honored in the second libation and on the second day of each month. Sequential
values can be ascribed according to some basic principles, which might of course
contradict each other: that the gods or the divine precedes the mortal, that the
undifferentiated precedes the differentiated, that the simple (e.g. roasting, four-
stringed lyre) precedes the elaborate (e.g. boiling, seven-stringed lyre), that what’s
underneath precedes what is on top of it, that an initial act precedes the re-enactment.
A special set of sequences involves natural process, morning to night, birth to death,
fresh to rotten meat.
Moreover, it is characteristic of the Greeks to construct the ‘‘world as it is’’ as a
‘‘world as it has become,’’ and almost any feature of thatachievedworld, its things
(fire, honey, the lyre, stars), its practices and institutions (agriculture, charioteering,
sacrifice, marriage, theft), its inhabitants (women) could be unthought, especially
through narratives of origin, which often focus on the first discovering (heurein), or
the first divine gift or epiphany, thus projecting sequence onto the mythistorical level
by postulating a prior epoch devoid of this thing. This kind of unthinking of the
status quo could be quite radical. At various times myth (and ritual) imagines a time
without labor, homosexualero ̄s, the division between free and unfree or between
mortals and immortals, and even, in the context of the divine dispute over Attica,
without the disfranchisement of women: ‘‘to appease Poseidon’s anger, the
women... should no longer have a vote’’ (Varro at AugustineCity of God18.9).
An especially resonant category of discoveries involves the discovery of manufacturing
processes: the process of turning grapes into wine, wheat into bread, wool into cloth.
These items contain two lots of time, the processing of the item from raw material to
finished product recapitulating the discovery of the process in mythistorical time.
It was always possible, therefore, for ancient commentators to make, and for
modern scholars to infer, a connection between a particular ritual or cult practice
and a particular superseded epoch. The wedding ritual in which a boy with a crown of
oak leaves offered bread from a winnowing-fan, saying ‘‘I/They fled the bad; I/they
discovered the better,’’ a formula also intoned in Bacchic initiations (Demosthenes
18.259), was interpreted as marking the ‘‘change in life’’ from theagrios(‘‘wild’’)
andakantho ̄de ̄s(‘‘thorny’’) to theale ̄lesmenos(‘‘ground’’)bios(Oakley and Sinos
1993:29). Using this parallel we might also agree with Brelich (1969:143), that the
ban on bread on Day 1 of the Spartan Hyacinthia ceremonially evoked a primordial
time when bread had not yet been invented.
There are numerous examples of these localized alignments of before–after, early–
late sequences. TheHomeric Hymn to Hermespaints an incongruous image of the
new god Hermes doing all his ‘‘firsts’’ – inventing the lyre, fire, herding, thieving,
sacrifice – on his very first day as a newborn baby. The ‘‘fled the bad, found the
better’’ formula assimilates the processing of initiates (into marriage or mysteries) to
the processing of grain from winnowing-fan to bread and further with the historical
progress of mankind from ‘‘thorny’’ to ‘‘ground way of life.’’ First thing at dawn, and
first in sequence, the Hellanodikai solemnly inspected the athletes for thestadion
sprint, the first event, supposedly, at the dawn of the Olympic Games. The Anthesteria
commemorated Dionysus’ gift of wine, the time when wine was new, by interrupting
the fermentation process, and by ritual drinking of must, or ‘‘new wine,’’ at a shrine
said, by Thucydides (2.15.4), to be the earliest of his shrines in Athens. Just as we have
come to understand that myths about Dionysus’ ‘‘coming’’ do not (necessarily)
Ogden / Companion to Greek Religion 1405120541_4_013 Final Proof page 211 17.11.2006 10:11amTime and Greek Religion 211