Aristophanic comedy sounds the same note. The women who went apart from the
men around the time of the autumn sowing to celebrate Thesmophoria must have
been aware that they were not only worshiping Demeter but somehow fostering the
regeneration of living things, the ‘‘Fasting’’ (Ne ̄steia) of the second day of the festival
promoting by contrast the ‘‘Fair Birth/Generation’’ (Kalligeneia) sought or cele-
brated on the third. They may have interpreted the obscene jokes and insults they
exchanged in the same way, though their functional role was no doubt to foster
female bonding: there is a Russian tradition that two people switching to the use of
the second person singular ritualize the change by drinking a toast with linked arms
and whispering obscene words in one another’s ears. Aristophanes’Thesmophoriazusae
(‘‘Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria’’) treats the festival merely as an oppor-
tunity for women to drink and to conspire against the tragedian Euripides, who gives
away their secrets and stratagems; likewise Aristophanes’ ‘‘Women in Assembly’’
(Ecclesiazusae) have conspired at the women’s festival Skira to seize political power
in Athens. That is undoubtedly a male, not merely a comic, perspective, but festivals
in general are treated with a persistent light-heartedness that it seems unjustified to
attribute solely to the comedic context. InPeaceTheoria, the attractive female
personification of ‘‘state delegation to international festivals’’ is restored to the
members of the Athenian Assembly amid much sexual humor as a pledge of
the delights of peace. InAcharniansDikaiopolis celebrates his separate peace with
the Spartans by organizing his own rural Dionysia. It is not just, then, that festivals
are mentioned in a light-hearted way, but that festivals are an obvious symbol of
peace, of fun and food. Aristophanes and the Thucydidean Pericles, each in his own
idiom, are saying the same thing about festivals, and it is rather different from the sort
of thing one gathers from the handbooks.
Scholarly discussion of non-ritual activities at festivals is never proportionate to
what the evidence we have been examining suggests is their centrality to the experi-
ence of festivals. There is only so much one can say about people eating and drinking,
dancing and flirting, watching parades and contests and shows – ‘‘a good time was
had by all’’ was the formula in the social columns of the old small-town newspapers.
For most of those attending a festival its primary attraction will not have been what
made it unique but the kind of thing that it had in common with others. To give a full
account of a festival is no more possible than to write the history of a ball, but we can
try to right the balance a little by paying closer attention to the common elements.
Dramatic, choral, and athletic contests are the most obvious common features. The
works composed for the choral and dramatic competitions at Athens generally have
little or nothing to do with the festival’s god or ritual, though it has been popular in
recent decades to expand the definition of ritual to encompass these works – an
expansion that for some of us makes the term ‘‘ritual’’ as unhelpfully vague as
‘‘initiation’’ has become. These works are concerned with the cultural inheritance,
including the religious inheritance, as a whole, which is another indication that a
narrow focus on their distinctive ritual and etiological particularities may distort our
perception of festivals. Athletic competitions, like dramatic and choral ones, rarely
have more than a superficial relationship to the distinctive religious concerns of a
festival – the victor in the torch race, for example, lighting the altar of Athena at
Panathenaea – and generally have none. Though contests have little or nothing to do
with the cultic elements of a festival, they are nevertheless of enormous cultural
202 Scott Scullion