees. It has sometimes been assigned to the Anthesteria, though similar rituals involving boys and girls may have taken place at other times in the year. 19
Its material remains show that Ikarion was indeed the home of a venerable Dionysiac cult. Beneath a Byzantine church were found the fragments of a massive cult statue once housed in the Dionysion. This marble image is dated to about 520, making it one of the earliest known cult statues in stone (most early examples were sculpted in wood or ivory). The seated, draped god held a kantharos and originally measured 2 m from head to foot. His history can be tentatively reconstructed with help from several inscriptions detailing the
133
DIONYSOS
? Figure 10. 1 Head of Dionysos cult statue from Ikarion, Attica, c. 520. Athens, National Archaeological Museum. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
cult and the system of liturgies for the presentation of dramatic performances in Ikarion. A fifth-century inscription (IG I3 254) mentions that the chore ? goi, the demesmen organizing the dramas for the Country Dionysia, were sworn in with one hand on a statue - presumably that of Dionysos. Ancient repairs to the statue are suggested by the present state of the head (which has some- times been mistaken for a mask) and confirmed by a fourth-century inscription (IG II2 2851). When first sculpted, this statue would have been one of the most impressive in Attica. It was certainly housed in a temple, though the extant architectural remains are not complete enough to tell us more. 20
The Lenaia
Like the Anthesteria, the Lenaia was a widespread festival among the Ionians, to judge from the appearances of the winter month name Lenaion in inscrip- tions. At Athens, the festival was celebrated in the corresponding month Gamelion, and was overseen by the King Archon and officials connected with the Eleusinian mysteries, who organized a procession and musical con- test, later expanded to include dramas. These competitions, at which several of Aristophanes' comedies debuted, were held in the Lenaion, a sanctuary
134
DIONYSOS
that has left no trace but was probably located in the agora. Little is known about the ritual activities of the Lenaia, except that Dionysos was invoked as "Iakchos, son of Semele, giver of wealth. " In a custom common to the Lenaia and Anthesteria, scurrilous gibes were cast at the spectators by young men in the processional wagons. 21
The name Lenaia is usually derived from the Ionic term le ? nai (wild women or mainads), though an alternative theory links it to le ? nos (a vat for treading grapes). If the former etymology is accurate, it points to an early mainadic element in the festival. Mainads (also known as bakchai) worshiped Dionysos in a "maddened" state of ecstasy, which was expressed primarily through physical movement: energetic dancing performed out of doors, particularly on the mountainsides. They wore distinctive animal skins over their dresses, left their hair unbound, and carried ivy-tipped staffs called thursoi. Their activities simulated those of the female half of Dionysos' entourage, the band of nymphs who reared him in Nysa. Archaic and Classical sources have much to say of these madwomen who leave the confines of their homes for the wild mountains, but rather surprisingly, there is no unambiguous evidence of real- life mainads as opposed to mythic ones before the Hellenistic period. Still, the wealth of literary evidence strongly suggests that mainadism was practiced in at least some areas (Boiotia, the Peloponnese, and Delphi) from an early date. Again, the literary accounts often focus on mainadic transgressions (those who reject the god are driven to crimes such as the dismemberment of their own children) or tell of superhuman invulnerability and strength (e. g. the rending of a bull in Euripides' Bacchae). It is difficult to separate the mythic elaborations from the authentic ritual core in these accounts.
A different type of evidence for Classical mainads are the so-called Lenaia vases, which depict women moving about a temporary, outdoor cult image of Dionysos, a draped column or pole topped with a bearded mask. This masked column appears first on black figured vases, mostly lekuthoi, where the presence of satyrs suggests that the female figures in attendance are to be understood as nymphs. Red figured examples (mostly stamnoi produced for export) include vases showing ecstatic, mainad-like females dancing around the column and altar of the god. On one side, we typically see stately women ladling wine from twin stamnoi set up on a table before the masked column; the other side shows women walking or dancing and holding drinking cups. Whether any of these scenes can be assigned to a specific Attic festival has been the subject of debate since the early twentieth century, with one camp opting for the Lenaia as the "festival of madwomen," another for the Anthesteria, and a third suggesting that the scenes are generic or mythical. It is probable that the use of the masked column was not limited to a specific festival, for the vases do not form a coherent group. The scenes of dancing women are consistent with the hypothesis of cultic mainadism in Classical Attica, but they cannot confirm it in the absence of other evidence. 22
135
DIONYSOS
? Figure 10. 2 "Lenaia" vase: women ladle wine before an image of Dionysos (a masked and draped pole).
