Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious Roles, and Social Functions

Citation: Use the following persistent identifier: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Calame.Choruses_of_Young_Women_in_Ancient_Greece.2001.

Chorus and Ritual

Up to now, my analysis of the chorus has been mainly morphological; I have described its internal organization and defined the positions and roles assigned to each of its participants. The relationship between choregos and chorus-members is at the heart of the ensemble. The function of the choregos is to set up and conduct the chorus, and he/she is responsible for the arrangement and coordination of its musical activity; on the basis of its own actions, the chorus forms a whole with a coherent activity. But the choregos him/herself is an integral part of the choral ensemble, and it is in this relation between the leader of the chorus and the chorus-members that the different components of Greek music are unified. The connection that unites the choregos with the chorus-members, therefore, is what gives the system of the lyric chorus its particular cohesion.

In this second section, I shall place the chorus in its ritual and religious setting. The definition of the chorus and its musical activity as a closed system does not exclude its being seen in a wider framework. We have observed that the chorus does not act for itself, but always exists for a specific occasion, most frequently a cult. It therefore possesses a religious aspect that associates it regularly with a deity.

This chapter on ritual is divided into two parts, one devoted to non-Spartan rituals, the other to those attested in Sparta itself. I have made this division because part of this research is aimed at defining those rituals that might have furnished the occasion for the performance of Alcman’s fragments 1 and 3, and I shall therefore examine Spartan rites more closely. Given the uncertain relationship between signifier and signified, it is impossible to gather a complete body of evidence; the first part of this chapter, therefore, does not claim exhaustiveness—the material included would anyhow be too vast. I simply give a general classification of the occasions for which women’s choruses were organized in ancient Greece, and I attempt to define briefly the qualities of the gods to whom those choruses were dedicated, so that I may then determine the connection between chorus and divinity and the various religious functions of the choral performances by girls and women. {89|90}

3.1. Non-Spartan rituals

3.1.1. Choral festivities among the gods

The analysis of the function of the choregos has brought to light several descriptions of divine choruses that serve as paradigms for humans. Those most often mentioned are the choruses of Muses and Nymphs; the first is generally led by Apollo, the second by Artemis; these two deities are thus the divine choregoi par excellence of the Greek pantheon.

By definition, the ritual as relating man to divinity is a concept irrelevant to a description of the internal organization of the domain of the gods. Among the gods, a lyric and choral performance need not be motivated by a cult. In the passage of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo mentioned above, the mere arrival of Apollo on Mt. Olympus gives rise to hymns sung by the Muses, dances performed by the Graces and the Seasons, the song of Artemis, and the dance-steps of Ares and Hermes executed under the delighted gaze of Leto and Zeus. Theseus, when he dives into the ocean, finds the house of Amphitrite and Poseidon filled with the Nereides dancing, according to Bacchylides. Dance seems to be their main activity. Similarly, according to the author of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the Nymphs, neither mortal nor divine, live on without end, feeding on divine food and dancing in chorus with the gods. [1] Dancing and singing form part of the image of the Golden Age and constitute one of the main features of the life of the Blessed. According to Pindar, the Hyperboreans, who know neither sorrow nor war, like the men of Hesiod’s golden race, live in perpetual bliss, banqueting and sacrificing to Apollo; and their whole country resounds to the feet of young girls dancing in chorus to the lyre and pipe. The choral dance, specifically when performed by adolescents and women, symbolizes for Pindar one of the basic features of a life equal to that of the gods. [2] In Archaic Greek poetry, music is the pleasure of the gods!

If, among men, the return to the Golden Age through choral music needs an occasion that confines it in time, the gods, who live perpetually in the bliss of the Golden Age, need no such temporal limitation for their dances. However, since they eat and marry in the same way as men, it is not surprising that the wedding ceremony and the banquet are the only motives, if motives are indeed needed, for a dance by a divine chorus. In the first book of the Iliad, the banqueting of the gods is accompanied by Apollo’s lyre and the singing of the Muses. And in Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides, the divine marriage of Thetis and Peleus is celebrated by the choruses of the fifty daughters of Nereus. [3] {90|91}

3.2. Lacedaemonian rituals

The gloomy colors in which our scholarly manuals and, at times, the political regimes that find it useful, paint the traditional image of Spartan life contrast vividly with the richness of the evidence that has come down to us of the musical and artistic activity of the Lacedaemonians. [148] This activity was not always as important in the life of the city, it is true. For the time being, I shall limit myself to Athenaeus, who said that, among the Greeks, the Spartans were the strongest in maintaining their musical traditions; the author of the Deipnosophists takes as proof a line of Pratinas who describes the Spartan as a cicada always ready to join the chorus. [149] Athenaeus continues by explaining that the musical activity of the Lacedaemonians compensated for their restraint and the austerity of their customs: with this explanation, Athenaeus introduces his reader to the conventional imagery of Spartan order. For an opinion on the compatibility of music and war, I shall refer the reader to the next chapter and to my analysis of the social function of the chorus and the role played by singing and dancing in ancient Sparta. {141|142}

As in the rest of Greece, musical and choral activity in Sparta was as much the responsibility of women as of men. As regards the women’s, it was mainly young girls who sang in choruses generally dedicated to Artemis. Beyond the privileged relationship between Artemis and adolescence, which I have attempted to show, the goddess held a special position in Sparta, equally as important as Hera’s position in Argos or Athena’s in Athens.

3.2.1. Artemis

The reader who follows in the steps of Pausanias through Laconia will note that the cult of Artemis existed in the most varied sites on Spartan territory. At the time under discussion, Artemis was revered in all corners of Laconia, in Karyai in the north, on the frontier with Arcadia near Las in the south, towards Cape Tainaron, at Limnai in the west, on the Messenian frontier, at Epidauros Limera in the southeast, on the banks of the Aegean Sea across from the island of Santorini. [150] The goddess was celebrated under many different epicleseis with a wide variety of functions. Using the methodology described above, I shall limit the analysis to cults in which the service of a female chorus is expressly mentioned. Hence the partial character of my study, which of course does not deny that choruses of young girls sang to Artemis Soteira in Boiai, Artemis Dereatis on the Taygetos or Artemis Dictynna in Sparta. [151] Before examining the cults of Artemis directly associated with the city of Sparta, which will be examined in a wider cultic and ritual framework than merely the cult offered to the virgin goddess, I shall discuss two cults of Artemis located within the confines of Spartan territory—one at Limnai, the other at Karyai.

3.2.1.1. Artemis Limnatis

There were two places by the name of Limnai on Spartan territory. The one on the Spartan plain was one of the four or five obai that made up the city of Sparta. The other was on the Messenian side of the Taygetos, in a small valley stretching from the mountain to the Gulf of Messenia, south of the present Kalamata. Leading down from the Langada pass, this valley follows the course of the Sandava, ancient Choireios. Parallel to the valley of the Nedon, which the modern road from Laconia to Messenia follows, it represented the southern frontier of the territory of Messenia. [152] The Messenian Limnai had a large {142|143} sanctuary where Artemis was honored under the name Limnatis, [153] The Spartan Limnai should perhaps be related to another sanctuary of Artemis, called Limnaion by Strabo. I shall address later the connections that can be made between the Spartan cult of Artemis, particularly Artemis Orthia, and the cult on the other side of the Taygetos.

The name Limnai itself defines the Artemis venerated on this site as a goddess of the wild water, water gushing from a spring or flowing in a river. This aquatic aspect is a semantic feature as characteristic of Artemis as of her followers, the Nymphs, and it can be found in the whole of Greece where Artemis was often given the name of the watercourse beside which her sanctuary was constructed, conforming to the reputation of the goddess for frequenting damp, wild places. The epiclesis Limnatis was given to Artemis at different points in the Peloponnese such as Sicyon, Patras and Tegea. [154] Add to this her connections with mountains and untamed nature that distinguished her in Limnai. The sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis probably lay at the bottom of a gorge where the valley curves towards the southwest, near the modern village of Pigadhia, for access to the sea. The cult was therefore practiced in a wild setting, closely relating to the character of the divinity inhabiting the region. [155]

In his account of the causes of the first Messenian war, it is in this sanctuary that Pausanias places the rape by the Messenians of the young Lacedaemonian girls (παρθένους) who were celebrating Artemis. Pausanias gives two versions of the event, one Laconian, the other Messenian. [156] According to the first, the Laconian girls present at the ritual for Artemis Limnatis were raped by the Messenians, who also killed the king of Sparta, Teleklos, when he tried to intervene. This version adds that, after having been raped, the young girls committed suicide for shame. The Messenians report that Teleklos had plotted to overthrow the aristocracy controlling Messene and rule the country. Profiting by the gathering of Messenian lords at the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis, the {143|144} Spartan king chose young beardless Spartan youths (ἀγένειοι νεανίσκοι) whom he armed and disguised as girls (ὡς παρθένους). Sent to the temple of Artemis, they went in to where the Messenians were sleeping to assassinate them, but they were discovered by their adversaries who killed them, along with Teleklos who accompanied them. The Lacedaemonian version is repeated by Strabo, who gives it as the cause of the first Messenian war. [157] Since this war began between 743 and 736, according to modern historians, the Lacedaemonian version offers a relative measure of how far back the presence of young Spartan girls in the sanctuary of Limnai goes, and of the antiquity of the rite performed there for Artemis. [158] Incorporating in their plot the rape and suicide of young girls or an act of transvestism of males, these two semi-historical stories look like two different aitia of the cult celebrated for Artemis Limnatis.

Actually, in the different passages in which he mentions the rite that the Spartan girls were performing when they were raped, Strabo gives us a description of the cult. He speaks of sacrifice (θυσία) and, more generally, of religious service (ἱερουργία); he adds that the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis was the location of a great festival and of a joint sacrifice offered by Messenians and Lacedaemonians together (κοινὴν συνετέλουν πανήγυριν καὶ θυσίαν). Pausanias uses the more general term for festival (ἑορτή) to describe the ritual. Neither of them mentions a choral performance. However, two facts allow us to presume that the Lacedaemonian girls raped by the Messenians were performing a choral dance for Artemis Limnatis.

In his Hymn to Artemis, Callimachus mentions several cult sites where he shows Artemis surrounded by her chorus of Nymphs, and the words he uses suggest ‘circularity’ and ‘center,’ features characteristic of the chorus. One of these sites is Limnai. This mythical image was widespread and was reflected in the rites performed by adolescents in honor of Artemis, which leads me to think that at Limnai, too, this model was mirrored in the festival mentioned by Pausanias and Strabo. In addition, the incursion into the sanctuary of Limnai and the rape of the Laconian girls recall the scenes of abduction often committed on choruses of girls dancing in honor of Artemis. In Laconia itself, this schema is repeated in legends associated with the cults of Artemis at Karyai and Artemis Orthia at Sparta. [159] In these three stories, the Spartan maidens are dancing in a chorus when their ravishers surprise them. {144|145}

This rape scene at the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis, as in other similar scenes of abduction and rape already mentioned, evokes adolescence inasmuch as in this period of pubescence the young girl arouses desire but refuses the advances of men; those she provokes resort to violent action, and the violence of the abduction and of the rape has to be understood as a metaphorical domestication, by force and through sexuality, of the untamed young girl. [160]

To this typically adolescent characteristic of the legend, associated as a kind of aition with the cult of Limnatis, can be added a votive epigram containing all the features I have defined as signifying female virginity. [161] This epigram, addressed to Artemis Limnatis without further qualification, might express the vows of a young Spartan girl or of any young girl of Patras, Tegea or Sicyon. It is significant in that it describes the objects that an adolescent girl (κόρα), Timareta, daughter of Timaretos (παῖς Τιμαρετεία), dedicates to Limnatis the virgin (κόρα), daughter of Leto (Λητῴα), before her marriage (πρὸ γάμοιο). It is obvious that the words used betray the semantic features ‘adolescence’ + ‘female’ and ‘family association’ which describe exactly and significantly both the young girl Timareta and Artemis. Among the objects dedicated to the goddess are the tambourines (τύμπανα) of the young maiden, her ball (σφαῖρα), the net that held back her hair (κεκρύφαλος), and her dolls (κόρας). The adolescent significance of the ball game is already present in Homer in the scene in which Nausicaa, like Artemis surrounded by her Nymphs, plays with her attendants; the consecration of the hairnet can be aligned with the consecration of hair by the Delian girls to the Hyperborean virgins, hypostases of Artemis. [162] The presence of the dolls, not previously seen, is an obvious symbol of childhood; their description as κόραι again repeats the word that is applied in the epigram to both Timareta and Artemis; as for the tambourines, I shall explain their function later, in the study of the cult of Artemis Korythalia. [163] All the objects dedicated by Timareta are thus associated with adolescence. Their dedication to Artemis signifies for the young girl the end of the period that they symbolize, and at the same time probably the transition to adulthood through marriage. The semantic constellation contained in these anonymous lines depicts the function of the cult of Artemis Limnatis as a preparation for the adolescent to adulthood. This image corresponds to the image of violence of which the girls celebrating Limnatis were victims.

A third element can possibly be added. In the Messenian version of the rape at the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis, as recounted by Pausanias, it is possible to see a real contamination of a historical event by the founding legend of the cult that is its context, even perhaps the historicization of the legend. The Messenian version, with its Spartan youth disguised as girls, recalls the numerous scenes of {145|145} cross-dressing in certain founding myths of adolescent rites. [164] For instance, Plutarch, in telling the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, reports that among the seven Athenian maidens and seven youths that accompanied Theseus to Crete there were two boys disguised as girls. They went on the expedition as girls, and then, during the ritual of the Oschophoria explained by the Cretan cycle, the same transvestites are to be found heading the cultic procession. [165] In terms of ritual, taking on the characteristics of the opposite sex for a short time is typical of a transitional phase; it signifies the reversal of the order characteristic of the period which is located between separation and reintegration into a new order. In the myths and rites of puberty, cross-dressing takes on an additional value, since it corresponds to the sexual ambiguity in Greek eyes of the first years of puberty. I shall follow this up in the next chapter.

To the ritual act of cross-dressing, as in the Messenian story, can be added that of deception, of ἀπάτη, also characteristic of adolescence. In the story, the apate is represented by the dagger that the adolescents hide under their tunics to assassinate the Messenian dignitaries in the sanctuary of Limnatis. The connotations of such an act of daring, performed in several Greek cities by the ephebe before being integrated into the adult military order as a hoplite, [166] are explained in a myth such as that of Aspalis. [167] This myth tells how Astagytes, while still a child (ἀντίπαις ὤν), wanted to avenge his sister Aspalis who, as a young girl (παῖς), hanged herself out of fear that the tyrant of the town would {146|147} abduct her and rape her as was his custom with his young subjects before they married (ἐμίγνυτο πρὸ γάμου κατὰ βίαν). To do this, the youth dressed in his sister’s clothes and, armed with a sword lying flat against his left thigh, [168] he entered the house of the tyrant, whom he killed. He is fêted by the citizens of the town as a result, and Aspalis, to whom a statue is raised near that of Artemis, is honored as Aspalis Ameilite Hekaerge.

It is the insistence of Pausanias on the Spartan youths’ lack of beards (γένεια οὐκ εἶχον, ἀγενείους νεανίσκους) that opens the door to a comparison with the legends recounted above. The presence of cross-dressing and the apate represented by the weapons and the entry at night manifestly characterize it as a story explaining an adolescent ritual practice. If looked at in the context of the schema common to all initiatory rites and particularly to tribal initiation rites with the three phases of reversal, segregation, and reintegration, it is tempting to see in the deaths of the Spartans a symbolic initiatory death before rebirth as hoplites in the adult world. Since the Spartans are disguised as girls, the Messenians kill women, not men. In other words, they symbolically destroy the female aspect in the adolescents who leave the state of sexual indifferentiation of childhood to embrace adulthood. [169]

If we return to the Spartan version, the suicide of the girls after being raped by the Messenians is a striking parallel to the murder of the boys; it is my opinion that this murder gives us the authority to interpret the suicide in a similar way and to see in it also the symbol of an initiatory death. Aspalis, in the legend that supports my interpretation of the Messenian version, is forced to commit suicide in her desire to avoid being raped. Rape (submitted to or not) and suicide are linked, [170] and it is probable that, if the violence of the rape refers symbolically to an attempt to domesticate the adolescent, suicide, by refusing adult sexuality, signifies entry into the period of puberty; it is thus the symbol of an initiatory death in the same way as the murder of the boys seems to represent the transition from childhood to adolescence. In this way it can be presumed that the two versions of the causes of the first war with Messenia are a kind of historicization of two founding myths associated with the cult of {147|148} Artemis Limnatis; and in fact the Roman inscriptions found in Messenia and Boiai mention the presence of an ἀγωνοθέτης and choruses of boys (παῖδες / νέοι) in the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis. [171] The result is a correspondence between myth and ritual, and through the legend made into history can be seen the myth explaining the ritual.

The varied information about the cult of Artemis Limnatis offers a closer interpretation of this ritual than that given by Nilsson at the beginning of the century. [172] Artemis indeed could connote fecundity, inhabiting cool, humid gorges, in a fertile and rich natural setting. But she is not alone in the Greek pantheon to fill this function. Artemis is actually the goddess of growth rather than of fecundity. She connotes humidity for its nutritive qualities rather than for its power to fertilize, and she exercises her nurturing power on a wild nature, apart from the means of agricultural cultivation and civilization. In the dry climate of Greece, places watered by a spring or a stream that does not dry up even in summer are the exception. They are like oases where continuous spring reigns and where nature flourishes in a constantly renewed youthfulness, without the intervention of the culture. This springtime of nature is echoed by the one known to humans: adolescence finds in the humid places inhabited by Artemis and the Nymphs a context that signifies what adolescence itself signifies, namely, the natural and free development of the forces of growth and blossoming.

The exuberance of spring is also the setting for the bacchic orgy. In the Bacchae, Euripides describes the valley in which Pentheus surprises the Maenads as a gorge with steep sides, watered by numerous springs and shaded by tall trees. [173] These Artemisian and Dionysiac landscapes are paralleled by the presence of bacchanalian elements in certain rituals of the cult of Artemis. I shall account for these elements and define their function later. For the moment, I shall just mention that in Sparta cymbals dedicated to Limnatis have been found. Remember that tambourines were dedicated by the girl of the epigram to the same goddess before marriage. [174] Traditional attributes of the Maenads, the tambourine and cymbals are essential symbols of Dionysiac cult. However, dedicated to Artemis, as seen in the epigram, along with dolls and balls, the {148|149} tambourine also represents female adolescence in the Artemisian system of values. Like the cymbals, it becomes the meeting point of two deities.

And finally, the location of the sanctuary of Limnatis on the boundary between the territories of Laconia and Messenia defines it as a sanctuary of the periphery, of distance from the order of the city, and a further sign of the adolescent and initiatory character of the cult celebrated there. There is more; a note of Tacitus tells us that this sanctuary was not only on the boundary between two hostile countries, but also in the interior of the ager Dentheliatis. [175] This area, a sort of no man’s land, was apparently constantly disputed by Messenians and Lacedaemonians until Roman times. In his study of the armed struggle between Eretria and Chalcis for possession of the Lelantine Plain and that between Argos and Sparta for the Thyreatid, Brelich shows the mythical and ritual values of this type of war. [176] These traditional struggles in a liminal setting, associated by authors who write about them with historical events, take on a very precise political and religious function. In relation to the cults of Artemis and Apollo they serve the agonistic education of young warriors. This function is similar to that of the cult of Artemis Limnatis, as we have seen in the apate of the Messenian version of the cause of the first war. This story, astride both founding myth and historical discourse, corresponds in its structure to the stories of the wars for the Lelantine Plain and the Thyreatid which also combine both historical and legendary elements. Thus these stories, among which Brelich includes the ones about the first Messenian war and the cult of Artemis Limnatis, confirm by form and content the adolescent character of the cult.

3.2.1.2. Artemis Karyatis

Like the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis in a mountainous region on the border between Laconia and Messenia, the sanctuary of Artemis Karyatis, near Karyai, was in the mountains separating Laconia and Arcadia, near the road leading from Sparta to Tegea. [177] The whole of the site of Karyai was dedicated to Artemis and to the Nymphs. The sanctuary was open to the sky; in its center there stood a statue of Artemis inscribed with her title Karyatis. According to the {149|150} sources, the Spartans made sacrifice there or more generally held a feast. [178] The central element of this annual feast was choral dances by Spartan maidens in honor of the goddess. Pausanias describes the rite with two terms that belong to the sphere of chorality: to organize (χοροὺς δὲ αἱ Λακεδαιμονίων παρθένοι κατὰ ἔτος ἱστᾶσι), and local (ἐπιχώριος ὄρχησις), which imply the semantic features ‘to institute’ and ‘geographical belonging.’ [179]

The dance of Spartan maidens at Karyai acquired a certain fame throughout Greece and the appearance of the word Karyatides for those who performed the dance suggests the formation of a permanent chorus attached to the cult of Artemis Karyatis, similar to the Deliades at Delos. Attempts at describing the dance, aided by the attitudes of the famous caryatids, architectural elements supporting the entablature of a building, have so far failed due to lack of source material; the use of the word Karyatides for an architectural component probably simply originates in the fame of the maidens dancing for Artemis. [180] In any case, a ring with a seal showing dancing Karyatides, given to Ctesias, the doctor of Artaxerxes II, by Klearchos, according to an anecdote of Plutarch, shows that at the end of the fifth century the image of the caryatids was associated with the Spartan community. This ring, in Klearchos’ mind, represents a symbol of the friendship of Ctesias for his parents and his Spartan friends. Pollux, too, cites the dance of the Karyatides in honor of Artemis as a typical Laconian dance. [181] Professional or not, the chorus of Karyatides is certainly a specifically Spartan institution.

In addition to the dance, the Karyatides also sang. This at any rate is reported in the sources that explain the origin of bucolic poetry by the replacement, in the time of the Persian wars, of the traditional chorus of maidens by local shepherds. Latin writers explain that the day on which the chorus of adolescent girls was to sing the traditional hymn in honor of Artemis Karyatis (eo die quo solitus erat chorus virginum Dianae Caryatidi hymnum canere), shepherds sang a pastoral, becoming substitutes for the girls who had fled terrorized by the war. [182] {150|151}

Like the cult of Artemis Limnatis, the cult of Artemis Karyatis is associated with a scene of violence perpetrated on the maidens celebrating the goddess. Pausanias tells that Aristomenes, the champion of the revolt of the Messenians against the Spartan occupation, attacked Lacedaemonia by night but was deflected by the miraculous apparition of Helen and the Dioskouroi, then placed himself and his soldiers in ambush near the sanctuary of Artemis at Karyai. [183] Surprising the Spartan girls who were dancing there for the goddess (παρθένους χορευούσας τῇ Ἀρτέμιδι), he carried off those whose fathers occupied the most visible positions in Sparta. Stopping to pass the night in a Messenian village, he entrusted the girls to his young soldiers (νεανίσκοι) who, perhaps under the effect of drink, tried to rape them (πρὸς βίαν ἐτρέποντο τῶν παρθένων). Intending to respect Greek custom, Aristomenes killed most of these soldiers and returned the captives intact for a large ransom.

In this story, the relationship between myth and history is still more complex than in the case of the rape of the Lacedaemonians and the murder of Teleklos in the sanctuary at Limnatis. Aristomenes is a Messenian hero who was the object of intense idealization after the liberation of Messenia in 370/369 B.C. It is generally admitted that, according to Rhianos, the author of the Messeniaka, Aristomenes was the leader of the revolt at the beginning of the fifth century, whereas Ephorus, and Callisthenes in his Hellenica, place him in the second Messenian war, associated with Tyrtaeus. Although Pausanias follows the events of the poem by Rhianos, he goes along with the second date. [184]

The impossibility of identifying the story with a historical event shows the semi-mythical nature of Aristomenes. It also shows that the story contains certain features of a traditional nature, all the more since the event has not been defined historically. Here again it is not impossible that the account of the “historical” event has been fleshed out with elements belonging to the founding myth of the cult. Such a process is all the more probable since the invasion of the temple of Karyatis, symbol of the Messenian revolt, repeats the theme of the causes of the first war with Messenia and the subjugation of the country symbolized by the Spartan invasion of the sanctuary of Limnatis. And if it is true that Pausanias takes a good deal of his information in the first part of the book dedicated to Messenia from the epic poem of Rhianos, in other words the {151|152} Messenian version of the facts, [185] then the story of Karyai, with a Messenian bias, is the complement of the Messenian version of the events of Limnai. Just as at Limnai, the murder of the Spartan boys disguised as girls (in fact an initiatory episode) seems justified from the Messenian point of view as a legitimate defensive reaction to the Spartan trick, so also at Karyai, the abduction and attempted rape (also initiatory) are not marked negatively, since Aristomenes forbids the soldiers to rape the girls and returns them to Sparta. By abducting the girls Aristomenes simply intended to affect the ruling class in Sparta, just as in the Messenian version of events at Limnai the Spartan ruse was directed at the highest dignitaries of Messenia. The story by Pausanias of the Messenians at Karyai shows how two sequences from the founding myth of adolescent rituals, abduction and rape, can be absorbed into a tale with a historical character, the aim of which is the ideological defense of a political action.

Defining the boundaries between historical events, legendary stories and their ideological value can give us a preliminary interpretation of the cult of Artemis Karyatis. The dance of the Karyatides, whose name ending in -ίδ- implies the features ‘collective’ and ‘geographical belonging,’ the abduction and attempted violence depict this cult as characteristic of female adolescence. It remains to be known whether the ritual described by the sources symbolizes separation in the tribal initiation rite or reintegration and admission to the adult order.

Brelich considers it possible to integrate the episode of abduction and rape with the few elements we possess of what must have constituted the founding legend of the cult of Artemis Karyatis. [186] In a commentary by Lactantius on the Thebaid of Statius, the chorus of maidens dancing for Artemis at Karyai (cum luderent virgines), fearing some misfortune would overcome them (meditatus ruinam chorus), took refuge in a nut tree and hanged themselves from a branch. Lactantius adds that the Greeks call this species of nut tree carya. He says that the goddess and her sanctuary take their name from this tree. [187] The suicide of the Karyatides naturally recalls that of the Spartan virgins after being raped by the Messenians near the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis. This suicide, in the adolescent context of the rite of Karyai, can be interpreted as the symbol of an initiatory death in the same way as that at Limnai. This semantic similarity suggests that the misfortune the Karyatides were escaping was abduction and rape. Certainly in the Limnai story the suicide of the girls is provoked by rape, whereas at Karyai, it is the fear of rape. The latter motive is not without parallels. {152|153} It is the cause of the suicide of Aspalis in the myth that I have connected with the cult of Limnatis. In the same way, rape, either suffered or feared, stands in opposition to the accepted idea of dominated sexuality in the case of the adult woman. The conjecture advanced by Brelich would then be confirmed and it would be believable that the misfortune feared by the young suicides of Karyai was the experience of a violent sexuality for which they were unprepared.

If the suicide of the Karyatides suggests an initiatory death, the myth attached to the sanctuary of Artemis Karyatis and consequently the rite it founds appears to signify the first stage of initiation, that is, the withdrawal from the old order. From a narrative point of view, the etymological explanation of the Lactantius story justifies its interpretation as the aition for the Karyai rite.

Another mythological element in a later source hints at the probable relation of the cult of Artemis Karyatis to that of Dionysus. Servius relates that Apollo wanted to thank Dion, king of Laconia, for his hospitality and the cult instituted for him, so he conferred on the three daughters of the king, Orphe, Lyko, and Karya, the gift of divination. Dionysus was on his way to Sparta but fell in love with Karya and made her his lover. Karya’s sisters were opposed to the love of the god: he abducted them in anger, took them to Taygetos, and changed them into stones. As for Karya, the god changed her into a nut tree. According to Servius, it was Artemis who told this to the Laconians and that is why they founded a sanctuary dedicated to Artemis Karyatis. [188] The myth contains various matters of interest. First, there is the sequence of adult violence invading the domain of intact sexuality of the adolescent, as we saw in Lactantius’ myth. The semantic and syntactic analogy between the two myths continues with the death of the maidens, which appears to be the consequence of violence done to them. In both cases, the death is associated with a nut tree; but in the first myth it is suicide, in the second, a metamorphosis. The transformation into a tree is one of the essential moments of a whole series of stories about the first sexual experience of adolescence. [189] It may be significant that the three daughters of Dion, although not specifically described by Servius as adolescent, fall under the jurisdiction of Apollo because of the gift of divination he gave them. Dionysus, in {153|154} his semantic character as divinity of the young adult woman, would then introduce adult sexuality into the sphere of adolescence that is under the jurisdiction of Apollo or Artemis. The resistance that Dionysus meets in the sisters of Karya, and its mortal consequences for the girls, are certainly characteristic elements of adolescent myths. Once again, a pubescent girl awakens the desire of a man, but cannot assume normal sexual relations with him. [190]

The presence of Dionysus in the Karya legend has led some scholars studying the Artemis Karyatis cult to conclude that there was a close association between the cults of the two deities, even that this legend proved the Dionysiac aspect of the cult of Artemis Karyatis. [191] The story of Karya, like the legends associated at Patras with Artemis Triklaria and Dionysus Aisymnetes, shows us how important it is to distinguish clearly the respective fields of action of these two deities. Their intervention in the same sphere does not mean that their functions are the same; it signifies on the contrary the point of contact between two distinct periods of human life, adolescence and adulthood, the first embodied by Artemis, the second by Dionysus.

The only indication that might identify the dance of the Lacedaemonian maidens in honor of Artemis with a bacchic dance comes from two very different sources. The first is the title of a play or a poem by Pratinas, Δύμαιναι ἢ Καρυάτιδες, the Dymainai or the Karyatides; the second is a gloss of Hesychius which defines the Dymainai as Bacchants who danced at Sparta in chorus (χορίτιδες). [192] In examining the cult of Limnatis we have seen that the Nymphs and the Maenads have various features in common to the extent that the followers of Artemis blend together with those of Dionysus. This semantic proximity mainly concerns the environment in which the two groups exist. The {154|155} Nymphs, like the Maenads, live in humid and shaded places. They are part of wild nature and enliven the mountains and forests with their dances. [193]

Although their environments may be comparable, the functions of the Nymphs and Maenads are not necessarily the same. This led the lexicon of Hesychius into the utmost error. Certainly during the puberty of Spartan girls, the period of segregation in a mountainous area such as Karyai signifies a return to the natural state, over which Artemis presides, and a reversal of the order of the civic community by a temporary deferment of normal social life. Dionysiac activities also represent a rupture with society and a temporary return to savagery. At this point Artemis and Dionysus seem to occupy the same spheres; however the contexts are different to the extent that the Artemisian reversal has to do with adolescent rites of passage, whereas the Dionysiac touches the whole community of women at regular intervals. The two cults therefore cannot be confused at all. On the other hand, the similarity of environments means that in the time of the Persian wars the substitution of a pastoral song for the dancing Karyatides could take place. [194]

In the chapter on the choregos I said that a chorus made up of members called Dymainai was mentioned in several recently published papyrus fragments of commentaries on poems by Alcman. In the fragment analyzed in the preceding chapter, the Dymainai formed a chorus led by Agesidamos. [195] In another fragment, the chorus of Dymainai is cited as the group which very certainly performed the poem commented on. [196] The reference to the chorus comes as a sort of preliminary note to the explanation of the poem and is found just after the invocation to the Muses which opened Alcman’s composition and before the exegesis of the cosmogonical development. As we shall see later, the name Dymainai, according to Alcman’s commentator, derives from the name of one of the three Dorian tribes that made up the Spartan community, the Dymanes, and perhaps also from a village called Δύμη, one of the obai forming the city of Sparta. [197] A third fragment, less complete than the others, links the Dymainai on several occasions with what seems to be a chorus of Pitanatides, young girls {155|156} from the Spartan obe of Pitane. The two repetitions of the word παρθένος confirm that the chorus or choruses were made up of adolescents. [198]

The evidence provided by these fragments is useful for more than one reason. First, since the Dymainai are designated as a chorus of adolescents, the interpreter need not follow Hesychius concerning the Dionysiac character of this chorus. [199] Also, if one agrees that the double title of the play by Pratinas names the same chorus, these fragments show that the choruses dancing at Karyai were formed by adolescent girls from the town of Sparta, and their participation depended on the political structure in the city; I shall develop this point later. Finally, they lead us to think that the cult of Karyai existed in the seventh century and that some of the poems of Alcman composed for the Dymainai were intended for this ritual.

