deed of murder: it was only when public proclamation of his pollutedness was made
that this condition came into existence. Indeed, it is almost a premise of the Greek
cities’ annual purifying scapegoat rituals that a city should accumulate numerous
overlooked acts of pollution in the course of a year.
Local festivals would be held at a more or less fixed time within the year; they
would draw in people from far around, and their central event was normally a sacrifice
with an ensuing feast.Scott Scullion(Chapter 12) deploys three case studies to
illustrate the difficulties ancient, medieval, and modern scholars alike have had in
trying to divine the meanings of festivals, and suggests that, so far as the majority of
ancient participants was concerned, we may all have been looking for their meaning in
the wrong place. The case of the Athenian Diasia, the festival of Zeus Meilichios,
illustrates, amongst other things, the way our dossier of fragmentary evidence for a
festival can be compromised by the misunderstandings and anachronistic inferences
of the later commentators and lexicographers of the classical tradition, upon whom
we depend for much of the evidence’s preservation. The case of the Spartan Karneia
illustrates how modern conceptions of the significance of festivals have changed
repeatedly over the last century, as different methodological approaches have come
into and gone out of fashion, each one emphasizing those parts of the catalog of
evidence for each festival with a resonance for their own theories. Was the Karneia an
expression of guilt and atonement? Was it an initiation rite? Or something else again?
The case of the Athenian Oschophoria illustrates the aetiological approach typically
taken by the poets and scholars of antiquity to the explanation of their festivals. They
tended to conceptualize festivals as commemorative of key events in the mythical past
and to develop elaborate – but not necessarily stable – narratives about these events.
These ‘‘commemorative’’ aetiologies typically focus on those elements of a festival’s
rituals that are most unsettling, such as transvestism in the case of the Oschophoria,
and attempt to explain them away. However, it is unlikely that much of the aetio-
logical material that survives had any official status at the festivals themselves, and it is
also unlikely that many of the participants in the festivals had any strong grasp of it. It
is more illuminating to ask, rather, what, for the average participant, the festival
experience was all about. Ancient descriptions of the popular experience of partici-
pation in festivals focus on the themes of ‘‘relaxation, jollification, and entertain-
ment,’’ the latter provided by parades and competitions of drama, singing, and
dancing. The light-hearted Aristophanes and the grimmer Thucydides agree on
this. For most participants the significance of a festival will not have lain in its unique
and arcane features, but rather in the features that it shared with all other festivals.
James Davidson(Chapter 13) investigates the way in which ancient Greek religion
was deeply structured and informed by processes, sequences, and series: in short, by
time. Cycles of the moon were critically important in determining the timing of
festivals, which were kept at the appropriate point of the solar year by careful
intercalation. The different cities all had their own calendars, but, despite their
independent spirits and rivalries, they contrived to keep their calendars remarkably
well synchronized, and this fact constitutes one of our strongest licenses to speak of
an ‘‘ancient Greek religion.’’ Although the Sun (Helios) was a marginal deity in the
Greek religious systems, he was one of the most ancient ones, and a deity the other
gods were reluctant to meddle with. Star myths (‘‘asterisms’’) linked heroes and
heroines to fixed points within the solar year. The apparent disappearance of stars
8 Daniel Ogden