the grape clusters – or perhaps they do that, Demon says, because they returned to
Athens during the harvest. Thedeipnophoroiare imitating the mothers of the youths
and maidens, who brought them food during the period of preparation for the
voyage. Myths are told at the festival, and this is because the mothers would comfort
and encourage the children by telling them myths. Proclus’ handbook does not tell
the story of the youths substituted for maidens, but simply says that Theseus insti-
tuted the rite on his return, using two youths ‘‘who had been kept in shade’’ as
assistants, in gratitude to Athena and Dionysus (rather than Dionysus and Ariadne).
A number of interesting conclusions, or at any rate plausible hypotheses, suggest
themselves. It is remarkable first of all how verynarrativethe explanation of the
festival is, resembling not at all the sort of thing that modern scholars, with their
focus on ritual, would want to say about it. Aspects of the festival program susceptible
to association with the story, thedeipnophoroifor example, are explained commem-
oratively, as mothers feeding their children, rather than functionally, as women
carrying provisions for sacrifice and feast, easy and obvious though the latter explan-
ation would be. The ritual program as such, no doubt because it seemed unaccount-
able, comes in simply as a given, warranted by the fact of its foundation by Theseus.
The grape clusters, Demon suggests, may be carried because it was vintage season –
good evidence for a native line in harvest-festival interpretation – but that is an
afterthought. The primary explanation is based on the simple equation ‘‘vine¼
Dionysus,’’ and Demon is so carried away by the narrative that he brings in Dionysus
and Ariadne from the myth as recipients of Theseus’ gratitude to the exclusion of the
festival honorand Athena, who does not figure in Theseus’ Cretan adventures.
Proclus’ source, who is not such an enthusiastic storyteller, remembers Athena,
bringing Dionysus in but naming him in second place, and leaves out Ariadne, the
one of the three to whom Theseus most obviously owes gratitude. This is a specially
clear illustration of the tendency of narrative, including etiological narrative, to take
on a life of its own, and it is sobering to reflect that a fourth-century Atthidographer
(whom there is no reason to think Plutarch is misrepresenting) can so far forget the
etiological purpose of his story as to leave the principal divinity out of it. Or should
we perhaps put it another way: etiology was not for the Greeks the thoroughly
allegorical correlate of ritual that we, in our thirst for evidence, would like it to be
and too often treat it as being. At any rate, those scholars can hardly be right who
treat Demon’s tale as a good argument for the view that Dionysus had an important
place in the festival.
It is generally held that we have here a rare attestation of the telling of myths at a
festival. We note that what is related are ‘‘myths’’ rather than ‘‘the myth.’’ If ‘‘the
myth,’’ this or another etiological myth, had been related, it seems doubtful that that
would have produced the etiological motif of the mothers telling stories to their
children. This is much more natural as a reflection of the telling of a variety of myths,
and is probably accounting for the oschophoric songs, which, if they were like the
songs performed at Athenian festivals in general, will not normally have been on an
Oschophoric theme, but on a wide range of mythical subjects. Perhaps then this is an
aetion of a normal choral component of Greek festivals rather than of an unusual
reading of a relevant myth. It is important to take the implications of this fully on
board. We have canvassed the possibility that most people attending a festival will not
have recollected in any detail its etiological myth or myths, and it seems clear that no
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