opportunity was provided at the festival to recite them. The variation of ‘‘myth’’ and
‘‘myths’’ is itself significant. We often know more than one aetion for a given festival,
and many festivals doubtless had several. Four aetia for various cultic activities at
the sanctuary at Brauron on the east coast of Attica are attested, three in late
lexicographers and one in Euripides. The later three all have to do with thearkteia,
the famous ritual in which small girls ‘‘played the bear’’ for Artemis; this common
reference produces a certain convergence in the aetia, but they are very different,
and there is no reason to believe that one of them must have been original and
authoritative. Evidently etiological myth was a true scion of Greek mythology
and so anarchically multiform. To judge by extant dithyrambs and dramas one
would be more likely to hear an aetion of a festival recounted in a tragedy than at
the relevant festival itself. The whole business of etiology was perhaps much less
official than we sometimes assume, a creation largely of antiquarians and poets that
had no authoritative status in cult.
There is another suggestive cultural motif to be culled from the aetion of
Oschophoria. Demon regards the grape clusters as straightforwardly cultic, either
an attribute of Dionysus or first fruits of his crop, and so does not attempt to account
for them mythically. He treats the ritual tranvestism very differently, however, as his
dilation on the youths’ disguise makes plain. The choice of a myth of Theseus was
doubtless deliberate, perhaps because his return to Athens from Crete and conse-
quent thank-offerings to Apollo were located in Phaleron (Plutarch,Theseus22.2–4),
perhaps also – but this is uncertain – because the Oschophoria were celebrated in the
same month Pyanepsion in which Plutarch places Theseus’ return to Athens, or even
on the same or the preceding day (7 or 6 Pyanepsion). It required real ingenuity to
connect the transvestism with the myth of Theseus by turning two of the seven
maidens into disguised youths, and the natural inference is that this ritual element
was driving the generation of the most distinctive features of the aetion. Modern
scholars speak easily of ritual transvestism, but this was evidently the aspect of the rite
that the ancient etiologists were keenest to account for as commemoration, which
may well mean keen to neutralize as ritual behavior. Demon’s elaborate description of
the youths’ transformation, and the minimalist version of Proclus, who confines
himself to the detail of their pallor, are probably varying responses to the same
discomfort with the transvestism of the ritual. If this is right, it is useful to know that
they regarded transvestism in a ritual context as strange and reacted to it so strongly.
This very intriguing festival is beset with problems both of reconstruction and of
interpretation. There are striking resemblances to the Karneia – not only the young
men in military training, the race, and the choral song, but the grape clusters. The older
view was that both wereharvest festivals. The carrying of the grape clusters is what gives
the Oschophoria its name, and the festival takes place at the right sort of time to
celebrate the end of the grape harvest in the autumn, as Demon is aware. Burkert
(1985:235, 441 n. 22) denied that the Karneia was a harvest festival on the grounds
that it took place two months earlier than Oschophoria. This kind of objection is
frequently used to dissociate festivals from agricultural concerns, but the grapes will
have been almost ready for harvest in the month Karneios and it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that that is a relevant fact, even if Spartan males did not stoop to agricultural
labor. That Oschophoria is at least partly agricultural in theme is suggested also by the
connection with Dionysus. That, however, raises a tricky problem.
198 Scott Scullion