3.2.1.3. Artemis Orthia

From the boundaries of the Lacedaemonian territory it is time to return to its center, Sparta itself. Artemis was honored there in more than one place, with numerous titles varying from one place to another. Without counting Orthia, Pausanias mentions no less than six cults in six different locations throughout the city. [200] As far as it is possible to locate them, these cult sites are generally at a distance from the city center. But Artemis, with Apollo and Leto, had her {156|157} statue in the market place, and thus had a presence in the heart of the city, within the space the Spartans called the Chorus (χορός). [201]

Among the cults mentioned, that of Artemis Orthia was far and away the most important. The number of sources referring to it, and the relatively large number of archaeological discoveries made on the site of the sanctuary, show it to have been at the center of the religious and social life of the Lacedaemonians. The excavations of the site have revealed cult activity since the tenth century B.C. and since the construction of a new altar and of a first temple in the middle of the eighth century. This temple was reconstructed during the sixth century, showing important activity through the whole Archaic period. [202]

Pausanias reports that the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia was in a place called Limnaion. It is easy to connect the aquatic and swampy character, also appropriate to the Limnai site on the outskirts of Laconia. It is more than likely that the place called Limnaion is related to the village of Limnai, one of the four or five obai joined together to form the city of Sparta. The obe of Limnai probably lay along the banks of the Eurotas. Strabo describes the surroundings of Sparta as being marshy and therefore called Limnai, the marshes; he mentions a temple of Dionysus built in the village of Limnai which stood on marshy ground. [203] The village of Limnai was thus associated with the damp place its name denotes.

It is, however, the excavations undertaken on the site of the sanctuary of Artemis that make the relation between the signifier and signified of Limnaion certain. [204] Even today we can see the foundations of the temple of Orthia next to the Eurotas. The humidity of this reedy area is in sharp contrast to the arid dryness of the Laconian countryside. The traveller from the north who goes there in summer is surprised to find, after having visited the thistly acropolis, grass of a green unmatched by the cisalpine fields. The sanctuary is down by the river on the furthest edge of town and is thus defined as a boundary sanctuary, comparable to Limnatis and Karyatis in their positions on the frontiers of Laconian territory. {157|158}

The sanctuary of Artemis Orthia was particularly famous in antiquity for the bloody whipping (διαμαστίγωσις) that Spartan ephebes were obliged to undergo. [205] The ancients as well as the moderns were so impressed with this image that it has become one of the symbols of the traditional severity of Spartan customs. [206] It seems that the rite of flagellation of the ephebes was one of the important elements of the return to the origins and to Lykourgos, and in Sparta continued into the Roman period. [207] Several historians of Greek religion have shown that, in comparing this rite with similar customs among peoples called “primitive,” it is one among many trials Spartan boys had to undergo before attaining their status as adult citizens. [208] From an ethnographic point of view, the rite of flagellation in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia could be defined as a rite of initiation, and more precisely a rite of tribal initiation. It refers to one of the three phases characteristic of all rites of passage. Between the separation from the old order (childhood) and the reintegration into the new order (adulthood), it represents among other things the phase of (symbolic) death, of segregation, of “immersion in chaos,” to use the terms of Eliade.

Historians and specifically historians of religion have seen in the Spartan agoge an education system by age groups that almost all so-called “primitive” societies know. Texts give precise names to the seven age groups in which the sons of Spartan citizens were enrolled from fourteen to twenty years of age. [209] Reference to several of these classes found on inscriptions (late, it is true) in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia show the meaning of the rite of flagellation in the {158|159} Spartan agoge. [210] The essential role of the agoge being to prepare adolescents for citizenship, the sanctuary of Orthia seems to have been one of the centers of the religious life and also of the civic life of ancient Lacedaemonia. The cult honoring Artemis is a sign that religion took upon itself in ancient Sparta, as in most societies with a tribal structure, the political and military education of the future citizen.

This civic character is confirmed by one of the myths explaining the origin of the flagellation rite, which relates a struggle round the altar of the goddess between the inhabitants of the four villages that formed Sparta in the beginning. Those who were not killed fell ill and the oracle ordered the altar of Orthia to be regularly washed in human blood, probably so that the sickness would end. [211] The story, reported by Pausanias, fits into the schema of almost all the myths about the origin of the cults of Artemis with their expiation/propitiation of a scourge sent by the god for punishment of a crime, and the ritual practice depending on a unique mythical event. This aition refers to the current image of the cult of Artemis without specifying a particular function. However, the fact that the whole of the Spartan community was involved indicates the political character of this strange cult.

But it was not only a cult for ephebes—young girls also had their part in it— although the little information we have belongs to the “mythical.” It is in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia in Sparta that Plutarch places the abduction by Theseus of the young Helen. [212] Plutarch gives three versions of this myth.

In the first, Helen was abducted by Idas and Lynceus, sons of Aphareus, to give her to Theseus. The latter refused to give her up to her brothers, the Dioskouroi. The motives for the gift and the refusal are not known. This version is found in the context of the struggle between the Tyndaridai, Lacedaemonian heroes, and the Apharetidai, Messenian heroes, particularly in connection with {159|160} the abduction of the Leukippides; I shall discuss later the cult founded by the Spartans for these two heroines.

In the second version, Tyndareus entrusts the girl to Theseus to protect her from being abducted by Enarsphoros, one of the sons of Hippocoon. [213] Tyndareus, father of the Dioskouroi, in this version is the defender of the kidnapped girl rather than the Apharetidai of the first version.

The last version of the myth, the best supported according to Plutarch, puts the responsibility for the abduction of Helen as she danced in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia squarely on Theseus and his companion Peirithoos. Having left Sparta, Theseus consigned Helen to Aphidna until he could marry her. A slightly different form of this version was already known to Alcman, in which the story ends with the return of Helen to Sparta, saved by the Dioskouroi brothers. [214]

The two latter versions in Plutarch’s text emphasize the youthfulness of Helen when she was taken away. One tells that when she was entrusted to Theseus she was still a child (ἔτι νηπίαν), the other that she was not yet pubescent (οὐ καθ’ ὥραν, οὔπω γάμων ὥραν ἔχουσαν). [215] As for Theseus, he was no longer the young man of the legends underlying the Pyanopsia and the Oschophoria, but a mature man of fifty. If one applies these mythical facts to the ritual practices in the temple of Orthia, it is evident that, as in the cult of Artemis at Brauron, the girls dancing for the goddess were still children. This extreme youthfulness contrasts with that of the girls taking part in the cults of Artemis Limnatis and Karyatis who, raped or fearing rape, were certainly pubescent. In the various versions of the myth of Helen, her abduction is never followed by rape.

The few figurative representations of Helen’s abduction by Theseus and Peirithoos only partly confirm the events in the legend put together from literary texts. A red-figure water pitcher and a black-figure cup probably show the chorus {160|161} of young girls from which Helen was removed. [216] We may presume that this chorus was dedicated to Artemis Orthia as was the one in the story reported by Plutarch. However, in most of these representations Theseus looks like an ephebe or a young adult rather than a man of fifty, while Peirithoos always wears the beard of a mature man. As for Helen, the images of her never show her as the child the literary sources claim she was, but as an adolescent.

A further mythical fact, unfortunately very brief, links the Nymph Taygete with the goddess Orthosia, an epiclesis that the inscriptions found on the site of the temple of Artemis Orthia in Sparta show to be equivalent to Orthia. In his account in the Third Olympian of the myth about the founding of the Olympic Games, Pindar talks of the hind with golden horns that Herakles had to bring back from Arcadia to Eurystheus after Taygete had consecrated it to the goddess Orthosia. The legend recounts that this consecration took place after Artemis had transformed Taygete into a hind to allow her to escape the assaults of Zeus; the god however managed to couple with the Nymph and a son was born to her and bore the name Lakedaimon, supposedly the founder of Sparta. [217] In Pindar’s text, Orthosia is presented as an autonomous divinity, different from Artemis, who intervenes independently in the same context. It is only the scholia on this passage that identify her with the divine huntress and particularly with the Artemis venerated on Mt. Orthion in Arcadia. Even if the goddess Orthosia mentioned by Pindar is Arcadian, the legend of Taygete, the origins and meanings of which are distinctly Lacedaemonian, shows that the figure of Orthia/Orthosia, like Artemis, is related to the image of the Nymph and to the scheme characteristic of the myths of adolescence: the rape followed by the death/metamorphosis of the violated virgin.

This myth, which incorporates Orthia into the common ritual image of adolescence, should prevent us from interpreting the age difference of the young girls in the Spartan cult of Orthia, as seen in the myth of Helen’s abduction, and {161|162} the adolescents dancing for Limnatis or Karyatis as indicative of a difference in the respective functions of these cults. Moreover, concerning the ephebes, if the inscriptions found in the sanctuary of the goddess are to be believed, only the four last age groups in the agoge were represented in the rituals for Orthia; that is, ephebes who were between sixteen and nineteen years old. [218] The very young age suggested by the myth of Helen’s abduction for the girls participating in the cult of Orthia consequently does not correspond to that of the boys. It is therefore impossible to use the different ritual practices performed by adolescents to define, by analogy, the function of the rites performed by the girls at the same altar.

Among the various stories attached to the cult of Orthia reported by Pausanias, one legend tells that the xoanon of the goddess venerated at Sparta was brought from Tauris by Orestes and Iphigenia. The statue, stolen by the two heroes, was erected at Sparta and not at Brauron as the Athenians claimed. [219] Artemis Orthia shares this origin not only with the Artemis at Brauron but also with the Artemis at Argos. [220] Because of these origins, the cult of Orthia is related to other Hellenic cults of Artemis that include ritual practices performed by young girls. However, once again, there is a lack of information to justify a complete parallel and to assume with certainty that choruses of young virgins were present in the sanctuary near the River Eurotas.

To round out the myths, a final legend reported by Pausanias tells that besides the epiclesis of Orthia, Artemis was also called Lygodesma because her xoanon was found in a clump of agnus castus trees (vitex or agnus castus) growing near the water. The trunks, explains Pausanias, kept the statue upright (ὀρθός), whence the double epiclesis of Lygodesma and Orthia. [221] {162|163}

These cult references to the agnus castus offer two different interpretations of the epiclesis Lygodesma. First, the fact that the vitex belongs to the category of trees that attach the cult of Artemis Orthia, as also that of Caryatis or Cedreatis at Orchomenos, to noncultivated trees. [223] This feature is a common characteristic in numerous cults of Artemis. The presence of the vitex in the Spartan sanctuary is all the more understandable since this tree grows in swampy regions; hence its location on the banks of the Eurotas. However, the aition reported by Pausanias is probably due less to any tree cult or to the wood from which the xoanon may have been carved than to the original form of the temple of Orthia; the construction of this first sanctuary apparently included the branches of bushes growing in the swampy area where the goddess was worshipped. So the temple of agnus castus would then be analogous to the laurel hut which probably protected the statue of Apollo in various locations, according to some legends, and traces of which have recently been found in Eretria. [224]

But this conjecture does not help tell us the function of the agnus castus in the cult of Orthia. In antiquity the tree was known for its numerous medicinal qualities; according to Aelian and others, some of these qualities were related to the sexual life of women, [225] associated with the opposing categories of chastity and fertility. On one hand, the leaves of the tree were reputed to temper sexual desire; thus the couches on which the Athenians who observed sexual continence during the Thesmophoria lay were made of agnus castus branches. On the other hand, the same agnus castus was known to favor menstruation and lactation. Seemingly opposed, these qualities are really not contradictory: the period of fecundity in women is incompatible with the development of an excessive {163|164} sexuality. [226] Thus the agnus castus can control sexual impulses while stimulating the powers of bleeding and hence of fecundity in a woman.

The role of this tree in the cult of Hera or in the Thesmophoria, both rituals for married women, is clear, but its role is less obvious in the cult of Artemis. The only comparison in my documentation brings together the agnus castus and the rods used to beat the boys. This gives rise to the traditional interpretation of the Lebensrute, the rod that activates the forces of growth and fecundity in the young initiates. [227] But what is decisive in the whipping of the young boys on the altar of Artemis Orthia is the bleeding. By analogy, for the female part of the Orthia ritual, the presence of the chaste tree in the foundation myth might be explained by the fact that young girls dedicated themselves to the goddess at their first menstruation; the specific qualities of the vitex would be used to regulate their future procreative role as mothers. This is of course pure conjecture, supported only by the procreative function that ancient authors, such as Plutarch, attribute to the Spartan woman. But it has been proposed recently that the ambivalent virtues of the agnus castus could be a symbolized representation of the transition of the young girl from the time of menarche to adulthood: from a “strangled, nonbleeding parthenos,” the girl would become a “released bleeding gyne.” [228] {164|165}

It remains for me to explain the etymology of the word Orthia. The numerous attempts of the ancients to explain this word show that the interpretation of this cult has always created confusion for its interpreters. For the Greeks, Artemis was called Orthia at Sparta because she induced safety (ὅτι ὀρθοῖ εἰς σωτηρίαν), because she helped set straight the newborn (ὀρθοῖ τοὺς γεννωμένους), because she restored women who had given birth (ὀρθούσῃ τὰς γυναῖκες καὶ εἰς σωτηρίαν ἐκ τῶν τοκετῶν ἀγούσῃ), because she re-established the city (τῆς τὴν πολιτείαν ἀνορθούσης), renewed the lives of human beings (ὀρθοῦν τοὺς βίους τῶν ἀνθρώπων), or because she came originally from the mountain in Arcadia called Orthion. [229]

Modern interpreters have also exercised their wits on the origin of this epiclesis. Except for a few attempts to connect the name Orthia with phallic symbolization, most philologists and historians of religion started with the explanations given by the ancients. [230] The most general feature that can be abstracted from these etymologies is ‘safety’: Artemis is the goddess who saves. [231] This accords well with her character as punisher then savior. More particularly, Artemis appears as the divinity who assures the health of the citizens and the community as a whole. This could provide the missing link for defining the founding legends and the rites attached to the cult of Orthia as indicating tribal initiation. In the initiatory rites and their underlying myths, the period of death is followed by a period of reintegration and rebirth, as in all rites of passage. In the case of Artemis Orthia, this death phase is represented in myth by the slaughter of the inhabitants of the four obai of Sparta or the madness of Astrabakos and Alopekos, and in ritual by the bloody beating of the ephebes as a substitute for the original human sacrifice on the altar of the goddess. The death {165|166} of the ephebes, represented by the flagellation, is then the initiatory death of the child followed by a rebirth of the young Spartan as citizen. [232]

The majority of scholars relates the etymology of Orthia to childbirth. In a famous passage on maieutics, Plato states that protection in childbirth is one of the basic functions of Artemis who presides over this event, although she herself never experienced it (ἄλοχος οὗσα τὴν λοχείαν εἴληχε). [233] And Plato adds that mid wives, who are the lay representatives of Artemis, are themselves women who are beyond childbearing age. Wide is therefore probably not wrong in relating the function of Artemis Orthia as midwife to that of Iphigenia. [234]

However, there are two texts of Euripides that give an exact explanation of Artemis’ function in childbirth (Λοχία). In the Suppliants, the chorus, made up of mothers whose children were killed beneath the walls of Thebes, weep because they will no longer be under the protection of Artemis Lochia; they mourn because, with the death of the Seven, their posterity has been taken away from them. In Iphigenia in Tauris, Artemis Lochia is depicted by Iphigenia’s attendants in a landscape of palm trees, laurels and olive shoots (θαλλόν). [235] The complaint of the suppliants and the image of the young branches among which Artemis Lochia lives show that this divinity protects childbirth as the first act of the process of growth for which she is responsible. The scholia {166|167} specify that Artemis Orthia saves women who have given birth (so that they can be pregnant again?) and at the same time “sets straight” the newborn. Similarly, modern etymology has shown that the root of the term Orthia could be related to several Indo-European verbs meaning ‘to make grow.’ [236] This is confirmed by a passage in the Hymn to Artemis by Callimachus who explains that the anger of the virgin goddess may cause illness and as a consequence the death of a woman in childbirth or, if she escapes that, the birth of a child who does not hold up (οὐδὲν ἐπὶ σφυρὸν ὀρθὸν ἀνέστη). [237]

Artemis is thus defined as protecting the newborn and promoting the forces of growth contained in childbirth. To this extent she is distinguished from Eileithyia and her function as liberator of the pregnant woman. [238] This difference between the two deities is expressed in the passage by Diodorus Siculus, cited above, who, in describing the functions of the divine children of Zeus, attributes to Eileithyia care for women in childbed and to Artemis care of the newborn. [239] It is this latter function that lends Artemis her title of kourotrophos. {167|168}

The cult of Artemis Orthia thus concerns two moments in the development of future citizens, early childhood and adolescence. We lack the information to establish whether girls were involved in the rituals marking these two periods. [240] The age of Helen, in the story of her abduction by Theseus, suggests a third moment, that of prepuberty.

On a diachronic level, the problems of the Spartan cult of Artemis Orthia are numerous. Excavations at the temple site offer some help by providing the interpreter with a precise historical framework. As I have mentioned, they allow us to retrace the history of the sanctuary from the tenth century. Apart from three gems, no Mycenaean object was found there, which leads one to think that the cult of Orthia was a Dorian import. [241]

If the vases found in the sanctuary indicate a style that attained the heights of richness and delicacy towards the beginning of the sixth century (beginning of the sixth century also for ivory figures, end of the fifth for lead figures), [242] the votive stelai erected on the occasion of the agon, placed around the altar of the goddess and bearing the names of the different age classes of the Spartan agoge, are no older than the fourth century and most are from the Roman period. [243]

The thematic consistency of the terra-cotta, ivory, and lead figures portraying Orthia as “mistress of the animals” leads to the conclusion that the outstanding features of this cult, as I have tried to define it through mostly later sources, show the same consistency and also go back to the Archaic period. This supposed correspondence between archaeological documents and literary sources is confirmed by how the goddess worshipped on the banks of the Eurotas is {168|169} named: just as only the later literary sources identify Orthia with Artemis, the inscriptions found in the sanctuary carry the designation Artemis Orthia, in place of Orthia alone, only from the middle of the first century A.D. [244]

As I said in the introduction, the gloss of a single line in the first fragment of Alcman is the basis for the opinion of many scholars that the poem was performed in the Orthia rituals. Chronologically, it is possible. And it would be strange for Alcman never to have written a composition for a cult that occupied a central place in the life of the Spartan community. However, two philological points need to be made before introducing the emendation in line 61 of fragment 1, making this a ritual poem dedicated to Orthia. The emendation requires the change from ορθριαι, as given in the papyrus, to ορθιαι proposed by the scholion. The objections given by philologists to this emendation are the following: the long ι of Ὀρθία does not fit the trochaic meter of the beginning of line 61, and linguistically the form ϝορθία only appears in inscriptions from the sixth century, whereas inscriptions going back to the seventh century only use the form ϝορθασία, which corresponds to the Ὀρθωσία in Pindar’s Third Olympian, or ϝορθαία (/-εία). [245] The question should be addressed in the larger framework of the whole fragment. Philologically, the insurmountable morphological obstacle raised by the term Orthia prevents the insertion of this poem in the cult of Artemis Orthia. Central to Archaic Sparta’s religious and social life as the cult may have been, Alcman’s poetic activity, in the present state of our documentation, seems paradoxically to have no connection with it.

3.2.1.4. Artemis Korythalia

There was another Artemis sanctuary in Sparta, located near a river. Athenaeus mentions a temple to Artemis on the banks of the Tiassos, basing his information on a work by the geographer Polemon (end of the third century B.C.). Here the goddess was honored under the title Korythalia. Athenaeus adds that the temple was not far from the area reserved for Kleta, allowing a precise location to be established. The area was known to Pausanias, who mentions a sanctuary dedicated to the Laconian Graces Phaenna and Kleta, the same Graces known to Alcman, without citing the temple of Artemis itself. The sanctuary was situated at the meeting of the road to Amyklai and a river that Pausanias calls Tiasa and that surely corresponds to the Tiassos of Athenaeus, and it was thus outside the precinct of the town, near a river called in myth the daughter of Eurotas. [246] The principal rite celebrated for Korythalia concerned male children {169|170} (τὰ ἄρρενα παιδία). They were carried to the sanctuary by their nurses who sacrificed piglets to the goddess; the rite was called Tithenidia, a name most likely formed on τιτθή, ‘nurse.’ The sacrifice of a piglet was accompanied by a ritual meal called κοπίς, accomplished in the same way as banquets of the same name organized for the Hyakinthia at Amyklai. [247] The children, therefore, for whom the cult was specifically intended, were represented by their nurses.

This strange ritual poses various problems. Let us begin with an analysis of the epiclesis of Artemis in this cult. The term Korythalia derives from korythale, a laurel branch used in rituals and defined by the metaphor implied by the term and by analogy with the eiresione, the Athenian equivalent of the Spartan korythale. [248] According to the ancients, the korythale, the budding branch (κόρος, θάλλειν), was carried on becoming an ephebe and on entering marriage, because these ceremonies were about the growth of boys and girls (ἡβησάντων τῶν νέων καὶ θυγατέρων). In accordance with the signified implied by the name, it appears then as the symbol of the growth process in children and adolescents, and was intended to be stimulated by the ceremonies in which it was carried and by the divinity presiding over the rituals. Artemis herself is called Korythalia, goddess of the flowering of young branches, because she promotes growth in babies. This name is not pure metaphor, though: Artemis also promotes the growth of noncultivated vegetation itself; as we have previously noted, she is concerned as much with the savage vegetable world as with the animal or the human. [249] The quality of protector of growth on all levels that the signified Korythalia attributes to the figure of Artemis is found in Athenian rituals during which the eiresione was carried. The parallel functions of the eiresione or the korythale and the probable initiatory character of the rites of 6 Mounichion and of the Pyanopsia could confirm the interpretation given by the ancients of the {170|171} symbolic value of the korythale. [250] Naming the protector goddess of the Tithenidia, a festival for babies, as Korythalia shows that the rites which fell under her jurisdiction covered the whole process of growth from early childhood to adulthood.

The participation of dancers, young girls or women, in the cult of Artemis Korythalia—the reason for my including this festival in the discussion —is based on a single source, namely a gloss of Hesychius. According to this lexicographer, these dancers were called κορυθαλίστριαι, the dancers for Korythalia. [251] Nilsson has taken another gloss of Hesychius that mentions the participation of satyr-like dancers in this same cult and associates with the dance of the korythalistriai a whole list of descriptions of orgiastic dances by Spartan women; [252] he deduces in a rather general way that the cult of Korythalia has the bacchic features of “fertility festivals.” The evidence is too weak to link these sources, which I shall analyze shortly, to the cult of Korythalia alone with any certainty.

The only allowable conjecture is that of identifying the korythalistriai with the nurses celebrating the Tithenidia. It is not impossible that these women, besides sacrificing to the goddess, performed orgiastic dances to bring down, by a kind of sympathetic ritual, the forces of growth upon the children present and perhaps upon those to come. Whatever we may suppose about such “magical” practices, it is significant that one of the two nurses of Apollo, according to a note in Plutarch, was named Korythaleia. [253] The identity of the signifiers lets us attribute a function analogous to the nurses taking part in the Tithenidia, to the nurse of Apollo and to Artemis Korythalia defined as a nurturing Artemis. This confirms the essential function of Artemis Korythalia as kourotrophos. [254]

The presence of nurses, thus of adult women, in the cult of Artemis Korythalia can only be justified insofar as these women are the intermediaries assuring the growth of young Spartans. Imbued with this function, they guarantee that for each child Artemis’ role of promoting growth will be exercised. Just as Korythaleia was the nurse of Apollo, so they are the {171|172} Korythaliai of the future citizens and, supposing that the conjecture proposed above holds, their orgiastic dances could stimulate the powers of growth possessed by the goddess and transmit those powers to the babies.

It is therefore not possible to interpret the Tithenidia as a simple festival of fertility based only on the bacchic flavor of the dances of the korythalistriai. Such an interpretation would not take into account the particular function of these dances in an Artemisian context; it would confuse a whole series of rites that have a specific and distinct role by sticking the same “fertility rite” label on them all. In the same way as the function of savage nature differs according to whether it is the context for Artemis or Dionysus, and in the same way as the divine dancers in such a landscape assume the role of Nymphs or of Maenads according to the deity they attend upon, so do the ritual dances described as bacchic play a different role in an Artemisian or a Dionysiac context.

Dances with an orgiastic character appear in several parts of Greece. [255] Even in Sparta, Artemis Korythalia is not the only one to be honored with bacchanalian dances. I have mentioned that dances by young Spartan girls at Karyai for Artemis Karyatis could have the same character; that, at any rate, would explain why they disappeared and were replaced by bucolic songs in the fifth century. On the other hand, the existence of an epigram attesting to the consecration of tambourines to Artemis Limnatis introduces similar Dionysiac connotations. [256] The use of tambourines links the Dionysiac element to the ritual character of the dance. Located in the mountains, in the foothills of Taygetos, and near a spring, the cult of Artemis Dereatis, known only from a brief note of Pausanias, also included dances thought of as indecent by the ancients. [257] Finally, such dances were probably not foreign to the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia; votive terra-cotta masks, found round the temple, can be linked to a gloss of Hesychius which mentions female Laconian masks worn by disguised dancers to perform satyr-like dances. Recently these masks, representing young unbearded men and hoplites, but also old women and caricatured figures, have been interpreted as referring to the ambivalent means used in the initiatory education of the young Spartans: the sufferings of the {172|173} athletic and military trials, the fear provoked by satyr-like and grotesque figures. [258] These masks recall in any case the wooden masks worn by the κυριττοί to celebrate Artemis Korythalia.

It therefore seems possible to find traces of orgiastic elements in each of the principal Laconian cults of Artemis. However, Artemis is not a Laconian substitute for Dionysus, since the latter had a right to the city in Sparta, as I shall explain. [259] It is only possible to understand the presence of dances of a satyr-like nature in the Artemis cult if they are viewed as a kind of transitory negation of the order of civilization with an initiatory function. The growth of children, as of vegetation and animals, has to be nourished from birth to adulthood by ever new forces acting upon the untamed part of the young “sprouts,” and since Artemis is concerned with the whole process of growth, it is normal that the ritual practices inviting such reversals of the order of adult civilization, “Dionysiac” or not, should be part of her cult.

To summarize: above and beyond the differences in function as described, the orgiastic dances performed by the emulators of Nymphs and Maenads have one thing in common, independent of their part in the cults of Dionysus or Artemis, namely that they always take place in natural surroundings. In both Artemisian and Dionysiac rites, this contact with uncultivated nature represents a break with the ordered world of the city and an immersion in a world where all cultural values are inverted or confused. This break is significant in all rites of passage, of which it is the second phase; it is the period of segregation from a world organized by men, and a return to chaos. The recurrence in Artemisian rites of ritual elements such as orgiastic dances, a mythical chorus of young girls incarnating life in the forest and mountain, nature in its wild state, all these elements suggest that these rites are rites of passage. But then the appearance of {173|174} these elements in a particular cult, that of Artemis, specifies their significance. They are not just any rites of passage: they belong to the sub-class of adolescent rites, rites of tribal initiation. Included in the ritual practices for Artemis, orgiastic dances, besides activating the powers of nature, also indicate the break with the cultural order implied by the transition of the proteges of the goddess from one state to another. [260]

3.2.2. Apollo: The Hyakinthia

Philostratos, by attributing to the Hyakinthia the same importance that the Isthmian Games had for the Corinthians and the Pythian Games for the people of Delphi, indicates the central position that this festival occupies in the cult calendar of Sparta. As confirmation, we recall that during this festival the Lacedaemonians were accustomed to observe a period of respite, and in 479 for example they refused to help the Athenians, who were being hard pressed by the Persians, before the Hyakinthia were at an end. [261]

Athenaeus gives a detailed description of the ritual practices for this festival, taken from two works of the second century B.C., the Laconica by the historian Polycrates and the work by the geographer Polemon dedicated to the Ceremonial Chariot mentioned by Xenophon. [262] As Nilsson showed, and more recently Brelich, the contrast between the practices as described in the two sources used by Athenaeus is only superficial. [263]

The festival, which lasted for three days, included a ritual phase of mourning followed by a feast of rejoicing. The first day supposedly took the form of a funerary ritual honoring the memory of the hero Hyakinthos. On that day, no bread was eaten, there were no wreaths for the banquet, and no paean was sung in honor of Apollo. [264] The day of fasting was followed by public festivities on a grand scale which Polycrates describes as a sort of many-colored spectacle (θέα ποικίλη); all the various members of the city took part. On this day there were musical and dance performances in which all the young people of the town participated. The children (παῖδες) played the lyre, they sang songs accompanied {174|175} on the aulos, one of which—perhaps the paean not sung on the first day—was dedicated to Apollo; [265] others, on horseback, appeared in the theater. The ephebes (νεανίσκοι) were divided into numerous choruses and sang local poems (τῶν ἐπιχωρίων τινὰ ποιημάτων ᾄδουσιν: here we find the feature ‘geographical belonging’); they were joined by dancers who performed traditional dances (κίνησιν ἀρχαϊκήν) to the sound of the pipe and the singers’ voices.

Young girls were not forgotten. The songs and dances of the boys seem to have taken place in one spot, in a theater of which Polycrates does not give us the exact location; the girls, however, were the central attraction of the procession organized at this time in which the whole city took part, according to Polycrates. Of the girls (παρθένοι), some took part in the parade (πομπεύουσι) on special chariots with particularly rich decoration, others were on chariots used in races. A gloss that probably crept into Athenaeus’ text explains that the decorated chariots had the form of a wooden arch. Plutarch goes further and describes them as being shaped like griffons and stags—he-goats. The word κάνναθρον describing the special chariots derives from κάννα ‘reed,’ and it is legitimate to conclude with the ancient lexicographers that the frame was constructed by interlacing reeds and by moulding them to the shape of an unusual animal. Doubtless such a chariot was for the most prominent of the adolescents in town, since Xenophon tells how the daughter of Agesilas, king of Sparta, went to Amyklai, in other words to the Hyakinthia, on a kannathron. He describes the vehicle as πολιτικόν, showing the civic value of these constructions used solely for rituals. [266]

The mention of this procession and the existence of a road called Road of Hyakinthos confirm that the festival took place at a distance from Sparta, at Amyklai, in the precincts of the sanctuary of Amyklaian Apollo. According to Pausanias, Hyakinthos was buried in a tomb that formed the pedestal of the monumental statue of Apollo. [267] The procession must have brought all the participants in the festival in a line stretching from Sparta to Amyklai. {175|176}

On the same day, or more probably on the third day of the festival, there was a grand sacrifice followed by a ritual meal called κοπίς, like the one in the Tithenidia. [268] The most important citizens invited all those belonging to their household and those in their service. According to Polycrates, the town was quite empty on this occasion, since no one wanted to miss the sacrifice. So all segments of Spartan society were concerned with the festival of the Hyakinthia.

