who had a tomb at Olympia: ‘‘And they say the Moon fell in love with Endymion and
bore him fifty daughters’’ (5.1.4).
Moons change noticeably over a few nights. In just a week ‘‘the circle of the full
moon which divides the month in two’’ (Euripides,Ion1155–6), will wane into a
half-moon; a week later into a fine C-shaped closing moon, before virtually vanishing
only to reappear a few nights later as a new moon, )-shaped, now waxing each night
for two weeks, until it becomes full once more. Judging from the Athenian example,
Greek religious festivals were almost always celebrated on the same day of the same
moon each year. A festival around the 15th, sometimes called the ‘‘split-month’’
(dichome ̄nia), ought therefore to be a full-moon festival. The regular alternation of
full thirty-day months with ‘‘hollow’’ months, which skipped ‘‘day 29,’’ kept the
calendar attuned to the lunar cycle. An extra ‘‘intercalary’’ month was regularly
inserted to keep the lunar cycle roughly aligned to the solar year, to stop the high
summer Panathenaea turning into a spring and then a winter festival. In Athens this
extra month was normally added in midwinter (a second month of Posideon), in
accordance with Delphi’s practice, but we know of extra months inserted at other
times of year.
The detailed workings of Greek calendars are highly controversial, but it is clear that
these seemingly haphazard adjustments nevertheless produced great overall stability.
Greek months and festivals seem to have stayed more or less where they were supposed
to be within the solar year in harmony with natural cycles, and, although Greek cities
did not generally coordinate their intercalations, over time they seem to have kept
roughly in phase, so that one can ‘‘translate’’ Attic Hecatombaeon into Ephesus’
Clareon, Priene’s Panemos, etc. andnormallythose translations would be accurate.
Indeed the first month-name in Greek literature, Lenaeon (Hesiod,Works504) seems
to be a translation of a Boeotian month-name into the ‘‘Ionian’’ calendar, more
appropriate to Hesiod’s panhellenic dialect. That so many fiercely independent poleis,
acknowledging no overarching religious authority, managed, nevertheless, quietly to
keep their ‘‘moons’’ and festivals more or less in step with each other over long
periods is in itself quite remarkable, and it gives us a tangible illustration of how
there is an ‘‘ancient Greek religion’’ to speak of, without there being a unitary
‘‘ancient Greece.’’
Helios and Eos (Dawn) seem to be, along with Zeus, the only Greek deities with
‘‘impeccable Indo-European lineage both in etymology and in their status as gods’’
(Burkert 1985:17); yet classical Greeks could consider the worship of Sun and Moon
a distinctly barbarian practice (Aristophanes, Peace 406–13). Certainly, Helios’
descendants – Medea, Circe, Pasiphae ̈– are a decidedly outlandish bunch, and cults
of luminaries were somewhat anomalous, though not necessarily (in the case of
Helios) rare. Although important divinities wereassociatedwith luminaries from an
early date, for example Apollo with the sun, they were never identified with luminar-
ies; that had come to seem alien. Helios, Eos, and Selene were not just sidelined;
persisting on the sidelines seems to have been their main function, namely to be
‘‘minor’’ deities that other more important deities were not the same as; thus they
too helped to keep Greek religion ‘‘Greek.’’
The relentless cosmic timekeeping of stars and luminaries is one of the pillars of
Greek religion, a bio-clock for mortals to be subjected to and for gods to rise above.
The gods avoided disrupting that clock, save under exceptional circumstances,
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