The testimonia to the Diasia are a typical mix of the various kinds of sources we
have for Greek festivals. Newly discovered artifacts and inscriptions often cast light on
some aspect of the subject from a quarter apparently unknown to ancient scholarship –
though in doing so they also remind us how much is still in darkness and how
deceptive our obscured vision can be. Diasia is a relatively simple case. As the quantity
of our sources increases so, on the whole, does our knowledge – but so too do the
number and complexity of our problems of interpretation. Let us turn to a case that
illustrates these.
Interpreting Festivals: The Spartan Karneia
There are fashions in the study of festivals as in other branches of scholarship.
Contemporary concern with gender and sociology is producing rich insights. Postwar
anthropological and comparative approaches focusing on ritual and myth culminate
in the important work of Burkert. The agricultural and magical interests of
nineteenth-century anthropology are central to the older standard works on Greek
festivals. Even this last approach still figures prominently in some recent work, most
of which is in fact eclectic – and rightly so, as none of these lines of approach is
dispensable. All of them have something to reveal about virtually any festival, and
some festivals lend themselves to study primarily by one or other of them.
We know most about the festivals of Athens, but let us break out of our besetting
Athenocentricity and consider the Dorian Karneia in honor of Apollo Karneios
(‘‘Apollo of the Ram’’), best known for precluding the waging of war and thus for
causing the Spartans to arrive too late at the battle of Marathon (for this festival see
further Chapter 15). In the second century BC Demetrius of Scepsis (quoted by
Athenaeus 141e–f ) described the Karneia as an ‘‘imitation [mime ̄sis] of military
training [ago ̄ge ̄s, that is of the famous Spartan form of education]. For there are
nine positions and these are called ‘sunshades’ because they have a certain resem-
blance to tents. Nine men dine in each of them, everything is done at announced
commands, and each ‘sunshade’ contains representatives of three phratries [‘broth-
erhoods’]. The festival of the Karneia lasts for nine days.’’ Hesychius and other
lexicographers provide us with further information. Five unmarried men from each
tribe (phyle ̄? – the word is missing: there were three tribes) were allotted the liturgy,
that is, official responsibility for laying on the festival, for a period of four years, the
so-called Karneatai. It seems to have been some of these who took part in a kind of
footrace under the namestaphylodromoi, ‘‘grape-cluster runners.’’ They chase a single
runner festooned with fillets of wool, and it is a good omen for the city if they catch
him, a bad omen if they do not – though there is the let-out that he is meant to pray
for the good of the city before or as he runs. Mixed dancing by boys and girls and
above all choral song and dance also formed part of the program. A number of
etiological myths are associated with the festival. The most influential in scholarship
has been Pausanias’ story that the cult was established to propitiate Apollo for the
murder of his prophet Karnos by one of the Herakleidai, the Dorian descendants of
Heracles, when they were conquering the Peloponnesos (3.13.4).
The various interpretations of this festival exemplify trends in the study of festivals
over the last hundred years. Wide (1893:73–85), in the long-standard work on
Festivals 193