Karneia: the festival creates the preconditions for unbridled expeditions of war’’
(1985:236). This interpretation has a certain appeal, as there is clearly something in
the notion that abstention from war during a festival replete with military motifs must
be in a significant rhythmic relationship with the waging of war. Apart from that
important insight, however, Burkert’s thesis seems strained. Accounting for the foun-
dation of a cult by representing it as atonement for a past crime against the relevant god –
in the case of Karnos, the slaying of Apollo’s prophet – is a very common etiological
device. There is by contrast no reason to suppose that such a foundation can atone
prospectivelyfor a military triumph, which is not a thing that inevitably requires atoning
for, nor that any ritual act can banish responsibility for future acts of bloodshed. Here
again, then, the ‘‘comedy of innocence’’ is being imposed by force upon the evidence.
Jeanmaire (1939:524–6) had interpreted Karneia as a festival of initiation, which
gives due prominence to the primary role of young men in the organization and rites
of the festival. We should be inclined nowadays to make much of this sociological side
of Karneia. The representation of phratries by the men in the ‘‘sunshades’’ and of the
tribes (if that supplement is right) by the Karneatai means that the festival reflects the
structure of Spartan society, and so constitutes a religious warrant for that structure.
We might say indeed that social and festival organization are mutually warranting;
that is generally true, but spectacularly so in Sparta, the author of whose laws,
Lycurgus, was worshiped as a god (Herodotus 1.65–6). It is also important that
young males, probably adolescents, are the central actors in the ritual and that they
rather than the men in the ‘‘sunshades’’ have liturgical responsibility for the festival.
Karneia is in fact one of a series of Spartan festivals in which adolescent boys figure
prominently. They performed as choristers at the Hyakinthia and Gymnopaidiai, and
at a festival (if it was a festival) of Artemis Orthia formed two teams, the one
attempting to steal cheeses from the altar while the other beat them back with
switches (Xenophon,Spartan Constitution2.9; Plutarch,Aristides17.8). All these
activities were components of the famous Spartanago ̄ge ̄or ‘‘training,’’ but does it
make sense to speak with Jeanmaire of Karneia as a festival of ‘‘initiation’’? Initiation
worthy of the name ought to effect a definitive transition from one status to another,
as it does in mystery cult, but we have no reason to believe that Karneia or any other
of the festivals we have mentioned marked such a transition; Karneia cannot have
done so, as the Karneatai performed the liturgy for four years. The festivals no doubt
functioned as markers on the road from adolescence to adulthood, but the term
‘‘initiation’’ soon ceases to be useful if it is applied indiscriminately to any rite
involving adolescents. There is also the problem that very few members of any age
cohort can have served as Karneatai, who were only fifteen in number and served
four-year terms. It is surely better to think of them not as initiates but as represen-
tatives of their age-groups and tribes in a long-running Spartan program of self-
representation and self-definition.
Athenaeus preserves a splendid anecdote about a visitor to Boeotia who is puzzled
by the local custom of garlanding and sacrificing Copaic eels and asks someone about
it. ‘‘The Boeotian said that he knew one thing only about the matter, and asserted
that the ancestral customs must be observed and that there is no need to account for
them to others’’ (297d). No doubt we would get a similar reply from one of the
Karneatai if we asked him whether he understood the single runner to be a vegetation
daemon or a ram offering himself for slaughter. Ritual appeals primarily by requiring
Festivals 195