than the modern nation-state. A high percentage of the population would have had
the opportunity to gather together on this occasion in ways that occur rarely in
modern western society.
To understand the significance of a festival, it is always worth exploring the myths
with which it is connected; in the case of the Panathenaea, we are dealing with a
festival rich in mythic associations. It celebrated two myths which concerned Athena’s
relationship with Zeus: her birth out of his head, and the gigantomachy (the battle
between the gods and the giants) in which she fought alongside her father. In
addition, as we have seen, its founder was none other than Erichthonius. This
tradition has major implications for understanding its communal appeal, attributing
as it did the establishment of the Athenians’ premier festival to the ancestral hero who
had a special relationship with the goddess.
A discussion of the events at the Panathenaea benefits from a chronological
approach, because it meant different things in different periods of Athenian history.
This takes us to another reason why this festival merits particular attention, namely
that it shows how religion was adapted and developed in response to changing needs
of the people. As Athens developed into a major power in the Greek world, the
festival developed accordingly. In other words, it is a festival with a history, one that
forms part of Athenian history of the archaic and classical periods.
The first date of significance is 566 BC, when a major innovation was attributed to
Peisistratos. This was a few years before he gained his first period as tyrant, but shows
that he was already an influential figure in the city. He introduced a grander version of
the festival every fourth year: the Great Panathenaea, an eight-day long event with
celebrations and competitions to rival in prestige and display the major quadrennial
festivals of the Greek world, such as the Olympic and Pythian Games. It included a
full program of sporting contests for athletes from all over Greece including boxing,
wrestling, and chariot races. There were torch races too, a male beauty contest, and a
regatta in the harbor. It was also a poetic and musical occasion, with competitions for
aulosandkitharaplayers, and recitations of the Homeric poems.
The procession of the Great Panathenaea was splendid, involving participants from
different walks of life: male, female, citizen, metic and also former slaves. Starting at
the Dipylon Gate, the festival wound its way through the city along the Panathenaic
Way up to the Acropolis. On reaching the temple of Athena Nike, it paused in order
to sacrifice a cow, although the main goal was the altar of Athena Polias for a sacrifice
of at least a hundred cows. From a modern western religious perspective, in which
animal sacrifice is alien, it is hard to grasp the noise and excitement that would have
been generated by this part of the festival. With so many animals to slaughter, the
sacrifice would have lasted for several hours, accompanied throughout by ritual
screaming and the noise of the animals, while the air would have been filled with
smoke from the fat.
What Peisistratos’ motives were in enlarging the festival is unrecoverable, although
as we will see presently he was all too aware of the potential of religious spectacle to
promote his own ends as a politician. In any case, the festival was from now on the
greatest event in the calendar. Having attained this status, subsequent innovations
took place in response to major events in the city’s history. After the Persian Wars, a
trireme on wheels from the naval victory at Salamis was introduced into the proces-
sion, with a sail that seems to have been in the form of a massivepeplosdepicting the
230 Susan Deacy