distance, to keep the gods gods, an exchange which did not just take place in an
ongoing present, but helped to maintain that present, to sustain the ongoing Age
of Zeus.
Alongside the sense of processing is the sense of continuity, of regular repetition.
This is made vivid not only in the regular repetition of festivals – monthly, yearly,
quadrennial, etc. – but also in institutions such as the forty-two Athenian year-heroes
and the year sets with which they are identified, each new set of ‘‘18 year olds’’
representing the reincarnation, at the level of the social, of the retiring set of ‘‘60 year
olds,’’ creating a sense of ‘‘continual movement while standing still,’’ a metastatic
cycle. The wheel is not smooth however, but represents a series of climaxes, for each
cycle, each moon, each man, reaches a peak, anakme ̄, followed by a waning or
diminishing. The best way to reconcile these three characteristic features, these
three types of time, accumulative, repetitive and climactic, is perhaps to think of
layers of silt left by a recurring tide.
Guide to Further Reading
Students of Greek religion often neglect time per se, while students of Greek time have often
focused narrowly on technical issues. Consequently, thelanguageof time, i.e. the symbolic
resonances of temporal structures, the movements of heavenly bodies, significance of dates,
synchronicities, numbers, sequences, and age structures, has been neglected or even sidelined
as representing an esoteric kind of thinking more at home in the East, and alien to the Greek
mainstream before the hellenistic period. The following, however, may prove useful. The best
introduction to the difficult literature on time in anthropology is Jedrej 1995. Stimulating
meditations on aspects of Greek time in general are to be found in Van Groningen 1953,
Brommer 1969, Tre ́de ́1992, Golden and Toohey 1997, Csapo and Miller 1998 and Darbo-
Peschanski 2000. Hannah 2005 is an accessible introduction to the sometimes fierce debates
about how calendars worked. Mikalson 1975 collects all the information about religious
activity on particular days of the year. Tru ̈mpy 1997 presents the most authoritative attempt
to reconstruct Greek calendars, their relationships to one another and of month names to
festivals. Parker 2005 presents the most up-to-date survey of Athenian festivals: chapter 13 on
Thesmophoria, chapter 14 on Anthesteria, and appendix 1, the ‘‘Check List,’’ have been
especially useful. On Cronus see Versnel 1987. Condos 1997 is a useful translation with
commentary of [Eratosthenes]Katasterismoiand HyginusDe AstronomiaII. I have written
at greater length on Athenian year-heroes and age structures in Davidson (2007).
Ogden / Companion to Greek Religion 1405120541_4_013 Final Proof page 218 17.11.2006 10:11am218 James Davidson