We have seen that the practice of swinging was characteristic of these solar
festivals, and that it was a feature of the Greek springtime festival known as
the Aiorai, ‘Swings’. According to the aetiological myth, girls swung from
trees because one Erigone had hanged herself from a tree. We have testimony
from Aristotle (fr. 515) that women sang a traditional song about her at the
Aiorai. Her hanging became attached to the story of Ikarios, the man who
brought viticulture to Attica, and she was made his daughter. But her name
is simply a variant of Erigeneia ‘Early-born’, the familiar title of the Dawn
goddess.^101 Her hanging was probably invented as the mythical counterpart
of a custom of hanging images in trees, and it was then used to explain the
swinging as well.^102
Alcman’sfirst Partheneion (PMGF 1) is a song composed for a Spartan
ceremony in which girls apparently carried a plough in procession. The time
of year is uncertain, but there are indications that the activities began before
sunrise. On one interpretation of lines 39–43 Agido, a girl who is located
apart from the singers and whose ‘light’ they acclaim, ‘is bearing witness to us
that the sun is shining’: this could mean that she is standing on an eminence,
watching for the first appearance of the sun’s disc above the horizon and
signalling it by raising a torch. In lines 87–9 the chorus sings, ‘my chief desire
is to be pleasing to Aotis, for she has become our healer of toils’. Aotis is
evidently a divinity, and her name can only be an extended form of Aos,
Dawn. Here then is a dawn goddess celebrated on the occasion of what is
presumably an annual festival. Perhaps her appearance on this day brings to
an end the toils of winter.^103
The Italic goddess Mater Matuta, ‘Mother Morning’, was considered, at
least by some (Lucr. 5. 656; Prisc. Inst. 2. 53), to be none other than Aurora,
though she evidently had other associations too. Her festival at Rome, the
Matralia, fell on 11 June. It began at dawn with an offering of cakes that were
flaua, the same colour as Aurora (Ovid, Fasti 6. 473–6, cf. Amores 1. 13. 2).
Like the cakes previously mentioned, these may originally have been solar
symbols.^104
(^101) von Schroeder (1914–16), ii. 144.
(^102) For hanging images on the May-tree or Maypole in various parts of Europe see
Mannhardt (1905), i. 156 (a doll in the form of a woman dressed in white), 173 (man and wife),
210, 408 f., 430 f. (young man and girl).
(^103) Procopius, Bell. Goth. 2. 15. 13, reports that in ‘Thule’ (somewhere in Scandinavia?) the
sun did not appear in midwinter for forty days. When thirty-five had elapsed, scouts were sent
up to mountain peaks to watch for its first appearance, and they then announced to those below
that it would shine for them in five days’ time.
(^104) Dumézil (1968–73), iii. 305–30, made an ingenious attempt to explain other features of
the ritual in terms of the mythology of Dawn. He took the date, 11 June, to mark the approach
of the solstice. It is certainly noteworthy that it falls exactly six months before the festival that
Johannes Lydus (De mensibus 4. 155) associates with the Sun.
226 5. Sun and Daughter