CHAPTER TWELVE
Festivals
Scott Scullion
Greek calendars varied from city to city, but the twelve months were most often
named after festivals, huge numbers of which were celebrated in the Greek world in
the course of a year. Some festivals were common to Doric or Ionian cities, though
these might take on a special form in a particular place, while others were unique to
individual poleis or subgroups within a polis. A sacrifice and a banquet was normally
the central event, and people would gather, often from afar, to attend. The two most
common terms for ‘‘festival,’’heorte ̄, which seems to be related to the worderanos,
‘‘banquet,’’ andpane ̄guris, ‘‘all-gathering,’’ emphasize respectively these two central
features. The particular combinations of divinities, rituals, etiological myths, and
other elements that constituted individual festivals were almost infinitely various,
but our knowledge of them is terribly limited by the paucity of our evidence. For
the most part we have to content ourselves with odd scraps of ancient scholarship,
often late – and sometimes confused or misleadingly abbreviated – summary of earlier
scholarship, and with earlier and more reliable but almost always tantalizingly terse
references in inscriptions and allusions in literature. Serious study of Greek festivals
consists largely of painstaking analysis of the sources, and it will be more useful to
discuss the reconstruction and interpretation of some festivals in detail than to give
thumbnail sketches of many. At the end of the chapter I shall hazard some generali-
zations about a relatively neglected aspect of the study of festivals, the attitudes and
experience of the general run of people taking part in them.
Evidence and Reconstruction: The Athenian Diasia
The troublesome nature of our evidence is best brought out by considering all the
sources for a particular festival, and the Athenian Diasia makes a good and represen-
tative case study. According to Thucydides, when Cylon was advised by Delphi to seize
the acropolis at Athens during ‘‘the greatest festival of Zeus’’ (1.126.4) he attempted