In the Hyakinthia young girls were not limited to the procession to the sanctuary of Apollo and Hyakinthos. When the chorus in Euripides’ Helen imagines the heroine returning to her native town, it describes her meeting with the Leukippides on the banks of the Eurotas or in front of the temple of Pallas, and her part in the festivites (κώμοις) celebrated during the joyful nocturnal feasts for Hyakinthos. A passage of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, to which I shall return concerning Helen, confirms the presence of young Lacedaemonian girls in the sanctuary of Apollo at Amyklai. [269] Euripides’ use of the term κῶμος confers on the nocturnal dances of the Lacedaemonian girls Dionysiac connotations.

Some sources of rather eccentric origin agree with the indications given by the chorus in Helen suggesting the existence in the Hyakinthia of a ritual particularly reserved for girls and women. The first source is St. Jerome, which is significant, even if substantially wrong. From the festival of Karyai he transfers to the Hyakinthia the abduction by Aristomenes of the young Spartan virgins during the Third Messenian War (rapuit de choris ludentium virginum quindecim). [270] Like Euripides, St. Jerome speaks of a night-time ritual and choruses of girls. This geographical displacement is only possible because St. Jerome knew that there were choruses of adolescent girls also at the Hyakinthia. Further, two later decrees (second century A.D.) found on the site of the cult of Amyklaian Apollo concern the nomination of a woman as ἀρχηίς and θεωρός for the festival of the Hyakinthia; the woman chosen for the position was elected on the basis of her discretion, dignity, and all the other qualities required of a woman of standing (σωφροσύνης τε καὶ σεμνότητος καὶ τῆς ἄλλης πάσης ἀρετῆς τῆς ἐν γυναιξὶν ἕνεκα). [271] The terms describing her function include leading the procession and directing the festival as a whole (ἀγών).

In addition, a passage from Plutarch, in which he does not refer explicitly to the Hyakinthia but may well mean this festival, since he speaks of a festival {176|177} involving the entire population (πάνδημον ἑορτήν), shows women celebrating a festival at the same time as adolescent girls, people of the household, and the newborn. This festival ended with a nocturnal rite performed near the sanctuary of Apollo in a big banquet tent (ἐν ἀνδρῶνι διεπαννύχιζον, τὸ μυστήριον ἐπετέλουν). [272] This rite might represent the counterpart of the great sacrificial feast celebrated by men at the Hyakinthia with their kin and servants. In describing the Spartan sanctuary of the Leukippides, Pausanias suggests that the women of the town wove a tunic for Amyklaian Apollo every year. This sacred practice took place in a special room which must have been in or near the sanctuary of Hilaeira and Phoibe, and which was called Χιτών. [273] This contribution to the festival of Apollo by women gives us to understand that they also had their part in the ritual practices performed then.

Two archaeological documents support this. First, numerous terra-cotta female figurines found on the site of Apollo’s sanctuary at Amyklai, some of which go back to the Mycenaean period and, second, a stele dating from the third century B.C. and found on the same site. [274] This stele has carved on it a sacrifice scene and a choral scene representing five figures among whom we can identify a dancing woman, a second female figure playing the pipe, and a third holding a plectrum. The part played by the Spartan girls at the Hyakinthia was therefore not limited to the procession on the kannathra. It also included choral dancing. [275]

This rough sketch of ritual practices culled from heterogeneous sources has not yet given us an idea of the cultic and social function of this festival. The only characteristic not seen in other festivals I have discussed is the involvement of all sectors of the civic body, from children to adults of both sexes. To begin to understand such a complex ritual, one must first ask to which divine being this festival was dedicated. Heretofore the problem has generally been dealt with historically. The formation in -νθ- in the term Ὑάκινθος has been taken as proof that the hero represents a pre-Hellenic deity, celebrated from the time of the {177|178} Minoan founding of the town and gradually displaced by Apollo with the spread of the Greek pantheon. [276] Without wishing to enlarge on conjectures about the history of the Hyakinthia, I will simply say that in the Archaic and Classical periods pertinent to my thesis the two supernatural beings cohabited at Amyklai, also in the physical meaning of the word, since the tomb of Hyakinthos was in the pedestal of the monumental statue of Apollo, as has been pointed out. This statue, says Pausanias, was not the work of Bathycles, who had constructed in the mid sixth century the famous throne of Amyklai; rather, it was an Archaic work with a rough form reminiscent of the protogeometric xoana. [277] It is thus certain that from the beginning of the Archaic period the cults of the two supernatural beings were associated without their being identified with each other. [278]

Independent of the dual presence of the god and of the hero, two elements offer historical perspectives showing the antiquity and civic importance of the festival. According to Aristotle, the armor of Timomakhos, hero of the capture of Amyklai by the Spartans, was regularly put on view during the Hyakinthia. The definitive conquest of Amyklai, a town which had succeeded in maintaining its independence in spite of the Dorian invasion of the Laconian plain, has been placed in the middle of the eighth century. [279] The presentation of the armor is a sign of the civic and political value placed on this Amyklaian cult, and excavations show that it existed before the Spartan “conquest.” The original meaning of the cult was certainly modified when it was absorbed into the Spartan cults. [280] {178|179}

The process of absorption was very rapid, as is proved by a second historical event that linked the founding of the Lacedaemonian colony of Tarentum to the flight of the Parthenians after a failed attack at the Hyakinthia. The colonization of Tarentum by the sons of Spartan women who had not taken part in the First Messenian War has been dated fairly exactly: the ancients assigned this event to the year 706. [281] In less than fifty years the Hyakinthia had become the civic festival described in later accounts. In fact, according to the legend narrated by Strabo, those involved in the Parthenian plot chose to revolt during the Hyakinthia because the whole population (οἱ τοῦ δήμου) was present at that moment.

The Hyakinthia as a Spartan festival was established permanently by the end of the eighth century. Of the two deities it celebrated, each had his own cult. The first day of the festival, austere and funerary, was dedicated to Hyakinthos, the second and third to Apollo, with the musical and sacrificial festivities already mentioned. This division is emphasized by Pausanias, who explains that before making the sacrifice (θυσία: sacrifice to an immortal) to Apollo, a sacrifice (ἐναγίζουσι: sacrifice to a mortal hero) was made to Hyakinthos within the tomb itself. [282]

The separation of the two supernatural beings, one a god, the other a hero, is also present in the myths associated with the Hyakinthia, each having his own character and function.

One of the scenes on the tomb of Hyakinthos represents Demeter, Kore and Hephaistos, the Moirai and the Seasons, along with Aphrodite, Athena, and Artemis leading the hero and his sister Polyboia, depicted as a young virgin (ἔτι παρθένον), up to the sky. [283] This relief probably dates from approximately the same period as the statue of Apollo, the pedestal of which was the tomb of Hyakinthos. It is at least not earlier than the middle of the sixth century when Bathycles constructed and sculpted the throne that served as support for the statue. This ascension scene of Hyakinthos and of his sister Polyboia to Olympus represents the final event in the legendary history of the two heroes. The most ancient form of the myth is given in a brief allusion in Euripides’ {179|180} Helen and tells how Apollo accidentally killed Hyakinthos in competing with him at throwing the discus. [284] Some sources, all from the Hellenistic period, add that Hyakinthos was the beloved of Apollo. [285] Most interpreters of the Hyakinthia see in this later addition of the love of the god for the hero a proof of the gradual absorption of the originally independent cult of Hyakinthos into that of Apollo. By turning the hero from an adult deity into a young effeminate lover, the myth of Hyakinthos would have been made banal and reduced to a sheer motif of Alexandrian literariness. [286] True, Pausanias in describing the reliefs on the tomb says that Hyakinthos wore a beard, whereas later, Nicias, a sculptor at the end of the fourth century, depicted him in the flower of adolescence looking like Apollo’s Ganymede. [287] But it is generally overlooked that Pausanias also notes that Polyboia on the relief looks like an adolescent, and so it is likely either that Hyakinthos is wearing not his full adult beard, but his first youthful beard, as a young man about to become adult, or that he is taken to the sky as an adult. The myth thus seems to show Hyakinthos and Polyboia as adolescent heroes already during the Archaic period [288]

The existence at Knidos of an Artemis Hyakinthotrophos is an additional indication of the image of childhood and adolescence the hero must have {180|181} embodied. [289] On the other hand, the daughters (παῖδας) of Erechtheus, whom the Athenians sacrificed in order to rid their city of famine and plague sent by Zeus, were called Hyakinthides. A later version of the myth probably took the term literally and turned the daughters of Erechtheus into the daughters of Hyakinthos, displacing the latter, one knows not why, from Sparta to Athens. This designation, however, probably referred to a function of the girls in an adolescent ritual. The ritual character of the denomination Hyakinthides is all the more probable in that in Euripides’ Erechtheus, Athena declares that she will give to the sacrificed virgins the name of Ὑακινθίδες θεαί and that the Athenians will honor them every year with sacrifices and choral dances performed by young girls (παρθένων [χορεύ]μασιν). The name Orthaia assigned to one of them possibly means that they represented hypostases of Artemis in the same way as Oupis and Hekaerge, the young Hyperboreans worshipped at Delos. [290]

In spite of the ambiguities, the various elements surrounding the figure of the Amyklaian hero sketch out a myth and a cult of adolescence. One cannot deny a priori that Hyakinthos was honored in the beginning as an adult. But the scene on his tomb and the text of Euripides’ Helen persuade me to believe that since the eighth century at any rate, as the Hyakinthia developed as a Spartan rather than a local festival, Hyakinthos is represented with adolescent features.

However, the funerary aspects of the cult caused Rohde to classify the cult with other rituals for chthonic divinities. Following him, Nilsson emphasizes the joyful character of the second day of the festival and sees a cult invoking the forces of vegetation. He makes it a spring festival, the Spartan equivalent of the Athenian Thargelia. Brelich, struck by the contrast between the mourning of the first day and the joy of the second, stresses the structural aspect of the contrast and sees it as the sign of transition from one order to another, thus making the Hyakinthia an initiation rite and a feast of renewal. And Brulé, comparing the {181|182} Lacedaemonian festival with the Great Panathenaia at Athens, sees in both of them festivals of renovation of the whole civic community. [291]

This contrast between the funerary sacrifice to Hyakinthos and the joyful rituals offered to Apollo is surely central to any interpretation of the festival of the Hyakinthia. Viewed as the necessary succession of two ritual phases in the same festival, it seems to translate a sort of passage from death to life. If one accepts Brelich’s initiatory interpretation, which seems to explain the presence of Apollo, the Hyakinthia could be the final ceremony of a process of tribal initiation. From the annihilation of the old order, from death and mourning, we pass to a new life marked by the joy of resurrection. This process is dramatized in the myth of Hyakinthos: the youth, killed by Apollo, the god of adolescence, in a competition of discus throwing, consequently in an adolescent exercise, is carried off to the sky where he takes on the new status of hero. After a short period of death, he is reborn and begins a new life with his sister Polyboia. The Hyakinthia may have been the annual ritual repetition of this mythological drama, which provided the festival’s significance.

There are many rites in the Hyakinthia which could be seen as a celebration of the end of initiation for young citizens in Sparta. It has been said that the paean to Apollo could be sung before or after a trial representing some sort of danger, as a hymn of propitiation or gratitude. It would then take its place after a successful outcome of the trial. In addition, the children with their musical and choral performances would prove to the assembled city what they had learned during the period of initiation. The local and traditional character of the songs and dances stood in direct relation with the past of the city that the children thus revitalized at each festival. These features of ‘spectacle’ and ‘public’ also define the children riding on horseback through the theater and the girls in procession riding on the kannathra. In spite of the conjectural character of these suggestions, I would not be surprised if the spectacle mentioned by Polycrates as a high point in the second day of festivities was actually a presentation to the townspeople of the new boy and girl initiates. As Hyakinthos and Polyboia, the young Lacedaemonians were born again on the second day to a new life, for which they expressed their thanks to Apollo. Their imminent integration into the adult community was of interest to one and all, hence, as Polycrates says, the town emptied itself entirely on the occasion of the spectacle. {182|183}

A comparison of the food eaten in the ritual banquets during the Hyakinthia and the Athenian Pyanopsia offers a striking parallel for the interpretation I have just put forward. Polemon says that, in additon to the goats sacrificed to Apollo, the Spartan citizens at Amyklai ate special bread resembling a cake made of oil and honey known as ἐγκρίς, pieces of cheese, sausage, and blood sausage, dried fruits including figs, beans, and green beans, and some sources add black broth (ζωμός). [292] In the Pyanopsia, one of the central rites consisted in eating a sweet porridge made of grains and vegetables. Also, the eiresione carried on this occasion in honor of the god Apollo was decorated with figs, bread rolls, cakes, and little jars containing honey, oil, and wine. [293] Certainly, in and of itself, this food has no meaning; however, appearing simultaneously in the same meal and in the context of an Apollonian ritual, they are charged with significance. In the Pyanopsia festival, itself named for a soup of grains and vegetables eaten on this occasion, the food symbolized the panspermia at the end of the harvest in October. Although there is no text to support it, one could be tempted to attribute to the food eaten on the second day of the Hyakinthia an analogous significance, in which case the κοπίς of the Hyakinthia, because of the consumption of the fruits of the earth produced during the summer, would mark the end of the harvest season. [294] {183|184}

The analogy between the Hyakinthia and the Pyanopsia is not limited to food, which is significant on one level, nor to agricultural topics. I have indicated that the Pyanopsia could have been interpreted as a final rite in the initiation process of adolescents insofar as it is linked to the myth of Theseus’ return from Crete with his young companions. This would explain why the rite has been perceived since antiquity as an act of thanksgiving to Apollo for having protected Theseus and his companions who had escaped from the Cretan labyrinth. [295] This interpretation of the Pyanopsia would correspond to the initiatory value I gave to the presentation of the adolescents to the townspeople, and to the transition from a period concerned with death to a state of renewed life found in both the myth of Hyakinthos and the two contrasting phases of the Spartan Hyakinthia. [296]

Once more, the post-war publications of papyri shed new light on the poet Alcman and give us reasons, although slight and subject to discussion, to connect his name with the festival of the Hyakinthia. The same fragment of an hypomnema, containing several lines of the poem in which the choregos Agesidamos and the chorus of Dymainai appear, reproduces a few supplementary lines, in support of a discussion of the poet’s Lydian origins, where the words Amyklai, near the Eurotas and Atarnides can be read. These lines begin with the feminine ἄκουσα, and it is very probable that the poem was sung by a chorus of young girls; the chorus might have been situated at Amyklai and might be describing its own activity there, or it might be describing another female chorus singing at Amyklai (ἄκουσα τᾶν ἀηδ[όνων). [297] Whether this fragment is by {184|185} Alcman or not—the attribution of the poem depends on how one interprets the first words of the commentary—the commentator certainly used these lines as proof of the compatibility of Alcman’s foreign origins and his activity as chorus-master of the girls and boys (διδάσκαλος τῶν θυγατέρων καὶ ἐφή[βω]ν) of Sparta, preparing civic choruses (πατρίο[ις] χοροῖς). One can deduce that the fragment gave the example of a poem in which Alcman describes himself or is described as a foreigner, and is linked to a chorus engaged in a typical Spartan festival. In the hypomnema the festival is called the Hyakinthia; as regards Alcman’s name, I suggest it can be seen in the Ἀταρνίδα in line 15. [298] Foreign poet, but one involved in the civic and religious life of Sparta, Alcman seems to have been active in both the festivals of Artemis Karyatis and the Hyakinthia. I shall return to the pedagogical role the poet seems to have played for the chorus, according to the papyrus commentary.

3.2.3. Leukippides and Dionysiades

Although no female chorus is involved in the cult honoring the Leukippides, the association of the eleven Dionysiades with the two sisters in the cult of Dionysus Kolonatas offers an invitation to clear up the problems arising from the myths and the cult associated with the ambiguous figures of these twin cult figures —ambiguous because both myth and cult place these two and their priestesses among the young girls and among the married women.

First, the cult: the Leukippides, Hilaeira and Phoibe, had a temple in the precincts of Sparta, in a quarter situated, according to Pausanias, near the Limnaion. The priestesses of this cult, also called Leukippides and probably also numbering two, are young girls, παρθένοι. The figure of Leda should, in a way, be associated with this cult, or her daughter Helen, since on view in the temple of the twins was the egg brought forth by the heroine. [299]

In addition, the priestesses of the Leukippides were associated with the cult of Dionysus and the group of eleven servants of this cult, called the Dionysiades. The Spartan Dionysus had his principal sanctuary in the center of the town, not {185|186} far from the temples of Apollo Karneios and Athena and Zeus Amboulioi, on the site called Kolona (the hill), which gave the god his epiclesis Kolonatas. [300]

It is difficult to determine what the cult of the Leukippides Hilaeira and Phoibe consisted of. The only indication of a ritual practice is given by the chorus in Euripides’ Helen, quoted with regard to the festival of the Hyakinthia. Here the chorus evokes the meeting of Helen with the Leukippides on her return to Sparta. They describe the meeting as taking place either among the choruses on the banks of the Eurotas, or in front of the temple of Athena, or during the nocturnal festivities of the Hyakinthia. Leaving aside the festival at Amyklai, the two other places have been respectively identified with the Dromos, the ritual function of which I discuss below, and the temple of Athena Khalkioikos, which was the main cult site for the goddess with the blue-green eyes at Sparta. [301] The scene evoked by the chorus takes place in mythical time, and it is probable that the Leukippides celebrated in song are the cult figures themselves and not their priestesses. The evocation of the Leukippides on the Dromos at any rate confirms the connection with the cult of Helen, hinted at by Leda’s egg laid on the roof of the temple.

We are better informed about the Spartan cult of Dionysus. According to Pausanias, this cult served as a framework for two different practices: on the one hand, a double sacrifice made by the Dionysiades and the Leukippides to the anonymous hero who introduced Dionysus into the city and to Dionysus himself, and on the other, a footrace (δρόμου ἀγῶνα) in which the eleven Dionysiades competed.

There have been numerous conjectures as to the identity of the pre-Dionysiac hero honored on the hill of Kolona at the same time as Dionysus. In line with the different suggestions as to the father of the Leukippides, the names of Phoibos, Leukippos, and Helios have been put forward, [302] but the oldest version of the myth of the Leukippides, reported in the Cypria, makes these adolescents the daughters of Apollo. This is the version we could use in order to {186|187} identify the hero honored at Kolona. It is quite probable that he assumed an Apollonian character. [303]

As for the footrace, it could be compared with two others. First, two glosses of Hesychius speak of a race run by young Spartan girls (παρθένοι); one of them explicitly names them Dionysiades, adding that the race took place during the Dionysia. [304] Second, we have seen that at Olympia the college of sixteen women of Elis had to organize, among other things, a race for separate age groups of girls which took place during the Heraia. [305] This race, run by girls, as was that of the Dionysiades, took place in the context of a cult for an adult god. It probably had the same function of adolescent initiation into adult life and into marriage as the rite of the chorus of Physkoa, also organized by the college of sixteen Eleans and performing at Elis, on the occasion of the Thyia dedicated to Dionysus. The race of the Spartan Dionysiades might represent the ritual and the civilized counterpart of a mythical and bacchic race such as that of the Proitides or that of the Minyades. I have already discussed the transition of adolescence to the state of married woman embodied by these two myths of free-form races in the mountains which can be complementary to rituals celebrated by girls and women for Dionysus inside the civic space. [306]

The presence of the Leukippides, the priestesses of the two adolescent divinities Hilaeira and Phoibe, in the cult of Dionysus, the god of adult women, is somewhat contradictory. The same contrast between adolescence and adulthood is found in the legends associated with the mythical figures of the Leukippides. Described by Euripides and Pausanias as young girls (κόραι, παρθένοι), the Leukippides were venerated near Argos as mothers (μητέρες) at the same time as the Dioskouroi whose wives they were. [307] The apparently contradictory semantic features of the Argive cult of the Leukippides send us back to the very large and complex myth surrounding the two divinities in Lacedaemonia, in which they appear both as adolescents and as married women.

In discussing the myth of Helen’s abduction, I mentioned the differing versions of the Leukippides myth which are connected with the events of their {187|188} abduction by the Tyndaridai and their marriage with these figures. [308] The oldest version of the legend has been reconstructed and corresponds to the version partly present in the Cypria and in Pindar, and it is found narrated in Lycophron. In this version, the Apharetidai laugh at the Dioskouroi during a banquet given by the latter on Paris’ journey to Sparta, because they carried off the daughters of Leukippos (of Apollo in the version of the Cypria) and married them without giving their father a gift (τῶν κορῶν ἁρπαγεισῶν ἄνευ ἕδνων). Cut to the quick, the Dioskouroi steal cattle from the sons of Aphareus for a gift. Then comes the famous fight between the Tyndaridai and the Apharetidai, related by Pindar in the Tenth Nemean. In the most recent form of the myth, the Leukippides, promised to the sons of Aphareus, were on the contrary abducted by the Tyndaridai, who had been invited to the wedding banquet of the Messenian “men” and the Spartan “women.” A lesser known version has the Dioskouroi abduct the Leukippides in order to marry them (ἁρπάσαντες ἔγημαν) and father two children.

The event common to these different versions is that the abduction of the Leukippides results in their marriage to the Dioskouroi. The abduction does not have the fatal consequences present in the myths associated with the festivals of Artemis Limnatis or Karyatis. Abduction here is not equivalent to rape, nor does it mean the death of the young girls, but a regular union with the heroes who protected the city. The connection between this and the celebrated Spartan custom of the fiance abducting his future wife before marrying her is evident. [309] For once the myth seems to be the direct reflection of the institutional reality. But the significance of the myth as regards marriage goes beyond this immediate connection with the social referent.

Among the figurative representations of the mythical episodes of the Leukippides mentioned by Pausanias, the scene of their abduction seems to have drawn as much attention as their marriage with the sons of Tyndareus. [310] It is surely not by chance that in Sparta the two scenes of the abduction of the Leukippides given by Pausanias were to be found on the bronze parts of the temple of Athena Khalkioikos and on the famous throne of Apollo at Amyklai in the sanctuary where the Hyakinthia were celebrated. These two sanctuaries were associated with female adolescence. Furthermore, two abduction scenes, one {188|189} on a krater dating from around 440, and one on a hydria of Meidias from around 410, are a significant addition to the literary evidence of this myth. [311]

It is difficult to identify all the characters on the krater. The center of the frieze has three young girls who could represent a chorus or a group of two surrounding the third daughter of Leukippos, Arsinoe. From this point, two quadrigae move away, each carrying one of the Tyndaridai and one of the Leukippides. A woman waving farewell and a seated man could be the parents of the Leukippides, while a person standing behind one of the quadrigae and holding laurel branches is certainly Apollo. The other quadriga is accompanied by a woman with the same coiffure as the woman identified as the mother of the Leukippides. Is this Artemis, complementing the figure of Apollo on the other side of the scene, or an adult divinity? The interpreter can only conjecture. The Dioskouroi are represented as young men with their first beard and are also crowned with laurel. There is no hint of violence in the scene, and the abduction seems to be completely accepted by the characters present.

In the scene painted by Meidias, however, the abduction takes place under the eyes of Aphrodite, of Peitho, of Agave, and of Zeus, who are gathered round an altar. The two quadrigae of the Dioskouroi are placed above the deities on each side of a statue of an unidentifiable goddess. If Zeus and Aphrodite watch the scene unmoved, Peitho flees the abduction, which symbolizes the opposite of what she stands for: convincing the loved one to accept her lover’s seductive advances. In spite of uncertainty about some of the identities in these scenes, the presence of Apollo in one of the friezes and that of Zeus and Aphrodite in the other shows that the abduction of the Leukippides on a religious level oscillates between the domain of adolescence and the semantic values of the adult world.

This oscillation may be explained by the fact that the myth seizes the moment when a young girl, taken from her parents and her circle of friends, submits to becoming an adult through marriage. [312] Incorporated in a succession {189|190} of narrative elements of differing semantic value, the abduction of the Leukippides no longer signifies the entrance into the period of adolescence, as in the myths behind the cults of Artemis Limnatis or Karyatis, but rather the exit. It is not marked negatively as a sign of death, an initiatory death, but positively as the sign of accession to a new life.

After this, it is easier to see what place the two heroines play in the cult of Dionysus Kolonatas. On the point of becoming adult, they have the right to be initiated into the mysteries of Dionysus. If we accept the suggestion that the hero they honor before sacrificing to Dionysus is a hypostasis of Apollo, if not Apollo himself, one could even propose that the Apollonian pre-sacrifice was the last honor given to adolescence before passing to the adult cult of Dionysus. Morphologically, the structure of the ritual of the cult would be identical to that of the Hyakinthia, in which the sacrifice to Hyakinthos represented the moment of annihilation before recognition by Apollo and the civic community of a completed adolescence. But, semantically, the cult appears in a different light; the myth behind it suggests that it was addressed to young girls ready to marry, or to young wives who had just been carried off. In relation to the Hyakinthia it stands at a later point in the development of women: if the Hyakinthia marked the end of adolescence and the completion of tribal initiation, the cult of Dionysus Kolonatas could represent one of the rituals marking the entrance of young initiates to the condition of adult women and their full acceptance of this condition.

We should note that a lyric fragment attributed to Bacchylides and entitled The Leukippides shows women, probably the Leukippides themselves, forming a chorus in honor of Aphrodite. [313] The total lack of context prevents us from knowing whether this is a mythical scene (Leukippides as heroines) or a ritual (Leukippides as priestesses). The only parallel pertinent to the relationship between Aphrodite and the Leukippides is the abduction of the latter, in which Aphrodite appears at the side of Zeus. The devotion of the Leukippides to the goddess of sexual maturity is an additional sign of their ambiguous position between adolescence and adulthood. This recalls the importance assumed by Ariadne-Aphrodite in the story of Theseus, with its initiatory flavor.

The link established between certain cults and Alcman’s work applies to the Leukippides. In a very brief fragment of the hypomnema mentioned above, some lines representing the end of the commentary of a poem contain the name of {190|191} Phoibe and perhaps also that of Apollo. [314] It is of course impossible to know whether this allusion refers to the myth of the Leukippides or to their cult.

Like the Leukippides, white mares, the Tyndaridai, white stallions, are both adolescent and mature men, the incarnation of youth, but a youth already adult. [315] Protectors of the town of Sparta, warriors who gave martial songs to the Laconian warriors, they appear under the same epiclesis in the cult of Zeus and Athena Amboulioi; significantly, however, they are not associated either with Artemis or with Apollo. [316] Therefore they belong to the realm of adult citizens, soldier citizens. Their adulthood appears again in their relationship to marriage.

A mythical tradition going back to Alcman portrays them as excellent horse-tamers, [317] and this must surely be taken at its word, given the numerous illustrations of the twin heroes on horseback. There is also a metaphorical meaning: the Dioskouroi taming the mare-Leukippides. By marrying them, they turn the young girls into tamed women, in other words adult women. This idea of marriage as taming is apparent in a whole series of metaphors incorporating the image of the mare, contrasting the unmarried girl and the young wife. I shall return to this in the following chapter. For now it suffices to say that in accordance with the illustration on the Lisbon krater where the Dioskouroi have light beards, they represent young recently married men. Young soldiers and young husbands, they are the model of the Spartan ephebe who has just become a citizen, just as the Leukippides stand for the young initiate taking on the status of the adult married woman.

3.2.4. Helen

In Sparta, Helen has the same ambiguous quality of both adolescence and adulthood as do the Leukippides. The story of Helen’s abduction by Theseus from the temple of Artemis Orthia shows us the child or adolescent girl, while {191|192} the legend of her abduction by Paris reveals the adult woman, wife of the king of Sparta. This ambivalence is reflected in the religious realm; at her first abduction, she was serving Artemis, at her second, she is under the control of Aphrodite and of Peitho. There is of course no way to justify historically the seeming contradiction between these two myths, [318] which has more to do with the double aspect of this figure central to Lacedaemonian legendary tradition.

The famous Laconian evocation at the end of the Lysistrata depicts the dances of young Spartan girls (κόραι) who, like mares (πῶλοι) and Bacchants, toss their hair and disport themselves along the banks of the Eurotas. Under the aegis of Amyklaian Apollo, Athena Khalkioikos and the Tyndaridai, these dances are led by Helen, the daughter of Leda (Λήδας παῖς), the divine and resplendent choregos (ἁγνὰ χοραγὸς εὐπρεπής), whose role has been previously analyzed.

This description is similar to the one given by the chorus in Euripides’ Helen of the return of the heroine to Sparta. The dances of young girls (κόρας) in which Helen, exiled in Egypt, would have taken part, took place, as we have mentioned with reference to the Leukippides, near the Eurotas, where they are associated precisely with those twin goddesses, in front of the temple of Athena Khalkioikos or during the Hyakinthia, which is in the precinct of the sanctuary of Amyklaian Apollo. Thus Apollo, Athena, and the Dioskouroi/Leukippides are the divinities associated in two great classical texts with the choral dances in which Helen participates. [319]

These two literary descriptions cannot be used to reconstitute a cult of Helen, but they contain several points in common with the picture that the twelve chorus-members singing the Epithalamium of Helen by Theocritus make of their activity as girls among other adolescents. [320] The chorus imagines the young Lacedaemonians gamboling on the banks of the Eurotas and forming a troop (νεολαία) of four-times-sixty adolescents, all of the same age. There are no dances in this passage, only a footrace (δρόμος). Among these girls Helen occupies a privileged position: she spins and weaves better than the others and can celebrate Artemis and Athena on the lyre better than anyone else. However, adds the chorus that sings her praises, Helen is now the young wife of Menelaus. At this point in the text there is a significant break (marked by the passage from {192|193} she to you, then by the μέν … δέ of lines 38ff.): the chorus evokes the past, then moves on to the present. As a young wife, Helen no longer joins in the activities of adolescence and has withdrawn from the group of which she was the erstwhile jewel. This is the reason why, as the movement of Theocritus’ text clearly shows, as soon as the new status of married woman embraced by the heroine is mentioned, the chorus of young girls express their intention of honoring her memory for the first time in a cult. On the very spot of their former races, adolescent girls will celebrate Helen by dedicating to her a lotus wreath and pouring a libation of oil on the roots of the plane-tree which will henceforth be the heroine’s tree and will mark the site of her cult.

Thus, at the moment when Helen’s adolescence is a thing of the past and she has become an adult woman, a mythical value is given to her activity as an adolescent and it becomes a sort of aition giving rise to the ritual destined to perpetuate her memory. I shall now investigate whether there is a similarity between the information Theocritus gives about the cult and what we know from other sources. But before studying the rites of this cult, I want first to establish its locality.

Pausanias gives us some ideas as to where the Spartan cult of Helen took place. South of the town was the Dromos where Spartan young men (νέοι) trained for races; it was under the protection of the Dioskouroi. The Dromos was next to the place known as the Platanistas, so called for the plane-trees planted there. The water surrounding this place, says Pausanias, gave it the aspect of an island, and here the ritual fights of ephebes, instituted by Lykourgos, were held. Before a fight began, the ephebes sacrificed in a neighboring sanctuary called Phoibaion and ended the rituals in the Platanistas. Still according to Pausanias, the sanctuary of Helen was near the Platanistas beside the tomb of Alcman, and we shall see that the rituals practiced by the neoi and the adolescents that provided the framework for the sanctuary are not unimportant when it comes to determining the function of Helen’s cult. [321]

However, Helen as cult object was also present on the opposite bank of the Eurotas at Therapnai in the precinct of Menelaus where she had been buried along with her husband. [322] These seemingly disparate elements can be organized into a geographical whole. The Dromos was probably on the southeast side of {193|194} the city towards the plain of the Eurotas, maybe near the spot where the Magoula empties into the river. This could coincide with the description of the Platanistas as a place surrounded by water and would also be consistent with the situation of Therapnai on the hills facing the depression at the southeast of Sparta on the opposite bank of the Eurotas. [323] It seems then that Helen had two cult sites in Lacedaemonia—one near the Platanistas, the other in the Menelaion in Therapnai. I shall now examine the meanings of these cults and their rituals.

