festivals were celebrated. On the 12th there was a feast of Cronus (Demosthenes
24.26), a ‘‘harvest home’’ festival in which slaves and masters celebrated the end of
the work of harvesting together. Four days later on the 16th was the Synoikia
commemorating Theseus’ unification (synoikismos) of Attica. An important but
undated procession (pompe ̄) for Aphrodite Pandemos and Peitho (Persuasiveness)
was also associated with this event. A hellenistic inscription dated to the last day of the
year entrusts to the city magistrates (Astynomoi) of the following year the prepara-
tory task of cleaning Aphrodite’s temple, its altars and images, and the provision of
purple, all ‘‘according to ancestral customs’’ (kata ta patria; Parker 2005:461).
New year was the occasion on which the ‘‘tyrant-slayers’’ put their revolutionary
plan into action in Athens, while the Theban coup-plotters chose the new year
celebrations of the Aphrodisia for theirs. Whether these coincidences of historical-
political and sacred-political turning-points are created by revolutionaries skilled in
the art of resonant news-making, or by later narrators skilled in the art of resonant
legend-making, is a question that perhaps needs more serious investigation, but it
underlines the fact that a calendar is a ‘‘live’’ web of significances, not merely a useful
index of events.
More insistent than the yearly rhythm was the monthly rhythm. The Greeks
divided each moon into three decades, ten of waxing, a middle ten around the full
moon, and ten of waning, which, in Athens, were counted backwards from 9. This
structure emphasizes the sense of each month reaching a climax, with the numbers
diminishing as the moon diminishes. Monthly festivals created or reflected ritual and
mythical connections. Artemis’s day – Day 6 – is next to the day of her twin brother
Apollo – Day 7. Aphrodite and Hermes are celebrated together on Day 4, which
informs and is informed by myths and cults which linked them as a symbol of a happy
couple, reflected in their combination son, Hermaphroditos, who was also honored
on this day by superstitious types (Theophrastus,Characters16.10–11). But gods
were not merely associated with a particular phase of each moon, but more abstractly
with thenumberof their day. Apollo’s identity as ‘‘seventh-born’’ is linked to other
sevens in the god’simaginaire. We hear of a group of Athenians called ‘‘Fourth-ists,’’
Tetradistai, who celebrated Aphrodite Pandemos (Menander,Kolax, at Athenaeus
659d). Hermes was sometimes represented in the form of the ‘‘tetragonal works’’
we call ‘‘Herms’’ (Thucydides 6.27), as were other ‘‘Fourth-borns,’’ Aphrodite,
Hermaphroditos, and Heracles, the shape itself, as it were, encoding a date. Again
we must be careful not to mistake symbolic for historical dates. The victory at
Marathon was commemorated on Boedromion 6, even though the battle was fought
around the time of the full moon (Herodotus 6.120), probably because the festival
included a votive sacrifice for Artemis and the 6th was her day.
Sequences and Processes
Another important aspect of time in Greek religion is simple sequence. The fact that
Artemis’ day precedes Apollo’s informs and is informed by the pervasive tradition that
she was the first of the twins to be born. Fourth-born Eros is born fourth in sequence
in Hesiod’sTheogony(120). Zeus So ̄te ̄r is honored on the last day of the year and
in the last of three toasts/libations which began the symposium. The heroes are
Ogden / Companion to Greek Religion 1405120541_4_013 Final Proof page 210 17.11.2006 10:11am210 James Davidson