New Year
The ‘‘new year,’’ which might be defined as the occasion on which annual magistrates
or sacred officials took up office, and/or when new citizens were admitted into the
citizen body, varied greatly throughout Greece, even between colonies and mother-
city. Some cities, such as Thebes, anticipated the modern pattern of a midwinter new
year; other calendars began around the spring or autumn equinoxes, Athens, ‘‘around
the summer solstice’’ (Aristotle, History of Animals543b), in accordance with
Delphi, or, if we follow Plato’s ‘‘Athenian,’’ ‘‘with the month next after the summer
solstice’’ (Laws767c, cf. 945e).
The changeover from old year to new was not just a single day but the climax of a
much longer period, often marked by rituals of cleansing and renewal, veiling and
unveiling, passing on secrets, absence and return, by festivals of disorder or of
suspension of norms, and of rebirth, festivals which often looked back to the foun-
dation of the city and/or to the start of a new divine order. At Thebes for instance
‘‘the Polemarchs [war magistrates] always celebrate a festival of Aphrodite upon the
expiration of their term of office’’ (Xenophon,Hellenica5.4.4); the three magistrates
were joined by three courtesans (hetairai), it seems. The strange ritual could not but
recall the adultery of the war god Ares and Aphrodite, which resulted in the birth of
Harmonia (i.e. of civic harmony and continuity), who in Theban foundation myths
was wife of the founder of the city, Cadmus. Meanwhile, at a secret location, the
Theban Hipparch (‘‘cavalry commander’’) was initiating his successor into a secret
sacrifice for Dirce, murdered by the founders Amphion and Zethos, just as he himself
had been initiated by his predecessor (Plutarch,Moralia578b).
Magistrates in classical Athens took up office in Hecatombaeon, the month which
climaxed with the Panathenaea. The centerpiece of this festival was the presentation
on the 28th of a new dress, apeplos,to the city goddess, i.e. the wooden statue of
Athena Polias, kept in the ‘‘Erechtheum,’’ a statue believed to have fallen from
heaven. But this presentation was simply the crescendo of a series of transitional
rites which had begun nearly two months earlier with the stripping of the goddess at
the Plynteria (Burkert 1985:228–33): ‘‘The family of the Praxiergidae perform these
rites in secrecy on the twenty-fifth day of Thargelion [month 11], removing the
goddess’s adornments [kosmos] and veiling the seated idol [hedos]. Because of this,
Athenians regard this day as the unluckiest of all days, one on which no business
should be conducted’’ (Plutarch,Alcibiades34.1).
Next, in Skirophorion, the last month of the year, the two little girls called
Arrhe ̄phoroi performed their last service for the goddess: ‘‘They place on their
heads what the priestess of Athena gives them to carry; she does not know what it
is she gives them, nor are they any the wiser. In the city, not far from Aphrodite ‘in the
Gardens,’ is an enclosure, and running through it, a natural underground passage.
Here the maidens descend. They leave the things they are carrying down there, and
pick up some other thing, which they fetch back wrapped up. Thereupon they are
immediately discharged, and [the Athenians] take other girls up to the acropolis in
their place’’ (Pausanias 1.27.3).
The month and the year closed with a sacrifice to Zeus (Lysias 26.6). In
Hecatombaeon itself, before the Panathenaea, more foundational/transitional
Ogden / Companion to Greek Religion 1405120541_4_013 Final Proof page 209 17.11.2006 10:11amTime and Greek Religion 209