sons offered statues of their daughters, wives, or mothers who had served as priestess
for Dionysus. Men and women made dedications to Dionysus together, and
women also made dedications alone. Simo of Erythrai, a priestess of Dionysus
‘‘Protector of the Polis,’’ said in her dedication that she wanted to be remembered
by her children and descendants (IErythrai201a). Males, however, were more
likely than females to be mentioned in epigraphical texts. This bias inevitably distorts
any discussion of gender in Dionysiac cult. The evidence from Thasos is a good
example. At Thasos an unpublished inscription addresses Dionysus as ‘‘Lord of
the Maenads’’ (Daux 1967:172, presented in French translation only). Although
the sacred enclosure ‘‘covered with vines’’ mentioned in the text seems intended
for rites involving mixed groups, all Bacchic worshipers on Thasian membership lists
are male.
At Athens exclusively male rituals for Dionysus were organized around wine-
drinking and the theater. Several Athenian festivals highlighted grapes and the making
of wine: Lenaia, Anthesteria, Oschophoria, Theoinia, and Iobakkheia, but the
Anthesteria are the only rituals whose events can be reasonably reconstructed. Sched-
uled to coincide with the earliest hint of spring, the Anthesteria celebrated the first
tasting of the previous year’s vintage. A sanctuary of Dionysus Limnaios was opened
one day in the year for this event. The three-day festival included several different
celebrations. On the first day, the Pithoigia, the storage jars,pithoi, were opened
for the tasting of the wine. The second day, Khoes, was a day that began with
preparations against pollution and ended with each adult male drinking a pitcher
(khous,pl.khoes) of wine in silence. Fear of pollution was justified because this was a
day when ghosts of the dead could return. The third day was called Khutrai, ‘‘Pots,’’
in honor of the simple earthenware pots used for cooking thepanspermia,a porridge
made up of all sorts of grains. This was a simple meal, without meat, to restore the city
to a normal state once the dead were back where they belonged.
Respectable women were not encouraged to drink wine, yet certain qualified
females presided over wine rituals during festivals at Athens. At the Lenaia it now
seems that women participated in a sacrifice followed by a banquet where they
entertained Dionysus in a mock symposium and shared in the wine themselves (Peirce
1998). At the Anthesteria the priestess of Dionysus served wine, and the Basilinna,
wife of the Basileus, took part in a skit that must have represented renewal for the
city. She waited in theboukoleionin the agora to receive Dionysus himself in sexual
union. No one knows what actually took place, but the Basileus probably played, in
costume, the part of the god (Parke 1977:112). The sexual status of the women
who performed public ritual during the Anthesteria was open to scrutiny. The
Basilinna herself had to be in her first marriage and a virgin at the time of her
wedding. The fourteen Gerarai, ‘‘Venerable Women,’’ who assisted the Basilinna,
had to swear an oath of purity before her to demonstrate that they were qualified to
preside at the fourteen altars in the sanctuary ([Demosthenes] 59.73–9).
Balancing Public and Private
In the opening lines of Aristophanes’ play in her name, Lysistrata is the only one who
arrives on time for her scheduled meeting. She complains that if the other women had
336 Susan Guettel Cole