The cult site of the “Helen of the Plane-Tree,” for which Theocritus gives the aition, can with certainty be identified with the sanctuary of Helen seen by Pausanias in the vicinity of the Platanistas. [324] The geographical proximity of the sanctuary and the island in the Eurotas or in the Magoula also has an obvious linguistic correspondence: Helen of the Plane-Tree belongs to the Platanistas (plane-trees).

Theocritus’ text is a particularly valuable source for the ritual. We have seen that the heroine, to whom the youthful Lacedaemonians render homage by hanging a wreath on the plane-tree dedicated to her, is not the wife Menelaus carried off but the adolescent who shone among the four-times-sixty girls running along the banks of the Eurotas. This race, symbolized in the figure of Helen as a young girl, becomes the mythical model of similar races; and these agones, repeating the one in which the heroine excelled, assume a ritual function by recalling Helen and her original race. Since Theocritus locates this race on the banks of the Eurotas and at the same time situates the cult rendered to Helen in the very same place, its status as mythical paradigm and its ritual function are assured (lines 22f. and 39). The race probably took place in the Dromos, very near Helen’s sanctuary, and it was certainly part of the ritual, along with other practices described by Theocritus, associated with Helen’s cult. [325] {194|195}

The older authorities, Aristophanes and Euripides, associate Helen not with a race but with adolescent dances which also took place near the Eurotas. Such a contradiction between Athenian classical authors on one side and Theocritus the Alexandrian poet on the other can be explained in two ways. First, historically, one can imagine that Aristophanes’ and Euripides’ descriptions refer back to an ancient period in which the lifestyle of Spartan adolescent girls and women was not yet modelled on that of men. Theocritus emphasizes that Helen’s companions anoint themselves before the race like men (line 23), and Pausanias mentions the detail that the races they trained for took place in the Dromos. Gymnastic exercises of a masculine order would have been substituted for the original choral dances among these girls. [326] The other explanation is synchronic and admits the coexistence of dances and the race. The information we have is too meager to allow a definite decision. A solution will be suggested in the following chapter.

It is, however, certain that the Helen venerated in the cult of the Platanistas is still a young girl, although one who is about to marry. She thus stands in the same relation to adolescence as do the Leukippides. [327] And it is with these heroines that Euripides associates Helen in the description of the dances on the banks of the Eurotas. Aristophanes compares the girls for whom Helen is the choregos to mares (ἇτε πῶλοι ταὶ κόραι, line 1309). As I have remarked and as we shall see later, the image of the mare being mastered illustrates the relation of feminine adolescence to marriage which, conceived as taming, ends adolescence and subdues the woman.

Aristophanes also compares these young girls dancing with Helen to Bacchants. This is not an identification, nor is it sufficient to turn the cult of Helen of the Plane-Tree into a Dionysiac cult or to liken the race talked of by Theocritus to the race of the Dionysiades; as I have already said, this race, like that organized at Olympia by the college of the sixteen women of Elis, probably had a prematrimonial character. [328] On the other hand, the association of Helen with Amyklaian Apollo and Athena Khalkioikos in Aristophanes and Euripides is significant. To the extent that the Hyakinthia can be interpreted as a festival of {195|196} the end of initiation, [329] the presence of Helen in this festival would make her a girl newly initiated but ready for marriage. Finally, the association with Athena Khalkioikos, to the extent that her cult can be defined in the absence of information, links the figure of Helen to the civic qualities of the virgin goddess enthroned on the acropolis. Athena is a young girl, but warrior and protector of the city, in other words a girl who, as Helen, has passed through adolescence and has been admitted to the body of citizens.

The association of Helen with her brothers the Dioskouroi, the preeminent protectors of the town of Sparta, suggests analogies that might confirm this interpretation. However, the fact that the girls led by Helen played in the Dromos on the spot reserved for the races of the neoi, where the Dioskouroi, mythical models for young citizens, also probably ran, according to Aristophanes, could constitute another hint: the girls emulating Helen would have similar qualities to the neoi, the young, newly initiated citizens not yet completely integrated into the adult order. [330]

Carried over the Eurotas to the hills of Therapnai and combined with the cult of Menelaus, Helen’s cult changes its character. [331] There she is no longer a young girl, but a married woman; her cult is not that of a hero now, but of a goddess. There is only one reference to this cult in an anecdote of Herodotus concerning Ariston the king of Sparta. [332] The temple of Helen at Therapnai, {196|197} easily identified in the text of Herodotus since the author locates it specifically above the Phoibaion, is associated with the history of the most beautiful woman in Sparta (γυνὴ καλλίστη). This woman, married, since she is the wife of a friend of Ariston, and desired by the king, did not always have outstanding beauty. According to Herodotus she was the ugliest of the children in the city. However, her nurse took pity on her ugliness and presented her each day at the temple of Helen. One fine day, Helen, in woman’s guise (γυναῖκα), came to the nurse and carressed the head of the child who, from that moment on, was transformed. In this way, says Herodotus, the child reached marriageable age (ἐς γάμου ὥρην ἀπικομένην) and married the friend of Ariston. Subsequently, Ariston stole her from her husband, just as Helen was taken from Menelaus by Paris.

In this story, Helen appears as the goddess who conferred beauty on female children. Beauty is not conferred for itself, but for the purpose of attracting a husband. Thus Helen made children into what she herself was, the most beautiful of women and the most beautiful of wives. [333] In the traditional system of education of Athenian girls, as described by Aristophanes, beauty was the {197|198} supreme quality characterizing the complete young woman. [334] The meaning here is the same: the change from ugliness to beauty is a metaphor for the change from the state of sexual neutrality to becoming the object of male desire. As Pausanias says, in relating the same anecdote as Herodotus, the ugliest girl (παρθένον αἰσχίστην) becomes the most beautiful woman (γυναικῶν τὸ εἶδος καλλίστην). [335]

The Helen of Therapnai thus becomes not so much the simple model of a married woman like Hera, but the woman whose beauty equals that of Aphrodite, who, as seductress and instigator of adult sexual desire, also intervenes in matters of marriage. Thus in all melic poetry and particularly in that of Sappho, Helen is the incarnation of seductive beauty. But such beauty cannot be understood as the irresistible power of love that belongs to Aphrodite. [336] {198|199}

It is within this religious context, I think, that one should interpret the beauty contests for women, held especially on Lesbos. [337] The reason they were not for adolescents but for adult women, and on Lesbos took place under the auspices of Hera, is that acquiring the feature ‘beauty’ marked the end of puberty and a readiness for marriage. It is therefore probable that the women who competed were under the spell of Aphrodite and ready to embrace adult status through marriage. Similarly, one can understand the presence of a (possible) representation of Helen as the choregos of a chorus of young girls on the metopes of Hera’s temple at Paestum. [338] The figure of the young choregos stands between the adolescence of the chorus and the adulthood of Hera.

However, one is justified in wondering if there is not a contradiction between the idea of ‘beauty’ attached to the woman ready for marriage and my statements concerning the role of the choregos, whose qualities as leader of a chorus of young girls also included the same feature. [339] Rather than a contradiction, I see here a new characteristic that can be attributed to the choregos, namely, that this young girl with the feature ‘beauty’ stands apart from the rest of the chorus and is at the point of being integrated into adult society through marriage. It is certainly not by chance that Helen appears as the incarnation of the choregos in the texts I have cited. In the same way, Antheia and Nausicaa, marked by the feature ‘beauty’ in their roles as choregos, are girls for whom marriage is imminent.

I have said that in the myth of Helen’s abduction by Theseus, the Tyndaridai are the saviors of the heroine. This association of the two brothers with their sister reappears on the level of cult, since the Dioskouroi, present everywhere in Sparta, were honored especially in places near where Helen was honored; for example on the Dromos, where the twin gods, worshipped as “starters,” probably presided over the races of the neoi, or at the Phoibaion not far from Therapnai, where the Dioskouroi had a temple in the enclosure of which the ephebes made sacrifice, as I have mentioned, before going to contend at the Platanistas. [340] {199|200} According to a fragmentary commentary on a poem by Alcman, the Dioskouroi were even honored at the same time as Menelaus and Helen at Therapnai; however, this cultic association seems to have happened only in the Archaic period, since only Alcman and Pindar mention it. [341] For an unknown reason, the cult of the Tyndaridai was moved in order to be situated near the Phoibaion and on the Dromos. Whatever the reason, the presence of the Dioskouroi at the races of young citizens and at the fights of the ephebes is not surprising, since in Sparta as in the rest of Greece the twin heroes were regarded as models for the young warrior and for the young champion in sports. The inventors of military music, the Dioskouroi administered, according to Pindar, all the games organized in Sparta εὐρύχορος. [342] Although this cannot serve as proof, one could say that just as the double cult of Helen was addressed to young girls and at the same time to married women or to women about to marry, the Dioskouroi presided over contests intended for adolescents as well as for men who, as young soldiers and as young citizens, had just ceased to be ephebes. The sons and daughter of Tyndareus all seem to promise a transition whose masculine aspect expresses itself in the accession to citizenship and to the status of soldier, and whose feminine counterpart is embodied in the acquisition of full sexual maturity which, denoted by the quality of beauty, has its corollary in the status of wife and of mother according to the usual Greek gender distinctions.

The excavations undertaken at the beginning of the century at the site of Therapnai permit us to reconstruct the large outlines of the history of the Menelaion. [343] This site, like that of Amyklai and unlike that of Artemis Orthia, was already inhabited during the Mycenaean period. It was probably used, already in that period, as a setting for a sanctuary. The number of ex-voto, particularly lead figurines, found in the sanctuary and going back to Laconian I {200|201} and II attests to the remarkable development of the cults of Helen and Menelaus that had to have happened during the seventh century, that is to say during the period when Alcman lived. This Archaic flourishing of the sanctuary at Therapnai is all the more significant in that these lead figurines are identical in form and content to the ex-voto figurines found on the site of the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. As for Orthia, the large majority of these figurines represents either armed men with the round hoplite shield, or women dressed in long chitons, winged or carrying wreaths in their hands. [344]

The identity of the ex-voto figurines offered to both the deities poses the problem of the relations between the two cults. It is impossible to assume that the cult of Artemis Orthia was specifically Spartan, imported by the Dorians and little by little replacing the one of Helen in the Menelaion. The number of ex- voto figurines found on the sites of the two cults is witness to their coexistence and their parallel vitality during the whole of the Archaic period. By substituting a structural explanation for the historical one, we could infer that the rituals for Helen in the Platanistas and at Therapnai extended the process of training the adolescents begun at the altar of Orthia. However, this continuity can only be seen through the rites of passage of youths: the cult of Helen showed itself to be essentially for women, while the cult of Orthia is difficult to define as a ritual probably for young girls. The only clue to the transition from the female cult of Orthia to that of Helen is furnished by Helen herself who was dancing in the sanctuary of Artemis when Theseus carried her off. [345] It is true that her young age offers chronological continuity, with adolescence in the cult at the Platanistas and adulthood at Therapnai, but the clue is too tenuous for certainty. Once again, our lack of information stymies us.

The new papyrus fragments of Alcman show us the poet being active at the Spartan festivals, including the cult of Helen at Therapnai. The fragment of a hypomnema already mentioned comments on a poem in which Menelaus, Helen, and the Dioskouroi were honored on the site of Therapnai. Another fragment from an indirect source speaks of the “holy sanctuary of well-fortified Therapnai.” [346] This description was handed down by grammarians and quoted at the same time as the beginning of a song which perhaps belonged to the same poem and in which the chorus, or the poet, asks the Muse to sing (ἄρχε) for the maidens (παρσένοις) a new song. Here the feature ‘to begin,’ characteristic of the role of the Muses, is apparent. However, the connection between the two quotations is based only on their mention in the same context and on their corresponding metrical structure, so the interpreter has no authority to conclude, in spite of the temptation, the presence in the Menelaion of a chorus of maidens singing a partheneion composed by Alcman.

3.2.5. The Lacedaemonian cycle of initiation

In this overview of Spartan rituals in which choruses of young girls play a role, most of the ritual practices I have examined are part of a formative process in the transition of future members of the city from childhood to adulthood. I have used the universal form of tribal initiation rites as a comparison with Laconian rituals, and some readers may consider this a mechanical application. Is this not a trick of interpretation? Is this procedure not basically a reductive analysis?

Since the rituals chosen depended on the presence of choral dances performed by girls or women, and since it was established that choral activity was essentially adolescent, it is natural that our attention has been focused on festivals preparing for or consecrating the transition of adolescents to maturity. There are, however, two great Spartan festivals which I have had to omit in order to remain faithful to the criteria chosen at the beginning (presence of choral dances by young girls), namely the Karneia and the Gymnopaidiai.

Here again, the omission is not haphazard. The Karneia, celebrated at the end of our August, was dedicated to Apollo Karneios. The rites lasted for nine days. We know at least three of them: a footrace for boys (νέοι) called σταφυλοδρόμοι, the grape-harvest runners; a ritual feast celebrated by adults (ἄνδρες) representing phratries divided into groups of nine in nine tents and acting as a μίμημα, an imitation, of the military agoge; musical competitions, the first winner of which was Terpander, and gymnastics competitions. [347] This festival was organized by young, not yet married citizens (ἄγαμοι). It was thus aimed at young men who had completed the different stages of the agoge and were due to be integrated into adult life by performing military service. The fact that Apollo Karneios had a sanctuary in the same place as Artemis Hegemone, near the Dromos, in the neighborhood of the temple of the Dioskouroi and the Graces, is significant: the Dromos, we should remember, was used as a running track for the neoi, the young adults. [348] The Kameia concerned young soldiers. Where the Hyakinthia mark the end of initiation with the presenting of the new initiates to the city, the Karneia, as Brelich points out, represent the integration of initiates to the adult life of the soldier and citizen. Girls probably have no place here. [349]

As for the Gymnopaidiai, the answer is less clear. According to the different sources we have, the choral performances in them were by ephebes (ἔφηβοι), children/adolescents and adults (παῖδες, ἄνδρες), children/adolescents, adults and old men (παῖδες, ἀκμάζοντες, γέροντες). [350] The evidence for the participation of children and adults [351] is given by the Laconian historian Sosibios, who is probably more trustworthy than the numerous later sources who see in the Gymnopaidiai a ritual only for children and adolescents. Their interpretation, which tends to be etymological, may have been influenced by the name of the ritual. In honor of Apollo, the choruses performed songs composed by the great poets of Archaic Sparta such as Thaletas, Alcman or Dionysodotos. Their dances took place on the agora, in the area called the Choros, the Dance Area, opposite the statues of Pythian Apollo, Artemis, and Leto.These choral performances certainly had a military significance, since a tradition began after the battle of Thyrea in 544 of singing paeans in honor of the fallen warriors. Brelich has pointed out the ritual element taken on by the constant struggle of the Spartans against the Argives for the possession of the frontier territory of Thyreatis. [352] The connection of the Gymnopaidiai with a war that was ritual and traditional rather than fortuitous suggests that this festival had its origins in the military training of citizen-soldiers. On the other hand, the analogy of this festival with the Arcadian Apodeixeis and the Endymatia of Argos, during which young citizens discarded their adolescent clothes to put on the costume of an adult, might suggest integration into the soldier’s life of the recently inducted ephebes, a function similar to that of the Karneia. [353] Whatever role this ritual played, the elements I have mentioned have nothing to do with female adolescence. The presence of adult men, let alone old men, makes this a festival that goes far beyond the integration of future soldiers into adult life, and probably Apollo’s presence there has more to do with his propitiatory function before a military campaign than with his role as protector of children and adolescents.

Other rites are only partially known, although they may have been important in ancient Sparta, for example the sacrifice offered by the king to Zeus Agetor before the departure of a military expedition, rites of a political character in honor of Athena Khalkioikos, or the festival celebrated for Poseidon at Cape Tainaros. [354] It is clear that Lacedaemonian religion was not focused entirely on the process of adolescent initiation. Nevertheless, those rites certainly impressed the ancients by their strangeness and resulted in a relative unevenness in our information about Laconian festivals.

An attempt to organize the rites examined here into a cult calendar leads to a relatively coherent pattern, but because of the often hypothetical interpretations I have given of these festivals, my synthesis can only be conjectural.

The reconstruction of rites marking the initiation cycle for Spartan girls begins with a large question mark. It would be tempting to place the start of the cycle in the rites dedicated to Artemis Orthia, and most of the evidence about this cult, generally spotty and contradictory as it is, indeed points in the direction of prepuberty; however, it is impossible to be more specific.

On the other hand, the two parallel cults of Artemis Limnatis and Artemis Karyatis very probably mark the beginning of puberty for young adolescents. By being situated on the confines of Spartan territory, these sanctuaries were all designed for the period of separation seen in all tribal initiation rites. The myths associated with these rites confirm this hypothesis to the extent that, with the refusal of adult sexuality and the onset of the moment of annihilation and death, they mark the separation of pubescent girls from childhood and their entry into a period of chaos and denial of both the old order and the new order of adulthood.

The rituals of the Hyakinthia, in contrast, mark the presentation to the citizens of the boys and girls who are the principal element, probably signifying the end of seclusion and tribal initiation. At any rate, this process seems to follow the sequence ‘mourning—joy’ which constitutes the structure of the festival. The completed process of initiation must be filled out with rites consecrating the integration of the initiates into the adult world. This is the role played by the cults of the Leukippides and Helen. It is significant that in Aristophanes, as in Euripides, these heroines are associated with Apollo Amyklaian, deity of adolescence, and with Athena Khalkioikos and the Tyndaridai, who embody the qualities of young citizens. Also, by their contact with the rites of Dionysus and their acquisition of the quality of beauty, a sign of the physical maturity characteristic of the cults of the Leukippides and Helen, young girls enter into possession of the features connected in Greece with the gender representation of the adult woman. These two cults thus stand at the axis between the end of initiation and the entry into the world of adults.

With the Tithenidia, the cycle, as it were, closes, since some of the girls, now adult, reappear as nurses of the newly born, future citizens. The closing of the cycle would be perfect if the nurses then brought their baby girls into the sanctuary of Artemis Korythalia; however there is no mention of this.

But the picture still lacks the ritual celebration of the moment of marriage. Under this aspect, the festivals celebrated in honor of the Leukippides and Helen play only a partial role for girls, in comparison with the boys’ establishment as soldiers in the Karneia and perhaps the Gymnopaidiai. For girls, marriage seems to correspond exactly to boys’ military service for the city. [355]

The presence to the north of the Spartan Acropolis of an ancient xoanon of Aphrodite-Hera, to which mothers made sacrifice when their daughters married, attests to the existence in Sparta of cult rites linked to the marriage ceremony. [356] It is tempting to bring this information together with the fragment of Alcman in which a girl or young woman offers a deity, identified from another text as a probable Hera, a wreath of ἐλίχρυσος and κύπειρος. [357] For the moment, it will suffice to remark that this rite has not been analyzed yet, for the reason that none of the sources associates it with choral dances. Nevertheless, it is the sign of the existence of ritual practices performed in relationship to the marriage ceremony, which, in ancient Greece, as now, had a private and above all occasional character preventing it from being included in a calendar of rituals. In Sparta, the secret abduction of the young bride withdrew the ceremony from the eyes of the public, where it generally resided in Greece.

My brief attempt at a synthesis shows the possibility, at least hypothetical, of reconstructing an initiation cycle for the future brides of the citizens. I shall now analyze its institutional forms and examine the education that adolescent girls received in Sparta.

Footnotes

[ back ] 1. Η. Ap. 186ff.; Bacch. 17.100ff.; H. Ven. 259ff.

[ back ] 2. Pind. P. 10.31ff., see also Bacch. 3.58ff., with the bibliography given by Page, Sappho, p. 251 n. 1, and by Maehler, Bakchylides II, pp. 51f.

[ back ] 3. Hom. Il. 1.601ff.; Eur. IA 1036ff.

[ back ] 4. Aes. Prov. 9.

[ back ] 5. Eur. Tr. 551ff.: the chorus is made up of young girls since Hecuba calls them κόραι (line 446); IA 1467ff.; Hec. 462ff.: the chorus consists of women rather than girls (lines 475 and 657), but Talthybios calls them Τρῳάδες κόραι (line 485); on the Deliades, see below pp. 104ff.; IT 1143ff.; Hel. 375ff.: the chorus is formed by young captive girls (Ἑλλανίδες κόραι, line 193); the legend of the daughter of Merops has no parallel (see H. Kruse, RE 15 [1931], s.v. Merops [1], col. 1066), but Ant. Lib. 15 reports the metamorphosis that the grandchildren of Merops had to undergo, the result of an insult to Artemis and Athena: see below n. 128.

[ back ] 6. Artemis is called in turn θυγάτηρ, κόρη/κούρα, παῖς, παρθένος and τέκνον of Zeus or Leto: Roscher, Suppl. 1, pp. 46ff.

[ back ] 7. Hom. Il. 16.179ff.: on virginal unions, see above p. 64; H. Ven. 117ff. and 133; on Hermes as abductor, see W. H. Roscher in Roscher, s.v. Hermes, col. 2372.

[ back ] 8. Eur. Ηel. 1310ff.; H. Cer. 5ff. and 417ff.; for the participation of Artemis and Athena in the chorus of the Oceanides, see Ν. J. Richardson, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Oxford 1974, pp. 290ff., with the remarks of pp. 140ff. on this chorus.

[ back ] 9. Paus. 6.22.9, see 5.14.6; on the other versions of the legend, see H. W. Stoll in Roscher, s.v. Alpheios, Farnell, Cults, pp. 428 and 558f., and P. Ellinger, La légende nationale phocidienne, Paris 1993, pp. 40ff.; this aition can also be found, among others, in Telesilla, fr. 717 P, in a fragment that could well be taken from a partheneion (see Choeurs II, p. 174 n. 70). On other scenes of abduction and rape, see Zeitlin, “Rape,” pp. 127ff., and G. Doblofer, Vergewaltigung in der Antike, Stuttgart-Leipzig 1994, pp. 83ff.

[ back ] 10. Xen. Eph. 1.2ff., Ant. Lib. 1, Aristaenet. 1.10, see Call. Aet. III, fr. 67ff. Pf.; see below pp. 112ff.

[ back ] 11. Plut. Mor. 249de.

[ back ] 12. Ael. NA 12.9 = Autocr. fr. 1 KA; doubtless the ἐξαίρουσα of line 8 should be understood as ἐξαίρουσαι; on the movement executed by the girls, see the fragments 30 and 148 KA of Aristophanes quoted in the same passage of Aelian: Diels, Hermes 31, p. 362, likens this festival to the one for Artemis Orthia in Sparta, and sees indications of a lascivious dance; in my opinion, Autocrates’ description suggests, on the contrary, order and restraint. On the whole complex of the Ephesia, see Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 243ff., and R. Fleischer, Artemis von Ephesos und verwandte Kultstatuen, Leiden 1973, pp. 18ff.

[ back ] 13. Call. Dian. 237ff., with the commentary of Bornmann, Dian., pp. 114ff.; see also Dion. Per. 828ff. and Hyg. Fab. 223.1 and 225.2; on the role of the Amazons and Hippo as a probable hypostasis of Artemis, see Cahen, op. cit. p. 54 n. 136, pp. 143ff., C. Picard, Ephese et Claros, Paris 1922, pp. 431ff., and by the same author, “L’Ephesia, les Amazones et les abeilles,” REA 42, 1940, pp. 270-284. For the iconography of armed dances by women, see M.-H. Delavaud-Roux, Les danses armées en Grèce antique, Aix-en-Provence 1993, pp. 112ff., and the forthcoming study by P. Ceccarelli.

[ back ] 14. EM 252.11ff.; on the ritual of Artemis Daitis, see Picard, op. cit. n. 13, pp. 312ff., with an interpretation often difficult to follow; a more interesting interpretation by R. Heberdey, “Δαιτίς. Ein Beitrag zum ephesischen Artemiskult,” J Œ AI 7, 1904, pp. 210-215 with Beiblatt col. 44, who, in connection with the publication of an inscription of the first century B.C., in which there is mentioned an offering of salt to Artemis, recalls the ritual of the Plynteria at Athens; on these rites of the bathing of statues of feihale divinities, see below p. 129 with n. 117. On the choral connotations of the term παιδιά, see above pp. 87f.

[ back ] 15. Xen. Eph. 1.2.2ff.; on the participation of women in the festival of Artemis at Ephesos, see Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 4.25.4f. and Thuc. 3.104.3, with the critical comment of S. Hornblower, “Thucydides, the Panionian Festival, and the Ephesia (III.104),” Historia 31, 1982, pp. 241-253.

[ back ] 16. Aristoph. Nub. 599f.; Picard, op. cit. n. 13, pp. 182ff., sees in the girls of the Lydians a sign of the existence in the classical period of Ephesian priestesses attested later in connection with the cult of Artemis.

[ back ] 17. Ion 19 F 22 SK (Λυδαὶ ψάλτριαι, παλαιθέτων ὕμνων ἀοιδοί), see also Diog. Ath. 45 F 1.6ff. SK (κλύω δὲ Λυδὰς Βακτρίας τε παρθένους … Ἄρτεμιν σέβειν ψαλμοῖς); the comparison of the chorus of the Deliades with that of Ephesos has been made by Allen, Hymns, p. 224; for a very hypothetical parallel in Sardis: Dion. Per. 839ff. On the Deliades, see below pp. 105ff. On probable iconographical depictions of the chorus of Ephesos, see Ghali-Kahil, art. cit. n. 28, p. 28.

[ back ] 18. Paus. 1.26.4, see also 3.18.9; CIG 2651b 26, see W. Drexler in Roscher, s.v. Leukophrys, coll. 2009f.; on the importance of this sanctuary, see Strab. 14.1.40; Magnesia on the Meander was, according to Strab. 14.1.11, a Cretan and Thessalian colony.

[ back ] 19. W. Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum II, Lepizig ³1917, decrees 557, 559, 562 and 695. Commentary in O. Kern, “Magnetische Studien,” Hermes 36, 1901, pp. 491-515, and Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 248ff.

[ back ] 20. On Artemis of Ephesos as a polis divinity, see Picard, op. cit. n. 13, p. 367; on other common features of the two goddesses, Farnell, Cults II, p. 483, and T. Schreiber in Roscher, s.v. Artemis, col. 593.

[ back ] 21. 695.4ff., with the commentary of Dittenberger ad loc.; on the epiphany of the goddess: 557.5f.

[ back ] 22. On the Thargelia, see below pp. 126f. and n. 110.

[ back ] 23. 562.19f.: see 558.19 (ἀγῶνα ἰσοπύθιον); 695, 4ff. As with many other celebrations in Greece, the festival of the Delia, renewed by the Athenians and celebrated in honor of Apollo, also included competitions in music, gymnastics, and horsemanship: Thuc. 3.104.3 and 6, see below p. 105.

[ back ] 24. 695.28ff.; the term νεωκόρος often refers to a priest of Artemis: see LSJ s.v. this word; on his function, Kern, art. cit. n. 19, p. 511.

[ back ] 25. Hdt. 3.48; the existence of a cult of Artemis at Samos is confirmed in other texts: see Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 240, and G. Dunst, “Zur samischen Artemis,” Chiron 2, 1972, pp. 191-200; the latter gives the transcription of a hymn addressed to Artemis Soteira: this is exactly the epiclesis expected, considering the underlying myth of the cult. The hymn contains an invocation to Artemis, then to Apollo; the inscription presenting the hymn dates from the second/third century A.D.

[ back ] 26. Cf. H. Stein, Herodotos II. 1, Berlin ⁴1893, p. 55, and D. Asheri, Erodoto. Le Storie III, Milano 1990, p. 267; this date corresponds more or less to the ones tradition attributes to the life of Periander: 627 to 584 or 590 to 550. In a comprehensive new reading of this founding legend, Sourvinou-Inwood, Greek Culture, pp. 246ff., has now shown that the aetiological story and the ritual have an initiatory character. On the values of the sesame, see Calame, Alcman, pp. 372ff.

[ back ] 27. Brelich, Paides, pp. 240ff., and now Brulé, La fille d’Athènes, pp. 179ff., with the complementary remarks in “Retour à Brauron: repentirs, avancées, mises au point,” DHA 15, 1990, pp. 61-90; the premarital function of this festival was acknowledged already in antiquity: see Crater, FGrHist. 342 F 9 (πρὸ γάμων); see also I. D. Kontis, “ἈΡΤΕΜΙΣ ΒΡΑΥΡΩΝΙΑ,” AD 22A, 1967, pp. 156-206; W. Sale, “The Temple-Legends of the Arkteia,” RhM 118, 1975, pp. 265-284; S. Montepaone, “L’ ἀρκτεία à Brauron,” SSR 3, 1979, pp. 343-364; R. Hamilton, “Alkman and the Athenian arkteia,” Hesperia 58, 1989, pp. 449-472, with the response of C. Sourvinou-Inwood, “Ancient Rites and Modern Constructs: On the Brauronian Bears again,” BICLS 37, 1990, pp. 1-14; see also P. Perlman, “Acting the She-Bear for Artemis,” Arethusa 22, 1989, pp. 111-133, and Lonsdale, Dance, pp. 171ff., particularly on the meaning of the bear.

[ back ] 28. Pyxis Brauron A3, see L. Ghali-Kahil, “Quelques vases du sanctuaire d’Artémis à Brauron,” AK Beiheft 1, 1963, pp. 5-29 (pp. 6f.), with pl. I, 4: I have Claude Bérard to thank for this reference. On the connection between the rite of Brauron and the sacrifice of Iphigenia, see sch. Aristoph. Lys. 645 with the important commentary of Lloyd-Jones, JHS 103, pp. 89ff., and the remarks of Dowden, Death and the Maiden, London 1989, pp. 9ff. Although the sources I use always speak of παρθένοι and κόραι in the cult of Brauron, they give age ten for the “bears”: on this contradiction see above, pp. 28f. with n. 38; on the question of the age of the young girls, see Brulé, La fille d’Athènes, pp. 344ff.

[ back ] 29. Cf., among others, Brauron A 25 and 26 with the notes of L. Ghali-Kahil, “Autour de l’ Artémis attique,” AK 8, 1965, pp. 20-33 with pll. 7.3 and 5; see also Brauron krateriskoi frr. 8 and 9 (pll. 8.4 and 5) and fr. Brauron (168 Crowhurst): see Crowhurst, Lyric, p. 210, who speaks of young girls; see similarly P. Truitt, “Attic White Ground Pyxis and Phiale ca. 450 B.C.,” BMusB 67, 1969, pp. 72-92 (pp. 86ff. with pl. 23); see also the statuettes cited by Kontis, art. cit. n. 27, p. 190, and the new frr. of three krateriskoi found at Athens and published by L. Kahil, “L’Artémis de Brauron: rites et mystères,” AK 20, 1977, pp. 86-98; coming probably from the Brauronion on the Acropolis and dating from the end of the fifth century, these fragments show groups of young girls, nude or with a short chiton, performing a race with a palm tree in the background; see also Brulé, La fille d’Ath è nes, pp. 251ff. (with pll. 31ff.), Arrigoni in Le donne in Grecia, pp. 101ff. (with pll. 17f.); Sourvinou-Inwood, Girls’ Transitions, pp. 39ff.; and E. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens, New York 1985, pp. 310ff. (with pll. 275ff.).

