gone very wrong with the tradition, that they were groping for an answer, and that
false quantities were no obstacle to conjecture.Skironas sunshade may be merely
another garbled reflex of the pallor-producing clayskiros. Perhaps when the role of
the unction had dwindled in the tradition to a mere reference to shade its proper
name was transferred to the sunshade, whose function in the procession was to
reinforce the pallor motif. Of course certainty is impossible, but there can be no
doubt that the tradition is deeply confused, and no doubt either that the later notices
purporting to give an account of a procession at Skira are completely at odds with the
classical evidence for that festival. It is no serious obstacle to our hypothesis that the
procession sets off in the one account from ‘‘the Dionysiac sanctuary’’ (‘‘the sanctu-
ary of Dionysus’’ in two lexicographers) in the other from ‘‘the acropolis.’’ They
could be equivalent, a sanctuary of Dionysus near the Acropolis, but both descrip-
tions are so vague – which of the sanctuaries of Dionysus? which of the sanctuaries in
or near the Acropolis? – that one suspects them of being antiquarian guesswork,
feeble substitutes for the specific location that would have been named by someone
who was not guessing. The Acropolis will have been inferred from the prominence of
Athena, the sanctuary of Dionysus from the prominence of the vine.
There are useful conclusions to be drawn from the study of etiology, and some of
the most important of them are negative. Modern scholars are in the line of the
ancient antiquarians; they too seek explanations, if of a different sort, and some of
their explanations may indeed get at the origins and original meanings of the rites. We
have guessed that it will have been a small minority of Greeks who bothered them-
selves about the origins of festivals, and that even such simple modes of explaining
their rituals as the antiquarians employed were dispensed with not only by Athenaeus’
Boeotian but by most Greeks. That may be too venturesome, but still it is possible to
wonder whether we would not learn more about the experience of most celebrants by
attending to obvious things, to aspects of festivals that tend not to attract the
attention of either ancient or modern scholars. The content and tone of the reference
to a festival in the text of Aristophanes – Strepsiades, say, recalling the exploding
haggis and the toy he bought for Pheidippides at Diasia, or ‘‘Lesser Logos’’ using the
Dipolieia festival as a byword for outmoded nonsense (Clouds984–5) – may be more
instructive than the account of the rites and the aetion in the scholion – the claim that
Diasia was conducted ‘‘with a certain grimness.’’ What, for the average Greek, was
the festival experience all about?
The Festival Experience
Democritus said that ‘‘a life without festivals is a long road without inns’’ (B 230 D-K).
The Thucydidean Pericles says of the Athenians in his funeral oration that ‘‘we have
provided the greatest number of opportunities for the relief of the mind from its toils,
establishing the custom of holding contests (ago ̄nes) and sacrifices throughout the
year’’ (2.38.1). Plutarch speaks of Pericles ‘‘giving the reins to the people...always
devising some festival spectacle or feast or parade in the city and ‘entertaining them like
children with not unrefined pleasures’ (a quotation from a comedy)’’ (Pericles11.4).
Relaxation, jollification, entertainment are the keynotes, not heightened religious
consciousness or feats of energetic piety.
Festivals 201