reflect the god’s historical arrival, but rather project onto the historical level an
essential quality of his divine personality as ‘‘the coming god,’’ so earliness and
lateness, priority and posteriority, should also be seen as symbolic sequential values
with their own rhyme and reason which need not have anything to do with a real
historical progression (Sourvinou-Inwood 1987:216). Hyacinthus might seem to
precede Apollo at Amyclae, not necessarily because of some memory of the fact
that his cult is more ancient at the site, as, indeed, it may well have been, but because
Apollo’s throne sits on top of Hyacinthus, literallysupersedinghim. Accordingly, in
the three-day Hyacinthia, Hyacinthus’ day precedes Apollo’s, and his cult is marked
by another symbol of earliness, namely a ban on invented/end-product bread.
Perhaps the most elaborate use of manufacturing processes as models for time,
from start/invention to finish, is to be found at the Panathenaea, in which two end-
products featured prominently, a finishedpeplospresented to the goddess and olive oil
used as prizes for the Games, just as the olive’s leaves were used for victory crowns
([Aristotle],Athe ̄naio ̄n Politeia60). Both were ‘‘gifts of Athena,’’ which had been
manufactured according to strict ritual protocols in the preceding year. The warp for
the weaving was set up almost exactly nine months before the Panathenaea at the
Chalkeia on the last day of Pyanopsion, a festival which celebrated ‘‘the discovery of
techniques.’’ The finished cloth features prominently on the Parthenon, on the
centerpiece of the lintel which stood over the entrance, probably indicating an
originarypeplos, woven by Pandrosus, daughter of Cecrops, ‘‘first to prepare woolen
clothing for mortals.’’ The oil was produced from branches of ‘‘sacred olives’’ from
all over Attica, descended from the very first tree believed still to be growing by the
shrine of Pandrosus within the ‘‘Erechtheum,’’ a gift celebrated on the back of the
Parthenon. Moreover, an olive branch was fixed to the front of a house in which a
new Athenian male had been born, raw wool if it was a girl; and indeed the first
Athenian, Erichthonius, founder of the Panathenaea, had been born from a piece of
raw wool impregnated with craftsman Hephaestus’ sperm and dropped onto the
earth. Therefore, through ritual practices, myths, and images, the processing of
olive into oil and wool into cloth provided a model sequence for the foundation of
Athens as Athena’s city, for the first Athenian and for each Athenian.
Of course festivals could play games with sequence. In Athens, the three-day
Thesmophoria on 11–13 Pyanopsion, was linked to the story of Persephone’s rape
and return and Demeter’s teaching of the secret of wheat, thistriduumrecapitulating
the tripartite division of the year into three seasons, the middle day of fasting, Nesteia,
linked to Persephone’ssaison en inferand Demeter’s mourning. But the rotten pigs
linked to the pigs of Eubouleus swallowed up by the earth along with Persephone,
were first retrieved from the underworld ‘‘halls’’ (megara), it seems, before fresh pigs
were deposited to be retrieved next year, and the first day was called Anodos, which
refers to the wives’ ‘‘going up’’ to the temporary encampment for the duration of the
festival, but also, inevitably, to Persephone’s ‘‘going up’’ from Hades, and the last day
Kalligeneia ‘‘Beautiful Birth’’ seems to invoke the birth of Persephone, the festival
thus reversing the sequence of the myth: return, loss, birth. Likewise the Anthesteria,
11–13 Anthesterion, seems to have begun by commemorating the discovery of safe
drinking with unusually sober toasts of wine mixed with water on Day 1, followed by
Choes, a day of dangerous drinking – ‘‘I have poured in unmixed wine again and
drained it without taking a breath’’ (Aristophanes,Acharnians1229) – anti-socially,
Ogden / Companion to Greek Religion 1405120541_4_013 Final Proof page 212 17.11.2006 10:11am212 James Davidson