us on grounds of tradition to do this set of special things rather than another, and
Athenaeus’ Boeotian was surely not unusual in his lack of interest in the meaning of it
all. No doubt the local Boeotian schoolteacher would have been happy to answer the
visitor’s question, and it must primarily have been such local antiquarians who
preserved and indeed generated etiological stories. Schoolchildren in modern Greece
are taught the lore of the local festivals, but teachers tell me that very few of them
retain any of it, despite attending the festivals regularly throughout their lives. Of
course the etiological stories themselves are generally no more than quaint pseudo-
explanations that dress the ritual up in narrative or conceptual clothing for those who
want an explanation. Burkert’s notion of etiological myths as ‘‘having grown from the
experience of participants at the festival’’ (1985:227), if that means the general run of
participants, must rarely apply. The impenetrably obscure origins and meaning of the
rites at many Greek festivals must have been precisely what prompted the generation
of the many aetia, such as that of Karnos the prophet, that involve no analysis of the
rites as such but simply represent the whole ritual complex as coming into being at
once as an atonement for some offence or a commemoration of some event or person.
This accounts for the rites, but in the sense of authorizing or authenticating rather
than (in our sense) explaining them. Sometimes, however, etiological myths have
more to tell us about the festival than those of Karneia do, and so become central to
interpretation. Let us consider a festival of which this is the case.
Festival and Aetion: The Athenian Oschophoria
We have two accounts of the Athenian festival Oschophoria, ‘‘carrying of vine shoots
with grape clusters,’’ one of them summarized by Plutarch in hisTheseus(23.2–4)
from the fourth-century BC Atthidographer Demon (FGrH327 fr. 6), the other
found in a much later handbook (ProclusChrestomathiaquoted in Photius,Library
239, 322a). The festival involved a procession from ‘‘the Dionysiac sanctuary’’ in
Athens to that of Athena Skiras in Phaleron which was led by two youths dressed as
women and carrying a vine shoot with grape clusters on it. These were followed by a
chorus singing the ‘‘oschophoric songs’’ named after the festival, and by female
deipnophoroi, ‘‘meal-bearers.’’ Ephebes, Athenian cadets, representing their tribes,
competed in racing. Aristodemus, a second-century BC Alexandrian commentator on
Pindar, is the earliest of two sources to say that they carried the grape clusters in the
race (FGrH383 fr. 9), which must be a result of confusion with the race at the
Spartan Karneia, and, unlike the other source, he places the race at the festival Skira, a
confusion obviously caused by Athena’s epithet. This is a salutary warning that
negligent error can impair the tradition early and catastrophically, which will not
have happened only in cases where we are able to detect the error.
Demon’s etiological story is about the seven youths and seven maidens to whose
lot it fell to go as Athenian tribute to the Minotaur. For two of the maidens Theseus
substituted courageous youths with girlish faces; he changed their appearance by
giving them warm baths, keeping them in shade, and rubbing unguents on their skin,
and taught them to walk, speak, and dress like girls. When they all returned safely
from Crete Theseus and the two youths founded the rite (‘‘as we know it’’ is the
implication) in gratitude to Dionysus and Ariadne, in whose honor they carry
196 Scott Scullion