[ back ] 30. Sch. A Hom. Il. 1.594 = Philoch. FGrHist. 328 F 101; Plut. Mor. 247a, with comment by Brelich, Paides, p. 241.

[ back ] 31. Bacch. 13.83ff.: see above pp. 86f. On Artemis as goddess of rivers, thus as Nymph, see Schreiber, art. cit. n. 20, col. 559ff.: on Aegina, see W. H. Roscher in Roscher, s.v. Aigina. To the sources cited, add Pind. fr. 52f. 132ff. M: (Zeus) ἀν̣ε̣ρέψατο παρθένον Αἴγιναν. It is unlikely that this ritual in honor of Aegina can be compared with the feasts of Hera on the island of Aegina on the model of the Argive festival: Pind. P. 8.79, sch. ad loc. (II, p. 217 Drachmann), and Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 46. It seems that the three archaic representations of female choruses found at Aegina, one of which (A 1) shows a chorus of nine women led by a pipe player and a citharist, should be related to the Heraia: Aegina Mus. 1750 (128 Tölle, 1 Wegner), Berlin 31573 A 1 (13 Crowhurst, 126 Tölle, 69 Wegner) and A 48 (129 Tölle, 70 Wegner), see A 41 and 49 (24 and 25 Crowhurst). See also the choral dances performed by the young Athenian girls for the Hyacinthides, the young daughters of Erechtheus sacrificed for the salvation of the city: see below pp. 180f.

[ back ] 32. Theogn. 1287ff.; on the figure of Atalanta, see M. Detienne, Dionysus mis à mort, Paris 1977, pp. 82ff., Sourvinou-Inwood, Greek Culture, pp. 85ff., and Calame, I Greci e l’Eros, pp. 18f.

[ back ] 33. On Artemis kourotrophos, the goddess who leads children up to the point of marriage, see Schreiber, art. cit. n. 20, coll. 569f. and 574, and Farnell, Cults II, p. 577; the parallels given by Schreiber show that Artemis is the protector of adolescents far more than of the newborn; as to her image as Hochzeiterin, it is limited to the period immediately preceding marriage: see on this the prudent remarks of Nilsson, Religion I, pp. 493ff., and of Burkert, Religion, pp. 235f. On the meaning of κουροτρόφος, see Chantraine, Dict. étym., s.v. κόρος (2); Artemis shares this quality with other goddesses: see Burkert, Religion, pp. 285 and 368.

[ back ] 34. Cf. Brelich, Paides, pp. 263 and 291, and Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 77f.

[ back ] 35. Pind. fr. 52b. 96ff. Μ: Δᾶλ]ον ἀν’ εὔοδμον is Housman’s conjecture based on Call. Del. 300: the choral dances of the girls of Delphi are mentioned again in fr. 52f. 16ff. M.

[ back ] 36. For the whole complex of the Delphic ceremony of the Ste-/Septerion, see (after Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 150ff., Farnell, Cults IV, pp. 293ff., and Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 388ff.) the more recent discussions of J. Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and its Origin, Berkeley-Los Angeles 1959, pp. 453ff.; Brelich, Paides, pp. 387ff.; and Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 144ff. On the Daphnephoria of Thebes see above pp. 59f., with the comparison proposed by S. Grandolini, “Canto processionale e culto nell’antica Grecia,” in Cassio and Cerri, L’inno, pp. 125-140.

[ back ] 37. Ael. VH 3.1 = Theopomp. FGrHist. 117 F 80 and Arg. Pind. Pyth. (II, p. 4 Drachmann), see also Ephor. FGrHist. 70 F 31b and Plut. Mor. 293c. A connection between the Delphic ritual and the Theban was denied by Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 164, but reaffirmed by Sbordone, Athenaeum 28, pp. 36ff., and Brelich, Paides, pp. 413ff. and 421ff.; on the stages of Apollo’s journey from Tempe to Delphi, see Farnell, Cults IV, p. 124.

[ back ] 38. On this, see C. Bérard, “Architecture érétrienne et mythologie delphique: le Daphnéphoréion,” AK 14, 1971, pp. 59-73.

[ back ] 39. Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 165 with pp. 116ff. and 182ff.; on the Thargelia and the eiresione, see below n. 110; on the cult of Artemis Korythalia, see below p. 169; Farnell, Cults, IV, pp. 284ff.; Sbordone, Athenaeum 28, pp. 42ff., relates the Daphnephoria to the festival of the Pyanopsia (see below pp. 125ff.); he sees in it a rite of thanksgiving. The interval of eight years between one Daphnephoria and the next one corresponds to the complete cycle of the sun and moon, perhaps represented symbolically in the kopo carried by the nearest relation of the daphnephoros: on this see A. Furtwängler in Roscher, s.v. Apollon, coll. 423ff., with the prudent remarks and the complementary references given by Schachter, Cults of Boeotia I, p. 84 n. 2. The Daphnephoria is in any case something more than a simple annual ritual of the May Tree.

[ back ] 40. Cf. E.F. Bischoff, RE 7 (1910), s.v. Galaxion (2), and O. Jessen, ibid., s.v. Galaxios (1). In the text of Photius Γαλαξίου has to be read rather than Χαλαζίου, in spite of Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 164 n. 3, and Severyns, Recherches I, p. 224 and II, pp. 230f.; see U. von Wilamowitz, “Lesefruchte,” Hermes 34, 1899, pp. 203-230 (pp. 223f., reprinted in his Kleine Schriften IV, Berlin 1962, pp. 64ff.), and Schachter, Cults of Boeotia I, pp. 48f., with Pind. fr. 104b Μ = PMG fr. adesp. 997 Ρ and the remarks of E.D. Francis, “Pindar Fr. 104b Snell,” CQ 66, 1972, pp. 33-41, who has serious doubts about the attribution of this fragment to Pindar. It has to be remembered that the Athenians celebrated during the spring a “milk ritual” called Galaxia: see Robertson, Festivals, pp. 29f.

[ back ] 41. Cf. Furtwängler, art. cit. n. 39, coll. 433f. and 441f., and Burkert, Religion, pp. 228f. On the meaning of the procession of the Stepterion, see Blech, Kranz, pp. 137f. and 221ff.

[ back ] 42. Procl. ap. Phot. Bibl. 321b 30; Proclus uses the term ἱκετεῖαι, in addition to that of τάξις, to describe the paean to Apollo in contrast to the Dionysiac dithyramb: according to Proclus, the paean was expressly written to exorcise misfortune: ibid. 320b 24ff.; see Kappel, Paian, pp. 44ff.

[ back ] 43. On a similar interpretation of the flight to Tempe, see Brelich, Paides, pp. 426f.; on the Theban Daphnephoria, see ibid., pp. 418f.

[ back ] 44. Paus. 9.10.2, sch. A.R. 1.537 (p. 46 Wendel), see H. W. Stoll in Roscher, s.v. Ismenios (1). On the situation of the sanctuary of Apollo Ismenios, near Thebes, see Schachter, Cults of Boeotia I, pp. 80f.

[ back ] 45. Η. Ap. 146ff.; on the role of mimesis in this choral song, see Miller, Delos, pp. 57ff., and Nagy, Pindar’s Homer, pp. 43ff. and 375ff.

[ back ] 46. Thuc. 3.104.1ff. and 1.8.1, Hdt. 1.64.2, Plut. Nic. 3.5ff.; on the reasons for taking over the Ionian ritual, see A. W. Gomme, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides II, Oxford 1956, p. 414; Strabo, 10.5.2, says in his description of Delos that the inhabitants of the Cyclades organized theoria and public sacrifices there (πέμπουσαι δημοσίᾳ θεωρούς τε καὶ θυσίας); Strabo also mentions choruses, saying they are made up of young girls (χοροὺς παρθένων): perhaps he is confusing the chorus of the Deliades proper and the choruses, the composition of which we do not know, sent by neighboring cities. The political meaning of the purification of Delos by the Athenians and of the reinstitution of the Delia are explained by S. Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides I, Oxford 1991, pp. 517ff. For the circumstances of the composition and performance of the Η. Αp., see W. Burkert, “Kynaithos, Polykrates, and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo,” in G. Bowersock et al. (edd.), Arktouros, Berlin 1979, pp. 53-67; Miller, Delos, pp. 1ff. and 111ff.; and Aloni, L’aedo, pp. 35ff. and 91ff.

[ back ] 47. Call. Del. 278ff.: other sources given by P. Stengel, RE 4 (1901), s.v. Delia (3), and by Mineur, Call. Del., pp. 231f.; see also H. Galet de Santerre, Délos primitive et archaïque, Paris 1958, pp. 239ff., and Bruneau, Cultes de Delos, pp. 37ff. (on the history of the festival); Stengel, interpreting Plat. Phaed. 58ab, improperly relates the Delia to the myth of Theseus returning to Athens. Theseus was celebrated at Delos, certainly, but during the festival of the Aphrodisia: see Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 380ff., Calame, Thésée, pp. 158ff., and below pp. 123ff.

[ back ] 48. Artemis had the epiclesis of Oupis in the cult celebrated by the Amazons in Ephesos: Call. Dian. 204 and 240 (see above, pp. 93f.); O. Crusius in Roscher, s.v. Hyperboreer, col. 2813; Farnell, Cults II, pp. 487f.; and O. Höfer in Roscher, s.v. Opis (1), (2), and (3); without any doubt, the name Loxo refers to Loxias, cult name of Apollo: see R. Ganszyniec, RE 13 (1972), s.v. Loxo; Hekaergos/erge is an epiclesis of Apollo as well as of Artemis: see H. W. Stoll in Roscher, s.v. Hekaerge (2) and Hekaergos (1), and also L. Radermacher, “Die Madchen aus dem Hyperboreer Land,” RhM 93, 1950, pp. 325-329. The Hyperboreans are regularly associated with the cult of Apollo and Artemis; they are generally present in the founding legends of Apollonian rites: Crusius, art. cit., coll. 2831f.; other bibliographical references on the Hyperboreans in A. Corcella and S. M. Medaglia, Erodoto. Le storie IV, Milano 1993, pp. 258f.

[ back ] 49. Hdt. 4.33ff.; on identifying τοῖσι θεοῖσιν with Eileithyia and Leto, see P.E. Legrand, “Herodotea,” REA 40, 1938, pp. 225-234 (pp. 230f.); if we accept with Stein, op. cit. n. 26, II. 2, p. 38, an identification with Artemis and Apollo, we must admit that the version that introduces Arge and Opis represents another legend unrelated to the birth of Apollo at Delos: the Delian Eileithyia also comes from the country of the Hyperboreans; she is the object of a cult at Delos during which the people of Delos make sacrifices and sing in her honor a hymn composed by Olen: Paus. 1.18.5, see also 8.21.3. On the problem of the two groups of young women mentioned by Herodotus, see W. Sale, “The Hyperborean Maidens on Delos,” HThR 54, 1961, pp. 75-89, and Bruneau, Cultes de Délos, pp. 45ff.

[ back ] 50. Cf. also Paus. 1.43.4 (αἱ θυγατέρες aἱ Δηλίων).

[ back ] 51. On the cult of Hippolytus at Troizen, see Eur. Hipp. 1423ff.; Paus. 2.32.1ff., with commentary by W. Fauth, “Hippolytos und Phaidra,” AAWM 1958, 9 and 1959, 8 (pp. 389ff.), and that of W. S. Barrett, Euripides. Hippolytos, Oxford 1964, pp. 3f.; on Hippolyus, see below pp. 241f. On the Athenian rite, see Deubner, Att. Feste, pp. 232ff.; Jeanmaire, Couroi, p. 258; and Vidal-Naquet, Le chasseur noir, pp. 147f. and 190. On a similar custom at Megara, see Paus. 1.43.4; other parallels in Burkert, Homo Necans, p. 75 n. 20. According to Poll. 3.38, who emphasizes the premarital character of this rite mainly for girls, Artemis was generally the object of the consecration, see also Hsch. s.v. κουρεῶτις and γάμων ἔθη (Κ 3843 and Γ 133 Latte; see also the dedicatory epigrams AP 6.276-279, which show that Artemis received the hair of the girls and Apollo that of the boys (on Apollo ἀκερσεκόμης, see Hom. Il. 20.39, Η. Ap. 134, Pind. P. 3.14, etc.). On this rite in general, see Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 257f. and 379f.; Nilsson, Religion I, pp. 238 and 493; von Gonzenbach, op. cit. p. 11 n. 26, pp. 95ff.; Brelich, Eroi, pp. 126f.; Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 74f., who includes this rite in the larger category of premarital sacrifices, and Dowden, Death, pp. 2f. and passim.

[ back ] 52. On the location of this tomb, see C. Picard and L. Replat, “Recherches sur la topographie du Hiéron délien,” BCH 48, 1924, pp. 217-263 (pp. 247ff.); Gallet de Santerre, op. cit. n. 47, pp. 165ff. and 217f.; and P. Bruneau and J. Ducat, Guide de Délos, Paris ³1983, pp. 149f.; for the probable tomb of Opis and Arge, see ibid., pp. 144f.

[ back ] 53. Hdt. 4.35; this hymn cannot be identified with the nomos of Olen mentioned by Call. Del. 304f., as U. von Wilamowitz thinks. Die Ilias und Homer, Berlin 1916, p. 451; that nomos was included in the Aphrodisia and not the Delia: see above p. 57.

[ back ] 54. On the archaeological identification of the place where the Delia were held, see E. Bethe, “Das archaische Delos und sein Letoon,” Hermes 72, 1937, pp. 190- 201.

[ back ] 55. Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 145ff. See also Farnell, Cults IV, pp. 288ff.; Allen, Hymns, p. 195 n. 1; Gallet de Santerre, op. cit. n. 47, pp. 246ff.; and Bruneau, Cultes de Délos, pp. 82ff. The decisive evidence is given by Dion. Per. 526ff. who speaks of choruses sent to Delos on the occasion of the first day of spring.

[ back ] 56. In the Η. Ap. 169, they are invoked under the name κοῦραι; but Thuc. 3.104.5 uses the expression τὸν Δηλιακὸν χορὸν τῶν γυναικῶν.

[ back ] 57. Cf. Gomme, op. cit. n. 46, p. 414.

[ back ] 58. Plat. Phaed. 58ac, see also Xen. Mem. 4.8.2; on the link between the Delia and the legend of Theseus, see Calame, Thésée, pp. 159ff.; on the Aphrodisia at Delos, see below pp. 123ff.

[ back ] 59. Call. Del. 300ff., Dion. Per. 526, and Luc. Salt. 16; see Mineur, Call. Del. pp. 235f.

[ back ] 60. Call. Del. 249ff. and 275ff.; see Mineur, Call. Del., pp. 206ff. and 222ff.

[ back ] 61. On the courotrophic aspects of Apollo, see Furtwängler, art. cit. n. 39, col. 442f., Willetts, Cults, pp. 174f., and Brelich, Paides, pp. 435f.

[ back ] 62. Eur. HF 687ff.; on the nature of the reference made to the Deliades by the chorus of old men, see Wilamowitz, Herakles II, pp. 140ff.; on the meaning of εὔπαις, ibid. III, p. 158; Hec. 462ff.; see also IT 1234ff.

[ back ] 63. T. Homolle, “Comptes et inventaires des temples déliens en l’année 279,” BCH 14, 1890, pp. 389-511 (pp. 500ff.), and Bruneau, Cultes de Délos, pp. 36f.; see Latte, Salt., pp. 67f. The inscription commented on by Homolle speaks of a χορὸς τῶν γυναικῶν, whereas, as we have seen, the literary tradition makes the Deliades young girls.

[ back ] 64. Call. Del. 255ff.; see Mineur, Call. Del., pp. 211f.; Latte, Salt., p. 83; and above p. 75 n. 198.

[ back ] 65. Mykonos Μus. Β 4208 (70 Crowhurst [who gives the reference of Delos 4.208], 131 Tölle, 115 Wegner), pl. in C. Dugas and C. Rhomaios, Délos XV: Les vases préhelléniques et géometriques, Paris 1934, pll. XLIII and LVI; on a sacrifice of the Deliades made in honor of Artemis Britomartis, see Ath. 8.335ab, and Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 210.

[ back ] 66. On the relationship of Artemis and Apollo, see Schreiber, art. cit. n. 20, coll. 576ff.; on their cult relationship, ibid., coll. 582ff. Like Artemis, but less often, Apollo is called variously γόνος, κοῦρος, παῖς, υἱός of Zeus and Leto, as well as Λατοΐδης; Roscher, Suppl. 1, pp. 22ff.; for the iconography of Artemis and Apollo, see now L. Kahil in LIMC II, s.v. Artemis, pp. 697f. and 703ff.

[ back ] 67. Paus. 2.7.7: see Hitzig-Bluemmer, Paus. I, pp. 523f., Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 171 f.; Brelich, Paides, pp. 377ff.; and D. Musti and M. Torelli, Pausania. Guida della Grecia II, Milano 1986, pp. 242ff.

[ back ] 68. Cf. above pp. 16f.; the distribution of the modes of action between Athena and Poseidon has been studied by M. Detienne and J.P. Vernant, Les ruses d’intelligence: La métis des Grecs, Paris 1974. For a similar rivalry between Artemis and Apollo in the rituals of Athenian adolescents, see Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 257ff.

[ back ] 69. Ant. Lib. 1; see above, p. 93, for Plutarch’s story of the legendary fidelity of the young girls of Ceos. The fact that the Ceans had a banquet hall within the Artemision at Delos, near the tomb of the Hyperborean virgins (Hdt. 4.35), could possibly be connected with their exemplary conduct in adolescence; there is anyhow convergent information on the Ceans regarding female kourotrophia.

[ back ] 70. On the festival of Apollo at Karthaia, see Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 160 n. 1, and Farnell, Cults IV, pp. 444f.; on the sanctuary of Artemis at Ioulis, see Papathomopoulos, Ant. Lib., p. 72.

[ back ] 71. In n. 48 above, I said that Hekaerge is a frequent epiclesis of Artemis, particularly in the Cyclades; see Papathomopoulo, Ant. Lib., p. 73, correcting H. W. Stoll’s error in Roscher, s.v. Hekaerge (3), who saw in Ktesylla Hekaerge an hypostasis of Aphrodite.

[ back ] 72. Ov. Her. 20 and 21; Call. Aet. III, fr. 67ff. Pf.; Aristaenet. 1.10, see W. H. Roscher in Roscher, s.v. Akontios (2); on the probable presence of female choruses during the Artemisia at Delos: Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 209, and above p. 110.

[ back ] 73. W. H. Roscher in Roscher, s.v. Hera, coll. 2098ff.; Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 40f., and Religion I, pp. 429ff.; Farnell, Cults I, pp. 184ff. and 195f., who shows that the hieros gamos of Zeus and Hera is an exemplary incarnation of human marriage much more than a symbol of a hypothetical cosmic marriage between earth and heaven; see also Burkert, Religion, pp. 209f., and, as far as the etymology of her name is concerned (as “the mature one”), Pötscher, Hera, pp. 2f.

[ back ] 74. Steph. Byz. s.v. Ἑρμιών (p. 277 Meineke) and sch. Theocr. 15.64 (pp. 31 1f. Wendel); Paus. 8.22.2 and Pind. O. 6.88: see Farnell, Cults I, pp. 190f., and Kerényi, Zeus, pp. 104f.; at Nauplia, the statue of Hera every year was the object of a bath in a neighboring river, through which she became a παρθένος· Paus. 2.38.2.

[ back ] 75. Paus. 5.16.1ff., see above pp. 24f. and n. 23, and now my study “Pausanias le Périégète en ethnographe ou comment décrire un culte grec,” in J. M. Adam et al., Le discours anthropologique: Description, narration, savoir, Paris 1990, pp. 227-250.

[ back ] 76. Weniger, Elis, pp-2ff., Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 62f. and 291ff.

[ back ] 77. Cf. above p. 28.

[ back ] 78. Paus. regularly uses the term γυναίκες to refer to them, likewise Plut. Mor. 251e, 299a, 364f, etc.; on the political meaning of the ritual weaving of the peplos, see J. Scheid and J. Svenbro, Le métier de Zeus: Mythe du tissage et du tissu dans le monde gréco-romain, Paris 1994, pp. 17ff.

[ back ] 79. Paus. 6.20.7; Weniger, Elis, p. 18, identifies these women (stretching the evidence I would say) with the sixteen women of Elis; on the location of the Hippodameion, see Hitzig-Bluemmer, Paus. II, pp. 639f.

[ back ] 80. On the myth of the marriage of Hippodameia, see O. Höfer in Roscher, s.v. Hippodameia (1), coll. 2668ff., and below pp. 242ff.

[ back ] 81. On Chloris, see L. von Sybel in Roscher, s.v. Chloris (4). According to L. Drees, Der Ursprung der olympischen Spiele, Schorndorf bei Stuttgart 1962, pp. 87ff., in the Mycenaean period this race was included in the celebration of the hieros gamos of Hera-Hippodameia.

[ back ] 82. Paus. 5.14.6 with Farnell, Cults II, pp. 559f.; the cult of Artemis Alpheiaia is described by Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 214ff.; see also above p. 92. According to T. F. Scanlon, “The Footrace of the Heraia at Olympia,” AW 9, 1984, pp. 77-90, the races of the girls have to be related to the ones during the Olympic games.

[ back ] 83. One can add that the feast of the Heraia took place in summer (Weniger, Elis, p. 17) while the Artemisian rituals took place in spring. However, we have no precise way of dating the Heraia. For Arrigoni, Le donne in Grecia, pp. 95ff., the footrace of the Heraia has a distinctive adolescent and prematrimonial character; see also P. Angeli Bernardini, “Le donne e la pratica della corsa nella Grecia antica,” in P. Angeli Bernardini, Lo sport in Grecia, Roma-Bari 1988, pp. 153-184.

[ back ] 84. Bacch. 11.37ff. and 82ff.; see also Apoll. 2.2.2 and sch. Hom. Od. 15.225; other sources in A. Rapp in Roscher, s.v. Proitides. This passage for the daughters of Proitos from savagery to civilization has been explained by C. Segal, “Baccylides Reconsidered: Epithets and the Dynamics of Lyric Narrative,” QUCC 22, 1976, pp. 99-130 (pp. 122ff.), and by A.P. Burnett, The Art of Bacchylides, Cambridge, Mass.-London 1985, pp. 107ff.

[ back ] 85. Hes. fr. 132 MW, see also fr. 130 MW which, by saying that all Greek men were suitors of the daughters of Proitos, shows that the girls had arrived at a marriageable age.

[ back ] 86. On the contact between Artemis and Hera concerning premarital and marriage rites, see Poll. 3.38.; the transition of the Proitides from the domain of Artemis to the one of Hera through the “taming” preparatory to marriage has been analyzed in detail by Seaford, JHS 108, 1988, pp. 118ff.

[ back ] 87. the temple of Artemis at Lousoi, see Paus. 8.18.8 and Pol. 4.18.10. On these two cults, see R. Stiglitz, Die Grossen Gottinnen Arkadiens, Wien 1967, pp. 100f. Other sources in Burkert, Homo Necans, p. 192 n. 16, and now M. Jost, Sanctuaires et cultes d’Arcadie, Paris 1985, pp. 46ff. and 419ff. Other versions of the legend of the Proitides make Proitos or Melampous the one who cures the girls: see Bornmann, Hymnus in Dianam, pp. 112f.

[ back ] 88. Paus. 8.18.8 (Ἄρτεμις Ἡμερασία), sch. Call. Dian. 236 (II, p. 65 Pfeiffer) who combines into a single explanation the epicleses of Koria and Hemera: διότι τὰς κόρας ἡμέρωσεν; it is not by chance that in this context Hesiod, fr. 37.13 MW, qualifies Bias, one of the two heroes charged with bringing back the Proitides from their mad chase, as ἱππόδαμος, tamer of horses. The existence of the cult of Artemis Hemera at Lousoi allowed Blass to restore a Ἡμ]έρα in the text Bacch. 11.39 (see IG V. 2, 398), which would directly link the latter’s version of the myth with the cult in Lousoi; on this, see R. Merkelbach, “Bakchylides auf einen Sieger in de Ἡμεράσια zu Lousoi,” ZPE 11, 1973, pp. 257-260; this restoration is more certain than the proposal that the whole song was dedicated to a victor at Metapontum whose divinity was Artemis Hemera: see Maehler, Bakchylides, II, pp. 195f. and 219f. [ back ] Jeanmaire, Dionysus, pp. 204ff., sees this myth as a rite of adolescence without making a distinction between the domains of Artemis and Hera; see also J. E. Harrison, Encyclopedia of Religions and Ethics III, Edinburgh 1914, p. 322. Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 189ff., also speaks of the reversal of the order of the polis and the change from young girl to queen as represented in the myth of the madness of the Proitides; he connects this to the Argive ritual of the Agrio(/a)nia. G.A. Privitera’s statement in Dioniso in Omero e nella poesia greca arcaica, Roma 1970, p. 17 n. 9, that the dances instituted by the Proitides were supposed to imitate the race of the girls through the hills is only conjecture; see also Dowden, Death and the Maiden, pp. 91ff., and G. Casadio, Storia del culto di Dioniso in Argolide, Roma 1994, pp. 51ff. and 83ff., who, after having enumerated the different versions of the myth, gives a review of the various interpretations given to the ritual of the Agriania.

[ back ] 89. Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 42ff., and Kerényi, Zeus, pp. 94ff.; on the excavations undertaken on this site, see C. Waldstein, The Argive Heraeum, 2 vol., Boston-New York 1902, and J. L. Caskey and P. Amandry, “Investigations at the Heraion of Argos,” Hesperia 21, 1952, pp. 165-221. The old statue of Hera venerated within the Heraion came from Tiryns, Proitos’ country: Paus. 2.17.5 and 8.46.3, with Burkert’s commentary, Homo Necans, p. 189. The various rituals for the girls celebrated at the Argive Heraion are now described by A. Avagianou, Sacred Marriage in the Rituals of Greek Religion, Bern-New York 1991, pp. 39ff.

[ back ] 90. Eur. El. 171ff., with the commentary of J. D. Denniston, Euripides. Electra, Oxford 1939, pp. 70f,; Poll. 4.78; see Emag. 108.48. The temple of Hera Antheia was in Argos itself near the sanctuary of Leto: Paus. 2.22.1; on the significance of the cult of Hera Antheia, see Pötscher, Hera, pp. 138ff.

[ back ] 91. Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.21.2; Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 45 n. 5, has reservations, as previously noted, as to the value of this source.

[ back ] 92. Argos Mus. C 229 (50 Crowhurst) and fr. (97 Tölle, 4 Wegner), Athianai MN frr. (56 Crowhurst, 92, 93, 95, 96 and 10 Tölle, 52 Wegner) and frr. (61 Crowhurst, 101 Tölle, 53 Wegner); see Waldstein, op. cit. n. 89, II p. 114 with pl. 57, and Wegner, Musik, pl. U VId.

[ back ] 93. By showing that the procession of the Heraia for the boys participating marked “die Initiation des waffenfähigen Epheben,” Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 183f., gives a similar interpretation of this festival.

[ back ] 94. On the guardianship of Hera at Argos, see Roscher, art. cit. n. 73, col. 2075ff., and R. A. Tomlinson, Argos and the Argolid, London 1972, pp. 203f.; on the protector aspect of Artemis at Ephesus, see above n. 20. Hera in Homer was already named Ἀργείη: Hom. Il. 5.908 and Hes. Theog. 12; Argos is one of the cities preferred by the goddess: Hom. Il. 4.51f.; on Hera’s central position at Argos, see S. Eitrem. RE 8 (1912), s.v. Hera, coll. 372f.; Hera was also celebrated on the acropolis of Argos, where she bore the epiclesis of Akraia: Paus. 2.24.1, with Roscher, art. cit. n. 73, coll. 2075f. [ back ] Artemis is not totally absent from Argos: see Paus. 2.21.1 and Hsch. s.v. Ἀκρία (Α 2565 Latte); moreover, Hera too is celebrated in certain places as Parthenos: see above p. 113, and U. von Wilamowitz, Der Glaube der Hellenen I, Berlin 1931, pp. 129ff.; near Nauplion, says Paus. 2.38.2f., the statue of Hera was washed at a spring, permitting the goddess to regain her virginity: on the bathing statues of virgin goddesses, see below pp. 129ff. with n. 117.

[ back ] 95. Sch. Eur. Med. 264 (II, p. 159f. Schwartz) = Parmeniscus fr. 13 Breithaupt, and Creophylus FGrHist. 417 F 3; other sources and discussion in Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 57ff., A. Brelich, “I figli di Medeia,” SMSR 30, 1959, pp. 213-254, and by the same author, Paides, pp. 355ff.; the tradition of the myth of the children of Medea and the rite founded on it probably goes back to Eumelus (frr. 3 and 5 Bernabé), i.e. to the 7th century B.C. [ back ] See C. Picard, “L’Héræon de Pérachora et les enfants de Médée,” RA 5.35, 1932, pp. 218-229, who presents this ritual as a “novitiate,” has shown that the sanctuary in which it took place is that of Hera Akraia and Limenia at Perachora; situated to the north of the town, across an arm of the Gulf of Corinth, this sanctuary has the characteristics of a sanctuary beyond the town walls of a place particularly well adapted to an adolescent initiation; on the problems of establishing the site of the sanctuary of Hera Akraia, see Brelich, Paides, p. 356 n. 117; on the excavations at Perachora, see H. Payne et al., The Sanctuary of Hera Akraia and Limenia, 2 vol., words death and resurrection, E. Will, Korinthiaka, Paris 1955, pp. 89ff., is very near an interpretation of this myth as initiatory.

[ back ] 96. Depictions of women’s choruses found in the sanctuary of Hera at Perachora have been collected by Payne, op. cit. n. 95, II, pl. 77; see also those found at Corinth: Berlin SM 31093 (65 Wegner) and Corinth Mus. (55 Crowhurst, 113 Tölle, 104 Wegner).

[ back ] 97. One proof of the adolescent character of Hera Akraia’s cult is the substitution at Corfu (see P.G. Kalligas, “Τὸ ἐν Κερκύρᾳ ἱερὸν τῆς Ἀκραίας Ἥρας,” AD 24, 1969, pp. 51-58) of her cult imported by the Corinthians in place of a preexisting cult of Apollo Dephnephoros. Another example of the fixed signified in relation to the flexibility of the signifier is given by Herodotus’ account (4.180) of a Libyan ritual. This rite, he says, is dedicated to Athena. Since we know that this ritual was annual and included a contest between young girls, with the most beautiful being fitted out as a soldier, it is easy to see how this designation comes from a deity foreign to Greece through the intermediacy of the name Athena: the presence of the features ‘adolescent,’ ‘female,’ and ‘armed’ in the rite are decisive. The attribution to Dionysus, also by Herodotus (2.48), of an Egyptian phallic procession offers an analogous semantic mechanism: see W. Burkert, “Herodot über die Namen der Götter: Polytheismus als historisches Problem,” MH 42, 1985, pp. 121-132. In this way the signified is determined by the signifier. At Corinth, the feature ‘adolescence’ and the schema ‘hybris / calamity / expiation’ would suggest the signifier Artemis. If we find Hera instead it is because, in the religious language of the Corinthians, Hera means what Artemis means elsewhere in Greece. The problem of the Libyan divinity’s name is a problem of translation: in the same way, the flexibility of the signifier in relation to the signified in Greece is reduced as a last resort to a question of religious translation between different geographic points. [ back ] For the parallel offered by the rite of the “Locrian Maidens,” see F. Graf, “Die Lokrischen Mädchen,” SSR 2, 1978, pp. 61-79, and Sourvinou-Inwood, Greek Culture, pp. 248ff.

