Anthesteria

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Anthesteria, one of the four Athenian festivals in honour of Dionysus (Dionysia), was held annually for three days, the eleventh to thirteenth of the month of Anthesterion (the February/March full moon). At the center of the festival was the celebration of the maturing of the wine stored at the previous vintage, and the beginning of spring. The festival was likely celebrated for more than two millennia, from before 1500 BC to after AD 500.

The three days of the feast were called Pithoigia (after πίθοι "casks"), Choës (χόες "beakers") and Chytroi (χύτροι "pots").

During the feast, social order was interrupted or inverted, the slaves being allowed to participate, uniting the household in ancient fashion. The Anthesteria also have aspects of a festival of the dead who freely roamed the city, comparable to the Roman Feast of the Lemures, the expulsion of ancestral ghosts: compare All Souls' Night and carnival. Either the Keres (Κῆρες) or the Carians (Κᾶρες) were entertained, and expelled from the city after the festival, symbolizing either the souls of the dead or the aboriginal inhabitants of Attica. A Greek proverb, employed of those who pestered for continued favours, ran "Out of doors, Keres! It is no longer Anthesteria". [1]

The festival was called Rosalia in Latin, loaned as Rusaliya into Slavic. The Rusalki were originally spirits associated with the cult.

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[edit] Origins

The name Anthesteria, according to the account of it given above, is usually connected with ανθη ("flower," or the "bloom" of the grape, cognate to Sanskrit andhas "Soma plant")

The month Anthesterion is named after the festival, not vice versa, and since the month's name is not restricted to the Attic calendar, but was known also in Ionia, it follows that the festival predates the Ionian colonisation, making it the oldest datable part of the Eleusinian Mysteries, originating likely as early as 1500 BC.

A. W. Verrall (Journal of Hellenic Studies, xx., 1900, p. 115) explains the name differently, as a feast of "revocation" (from αναθεσσασται, to "pray back" or "up"), at which the ghosts of the dead were recalled to the land of the living (cp. the Roman mundus patet). J. E. Harrison (ibid. 100, 109, and Prolegomena), regarding the Anthesteria as primarily a festival of all souls, the object of which was the expulsion of ancestral ghosts by means of placation, explains πιθοιγια as the feast of the opening of the graves (πιθος meaning a large urn used for burial purposes), χοες as the day of libations, and χυτροι as the day of the grave-holes (not "pots," which is χυτραι), in point of time really anterior to the πιθοιγια. E. Rohde and Martin P. Nilsson, however, take the χυτροι to mean "water vessels," and connect the ceremony with the Hydrophoria, a libation festival said to propitiate the dead who had perished in the flood of Deucalion[2].

[edit] Pithoigia

On the first day, called Pithoigia (opening of the casks), libations were offered from the newly opened casks to the god of wine, all the household, including servants and slaves, joining in the festivities. The rooms and the drinking vessels in them were adorned with spring flowers, as were also the children over three years of age.

[edit] Choes

The second day, named Choës (feast of beakers), was a time of merrymaking. The people dressed themselves gaily, some in the disguise of the mythical personages in the suite of Dionysus, and paid a round of visits to their acquaintances. Drinking clubs met to organize drink-off matches, the winner being he who drained his cup most rapidly. Others poured libations on the tombs of deceased relatives. On the part of the state this day was the occasion of a peculiarly solemn and secret ceremony in one of the sanctuaries of Dionysus in the Lenaeum, which for the rest of the year was closed. The basilissa (or basilinna), wife of the archon basileus for the duration, went through a ceremony of marriage to the wine god, in which she was assisted by fourteen Athenian matrons, called geraerae, chosen by the basileus and sworn to secrecy. The days on which the Pithoigia and Choës were celebrated were both regarded as αποφραδες (nefasti, "unlucky") and μιαραι ("defiled"), necessitating expiatory libations; on them the souls of the dead came up from the underworld and walked abroad; according to Photius, people chewed leaves of buckthorn and besmeared their doors with tar to protect themselves from evil. But at least in private circles the festive character of the ceremonies predominated.

Thucydides noted that "the more ancient Dionysia were celebrated on the twelfth day of the month of Anthesterion in the temple of Dionysus Limnaios ("Dionysus in the Marshes") (Thucydides, ii.15).

[edit] Chytroi

The third day was named Chytroi (feast of pots, from χυτρος, a pot), a festival of the dead. Cooked pulse was offered to Hermes Chthonios, Hermes in his capacity of a god of the lower world, and to the souls of the dead, who were then bidden to depart. None of the Olympians were included and no one tasted the pottage, which was food of the dead. Although no performances were allowed at the theatre, a sort of rehearsal took place, at which the players for the ensuing dramatic festival were selected.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Noted in Harrison 1903, p34.
  2. ^ "The deluge is of course introduced to get mythological precedent" (Harrison, p 37).

[edit] References

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

[edit] External links