basket [waskane ̄phoros], wearing a chain of figs.’’ The rituals alluded to in this passage
are concerned with fertility. For example, girls went to ‘‘play the bear’’ at Artemis’
sanctuary at Brauron, on the east coast of Attica, at about the time of the onset of
menstruation, and later, after childbirth, they might dedicate birthing rags and
swaddling wraps in her sanctuary on the Acropolis in Athens. If female initiation
rituals centered on fertility, those of males emphasized warfare. In early adolescence
boys were initiated into the phratries at the sacrifice of thekoureio ̄n, or ‘‘shearing.’’ A
year or two later, in ceremonies involving oaths and sacrifices, they became ephebes,
soldiers in training, and at 18 they were admitted to the army and deme membership.
In religious activities women sometimes achieved an unusual freedom and auton-
omy. Certain religious festivals, such as the Thesmophoria and various Dionysiac
observances, were restricted to women. Details are elusive: the Athenians regarded
them as sacred mysteries and even authors like Aristophanes, who wrote a play called
theThesmophoriazusae(‘‘Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria’’), are careful to
provide no particulars. Late sources typically suggest (and modern scholars plausibly
guess) that such rites dealt with the related questions of human and agricultural
fertility. In ancient Athens, women were ideally to be kept sequestered from public
view. In the Funeral Oration, Thucydides has Pericles tell women that they paradox-
ically achieve the greatest renown when they are least talked about, for good or ill
(2.45.2). Though female sequestration was a social ideal, it is debatable to what
extent it was ever achieved. At religious festivals like the Thesmophoria women not
only acted without male supervision, they organized the rituals themselves. Male
anxieties about what went on at such celebrations – doubtless drinking and orgiastic
sex – were commonplace; nowhere are they more fluently expressed than in Euripides’
Bacchae, a play about the disastrous attempts of a king (Pentheus) to subordinate
female celebration of Dionysiac rites to political regulation. Certain religious cults,
particularly those of goddesses, were in the charge of priestesses, who by virtue of
their positions sometimes came to have an unusual prominence. In Aristophanes’
famous war-protest play, theLysistrata, the title character supposedly leads Athenian
women in a sex-strike to bring an end to the Peloponnesian War; ‘‘Lysistrata’’ may
perhaps be a pseudonym for the famous contemporary priestess Lysimache, who was
for over sixty years priestess of the chief goddess of the city, Athena Polias.
Resident non-citizens had a special importance at the annual festival of Heracles at
the gymnasium at Kynosarges, not coincidentally the place where the Athenian
Polemarch held court in cases regarding metics. Even more interesting are the rare
instances in which the state allowed resident aliens the privilege of worshiping their
gods in Athens: so merchants from Kition on Cyprus were allowed to establish a
shrine of Aphrodite, as were Egyptians of Isis (IGii^2 337), and most famously
Thracians were permitted to celebrate rituals of Bendis (e.g. Plato,Republic327a).
Such license amounted to a political ‘‘naturalization’’ of the cult groups: they
were allowed to own land and build on Athenian soil, privileges normally restricted
to citizens. And as we see notably at the beginning of Plato’s Republic, citizens
subsequently might participate in these ‘‘alien’’ religious observances.
With a very few exceptions, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries, slaves were not
allowed to participate in civic ritual. The festival of Cronus (the Kronia), provides
the notable exception: here ‘‘fathers of families fed on the already harvested grains and
fruits here and there with their slaves; with them they endured the suffering of work in
Religion and Society in Classical Greece 291