[ back ] 98. Ath. 13.609eff., Hom. Il. 9.129f. with sch. A ad loc.; see also Hsch. s.v. Πυλαιΐδεες (Π 4342 Schmidt); see Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 57 and 336, and the same author, RE 10 (1919), s.v. Kallisteia; on the rite of Basilis, see Stiglitz, op. cit. n. 87, pp. 58f., who compares the contest of the Kalligeneia on the last day of the festival of the Athenian Thesmophoria with this ritual; on the meaning of the Athenian ritual, see below n. 140.

[ back ] 99. Sapph. fr. 17 V, Alc. fr. 129 V, with Page, Sappho, pp. 60ff. and 168, Treu, Sappho, pp. 235ff., Burnett, Three Archaic Poets, pp. 159ff. (with n. 4), and Pötscher, Hera, pp. 14ff.; on the identification of the sanctuary of Hera where the beauty contests were held, see L. Robert, “Rscherches épigraphiques,” REA 62, 1960, pp. 276-361 (pp. 311ff.), who gathers together the reconstructions of his predecessors. The relationship drawn between the term Πυλαιΐδεες and Mount Pylaion by K. Tümpel, “Lesbiaka 5: Pylaiïdees,” Philologus 50, 1891, pp. 566-568, is criticized by G. Radke, RE 23 (1957), s.v. Pylaiidees.

[ back ] 100. Ale. fr. 130b. 13ff. V; see Burnett, Three Archaic Poets, pp. 178ff. On the ololyge, see above pp. 78f.

[ back ] 101. AP 9.189: see Lasserre, Sappho, pp. 40f., and above p. 65.

[ back ] 102. Cf. below p. 199.

[ back ] 103. Cf. above p. 53.

[ back ] 104. Call. Del. 304ff., Plut. Thes. 21, Paus. 9.40.3f.; on the composition of the chorus performing the Crane Dance, see above p. 56; for the inscriptions, see Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 380ff., and Bruneau, Cultes de Délos, pp. 331ff. and 341, with the complementary references I give in Thésée, pp. 158f.; see also Pirenne-Delforge, Aphrodite, pp. 395ff.

[ back ] 105. Hom. Il. 18.590ff. and sch. AB Il. 18.590f. also Paus. 9.40.3: see Herter, art. cit. p. 54 n. 138, col. 98, and above pp. 55f.

[ back ] 106. Plut. Thes. 20.7; Paus. 2.23.8; other sources are mentioned by H. W. Stoll in Roscher, s.v. Ariadne, coll. 543f.; see also Farnell, Hero Cults, pp. 48f.; Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 382, recalls the interesting comparison made by others between the etymology of the word Ἀριάδνη as ἀρι-άγνη and the adjective ἁγνή that Aphrodite receives in an inscription mentioning the service of a kanephoros at the Aphrodisia of Delos; on the assimilation between Ariadne and Aphrodite, see Calame, Thésée, pp. 198ff.

[ back ] 107. See in particular Aesch. fr. 44 Radt and Soph. fr. 941 Radt; A. Furtwängler in Roscher, s.v. Aphrodite, coll. 397ff., Burkert, Religion, pp. 239ff., Calame, Eros, pp. 87ff., and Pirenne-Delforge, Aphrodite, pp. 419ff.

[ back ] 108. Paus. 3.13.9; on this cult, see below pp. 205f. On the matrimonial and courotrophic aspects of Aphrodite, see Farnell, Cults II, pp. 655ff. and Pirenne-Delforge, Aphrodite, pp. 421ff.; Diod. Sic. 5.73.2, defining the children of Zeus in their reciprocal positions, attributes to Aphrodite the protection of girls at the moment of marriage; this protection is not incompatible with that of Zeus and Hera Teleioi which covers the whole marriage. On the simultaneous intervention of Zeus Teleios, Hera Teleia, Aphrodite, Peitho, and Artemis in the marriage process, see Plut. Mor. 264b; on Aphrodite and marriage, see Sapph. test. 194 V. [ back ] Given the place occupied by Apollo and Artemis at Delos, it would be useless to explain the presence of a nurturing Aphrodite on the island with semantics such as I used to account for the exceptional powers of Hera at Argos; Aphrodite intervenes on Delos according to her usual mode of action. Note that she is also present in the legends of Akontios and Kydippe and of Hermochares and Ktesylla, legends which seem to be entirely under the sign of Artemis/Apollo (see above p. 112): this presence is symbolized by the apple bearing the vow of love between the lovers (on this symbolism see J. Trumpf, “Kydonische Äpfel,” Hermes 88, 1960, pp. 14-22, and A. R. Littlewood, “The Symbolism of the Apple,” HSCPh 72, 1967, pp. 147-181). When love comes into play, Aphrodite intervenes in the domain of adolescence. [ back ] On Hekaerge as hypostasis of Artemis, see above n. 48; also Ant. Lib. 13.6, which identifies Aspalis Hekaerge with Artemis.

[ back ] 109. On the Pyanopsia and Oschophoria, see Plut. Thes. 22f., other sources in Deubner, Att. Feste, pp. 198ff. and 142ff., and in Severyns, Recherches II, pp. 243ff., bibliography in Herter, art. cit. p. 54 n. 138, col. 102ff.; the analysis of Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 344ff., needs to be revised; the rather badly articulated remarks of Willetts, Cults, pp. 124ff. and 193ff., also move towards an initiation as characteristic of the Delian and Athenian rituals; on an interpretation of the Athenian ritual as initiatory, see Vidal-Naquet, Le chasseur noir, pp. 164ff. [ back ] Sources more recent than Plutarch attribute to Athena Skiras, and no longer to Ariadne, the honors given at the Oschophoria. Thus Severyns, Recherches II, ρ. 247, following A. Rutgers van der Loeff, “De Oschophoriis,” Mnemosyne 43, 1915, pp. 404-415 (p. 409), proposes to introduce an Ἀθηνᾷ in the place of Ἀριάδνῃ in Plutarch’s text, considering Procl. ap. Phot Bibl. 322a 21. It is probably necessary to distinguish here, as does R. Flacelière, “Sur quelques passages des Vies de Plutarque I,” REG 61, 1948, pp. 67-103 (p. 81), between myth and ritual. It would take too long to analyze this, so I shall simply say that Ariadne, as well as Athena Skiras (see Deubner, Att. Feste, pp. 46f.) is associated with the adult female: see Calame, Thésée, pp. 128f. and 206. On the Oschophoria in general see also E. Kadletz, “The race and procession of the Athenian Oschophoroi,” ZPE 21, 1980, pp. 363-371, E. Simon, Festivals of Attica: An Archaeological Commentary, Madison 1983, pp. 89ff., and Robertson, Festivals and Legends, pp. 121 ff. (with further bibliography!).

[ back ] 110. Plut. Thes. 18.1ff. (ἱκετηρία) and 22.6f. (εἰρεσιώνη), see Deubner, Att. Feste, p. 201 with p. 199 n. 9; Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 312ff.; Chirassi-Colombo, QUCC 30, 1979, pp. 31ff.; and below n. 293. On the texts of Plutarch, the commentary of C. Ampolo and M. Manfredini, Plutarco. Le vite di Teseo e di Romolo, Milano 1988, is very useful (see particularly pp. 220 and 231ff.). The supposed recurrence of the presentation of the eiresione at the Thargelia has led J.-P. Vernant, “Ambiguïté et renversement. Sur la structure énigmatique d’Oedipe-Roi,” Echanges et Communications (Mélanges offerts à Claude Lévi-Strauss) II, Paris 1970, pp. 1253-1279, reprinted in J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne, Paris 1972, pp. 101-131 (pp. 119ff.), to see this rite as having the same role as the 6 Mounichion ritual, but Deubner, Att. Feste, pp. 191f., has denied that the eiresione was also carried at the Thargelia (see also Calame, Thésée, pp. 308ff.). Seeing the same connection between these two rites, W. Mannhardt, Wald- und Feldkulte II, Berlin ²1905, pp. 214ff., had already conjectured a connection between the Thargelia (“Früherntefest”) and the Pyanopsia (“Erntedankfest”); he had also shown their parallels with the myth of the departure and return of Theseus. In Mannhardt, all the testimony on the eiresione can be found (p. 218); on the meaning of this ritual instrument, see below p. 183. J. Robert and L. Robert, “Bulletin epigraphique,” REG 62, 1949, pp. 92-162 (p. 106), published a decree dating from 150/49 B.C. showing that the eiresione was carried at the Pyanopsia in honor of Apollo and Theseus. See the critical remarks on these studies in my Thésée, pp. 126ff. and 143ff.

[ back ] 111. Plut. Thes. 23.3; on the meaning of this cross-dressing, see below pp. 150f. The fact that the legendary race of Theseus’ companions has exactly the inverse direction of the ritual procession leading the young Athenians from the sanctuary of Dionysus “in the Marshes” to the sanctuary of Athena Skiras at Phaleron shows that the aetiological relationship of the ritual with Theseus’ legend is secondary: see Calame, Thésée, pp. 162ff. and 446ff.

[ back ] 112. Procl. ap. Phot. Bibl. 322a 13ff.: see Choeurs II, pp. 157f.; Ath. 14.631b also speaks of dances called ὠσχοφορικοί. See also the proposal of I. Rutherford and J. Irvine, “The Race in the Athenian Oschophoria and an Oschophoricon by Pindar,” ZPE 72, 1988, pp. 43-51.

[ back ] 113. For a semantic analysis of the figure of Ariadne as the meeting point of the influence of Artemis and Aphrodite, see C. Gallini, “Potinija Dapuritoio,” Acme 12, 1959, pp. 146-176; mistress of the labyrinth, Ariadne is situated between adolescence and adult sexuality; see also Willetts, Cults, pp. 193ff., and Calame, Thésée, pp. 205f. On the supposed initiatory character of the Crane Dance, see Brelich, Eroi, p. 170 n. 269.

[ back ] 114. This goes against the arguments of Gallet de Santerre, op. cit. n. 47, pp. 179ff., who, among others, separates the rite of the Crane Dance from the Aphrodisia at Delos.

[ back ] 115. Call. Lav. Pall. 1ff.; the sch. ad loc. (II, p. 74 Pfeiffer) define the ἴλα as ἡ τῶν νυμφῶν φρατρία καὶ ἄθροισις; these same scholia paraphrase the rite described by Callimachus, saying that it is the women (γυναῖκες) of Argos who go down to the River Inachos to wash the statues of Athena and Diomede: Jost, op. cit. n. 87, pp.

[ back ] 116. On the particular function of Chariklo, the nymph beloved of Artemis, see Bulloch, op. cit. n. 115, pp. 163f. and 174ff., and above p. 46.

[ back ] 117. Deubner, Att. Feste, pp. 17ff., with numerous references on the ritual, and Brulé. La fille d’Ath è nes, pp. 105ff. On other ritual bathing of female statues of goddesses, see Fehrle, Keuschheit, pp. 171ff.; Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 255f.; and, above all, R. Ginouvès, Balaneutikè: recherches sur le bain dans l’Antiquité grecque, Paris 1962, particularly pp. 292ff. On the bathing of the statue of Artemis Daitis at Ephesos, see above n. 14; on that of Hera Parthenos at Nauplion, see above n. 94.

[ back ] 118. Cf. Paus. 2.24.3 and Hsch. s.v. Ἀκρία (Α 2565 Latte) with F. Dümmler, RE 2 (1896), s.v. Athena, coll. 1971f.; on the mythical background of this cult, ibid., coll. 1972ff.; for the difficult positioning and identification of this temple of Athena Akria at Argos not far from a sanctuary of Hera Akraia (Paus. 2.24.1), see F. Geiger, RE 12 (1925), s.v. Larisa (1); Bulloch, op. cit. n. 115, pp. 14ff.; and D. Musti and M. Torelli, Pausania. Guida della Grecia II, Milano 1986, pp. 290ff.

[ back ] 119. Cf. C. J. Herington, Athena Parthenos and Athena Polias, Manchester 1955, M. Detienne, “L’olivier: un mythe politico-religieux,” in M. I. Finley (ed.), Problèmes de la terre en Grèce ancienne, Paris-La Haye 1973, pp. 293-306, and C. Leduc, “Les naissances assistées de la mythologie grecque,” in Se reproduire, est-ce bien naturel?, Toulouse 1991, pp. 91-175.

[ back ] 120. Eur. Her. 777ff.; Deubner, Att. Feste, p. 24, identifies the songs of the young people with the paean mentioned by Hid. Aeth. 1.10.

[ back ] 121. W. Burkert, “Kekropidensage und Arrhephoria,” Hermes 94, 1966, pp. 1-25 (now in Wilder Ursprung: Opferritual und Mythos bei den Griechen, Berlin 1990, pp. 40-59), who gives the sources and the basic bibliography for this much discussed ritual of the Arrhephoria, as also Homo Necans, pp. 169ff.; see among others Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 264ff.; Brelich, Paides, pp. 231ff.; Brulé, La fille d’Athènes, pp. 68ff. and 79ff.; and Pirenne-Delforge, Aphrodite, pp. 50ff. See also above p. 28 n. 38.

[ back ] 122. Eur. Ion 492ff.; on the exact site described by Euripides and on a textual uncertainty about the name of the Cecropids, see A.S. Owen, Euripides. Ion, Oxford 1939, p. 105; Plut. Mor. 839c.

[ back ] 123. Hom. Od. 6.99ff., see above pp. 42 and 87f.

[ back ] 124. Aristoph. Lys. 641: see EM 149, 18ff. and An. Gr. I, p. 202, 3ff. Bekker, who takes the age limit of this service to eleven years. About this passage of Aristophanes, see above pp. 28f. See now the interpretation I have presented of the Arrhephoria in Eros, pp. 134ff.

[ back ] 125. Eur. Ion 465ff., with the comment of Loraux, Enfants d’Athéna, pp. 226ff. (see particularly n. 119!).

[ back ] 126. On the myth of Erichtonios, see R. Parker, “Myths of Early Athens,” in Bremmer, Greek Mythology, pp. 187-214, and G.J. Baudy, “Der Heros in der Kiste. Der Erichthoniosmythos als Aition athenischer Erntefeste,” A&A 38, 1992, pp. 1-47; Erichthonios was associated with both the founding of the Panathenaia and with a cult of a courotrophic goddess honored in the sanctuary of Aglauros: references in Burkert, art. cit. n. 121, pp. 20 n. 3 (end) and 23 n. 1.

[ back ] 127. On the service of the kanephoroi, see Brelich, Paides, pp. 286ff., and Brulé, La fille d’Athenès, pp. 301ff.

[ back ] 128. On the maternal aspects of Athena, see Fehrle, Keuschheit, pp. 193ff.; Deubner, Att. Feste, pp. 15ff.; and Loraux, Enfants d’Athéna, pp. 63ff., with the critical remarks of G. Sissa and M. Detienne, La vie quotidienne des dieux grecs, Paris 1989, pp. 233ff. One should distrust Fehrle’s interpretation, since he sees in the marital and adolescent aspects of Athena the evolution of a primitive Muttergottheit to a more recent Jungfrau. The synchronic explanation here replaces the historical: Athena watches over this ambiguous period of female adolescence but also has an interest in virginity as well as in marriage. Farnell, Cults I, p. 302, has grasped the political and adolescent connotations of the cult of Athena Apatouria; see also P. Schmitt, “Athena Apatouria et la ceinture: Les aspects feminins des Apatouries a Athenes,” Annales E.S.C. 32, 1977, pp. 1059-1073. [ back ] Athena appears beside Artemis also in the myth of Meropis (Ant. Lib. 15), which tells how the two daughters (παῖδες) of Eumelos, granddaughters of Merops, backed up by their brothers, refused to go to the sacred wood of the two goddesses at the same time as the virgins of their age (ὁμήλικες). Athena and Artemis intervene side by side in a story, the essential features of which denote female adolescence. On the cult of Athena, protector of adolescence and of the city, see Herington, op. cit. n. 119, pp. 8ff.; Athena and Artemis Parthenoi: O. Höfer in Roscher s.v. Parthenos, coll. 1661ff.; on the figure of Artemis at Ephesos as guardian of the polis, see above n. 20.

[ back ] 129. Paus. 2.23.5, who denies the authenticity of this statue; on the different versions of the legend of the Palladion, see the bibliographical references given above n. 115. It is still true that Athena plays an important role in the most ancient Argive myths: see Dümmler, art. cit. n. 118, coll. 1972ff.

[ back ] 130. Eur. Bacch. 196, 299, 686ff., etc.; all ages are subject to the influence of Dionysus: ibid. 201ff.; in the enormous amount of new readings provoked in those last twenty years by Euripides’ Bacchae, see particularly C. Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae, Princeton 1982, and J.-P. Vernant, “Le Dionysus masque des Bacchantes d’Euripide,” in J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne II, Paris 1986, pp. 237-270, with the useful historical and critical study of A. Henrichs, ‘”He Has a God in Him’: Human and Divine in the Modern Perception of Dionysus,” in Carpenter and Faraone, Masks of Dionysus, pp. 13-43. For the dance of the Maenads, see Lonsdale, Dance, pp. 99ff.

[ back ] 131. For the celebration of the Agrio(/a)nia, see F.A. Voigt in Roscher, s.v. Dionysus, col. 1052ff.; Jeanmaire, Dionysus, pp. 202ff.; Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 189ff.; Dowden, Death and the Maiden, pp. 82ff.; and Casadio, op. cit. n. 88, pp. 83ff. and 108ff., who has not understood the meaning of the remarks presented here on the intervention of Dionysus in the domain of femininity in general. For Orchomenos and Thebes in particular, see Schachter, Cults of Boeotia I, pp. 179ff. and 185ff.; a ritual of the Agriania was celebrated at other Boeotian sites as well: at Chaironeia and maybe at Haliartos and Tanagra: ibid., pp. 173ff., 176 and 183ff. On the legend of the Minyades, see S. Eitrem, RE 15 (1932), s.v. Minyaden; the main source for this myth is Ant. Lib. 10: see Papathomopoulos, Ant. Lib., pp. 90ff.; on the Proitides, see above pp. 116ff.

[ back ] 132. On the Maenads, see Voigt, art. cit. n. 131, col. 1042ff., and J. Bremmer, “Greek Maenadism Reconsidered,” ZPE 55, 1984, pp. 267-286. The communal and ritual character of the groups of Maenads has been pointed out by A. Henrichs, “Changing Dionysiac Identities,” in B. F. Meyer and E. P. Sanders (edd.), Jewish and Christian Self-Definition III, London 1982, pp. 137-160; for the Maenads in Athenian tragedy, see R. Schlesier, “Mixtures of Masks: Maenads as Tragic Models,” in Carpenter and Faraone, Masks of Dionysus, pp. 89-114. The comparison of the three Proitides/Minyades and the three daughters of Kadmos has been made by E. R. Dodds, Euripides. Bacchae, Oxford ²1960, pp. 161f.

[ back ] 133. The college of sixteen women of Elis served both deities jointly: see above p. 114. For the composition of the chorus of Dionysus, see Seaford, JHS 108, pp. 124ff.

[ back ] 134. Sim. fr. 148 Β = Bacch. Epigr. 3 P, see Wilamowitz, Sappho, pp. 218ff., Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, p. 16; see above pp. 79f.

[ back ] 135. Paus. 5.16.6f. and 6.26.1; Plut. Mor. 299a; Weniger, Elis, pp. 4ff. and 10ff., J. Schmidt in Roscher, s.v. Thyia (4), and Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 291ff.; on the meaning of Thyad, see J. Schmidt in Roscher, s.v. Thyias: the Thyads are mainly adult women.

[ back ] 136. Plut. Μor. 299b and 364f = PMG carm. pop. fr. 871 P; see above pp. 79f. The poem has been commented on by C. Bérard, “Axie taure,” in Mélanges Paul Collart, Lausanne 1976, pp. 61-78, and C. Brown, “Dionysus and the Women of Elis: PMG 871,” GRBS 23, 1982, pp. 305-314. Insisting on the leaping of Dionysus, M. Detienne, Dionysus à ciel ouvert, Paris 1986, pp. 84ff., recalls that Paus. 6.26.1 puts the Thyia of Elis in relationship with one other, extra-urban sanctuary of Dionysus, marked by a ritual miracle of the wine, in this case no longer for the women, but for the men.

[ back ] 137. Paus. 7.19.1ff.; see M. Massenzio, “La festa di Artemis Triklaria e Dionysus Aisymnetes a Patrai,” SMSR 39, 1968, pp. 101-132, who interprets this rite and its aition as initiatory; see also Privitera, op. cit. n. 88, pp. 29ff., and R. Seaford, “Dionysus as Destroyer of the Household: Homer, Tragedy, and the Polis,” in Carpenter and Faraone, Masks of Dionysus, pp. 115-146, with the fine interpretation of the relationship between the aition and this “prematrimonial” ritual proposed by J. -P. Vernant, Figures, idoles, masques, Paris 1990, pp. 189ff., and the development given by J. Redfield, “From Sex to Politics: The Rites of Artemis Triklaria and Dionysus Aisymnêtês at Patras,” in Halperin, Winkler, Zeitlin, Before Sexuality, pp. 115-134.

[ back ] 138. Aristoph. Thesm. 969ff.; on the play on genre and gender in this comedy, see F. I. Zeitlin, “Travesties of gender arid genre in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae,” in Foley, Reflections of Women, pp. 169-217.

[ back ] 139. See Farnell, Cults III, pp. 78ff. and 91ff.; O. Kern, RE 4 (1901), s.v. Demeter, coll. 2748ff.; and Nilsson, Religion I, pp. 461ff. On the privileged relations between Demeter and Dionysus, ibid., coll. 2754f.

[ back ] 140. Ath. 13.609ef, see above pp. 122f. The fact that the third day of the Thesmophoria at Athens was called Kalligeneia, during which the participants prayed for perfect offspring, might confirm the interpretation of the beauty contests: the beauty of the woman was perhaps judged by whether she looked as if she could bear fine children. On the Kalligeneia, see Deubner, Att. Feste, pp. 57f., and M. Detienne and J. -P. Vernant, La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec, Paris 1979, pp. 191ff.

[ back ] 141. Aristoph. Thesm. 331 and Ran. 445ff.; on these two rituals see Deubner, Att. Feste, pp. 40ff., and Chirassi Colombo, QUCC 30, pp. 38ff. For the rest of Greece, Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 313ff. On the composition of the chorus of Aristophanes’ Ranae and the ritual it performs, see Κ.J. Dover, Aristophanes. Frogs, Oxford 1993, pp. 57ff.

[ back ] 142. H. Cer. 270ff., Paus. 1.38.6, see Deubner, Att. Feste, p. 74 with pl. (6, 2) of the archaic well found on the site of Eleusis, and Richardson, op. cit. n. 8, pp. 326ff., for the complicated question of the archaeological identification of this well. On the austere female character of this festival, implying the legitimacy of marriage and domestic virtues in contrast to the disorder rampant in the Adonia, see Detienne, Adonis, pp. 151ff. On the other hand there is no way of linking to any known cult the Alexandrian fragment (Coll. Alex. fr. lyr. ad. 9 Powell) sung by a chorus of adolescents in honor of Demeter; it is probably only a free imitation of a poem by Alcman: see the commentary of Powell ad loc.; but see nevertheless Call. Cer. 118f., whose hymn was perhaps composed for a festival of Demeter that took place at Alexandria: see the prudent remarks of N. Hopkinson, Callimachus. Hymn to Demeter, Cambridge 1984, pp. 32ff.

[ back ] 143. Sch. Aristoph. Plut. 1014 and Tzetz. ad loc. (IV. 1, p. 209, 11ff. Koster); Hdt. 5.83, see above p. 64, and Richardson, op. cit. n. 8, pp. 213ff. The insults proffered by the women were also customary in the Athenian ritual of the Stenia; this ritual, dedicated to Demeter and Kore, was connected with the Thesmophoria: see Deubner, Att. Feste, p. 52.

[ back ] 144. Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 41ff., Farnell, Cults III, pp. 112f., Deubner, Att. Feste, pp. 53 and 57f.; see H. W. Stoll in Roscher, s.v. Auxesia, and R. Peter, ibid., s.v. Damia.

[ back ] 145. Pind. P. 3.77ff., sch. ad loc. (II. p. 80f. Drachmann), see Vita Ambros. (I, p. 2, 4ff. Drachmann) and Paus. 9.25.3, who mentions the existence at Thebes of a temple dedicated to Meter Dindymene: on this very controversial information, see Lehnus, L’inno a Pan, pp. 5ff. (other bibliographical references at p. 9 n. 14), and Schachter, Cults of Boeotia II, pp. 138ff.; see also above, p. 87. On this cult, see also A. Rapp in Roscher, s.v. Kybele, col. 1662, who shows the specific relationship of the Mother with Pan and the Nymphs in contrast to Cybele, Farnell, Cults III, p. 290, and Latte, Salt., pp. 93f.

[ back ] 146. This information corresponds to one of the solutions given by the scholia to explain the term κόραι; the other version uses the term νύμφαι.

[ back ] 147. Pind. frr. 95 and 99 M; the Vita Ambros., loc. cit. n. 145, gives a somewhat different version of fr. 95: see Lehnus, L’inno a Pan, pp. 107ff. and 189ff.; on the Separate Partheneia, see Choeurs II, pp. 167f., and Lehnus, L’inno a Pan, pp. 68ff.

[ back ] 148. On the use the Nazis made of Spartan rigor, see Oliva, Sparta, p. 10, and Rawson, Tradition, pp. 338ff.; on the use of it made at the end of the sixties by the fascist regime in Greece, see for example the help given by the military government to the paramilitary associations of the Alkimoi (Le Monde, March 30, 1973).

[ back ] 149. Ath. 14.632f, Prat. fr. 709 Ρ = 4 Sn.; Pratinas shows a particular interest in Spartan music: see Plut. Mus. 7.9 and 42 (= Prat. fr. 713 Ρ = 7- 9 Sn). On Sparta’s musical fame, see Tigerstedt, Sparta I, pp. 41ff.; F. Stoessl, “Leben und Dichtung im Sparta des siebenten Jahrhunderts,” in Eumusia: Festgabe f ü r E. Howald, Erlenbach-Zürich 1947, pp. 92-114; Prato, Tirteo, pp. 37ff.; and Choeurs II, pp. 33ff. On the musical gifts of the Lacedaemonians, see W. Schmid and O. Stählin, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, I. 1, München 1929, p. 453 n. 10.

[ back ] 150. Paus. 3.10.7, 3.24.9, 4.4.2 and 4.31.3, 3.23.10: see particularly Wide, Kulte, pp. 102ff.

[ back ] 151. On the cults, see Paus. 3.22.12, 3.20.7, 3.12.8; on the Spartan cult of Artemis Dictynna, see Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, pp. 202f.

[ back ] 152. Paus. 4.31.3 and Strab. 8.4.9, who distinguishes the Messenian Limnai from the Lacedaemonian.

[ back ] 153. Paus. 4.4.2 and 3.2.6 and 7.4 (Ἄρτεμις Λιμνάς). On the modern identification of the site and of the sanctuary, see IG V. 1, 1373-8 and 1431, 37ff., with F. Geiger, RE 13 (1926), s.v. Limnai (2), M. N. Valmin, Etudes topographiques sur la Messénie ancienne, Lund 1930, pp. 189ff., Chrimes, Sparta, pp. 63f., E. Meyer, RE Suppl. 15 (1978), s.v. Messenien, coll. 189f., and Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, p. 286.

[ back ] 154. Paus. 2.7.6 (Ἄρτεμις Λιμναία), 7.20.7 and 8.53.11; see Schreiber, art. cit. n. 20, coll. 559ff., H. Kruse, RE 13 (1926), s.v. Limnatis, and Thomson, Altgr. Gesellschaft I, p. 221.

[ back ] 155. On the meanings of the water and mountain traits of the Nymphs and Artemis and on the frequency of their occurrence, see L. Bloch in Roscher, s.v. Nymphen, coll. 504ff. and 519ff., Fehrle, Keuschheit, p. 166, as also Farnell, Cults II, pp. 427ff.

[ back ] 156. Paus. 4.4.2ff.; on the murder of Teleklos see also 3.2.6, 3.7.4 and 4.31.3 as also Strab. 6.3.3. In “Discours mythique et discours historique dans trois textes de Pausanias,” Degrés 17, 1979, pp. 1-30, I tried to show all the elements of initiatory ritual that are integrated into both versions of the story.

[ back ] 157. Strab. 8.4.9 and 6.3.3: in this last passage, Strabo only mentions the assassination of Teleklos, but he reports the event by referring to the description of Ephoros of the founding of Tarentum (Eph. FGrHist. 70 F 216: on Ephoros and the credibility of his report, see Tigerstedt, Sparta I, p. 210 with n. 896); Strab. 6.1.6: the rape is given as one of the reasons for the flight of a group of Messenians, guilty of murder, who then colonized Rhegium.

[ back ] 158. See Kiechle, Mess. Studien, pp. 9ff., Oliva, Sparta, pp. 105f., and Cartledge, Sparta, pp. 112ff.

[ back ] 159. Call. Dian. 170ff.; see above p. 92 and below pp. 151ff. and 159ff.

[ back ] 160. See, among others, Zeitlin, “Rape,” pp. 137ff.; see also above, p. 92 and below pp. 238ff.

[ back ] 161. AP 6.280.

[ back ] 162. Hom. Od. 6.99ff., see above p. 42; Call. Del. 296f., see above p. 106.

[ back ] 163. See below pp. 172f.

[ back ] 164. The comparison of the Messenian story and the ritual scenes of cross-dressing has been made by Brelich, Paides, p. 164 n. 156, with the ethnographic parallels cited p. 72 n. 60; on the theme of the inversion of the exterior signs of sexuality, see J. E. Harrison, Themis, Cambridge 21927, pp. 505ff.; M. Delcourt, Hermaphrodite, Paris 1958, pp. 5ff.; Brelich, Eroi, pp. 240ff.; C. Gallini, “Il travestismo rituale di Penteo,” SMSR 34, 1963, pp. 211-228; and Zeitlin, art. cit. n. 138.

[ back ] 165. Plut. Thes. 23, see Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 351ff., and above pp. 125ff., with the particulars I give in Thésée, pp. 128, 145, and 335f. The cross-dressing linked to a ruse and then to death is for instance the central point of the myth of Leukippos, son of Oinomaos: he disguised himself as a girl in order to come near the Nymph Daphne who avoided men, and to introduce himself among her companions; but the girls, on discovering the trick and led by the jealousy of Apollo, killed the hero: Paus. 8.20.2ff. and Parth. 15, see Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 440ff.; Dowden, Death and the Maiden, pp. 66 and 174ff.; Forbes Irving, Metamorphoses, pp. 152ff.; and below p. 252.

[ back ] 166. The role of the cross-dressing in the Messenian story has been compared to a homologous ruse in a ritual war between Phocians and Thessalians: see Ellinger, op. cit. n. 9, pp. 37ff. and 307f. On the role of the apate in the founding myths of adolescent rituals and particularly that associated with the Athenian Apatouria, see Vidal-Naquet, Le chasseur noir, pp. 155ff. The author shows to what degree the pinciple of inversion (institutional, sexual, etc.) is characteristic of the period of transition between adolescence and adulthood; see also Schmitt, art. cit. n. 128, pp. 1060ff.

