the Panathenaea festival wore an application of white make-up (Aristophanes,
Ecclesiazusae732 with Hermippus fr. 25 K-A). The epithet under which Athena is
honored at Oschophoria, Skiras, is related in ancient sources toskiros, a white clay or
chalk that could be used as an unction: a scholion on Aristophanes (Wasps926) tells
us that ‘‘Athena is called Skiras because she is anointed with white chalk [leuke ̄i].’’ This
may be mere inference from the epithet, but it may not be. That Proclus specifies
precisely the paleness of the ̄oschophoroiand that alone, and that the same detail shows
up in Demon’s aetion and so is probably owed by both to a common source, makes it
very tempting indeed to conclude that theo ̄schophoroiwere made up with the white clay
skiros, and that this was connected with Athena Skiras. If that is so, the transvestism
here veryprobably has to do with Athena Skiras rather than Dionysus – unless the white
clay alone was the ultimate basis of the idea that they were ‘‘dressed like women,’’
in which case ‘‘transvestism’’ might not be the relevant concept.
We can perhaps go a little further. Passages in classical comedy and inscriptions
refer to a festival Skira which they treat as a women’s festival comparable to
Thesmophoria and Stenia, and one would naturally infer that like them it honored
Demeter. Philochorus tells us that at the festival ‘‘they ate garlic with a view to
abstaining from sex, so that they would not smell of perfume’’ (FGrH328 fr. 89).
Athenian writers on festivals, however, and in particular Lysimachides in the first
century BC or first century AD, reported of Skira ‘‘that theskironis a large sunshade
under which the priestess of Athena, the priest of Poseidon, and the priest of Helios
walk as it is carried from the acropolis to a place called Skiron’’ (FGrH366 fr. 3).
Lysimachides is quoted by the second-century AD lexicographer Harpocration, who
is explaining an occurrence of the wordskironin the fourth-century orator Lycurgus,
but Lycurgus may simply have used the word rather than defined it, and so there is
every possibility that Lysimachides’ definition and explanation of it differed from the
orator’s. Helios, ‘‘Sun,’’ was not worshiped in Athens until the hellenistic period, and
the version of the festival that Lysimachides reports must therefore be post-classical.
This is all very difficult indeed to reconcile with the early evidence for Skira. We note
the sunshade, and think of that motif in our evidence for the Oschophoria. Is this a
confused description of the Oschophoria procession in its hellenistic form? Poseidon
certainly had a sanctuary in or near the port of the Piraeus, and may well have done at
the neighboring harbor of Phaleron. Did its priest perhaps come up from Phaleron to
accompany the procession down from Athens? The initial vowel of the festival name
Ski ̆rais short, that of the word for white clay,skı ̄ros, long, but this may well have been
insufficient to hinder a later antiquarian from equating them. Lysimachides (or his
ultimate source) was in any case over-explaining the name of the festival, by means
both ofskironthe sunshade and Skiron the place. An abundance ofskir- words
certainly caused the scholars confusion. A scholion on Pausanias (1.1.4) derives the
name Skirophoria (the full, older name of the festival: ‘‘Bearing ofSkiron/Skira’’)
from ‘‘the bearing at the festival by Theseus ofskira, or of chalk, for when Theseus
went away to deal with the Minotaur he made an image of Athena of chalk and took it
with him.’’ Here the word for chalk isgypsosrather thanskiros, but the suggestion
must originally have been inspired byskiros, even though the vowel quantity proves
that that word cannot be the source of Skirophoria or Skira. The number and variety
of the scholars’ guesses – chalk unction on the goddess’ face, a chalk image of the
goddess, Skiron as a place andskironas a sunshade – indicates that something had
200 Scott Scullion