[ back ] 167. Ant. Lib. 13, with the commentary of Papathomopoulos, Ant. Lib., p. 102.

[ back ] 168. Papathomopoulos, loc. cit. n. 167, recalls that the hoplite normally carried his sword on the right: here too the reversal is significant.

[ back ] 169. On a Cretan myth and rite of sex change in adolescence, see Ant. Lib. 17, with Willetts, Cults, pp. 175ff., and Brelich, Paides, pp. 201f.

[ back ] 170. According to Ps. Plut. Fluv. 17.3, the Nymph Taygete hanged herself for shame after being violated by Zeus. Similarly, the Nymph Briotmartis, the hunting companion of Artemis, threw herself into the sea for fear of the advances of Minos; saved by the nets of the fishermen, she was later worshipped as Artemis Dictynna: sch. Eur. Hipp. 1130 (II, p. 121 Schwartz). Again, according to one of the episodes of Pausanias before the battle of Leuctra, the two daughters of a local man, raped by Spartan soldiers, strangled themselves, not wanting to survive such an act of hybris: Paus. 9.13.5; on other parallels in myths about the suicides of young women, see Brelich, Paides, p. 443 n. 2. On the rape of adolescents as prematrimonial sacrifice, see Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 73ff.

[ back ] 171. See IG V. 1.1375-77, and V. 1.952, with Brelich, Guerre, p. 39. Plutarch, Mor. 239c, notes that in Laconia adolescents of both sexes had common sanctuaries.

[ back ] 172. Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 210ff.

[ back ] 173. Eur. Bacch. 1051f., see also 704ff.; on the correspondence between the Dionysiac landscape and characteristics of the god and his followers who inhabit it, see Voigt, art. cit. n. 131, coll. 1059ff., Rapp, art. cit. n. 132, coll. 2245ff., and Buxton, Imaginary Greece, pp. 94ff.

[ back ] 174. IG V. 1.225 and 226, AP 6.280.1; see Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 211f.; on the τύμπανον as Dionysiac instrument, see K. Schneider, RE 7A (1939), s.v. Tympanum, coll. 1750f.

[ back ] 175. Tac. Ann. 4.43, Steph. Byz. s.v. Δενθάλιοι (p. 255 Meineke); on the position of this territory, see Valmin, op. cit. n. 152, pp. 194f.

[ back ] 176. Brelich, Guerre, passim, F. de Polignac, La naissance de la cit é grecque, Paris 1984, pp. 58ff. and 146ff., and Ellinger, op. cit. n. 9, pp. 41ff.; on the meanings of boundary territory, outside the city, see also Robert, art. cit. n. 99, pp. 304ff., and Buxton, Imaginary Greece, pp. 81 ff.

[ back ] 177. Phot. Lex. s.v. Καρυάτεια (I, p. 314 Naber). On the location of Karyai, see Frazer, Paus. III, pp. 319f.; Chrimes, Sparta, pp. 68f.; and Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, pp. 189f. Karyai might have been near the remains of a fortress, more than a kilometer from the modern village of Kryavrysi. At the foot of the hill runs the Sarantopotamos. It is possible that the sanctuary of Artemis Karyatis, as that of Limnatis, was associated with a landscape in which there was much humidity.

[ back ] 178. Paus. 3.10.7; Hsch. s.v. Καρυάτεια and Καρυᾶτις (Κ 907 and 908 Latte).

[ back ] 179. Contrary to Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 197, I do not think the term ἐπιχώριος means that the dance was performed only by girls from Karyai. The sources insist on the participation of young Spartan girls in this festival. It is likely that in antiquity Karyai was not even a village.

[ back ] 180. See E. Fiechter, RE 10 (1917), s.v. Karyatides, coll. 2249f., and Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 197f. The comparison made by Eucrates (anecdote told by Ath. 6.24lde) between the attitude of a person eating in a friend’s crumbling home and that of the karyatid is the first time the term karyatid is associated with the specific pose of the architectural forms. It dates from the second half of the fourth century; see also Vitr. 1.1.5, and E. M. Schmidt, Geschichte der Karyatide, Würzburg 1982, pp. 17ff.

[ back ] 181. Plut. Artax. 18.1, Poll. 4.104, see also Luc. Salt. 10 and Stat. Theb. 4.225. For representations of these dances, see Ghali-Kahil, art. cit. n. 29, p. 29 with n. 69.

[ back ] 182. Diom. Art. Gramm. 3 (I, p. 486, 20ff. Keil), Prob. ad Verg. Buc. and Georg. (= Serv. III. 2, p. 324, 8ff. Thilo-Hagen) and Serv. ad Verg. Buc., Prooem. (III. 1, pp. 1f. Thilo-Hagen) = sch. Theocr. Proleg. (p. 20 Wendel)); see F. Frontisi-Ducroux, “Artémis bucolique,” RHR 198, 1981, pp. 29-56, and below p. 155 with n. 194.

[ back ] 183. Paus. 4.16.9f.

[ back ] 184. Callisth. FGrHist. 124 F 23, with commentary by Jacoby, FGrHist. II C, pp. 424f., and Ephor. ap. Diod. Sic. 15.66; see also Paus. 4.6.1ff. On Aristomenes as historical character, see Jacoby, FGrHist. III A, pp. 169ff., as also Oliva, Sparta, pp. 104f. and 139ff., and on the mythical aspect of this same figure, Brelich, Eroi, pp. 317ff. [ back ] See the remarks of Jacoby, FGrHist. III A. pp. 138ff., concerning the sources of Paus. 4.14.6-17.9; Kiechle, Mess. Studien, pp. 15f. and 104f., thinks that Pausanias’ story only follows Rhianos from 4.17.10 (see 4.6.2).

[ back ] 185. See the remarks of Jacoby, FGrHist. III A, pp. 138ff., concerning the sources of Paus. 4.14.6-17.9; Kiechle, Mess. Studien, pp. 15f. and 104f., thinks that Pausanias’ story only follows Rhianos from 4.17.10 (see 4.6.2).

[ back ] 186. Brelich, Ρaides, p. 165.

[ back ] 187. Lact. ad Stat. Theb. 4.225. King, in Images, pp. 118ff., has recently proposed to interpret the suicide of young girls by strangulation as a symbolic expression of the fear of the bloodletting of menarche and of defloration.

[ back ] 188. Serv. ad Verg. Buc. 8.29 (III. 1, p. 96f. Thilo-Hagen); see Forbes-Irving, Metamorphoses, pp. 264ff. and 50ff. To the criticisms formulated by the author concerning an “initiatory” interpretation of this story, I should answer that the whole setting of the myth (sanctuary of Artemis, on the border of Laconia, in an uncultivated region) refers this particular metamorphosis to the rites of tribal initiation. The metamorphosis into a mineral or into a vegetable itself can, of course, have different semantic values according to the narrative context into which it has been inserted.

[ back ] 189. See Ant. Lib. 32.5: Smyrna transformed into a myrrh tree after a ‘virginal’ union with her father; Apoll. 3.14.4 = Panyas. fr. 27 Bernabé: Syrinx was changed into a reed to escape Pan; Ant. Lib. 22.4: the Nymphs were transformed into poplars by Poseidon so that he could unite with one of them; see Forbes Irving, Metamorphoses, pp. 128ff. On the Hamadryads, Nymphs of the trees among whom is Karya, see Ath. 3.78b.

[ back ] 190. The gloss of Servius (above n. 188) relating the myth of Karya indicates the various meanings given to the nut in Roman antiquity; all these cultural significations in one way or another denote marriage: it may be the “nuts of Jupiter” (juglandes) when speaking of his union with Juno, or the nuts thrown down to cover the cries of the young wife at the moment of her deflowering; given the implications of adolescence in the myth of Karya, it is not improbable that the nut had similar connotations in Greece.

[ back ] 191. Wide, Kulte, p. 108 and Brelich, Paides, pp. 164f. Among sources reporting the cult relation between Artemis and Dionysus cited by Wide, only that for the cult of Patras (Paus. 7.19.1ff.) is pertinent. At Epidaurus (Paus. 2.29.1) and at Troizen (Paus. 2.31.5), the two divinities enjoyed only a geographic closeness. At Aegina (Paus. 2.30.1), this closeness, which also included Apollo, might have had a cult basis, but there is no evidence that confirms it.

[ back ] 192. Prat. fr. 711 P = 1 Sn. (quoted by Ath. 9.392f: δυμαναις cod., Δυσμαίναις corr. Meineke), see above p. 79; Hsch. s.v. Δύμαιναι (Δ 2600 Latte; δυσμαιναι cod., Δύμαιναι corr. Latte): αἱ ἐν Σπάρτῃ χορίτιδες Βάκχα; see also Brev. Exp. ad Verg. Georg. 2.487 (III. 2, p. 316, 16f. Thilo-Hagen) and Plin. NH 36.4.23.

[ back ] 193. See above pp. 137f. and pp. 142f. See M. Detienne, Dionysus mis à mort, Paris 1977, pp. 75ff., and G. Hedreen, “Silenus, nymphs and maenads,” JHS 114, 1994, pp. 47-69.

[ back ] 194. See above p. 150 with n. 182; the name astrabikon that Probus gives to the pastoral song of Karyai could come from the Spartan hero’s name Astrabakos whom Wide, Kulte, pp. 279f., interprets as the hypostasis of Dionysus; see Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 198f. On contacts between Artemis and Dionysus with regard to bucolic poetry, see R. Reizenstein, Epigramm und Skolion, Giessen 1893, pp. 193ff., and at Sparta itself in a poem of Alcman (fr. 56 Ρ = 125 C), see Calame, Alcman, pp. 520ff.

[ back ] 195. Alcm. fr. 10 (b). 8ff. Ρ = 82a. 1 C = P. Oxy. 2506 (a), fr. 5, col. II. 8ff., see above pp. 58ff.; in the PMG, Page conjectures Δυ|μαί[ναις, while in vol. 29 of the P. Oxy., p. 7, he writes δυ[|μαι[.

[ back ] 196. Alcm. fr. 5.2, col. I (sic). 24f. P = 81, col. II. 24f. C = P. Oxy. 2390, fr. 2, col. II. 24.: ὁ δὲ χ]ορός (ἐστι) | Δύμα[ιναι.

[ back ] 197. See Calame, Alcman, pp. 388ff., and below pp. 219f.

[ back ] 198. Alcm. fr. 11 Ρ = 24 C = P. Oxy. 2389, fr. 35: col. I, 5 Δύ̣μαι | [ν-, j17 Δ]υμαιν[, 1 παρσεν[ (as lemma), 25 πα]̣ρ ̣σένω[ν] μάλι[σ]τ̣ άείσατ[ε, with the commentary of Lobel, P. Oxy. vol. 24, p. 47; cf. also Alcm. fr. 4.5 Ρ = 61 C.

[ back ] 199. I prefer to Meineke’s correction (Δυσμαίναις, see above n. 192) the reading of the ms. of Athenaeus (δυμάναις), which can probably be corrected to Δυμαίναις; but in Hesychius, Latte is right in modifying the lemma Δύσμαιναι to Δύμαιναι; what Hesychius offers us is a kind of reinterpretation of the lemma through its definition, itself a reinterpretation wrongly accepted by Farnell, Cults V, p. 155 ( = the dangerously mad ones), and Jeanmaire, Dionysus, p. 212; see also now Arrigoni, in Le donne in Grecia, pp. 77ff.

[ back ] 200. Artemis Dictynna (Paus. 3.12.8) had a temple within the walls of the city, but near them (see Frazer, Paus. III, p. 331, Hitzig-Bluemmer, Paus. I, p. 775, Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, pp. 202f.); another temple was probably near the fortifications, since it was in a spot called τά Φρούρια (Paus. 3.12.8; a place difficult to identify: see Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, p. 204). The sanctuaries of Artemis Aiginaia and Issoria were west of the Agora near the Pitane quarter (Paus. 3.14.2: see Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, p. 213), the latter also associated with a fortified site (see Plut. Ages. 32.6, with Frazer, Paus. III, pp. 334f.). Artemis Hegemone, near the sanctuaries of the Dioskouroi, the Graces, Eileithyia, and Apollo Karneios, was at a distance from the famous Dromos (Paus. 3.14.6) which itself was outside the town (Liv. 34.27, with Hitzig-Bluemmer, Paus. I, p. 787). It is hard to identify the site of the temple of Artemis Knagia, whose originating legend is related by Pausanias (3.18.4f.; see Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, p. 233) just at the end of his description of the town. He then goes on to speak of Amyklai. On the cults of Artemis in Sparta, see Ziehen, RE 3A, coll. 1462ff.

[ back ] 201. Paus. 3.11.9; see Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, pp. 196f.

[ back ] 202. The great account of the excavations undertaken on the site of the sanctuary of Orthia at the beginning of the century dates from 1929: R.M. Dawkins, “The History of the Sanctuary,” in Dawkins, Orthia, pp. 1-51. For the chronological development of the sanctuary, see more recently J. Boardman, “Artemis Orthia and Chronology,” ABSA 58, 1963, pp. 1-7; J.T. Hooker, The Ancient Spartans, London-Toronto-Sydney 1980, pp. 52ff.; Nafissi, Kosmos, pp. 161f.; and Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, pp. 226f. See Paus. 3.16.7f., Strab. 8.4.9; without unfortunately being able to explain this isolated piece of information, we notice that Pausanias, 3.14.2, says that Artemis Issoria or Britomartis also has the epiclesis Limnaia in Sparta; this is not enough, however, to see in Artemis Orthia the figure of an Artemis Limnatis, as some would like: see O. Höfer in Roscher, s.v. Orthia, col. 1211; on other Hellenic sites with a cult of Artemis Orthia, ibid., col. 1210.

[ back ] 203. Strab. 8.5.1; on the location of the Limnai quarter, see Bölte, RE 3A, coll. 1363f.

[ back ] 204. See above n. 202.

[ back ] 205. See Xen. Resp. Lac. 2.9, Plut. Mor. 239cd, Lyc. 18.2 and Paus. 8.23.1.

[ back ] 206. See Rawson, Tradition, pp. 109ff., 132, 178, and 252.

[ back ] 207. See Liban. Or. 1.23, Tert. Mart. 4, other references in Wide, Kulte, p. 100, and Michell, Sparta, p. 176 n. 4. Michell is certainly wrong in considering this rite to a large extent a Roman creation; see on the contrary Chrimes, Sparta, pp. 248ff., and Brelich, Paides, pp. 133ff.

[ back ] 208. The first scholars to use the term initiation with regard to this rite were Frazer, Paus. III, pp. 341f., and Nilsson, Klio 12, p. 308ff. See later Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 510f.; Willetts, Cults, p. 46; and Brelich, Paides, pp. 129ff. and 173ff. Cursory allusion to the initiatory function of the rite in I. Chirassi, Miti e culti arcaici di Artemis nel Peloponneso e nella Grecia Centrale, Trieste 1964, pp. 16f.; see now also J.-P. Vernant, La mort dans les yeux: Figures de l’Autre en Gr è ce ancienne, Paris 1985, pp. 25ff., and Pettersson, Apollo at Sparta, pp. 78ff., with the cautious remarks of P. Bonnechère, “Orthia et la flagellation des éphèbes spartiates. Un souvenir chimérique de sacrifice humain.” Kernos 6, 1993, pp. 11-22.

[ back ] 209. See sch. ad Hdt. 9.85 and sch. ad Strab. published by H. Diller, “A New Source on the Spartan Ephebia,” AJPh 72, 1941, pp. 499-501. On the controversy about this, see H.-I. Marrou, “Les classes d’age de la jeunesse spartiate,” REA 48, 1946, pp. 216-230; A. Billheimer, “Age-Classes in Spartan Education,” TAPhA 78, 1947, pp. 99-104; Michell, Sparta, pp. 165ff.; Den Boer, Lac. Studies, pp. 248ff.; C. M. Tazelaar, “ΠΑΙΔΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΕΦΗΒΟΙ. Some Notes on the Spartan Stages of Youth,” Mnemosyne IV. 20, 1967, pp. 127-153, etc., as also analyses of the historians of religion mentioned above n. 208 (particularly Brelich, Paides, pp. 116ff.).

[ back ] 210. IG V. 1.252-334, see A.M. Woodward, “Inscriptions,” in Dawkins, Orthia, pp. 285-377 (pp. 286ff.); Chrimes, Sparta, pp. 86ff. and 247 n. add.; and Brelich, Paides, p. 130.

[ back ] 211. Paus. 3.16.9f.; the πομπὴ Λυδῶν which, according to Plut. Aristid. 17.10, followed the flagellation of the ephebes on the altar of the goddess, cannot be interpreted as Chrimes, Sparta, p. 266, and Page, Alcman, p. 72, think, as a procession of girls: see Diels, Hermes 31, p. 361. This does not give us the only ritual practice for girls in the cult of Orthia. Following the whipping, it is more likely that the procession represents the stage in which the ephebes, after having been beaten, were presented to the community; another interpretation, in relationship to the masks found in the sanctuary of Orthia (see below, pp. 172f.), has been presented by F. Graf, Nordionische Kulte, Roma-Vevey 1985, pp. 85ff. On the dispute among the inhabitants of the four obai of Sparta, see Brelich, Guerre, p. 74 n. 147.

[ back ] 212. Plut. Thes. 31 = Hellan. FGrHist. 4 F 168a = 323a F 18; bibliographical references in Calame, Thésée, pp. 262ff. (with n. 180) and 399ff. (on the history of this episode of Theseus’ legend).

[ back ] 213. Enarsphoros had a herοon in Sparta: Paus. 3.15.2; on the Hippocoontids as ἀντιμνηστῆρες of the Dioskouroi, see sch. Clem. Alex. Protr. 2.30.5 (I, p. 305 Staehlin), and Alcm. fr. 1, 1ff. Ρ = 3, 1ff. C: see Choeurs II, pp. 37ff., and Alcman, pp. 313ff.; on the struggles between Hippocoon and Tyndareos for the possession of Sparta, see H.W. Stoll in Roscher, s.v. Hippokoon (1). The scene of Helen’s abduction was depicted on the throne of Amyklai: Paus. 3.18.15.

[ back ] 214. Sch. A Hom. Il. 3.542 = Alcm. fr. 21 Ρ = 210 C, see Hyg. Fab. 79: (Theseus et Pirithous) Helenam Tyndarei et Ledae filiam virginem de fano Dianae sacrificantem rapuerunt, on the other sources of this version see Ghali-Kahil, Helene, pp. 305ff.

[ back ] 215. According to Tzetz. ad Lyc. 513 = Hellan. FGrHist 4 F 168b = 323a F 19, Helen was seven years old when Theseus abducted her; she was twelve according to Apoll. Epit. 1.23 (according to Apoll. 3.10.7, she was carried off as soon as she became distinguished for her beauty: on her age suggested by this, see below pp. 196ff.); on the significance of the very young age of Helen when she was abducted, see Brulé, La fille d’ Ath è nes, pp. 98 and 366f., and Sourvinou-Inwood, Girls’ Transitions, pp. 52ff.

[ back ] 216. London BM Β 310 (pl. 103, 1 Ghali-Kahil); Florence 82894 (plates 104, 1 and 2 Ghali-Kahil), see also the fr. Sofia (pl. 104, 3 Ghali-Kahil); other iconographic objects in Ghali-Kahil, Hélène, pp. 309ff. and 320, and von Steuben, op. cit. p. 54 n. 138, pp. 35 and 115; but the identification of those scenes is far from certain: see Brommer, Theseus, pp. 94f.

[ back ] 217. Pind. O. 3.26ff. with sch. ad loc. (I, pp. 121f. Drachmann); other sources for the myth in O. Höfer in Roscher, s.v. Taygete. See also Wide, Kulte, p. 127; E. Krummen, Pyrsos Hymnon: Festliche Gegenwart und mythisch-rituelle Tradition als Voraussetzung einer Pindarinterpretation, Berlin-New York 1990, pp. 247ff.; and Forbes Irving, Metamorphoses, pp. 298ff. The abduction of Taygete by Zeus was pictured on the throne of Amyklai: Paus. 3.18.10; on the form Ὀρθωσία for Ὀρθία, see Davison, Arch.-Pind., pp. 171f., and Lipourlis, EEThess 10, pp. 366f. According to Steph. Byz. s.v. Ταΰγετον (p. 607 Meineke), Taygete was supposed to have been the mother of Eurotas. See Ps. Plut. Fluv. 17.1 where Taygete killed herself in shame after being raped by Zeus and where Eurotas is described as the son of Taygete and Lakedaimon. On the Arcadian Orthia, see Höfer, art. cit. n. 202, col. 1210, and W. Immerwahr, Die Kulte und Mythen Arkadiens, Leipzig 1891, pp. 147f.

[ back ] 218. The age classes given by the inscriptions correspond to the μικιζόμενος, πρόπαις, παῖς and μελλείρην given by the sch. to Hdt. and Strab.: see above notes 209 and 210. It seems that, even if these denominations seem to refer to younger age classes, they lead to the status of ephebes: see Chrimes, Sparta, pp. 91ff.

[ back ] 219. Paus. 3.16.7ff.; in another version of the legend, Astrabakos and Alopekos, the descendants in the fifth generation of the first king of Sparta, Agis, became insane when they found the goddess’s statue.

[ back ] 220. On the origins of the xoanon of Artemis at Brauron or at Halai, on one of the ἔσχατα of Attica, see Eur. IT 1446ff., Call. Dian. 174, Paus. 1.23.7 and 33.1. See Deubner, Att. Feste, pp. 208f. (who differentiates the cults of Artemis Tauropolos and Artemis at Brauron); Brelich, Paides, pp. 242ff.; and Brulé, La fille d’Athènes, pp. 192ff. On the Taurian origins of Artemis, see Schreiber, art. cit. n. 20, coll. 586ff.; H.W. Stoll in Roscher, s.v. Iphigeneia, coll. 299ff.; Farnell, Cults II, pp. 452ff.; and Lloyd-Jones, JHS 103, pp. 95ff.

[ back ] 221. Paus. 3.16.11; the agnus castus (the chaste tree) had a thick trunk in which a xoanon could be sculpted as is the case, at Sparta itself, for the xoanon of Asclepius Agnites: Paus. 3.14.7; for the presence of the agnus castus in the sanctuary of the Nymphs near the Ilissus, see Plat. Phaedr. 230b (description of the qualities of this tree in R. Wagner, RE 1 [1894], s.v. Agnos). One could conceive that the statue of Artemis Orthia was carved in this wood. It is also possible that the original statue consisted of a simple bundle of branches of the “chaste tree,” as is the case for the Latin struppi placed on the pulvinar and venerated as the incarnation of the god thus represented: on this custom, see C. Boetticher, Der Baumkultus der Hellenen, Berlin 1856, pp. 221f.

[ back ] 222. See Ath. 15.672de and Paus. 7.4.4 and 8.23.5, with Frazer, Paus. III, pp. 343f.; Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 46ff.; Blech, Kranz, pp. 247ff.; and Pötscher, Hera, pp. 125ff.

[ back ] 223. On Artemis Cedreatis, see Paus. 8.13.2; on Artemis and the tree, see Nilsson, Religion I, pp. 486f.

[ back ] 224. See above p. 102 with n. 38.

[ back ] 225. Ael. NA 9.26, Plin. NH 24.9.38, Dsc. 1.134 and Gal. 11, pp. 807ff. Kühn.

[ back ] 226. In his analysis of the role of the agnus castus in the festival of the Tonaia, Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 48f., supposes, in the qualities attributed to it, a diachronic change of the signified: from a symbol of the sexual instinct and fertility, the agnus castus would become the sign of continence by the resemblance of its signifier ἄγνος with the word ἁγνός. It is, however, not to be assumed that the quality of diminishing sexual desire is only attributed to the tree during the Thesmophoria: compare Plin. NH 24.9.38 with 62. See now the interesting analysis of the values of the λύγος proposed in his interpretation of Anacr. fr. 352 Ρ by M. Nafissi, “Anacreonti, i Tonea et la corona di lygos,” PP 38, 1983, pp. 417-439. Here again, the reduction of an apparent contradiction to a historical explanation misses the specific meaning of the term, in this case the agnus castus, whose qualities clearly signify in Greece the status of the married woman: Greek marriage does not only correspond with the satisfaction of a sexual drive; above all it serves to generate descendants. On the value of the fecundity of the agnus castus, see Deubner, Att. Feste, p. 56, who remains no less a victim of Nilsson’s error; on the role of the agnus castus in the Thesmophoria in relation with other plants, see Detienne, Adonis, pp. 153ff., and op. cit. n. 140, pp. 213f. Fehrle, Keuschheit, pp. 139ff, has well shown, notably with regard to the Tonaia of Samos, the double role of purification and fecundation that the agnus castus has in Greek cult. According to Fehrle, it is the feature of ‘fecundity’ which, through the medium of the “Lebensrute,” would link the agnus castus to the cult of Artemis Orthia; see also Kerenyi, Zeus, pp. 127ff.; other speculations in Pötscher, Hera, pp. 65ff. and 147ff.

[ back ] 227. See A. Thomsen, “Orthia,” ARW 9, 1906, pp. 397-416 (pp. 406ff.), and Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 190ff. On the beneficent power of the agnus castus see the custom reported by Plut. Mor. 693f, with commentary by Deubner, Att. Feste, p. 195.

[ back ] 228. This according to the proposition formulated by King, in Images, pp. 122f.; see also Wide, Kulte, p. 114.

[ back ] 229. Sch. Pind. O. 3 30 (I, pp. 121f. Drachmann), sch. Plat. Leg. 633b (p. 306 Greene), sch. Lyc. 1331 (II, p. 375 Scheer), EM 631.2f.; all the etymologies given by the scholia of Pindar concern the Arcadian Orthia whom I discussed in connection with the myth of the Nymph Taygete.

[ back ] 230. References in Höfer, art. cit. n. 202, coll. 1212f.; H.J. Rose, “The Cult of Artemis Orthia,” in Dawkins, Orthia, pp. 399-407 (pp. 403f.); and Lipourlis, EEThess 10, pp. 368f. Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 521ff., has linked the idea of erection suggested by Orthia with the tree cult: he makes Artemis Orthia-Lygodesma concurrent with Artemis Korythalia whose cult was gradually limited to the newborn. Chrimes, Sparta, p. 258, sees in Artemis Orthia a mountain deity; and Brelich, Paides, pp. 131f., no longer bases his findings on possible etymologies of the term Orthia, but on the votive figurines found in the sanctuary of the goddess: R.M. Dawkins, “The Terracotta Figurines,” in Dawkins, Orthia, pp. 145-162 (p. 149), and “Objects in Carved Ivory and Bone,” ibid., pp. 203-248 (pp. 205ff.); and A.J.B. Wace, “The Lead Figurines,” ibid., pp. 249-284 (pp. 259ff. and 283). Brelich identifies her with the πότνια θηρῶν, the mistress of the animals. On the role attributed to women in the Spartan community, see below pp. 234ff.

[ back ] 231. On Asclepius Orthios as the god savior, see O. Höfer in Roscher, s.v. Orthios; see also ibid., s.v. Orthopolis.

[ back ] 232. The interpretation of the flagellation given by Thomsen, art. cit. n. 227, pp. 407ff. is significant: he rejects the rites of tribal initiation and thus the interpretation of the flagellation as a death rite, substitute or symbol of a real human sacrifice; however, he admits that the flagellation, perhaps done with agnus castus branches, was to stimulate growth and good health in adolescents, and it becomes the symbol of an “Einweihung zum Leben” (p. 409); see for the contrary opinion W. Burkert, “Demaratos, Astrabakos und Herakles,” MH 22, 1965, pp. 166-177 (p. 173), much clearer than A. Seeberg, “Astrabica,” SO 41, 1966, pp. 48-74; see also Graf, op. cit. n. 211, pp. 83ff., who speaks of a ritual of “Auflosung vor dem Neuanfang.”

[ back ] 233. Plat. Theaet. 149d; Socrates insists on the fact that midwives were even more proud of their ability to bring together couples who would have fine children than of their efficiency at the birth of a child. The important part of childbirth is thus its result: ὡς ἀρίστους παῖδας τίκτειν.

[ back ] 234. Wide, Kulte, p. 114; interpretation rejected by Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 191; see Ant. Lib. 27.4 where Iphigenia is called Ὀρσιλοχία, she who delivers children; the term Ἰφιγένεια cannot be interpreted as ἶφι γεννᾶσθαι ποιοῦσα; in the compounds in -γενής, such as αἰθρηγενής, διογενής, εὐγενής, the morpheme -γενής, which goes back to the root *gen-, is always intransitive: see Chantraine, Dict. étym., s.v. γίγνομαι, p. 222 (on the feminine ἰφιγένεια from a masculine *ἰφιγενής, see Schwyzer, Gr. Gr. II, p. 34); the goddess born “with power” is also she who then favors vigorous newborns. On the relatedness of Iphigenia and Artemis, see Paus. 2.35.1, Hsch. s.v. Ἰφιγένεια (Ι 1122 Latte): ἡ Ἄρτεμις; see Brelich, Paides, p. 275; Lloyd-Jones, JHS 103, pp. 95ff.; and Brulé, La fille d’Athènes, pp. 186 and 191ff.

[ back ] 235. Eur. Suppl. 955ff., IT 1097ff. On the cult of Artemis Lochia and Eileithyia, see Schreiber, art. cit. n. 20, col. 571ff.; Brelich, Paides, p. 203; and T. Hadzisteliou Price, Kourotrophos: Cults and Representations of the Greek Nursing Deities, Leiden 1978, pp. 151f. and 157f.

[ back ] 236. See Frisk, GrEW, s.v. ὀρθός, P. Kretschmer, “Die vorgriechischen Sprach-und Volksschichten,” Glotta 30, 1943, pp. 84-218 (pp. 155f.), compares Orthia with Rhetia, the title of a Venetian goddess (cf. umbr. rehte = lat. recte) who also had a preserving function.

[ back ] 237. Call. Dian. 124ff.: for a possible allusion at line 128 to Artemis Orthia, see Bornmann, Call. Dian., pp. 64f.; in Aesch. Ag. 135ff., Artemis is angry because the eagles of Zeus kill a pregnant hare and devour her little ones along with the mother. From an anthropological point of view, the interpretation of Orthia as one who “raises” children could be confirmed in the fairly universal rite of “lifting” the newborn at birth; see N. Belmont, “Levana, or how ‘to raise’ children,” Annales E.S.C. 28, 1973, pp. 77-89.

[ back ] 238. The archaic figurines of Eileithyia discovered in excavations on the site of the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia might give reasons for attributing to this goddess the specific function of midwife: see Dawkins, art. cit. n. 202, p. 51. It is true that according to Paus. 3.17.1, Eileithyia had her own sanctuary near that of Orthia: see Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, pp. 227f. One might conjecture that in the archaic period the two cults were combined. Note that the two tiles with later inscriptions regarding Eileithyia (IG V. 1.867 and 868) were found in Orthia’s sanctuary: see W. S. George and A. M. Woodward, “The Architectural Terracottas,” in Dawkins, Orthia, pp. 117-162 (p. 143), also the inscription 169.24 (Woodward, art. cit. n. 210, p. 370). At any rate one cannot say that the etymology of Orthia makes her the goddess of childbirth as Eileithyia is (proposal by Wide, Kulte, pp. 113ff., repeated by Höfer, art. cit. n. 203, col. 1213). [ back ] On the other hand, with a short remark by Brelich, Paides, p. 191 n. 222, as point of departure, one could interpret the birth mentioned in the scholia to explain the etymology of Orthia as that of the initiate who, dead as an adolescent, is reborn into adult life. The safety of women giving birth would then simply correspond to the lack of comprehension of the scholiasts who had taken the word birth too literally, as have modern interpreters.

[ back ] 239. Diod. Sic. 5.73.4ff.; see above n. 108.

[ back ] 240. Thomson, Altgr. Gesellschaft I, pp. 220f., starting from the presence of a priestess in the flagellation rite of the ephebes, suggests that the cult originally consisted in an initiation rite for young girls; this thesis is used by Willetts, Cults, p. 185, in analyzing the Cretan cult of Artemis Dictynna.

[ back ] 241. See the references given above n. 202; add E. Kirsten, “Heiligtum und Tempel der Artemis Orthia zu Sparta in ihrer ältesten Entwicklung,” BJ 158, 1958, pp. 170-176; further bibliography in Davison, Hermes 73, p. 454 n. 1.

[ back ] 242. J.P. Droop, “The Laconian Pottery” in Dawkins, Orthia, pp. 52-116 (pp. 80ff.); Dawkins, art. cit. n. 230, pp. 145ff. and 203ff.; Wace, art. cit. n. 230, pp. 249ff., with the remarks of Wade-Gery, review of Dawkins, Orthia, JHS 50, 1930, pp. 146-150; and of R. M. Dawkins (et al.), “A Note on the Excavation of the Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia,” ibid., pp. 329-336. See also Boardman, art. cit. n. 202, which displaces the date of the end of Laconian II from 600 to about 580 and reduces the timespan established by his predecessors by a quarter of a century (thus agreeing with the conclusions of Kirsten, art. cit. n. 241), and Sourvinou, art. cit. p. 28 n. 38, pp. 173ff. C. M. Stibbe, Lakonische Vasenmaler des sechsten Jahrhunderts v. Chr., Amsterdam-London 1972, p. 9, arrives at similar conclusions. See also E. L. I. Marangou, Lakonische Elfenbein- und Beinschnitzerei, Tübingen 1969, p. 3 and passim, and Pipili, Iconography, pp. 41ff.

[ back ] 243. Woodward, art. cit. n. 210, p. 296ff.; on a more ancient origin for these games, see Brelich, Paides, pp. 174ff.

[ back ] 244. Woodward, art. cit. n. 210, pp. 308ff., and Pipili, Iconography, pp. 42ff.

[ back ] 245. A. M. Woodward, “Laconia. I. – Inscriptions,” ABSA 24, 1920, pp. 88-143 (pp. 116f.), and art. cit. n. 210, pp. 296ff.; on the problem of the correction of line 61 in fragment 1, see Choeurs II, pp. 119f., and Alcman, p. 333.

[ back ] 246. Ath. 4.139ab, the source for which is Polem. Hist. FHG fr. 86 (III, p. 142 Müller), Paus. 3.18.6, Alcm. fr. 62 Ρ = 223 C; on the geographical location of the Tiassos, see Frazer, Paus. III, p. 349; on this sanctuary see Ziehen, RE 3A, coll. 1464f.

[ back ] 247. On the ritual feasts of the Hyakinthia, see below pp. 183f.; although mentioned in the same passage from Polemon, the κοπίς of the Tithenidia is not identical to that of the Hyakinthia, and the two rituals were not celebrated at the same time. In Athenaeus, the expression κατὰ τὸν καιρὸν τοῦτον refers to the particular ocassion represented by the Tihenidia.

[ back ] 248. EM 531.53ff., 303.30ff. and 276.26ff., Hsch. s.v. κορυθαλία (3688 Latte), Eust. Od. 1856.33ff.

[ back ] 249. Wide, Kulte, pp. 123 f., Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 182ff.; given the homology of the three levels, the question as to the vegetal meaning or the human meaning of κόρος is difficult to decide: see Frisk, GrEW, s.v. κόρη; if one agrees with Frisk that the original meaning is ‘young man,’ the metaphor develops diachronically on two levels: the primary meaning of ‘young man’ has led to ‘branch’ which, associated with θάλλειν, was reused to refer metaphorically to the young man; on this, see also above p. 31 n. 48.

[ back ] 250. On the 6th of Mounichion and Pyanopsia rituals, see above pp. 126ff.

[ back ] 251. Hsch. s.v. κορυθαλίστριαι (Κ 3689 Latte): αἱ χορεύουσαι τῇ Κορυθαλίᾳ θεᾷ; for archaic depictions of orgiastic female dances in relation to the newborn, see I. Jucker, “Frauenfest in Korinth,” AK 6, 1963, pp. 47-61.

[ back ] 252. Hsch. s.v. κυριττοί and κύριθρα (Κ 4684 and 4678 Latte), with Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 184ff.

[ back ] 253. Plut. Mor. 657e; the text of Eustathius cited above (n. 248) relates the korythale to the kourotrophia of Apollo.

[ back ] 254. On Artemis as kourotrophos in general, see Wide, Kulte, p. 124; Schreiber, art. cit. n. 20, coll. 569f.; Farnell, Cults II, pp. 463f. and above pp. 100f.; on the relationship of Artemis Korythalia at Sparta with other kourotrophoi, see Hadzisteliou-Price, op. cit. n. 234, pp. 138ff. and 189f. For the diligence of Spartan nurses and on their fame in antiquity, see Plut. Lyc. 16.4f.

[ back ] 255. Orgiastic dances in honor of Artemis for example in Elis (Paus. 6.22.1) and in Syracuse (Ath. 14.629e); other instances in Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 187; Alcman himself, fr. 63 Ρ = 94 C, associates the Naiads with the Thyads.

[ back ] 256. See above p. 146.

[ back ] 257. Paus. 3.20.7, see Hitzig-Bluemmer, Paus. I, p. 844, and Wide, Kulte, pp. 117f.; Hsch. s.v. καλαβῶται (Κ 379 Latte): ἐν τῷ τῆς Δερεατίδος Ἀρτέμιδος ἱερῷ ᾀδόμενοι ὕμνοι, see also s.v. καλαβίς (Κ 383 Latte); see Eupol. fr. 176 ΚΑ (= Ath. 14.630a), Hsch. s.v. καλλιβάντες (Κ 471 Latte), and Phot. Lex. s.v. καλλαβίδες (I, p. 307 Naber). According to Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 185, the gloss of Hsch. s.v. καλαοίδια (Κ 409 Latte), which gives this name to a Laconian festival honoring Artemis, is linguistically related to the term καλαβῶται; see the objections to this of Latte, Salt., pp. 23ff., and Ziehen, RE 3A, coll. 1464f.; Verg. Georg. 2.487f. himself sees in the Nymph Taygete a Bacchant.

[ back ] 258. See G. Dickins, “The Masks,” in Dawkins, Orthia, pp. 163-186, with the remarks of E. Kunze, review of Dawkins, Orthia, Gnomon 9, 1933, pp. 1-14 (pp. 10f.), and the interpretation now proposed by Vernant, M é tis 2, pp. 279ff.; see also J. B. Carter, “The Masks of Orthia,” AJA 91, 1987, pp. 355-383, and Parker in Sparta, pp. 151f. For speculations on the relationship of these terra-cotta masks with the Partheneia of Alcman, see J. B. Carter, “Masks and Poetry in Early Sparta,” in R. Hagg, N. Marinatos, and G. C. Nordquist (eds.). Early Greek Cult Practice, Stockholm 1988, pp. 89-98. The oldest of these masks represent old women and are from the end of the seventh century (beginning of the seventh according to Kunze). The remarks of Hesychius may concern the archaic period: see s.v. βρυδαλίχα, βρυλλιχισταί, and possibly βυλλίχαι (Β 1234, 1245 and 1309 Latte), also Poll. 4.104. See Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 186f.; Latte, Salt., pp. 8f.; and Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, pp. 163ff. Wide, Kulte, pp. 115f. and 279f., tries to prove a Dionysiac element in the founding myth of the cult of Artemis Orthia, seeing in Astrabakos, one of the two heroes who found the statue of the goddess on the banks of the Eurotas (see above n. 231), a hypostasis of Dionysus.

[ back ] 259. The grotesque dances present in different cults of Artemis at Sparta have been related to the satyr-dances by F. Stoessl, Die Vorgeschichte des griechischen Theaters, Darmstadt 1987, pp. 60ff.; on Dionysus at Sparta, see below pp. 185ff.

[ back ] 260. It is with a similar term, “Auflösung,” that Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 190f., interprets the use of masks representing old women in the cult of Artemis Orthia, comparing it to other similar customs. See also Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 520f.; Graf, op. cit. n. 210, pp. 89f.; and, without taking into account the arguments of his predecessors, Vernant, Metis 2, pp. 283ff.

[ back ] 261. Philostr. VS 2.12.3; Hdt. 9.7.1 and 11.1; see also Thuc. 5.23.4. Other references in Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 130. Theodor. Graec. affect. 8.28 Raeder says that the Spartans thought of it as a great public festival (δημοθοινία).

[ back ] 262. Ath. 4.138eff. = Polycr. FGrHist 588 F 1 and Polem. Hist. FHG fr. 86 (III, p. 142 Müller); critique of these sources in Bölte, RhM 78, pp. 132ff.

[ back ] 263. Brelich, Paides, pp. 143ff.; Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 132ff. See also Rohde, Psyche, p. 116 n. 2; Farnell, Cults IV, pp. 264ff.; Mellink, Hyakinthos, pp. 29ff.

[ back ] 264. Εἰς τὸν θεόν (Ath. 4.139d): Apollo is certainly meant, not Hyakinthos; see Ath. 4.138f: παρὰ τὸν θεόν (near the temple of the god), and 139e: τὸν θεὸν ᾄδουσιν.

[ back ] 265. On the paean sung during the Hyakinthia: Xen. Hell. 4.5.11, and Ages. 2.17, on this last passage, see above p. 45 n. 110.

[ back ] 266. Xen. Ages. 8.7, Plut. Ages. 19.5f.; see Hsch. s.v. κάνναι and κάνναθρα (Κ 676 and 675 Latte); note that in this gloss the use of the kannathron is associated with a festival in honor of Helen (see below n. 329), EM 489.5ff., sch. BT Hom. Il. 24.190 and Eust. Il. 1344.44; on the formation of the term κάνναθρον, see Chantraine, Dict. étym., s.v. κάννα. It will be recalled that Polemon had written a whole treatise on the question of the “kannathron mentioned by Xenophon”: Ath. 4.138e. This work probably referred to the passage in Ages. 8.7. On these carts, see Bölte, RhM 78, pp. 137f., and Mellink, Hyakinthos, pp. 16f.

[ back ] 267. Paus. 3.1.3 and 3.19.3; on the Hyakinthos Way, see Ath. 4.173f. For a reconstruction of the throne of Amyklai, see E. Buschor, “Vom Amyklaion (Übersicht),” MDAI(A) 52, 1927, pp. 1-23 (p. 19); R. Martin, “Le trône d’Amyclées,” RA 1976, pp. 205-218; and Pipili, Iconography, pp. 81f. On its religious significance, see F. Prontera, “Il trono di Apollo in Amicle: appunti per la topografia e la storia religiosa di Sparta arcaica,” AFLFP 4, 1980/81, pp. 217-230.

[ back ] 268. See Bölte, RhM 78, pp. 138ff., for the division of the ritual practices among the three days of the festival as described by Polemon and Polycrates. He corrects the θέαν in the final note of Polycrates’ description (Ath. 4.139f.) to θοίνην: the Hyakinthia would then not end with the spectacle of the adolescents but with the great banquet. Bölte’s suggestion has not been taken up by Mellink, Hyakinthos, pp. 12f.; on the κοπίς, see below n. 293.

[ back ] 269. Eur. Ηel. 1465ff.; on the meaning of this passage, see R. Kannicht, Euripides Helena II, Heidelberg 1969, pp. 383ff.; Aristoph. Lys. 1296ff.

[ back ] 270. Hier. Jov. 1.41 (XXIII, p. 284 Migne).

[ back ] 271. IG V 1.586 and 587; see Mellink, Hyakinthos, pp. 22ff.

[ back ] 272. Plut. Μor. 775de. See Wide, Kulte, p. 288 n. 1; Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 137 n. 3; and Mellink, Hyakinthos, p. 21 n. 1.

[ back ] 273. Paus. 3.16.2; according to Mellink, Hyakinthos, p. 17, this peplos would have been transported to Amyklai during the procession of the Spartan girls on the kannathra. On the political, if not matrimonial, function of the weaving of this peplos, see Scheid and Svenbro, op. cit. n. 78, pp. 19ff. and 61ff.

[ back ] 274. W. von Massow, “Vom Amyklaion (Einzelfunde),” MDAI(A) 52, 1927, pp. 33-64 (pp. 39ff.), with Buschor, art. cit. n. 267, p. 11; B. Schröder, “Archaische Skulpturen aus Lakonien,” MDAI(A) 29, 1904, pp. 21-49 (pp. 24ff.). See also the very mutilated inscription published by C. N. Edmonson, “A Graffito from Amyklai,” Hesperia 28, 1959, pp. 162-164.

[ back ] 275. Mellink, Hyakinthos, pp. 20 and 43f., on the basis of an interpretation by Schroder, sees in this scene a specific dance called kalathiskos, associated with the Artemis cult which also would have a place in the precincts of Amyklai: see Call. Aet. III, fr. 75.24 Pf. and Paus. 3.18.9.

[ back ] 276. See among others Farnell, Cults IV, pp. 126ff.; S. Eitrem, RE 9 (1916), s.v. Ὑάκινθος (2), coll. 7f.; C. Picard, “Amyclæ et les Hyacinthes,” L’Acropole 4, 1929, pp. 206-222 (pp. 210ff.); M.P. Nilsson, The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion, Lund 1950, pp. 470f. and 556ff. Mellink, Hyakinthos, pp. 139ff., credits the Achaeans with introducing Apollo into Amyklai; excellent remarks on this by Brelich, Paides, pp. 177ff. On the pre-Hellenic character of linguistic forms in -νθ-, see P. Kretschmer, Einleitung in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache, Göttingen 1896, pp. 402f.

[ back ] 277. Paus. 3.19.2; see Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, pp. 245ff.

[ back ] 278. This was the cae in the time of Agesilas: see Paus. 3.10.1, see also Macr. Sat. 1.18.2. The Hyakinthia were celebrated in honor of Apollo.

[ back ] 279. Sch. Pind. I. 7.12 (III, p. 263s. Drachmann) = Arist. Resp. Lac. fr. 532 Rose. On the “conquest” and integration of Amyklai by the Spartans, see Kiechle, Lakonien, pp. 55ff.; Huxley, Sparta, pp. 22f.; and Cartledge, Sparta, pp. 80ff. and 106ff. The traditional genealogy makes Hyakinthos a son of Amyklas who is himself said to be the son of Lakedaimon and Sparte: Apoll. 3.10.3; the Amyklaian genealogy has thus been linked with the Spartan genealogy, showing the dependence of Hyakinthos (and of his cult) on the Lacedaemonian state.

[ back ] 280. On the archaeological history of the Amyklaion, see Buschor, art. cit. n. 267, pp. 3ff.; H. Waterhouse and R. Hope Simpson, “Prehistoric Laconia: Part I,” ABSA 55, 1960, pp. 67-107 (pp. 74ff.); W. Desborough, The Last Mycenaeans and Their Successors, Oxford 1964, pp. 42 and 88ff.; and Cartledge, Sparta, pp. 81ff.

[ back ] 281. Strab. 6.3.2 = Antioch. Syr. FGrHist. 555 F 13. On the Parthenians, see M. Schaefer, RE 18 (1949), s.v. Partheniai, coll. 1884ff.; M. Corsano, “Sparte et Tarente: le mythe de fondation d’une colonie,” RHR 196, 1979, pp. 113-140; and Vidal-Naquet, Le chasseur noir, pp. 278ff. On the colonization of Tarentum, see T. J. Dunbabin, The Western Greeks, Oxford 1948, pp. 29ff.; Kiechle, Lakonien, pp. 176ff.; and I. Malkin, Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece, Leiden 1987, pp. 47ff. and 216ff.

[ back ] 282. Paus. 3.19.3; ἐναγίζω as opposed to θύω to describe the sacrifice offered to a hero (deceased) in contrast to the sacrifice offered to a god (immortal): see Hdt. 2.44, and Burkert, Religion, pp. 299 and 307ff.; Rohde, Psyche, p. 115 n. 3, is wrong to think that the before in Pausanias’ text has a chronological meaning.

[ back ] 283. Paus. 3.19.4, with the useful commentary of Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, pp. 246f.

[ back ] 284. Eur. Ηel. 147 1ff.; for the iconographical representation of the young Hyakinthos, see Pettersson, Apollo at Sparta, pp. 30ff.

[ back ] 285. Apoll. 1.3.3 and 3.10.3; other sources in Eitrem, art. cit. n. 276, col. 9f., and Sergent, Homosexualite, pp. 102ff. In one of the versions of the legend, Hyakinthos is even credited with being the initiator of male homosexuality. Pausanias, 3.19.5, is somewhat skeptical about the episodes of the accidental death of Hyakinthos and his metamorphosis into a flower.

[ back ] 286. See Rohde, Psyche, pp. 114ff., and Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 130f.

[ back ] 287. Paus. 3.19.4, see Hitzig-Bluemmer, Paus. I, p. 833; for an image of Hyakinthos as adolescent dating from about 500, see Mellink, Hyakinthos, pp. 168ff.

[ back ] 288. On this subject, see Brelich, Paides, p. 148 n. 110, and Sergent, Homosexualité, p. 106f.; see also L. Piccirilli, “Ricerche sul culto di Hyakinthos,” SCO 16, 1967, pp. 99-116. Outside Laconia, Hyakinthos ended by being identified with Apollo: on the cult of Apollo Hyakinthos at Tarentum, see Pol. 8.28.2f., and G. Gianelli, Culti e miti della Magna Grecia, Firenze ²1963, pp. 27ff. Polyboia was also identified with Artemis or Kore: see Hsch. s.v. Πολύβοια (Π 2825 Schmidt). If they cannot be identified with the gods of adolescence, Hyakinthos and Polyboia were certainly adolescent heroes: see Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 529f. On the other hand, one should be skeptical about the etymology proposed by K. Brugmann and B. Delbrück, Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen I, Berlin- Leipzig ²1930, p. 261, who give the term ὑάκινθος the meaning of ‘young adolescent’ (etymology and meaning accepted by Farnell, Cults IV, p. 126). Conversely, the ancients attributed to the hyacinth plant qualities related to adolescence: it was supposed to retard the onset of puberty: Dsc. 4.63, Plin. ΝΗ 21.26.97. On the youth of Hyakinthos, see Nic. Ther. 905: πρωθήβην Ὑάκινθον, and the complementary information given by Forbes-Irving, Metamorphoses, pp. 133ff. and 280ff.

[ back ] 289. SGDI 3501, 3502 and 3512; see Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 140 n. 4 and 241, and L. Robert, Hellenica VII, Paris 1949, pp. 114ff. Wide, Kulte, p. 95, on the basis of a gloss of Hesychius, s.v. κουρίδιον (Κ 3853 Latte), juxtaposes the Apollo τετράχειρ honored in Sparta with the Apollo celebrated at the Hyakinthia. However, contrary to Wide’s idea, the gloss emphasizes the relation of the Amyklaian Apollo with the Parthenians rather than his adolescent character.

[ back ] 290. Dem. 60.27, Eur. Erechth., fr. 65.73ff. Austin; see Sud. s.v. Παρθένοι (Π 668 Adler). According to Apoll. 3.15.8, the adolescents sacrificed by the Athenians were the daughters of Hyakinthos himself. See also Diod. Sic. 17.15.2, Harp. s.v. Ὑακινθίδες (p. 295, 11f. Dindorf); Steph. Byz. s.v. Λουσία (p. 419 Meineke); and Hyg. Fab. 238.2. This more recent version of the myth of Hyakinthos has been used by historicists. cited above n. 276, to confirm their thesis of a Hyakinthos worshipped at Amyklai as an adult hero. Mellink, Hyakinthos pp. 56ff., rightly prefers to see in the Hyakinthides the Ὑακινθοτρόφοι. On the Hyakinthides, see Herzog-Hauser, art. cit. p. 26 n. 28, coll. 1905ff., and Brulé, La fille d’Ath è nes, pp. 31f. and 203f.; see also Sissa and Detienne, op. cit. p. 133 n. 128, pp. 242ff.

[ back ] 291. Rohde, Psyche, pp. 115ff.; Nilsson. Gr. Feste, p. 140; Brelich, Paides, pp. 143ff.; and P. Brulé, “Fêtes grecques: périodicité et initiations. Hyakinthies et Panathénées,” in A. Moreau (ed.), L’initiation I. Les rites d’adolescence et les mystères, Montpellier 1992, pp. 19-38. See also Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 529ff., and the recent speculations of B. Sergent, “Svantovit et l’Apollon d’Amyklai,” RHR 211, 1994, pp. 15-58. One should notice that the Hyakinthia were probably celebrated during the summer: see below, n. 293. On the contrary, Pettersson, Apollo at Sparta, pp. 25ff. and 75ff., sees in the Hyakinthia, with their dual structure, a rite of passage marking the departure from “the mundane life” and the beginning of the liminal period.

[ back ] 292. Ath. 4.139a. Athenaeus, 4.140ab, cites two other fragments listing the dishes eaten at the κοπίς of the Hyakinthia. One of them, due to Epilycos, fr. 4 KA, links the feast to the ritual for Amyklaian Apollo explicitly and speaks of barley cakes, wheat loaves, and a sweetened broth. The other, by Molpis, FGrHist. 590 F 1, tells of barley bread, wheat bread, meat, raw vegetables, broth, figs, dried fruits, and hare. The broth listed by both is perhaps the same as the bean or barley soup mentioned by Alcman, fr. 96 Ρ = 130 C, when he uses the term, πυάνιον πολτόν, that gave its name to the ritual of the Athenian Pyanopsia. See P. Von der Mühll, “Kultische und andere Mahlzeiten bei Alcman,” ASTP 47, 1951, pp. 208-214 (pp. 212f.); Calame, Alcman, pp. 533ff.; and Nafissi, Kosmos, pp. 214ff. The parallel I propose here between Lacedaemonian Hyakinthia and Athenian Pyanopsia was previously suggested by Jeanmaire, Couroi, p. 528; see also Nilsson, Gr. Feste, p. 135. On the general significance of those ritual banquets, see L. Gernet, “Frairies antiques,” REA 51, 1928, pp. 313-59 (reprinted in Anthropologic de la Gr è ce antique, Paris 1968, pp. 21-61).

[ back ] 293. Plut. Thes. 22.5f.; Eust. Il. 1283.6ff.; EM 303.18ff.; Harp. s.v. Πυανόψια (pp. 265, 2ff. Dindorf); Sud. s.v. πυανεψιῶνος (Π 3104 Adler); Phot. Lex. s.v. Πυανόψια (II, p. 120 Naber). See also Ath. 14.648b = Sosib. FGrHist. 595 F 12 and Hsch. s.v. πυσάνια (Π 4478 Schmidt): see now Calame, Thésée, pp. 291ff., and above p. 126 with n. 110. The comparison and distinction between the “κοπίς” of the Hyakinthia and the meal of the Pyanopsia has been carried further by L. Bruit, “The Meal at the Hyacinthia: Ritual consumption and offering,” in O. Murray (ed.), Sympotica: A Symposium on the Symposion, Oxford 1990, pp. 162-174.

[ back ] 294. Unfortunately, there is nothing in any of the documents for the Hyakinthia period to confirm this interpretation. It has not yet even been possible to settle on where the month Hecatombeus, the month of the Hyakinthia, falls in the Spartan calendar, as Hesychius says, s.v. Ἐκατομβεύς (Ε 1272 Latte); see also IG V. 1, 511.2. A month called Hyakinthios occurs in the Laconian inscription IG V. 1, 18B. 8, and the appearance of this month in other Greek calendars at the height of summer has led most scholars to think that the Hyakinthia took place in July. See recently Robertson, Festivals, p. 153 n. 17. On the various opinions, see E. F. Bischoff, RE 9 (1916), s.v. Hyakinthios (2), and the exhaustive discussion by Mellink, Hyakinthos, pp. 25ff. Nilsson alone, Gr. Feste, pp. 134f., has adopted a different method of dating, but an unconvincing one: given the season in which the harvest was eaten fresh during the Hyakinthia, he deduces that the festival took place during the Athenian month Thargelion (24 April-24 May) and that it therefore had the character of fertility rituals at the start of the harvest; it would then correspond more or less to the Athenian Thargelia.

[ back ] 295. Plut. Thes. 22.4; Eust. Il. 1283.17ff.; see above pp. 126f.

[ back ] 296. In my recent research in Thésée, pp. 432ff., I expressed some doubts about a unilateral initiatory interpretation of the Pyanopsia.

[ back ] 297. Alcm. fr. 10 (a) P = test. 5 C = P. Oxy. 2506, fr. 1 (c). In his comments in the edition of the P. Oxy. vol. 29, p. 31, Page is inclined to attribute the quotation not to Alcman (ουσαν and που are not used by the poet), but to Aeschylus, whose name may be written at the head of the column. In the edition of the PMG, on the other hand, Page extracts from the quotations fragments of phraseology containing on-dialectal words and includes them in the commentary; in the apparatus, he expresses skepticism as to the attribution of the remaining lines to Alcman.

[ back ] 298. An [Ἀ|ταρνίδες reappears in the sch. B, fr. 6, col. II. 9f. ad Alcm. fr. 1 Ρ = 3 C, but the context is not clear (on this see Lobel, P. Oxy. vol. 24, p. 38). Hdt. 1.160, 6.28, 7.42, 8.106, and Xen. Hell. 3.2.11, give the name Atarneus to the region of the Aeolid across from Lesbos. This region is connected with either Mysia or Lydia. It is not improbable that Alcman the Lydian was also called the Atarnida. On the problem of the origin of the poet, see Calame, Alcman, pp. xivff.

[ back ] 299. Paus. 3.16.1, see Plut. Mor. 302d.

[ back ] 300. Paus. 3.13.6f., see Ath. 13.574d = Polem. Hist. FHG fr. 18 (III, p. 121 Müller). This detail that the temple of Dionysus was built on a hill does not agree with Strab. 8.5.1, who mentions a temple of Dionysus ἐν Λίμναις. On this see Wide, Kulte, pp. 161f.; Ziehen, RE 3A, coll. 1475f.; and in particular Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, pp. 208f.

[ back ] 301. Eur. Hel. 1465ff. (the text mentions simply the temple of Pallas, but Athena Khalkioikos was twice mentioned at the beginning of the tragedy, line 227 and 245), see Kannicht, op. cit. n. 269, pp. 381f. On the cult of Athena Khalkioikos, see Ziehen, RE 3A, col. 1455. On Helen’s part in this cult, see below pp. 192f.

[ back ] 302. See Wide, Kulte, pp. 160f., and E. Kuhnert in Roscher, s.v. Leukippiden, col. 1992. The latter author offers the idea, already presented to explain the simultaneous presence at Amyklai of Hyakinthos and Apollo, of Dionysus’ gradually subsituting for a more ancient sun hero.

[ back ] 303. Paus. 3.16.1 = Cypr. fr. 11 Bernabé. The double set of parents of the Leukippides is not surprising: human parents are often doubled by divine ones. The Dioskouroi are themselves the sons of both Tyndareus and Zeus; on this see Brelich, Eroi, p. 297.

[ back ] 304. Hsch. s.v. Διονυσιάδες (Δ 1888 Latte): ἐν Σπάρτῃ παρθένοι, αἱ ἐν τοῖς Διοϝυσίοις δρόμον ἀγωνιζόμεναι, and s.v. ἐν Δριώνας (Ε 2823 Latte): δρόμος παρθένων ἐν Λακεδαίμονι; the lemma of this last gloss has been compared to the Driodones, divinities of which we know only that they were worshipped at Sparta: see Hsch. s.v. Δριωδόνες (Δ 2391 Latte), and Ziehen, RE 3A, coll. 1479f.; see also below n. 328.

[ back ] 305. See above p. 114.

[ back ] 306. See Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 192ff., and above pp. 134ff.

[ back ] 307. Paus. 3.16.1, Eur. Hel. 1466; Paus. 2.22.5: on this Argive sanctuary of the Dioskouroi and of Hilaeira and Phoibe, see D. Musti and M. Torelli, Pausania II, Milano 1986, p. 286.

[ back ] 308. Lyc. Alex. 546ff. with sch. ibid. 547 (II, pp. 194f. Scheer), see Cypr. p. 40 Bernabé, Pind. N. 10.60ff.; Theocr. 22.137ff., sch. Pind. N. 10.60 (III, pp. 178f. Drachmann), Apoll. 3.10.3 and 3.11.2, see Kuhnert, art. cit. n. 302, coll. 1988ff., and U. von Wilamowitz, Die Textgeschichte der griechischen Bukoliker, Berlin 1906, p. 188 n. 1. Note that the Leukippides had a sister, Arsinoe, who was loved by Apollo and conceived Asclepius by him according to a Messenian legend: see Hes. fr. 50 MW and Apoll. 3.10.3. On the Apharetidai as Messenian heroes, see W. Drexler in Roscher, s.v. Idas (1), col. 97ff.

[ back ] 309. Xen. Resp. Lac. 1.6, Plut. Lyc. 15.4f.

[ back ] 310. Paus. 3.17.3, 3.18.11, 4.31.9 (ἁρπαγή), 1.18.1 (γάμον), see 2.22.5 (Leukippides as μητέρες in comparison with the Dioskouroi and their children; see above n. 307).

[ back ] 311. Lisboa Gulb. 682, see E. M. W. Tillyard, The Hope Vases, Cambridge 1923, pp. 65ff., with pll. 17f., and M. H. da Rocha Pereira, “Notícia acerca de vasos griegos existentes em Portugal, II,” Humanitas 11-12, 1959-60, pp. 11-32 (pp. 29ff. with pll. 24ff.). If the band holding back the hair of the two female figures represented here were only worn by unmarried girls in the classical period, as M. Bieber states in Entwicklungsgeschichte der griechischen Tracht, Berlin 1967, p. 34, neither of these figures can be the mother of the Leukippides; London BM Ε 224, CV 3.1 C, pl. 91f.: on this vase the Leukippides are named Eriphyle and Elera. For other depictions of the abduction of the Leukippides: F. Brommer, Vasenlisten zur griechischen Heldensage, Marburg/Lahn ²1960, p. 360, and A. Hermary, LIMC III, s.v. Dioskouroi, pp. 583ff.; interpretation in Wide, Kulte, pp. 328ff. Peitho is generally opposed to violence and consequently to abduction: see P. Weizsäcker in Roscher, s.v. Peitho, col. 1805 with pl. 6, and V. Pirenne-Delforge, “Le culte de la persuasion: Peithô en Grèce ancienne,” RHR 208, 1991, pp. 395-413.

[ back ] 312. Hyg. Fab. 80.1 relates that at the moment of their abduction, while still promised to the Apharetidai, Phoibe and Hilaeira, formissimae virgines, are respectively priestesses of Minerva and Diana. On the relationship of the Leukippides with marriage, see now M. L. Napolitano, “Donne spartane e τεκνοποιία,” AION 7, 1985, pp. 28-42.

[ back ] 313. Bacch. fr. dub. 61 M; on the meaning of τελλόμεναι, see above p. 41 n. 91. On the cult of Aphrodite in Sparta, see Wide, Kulte, pp. 136ff.; the brevity of the fragment makes it impossible to compare the Leukippides’ actions and one of the five Aphrodite cults in Sparta.

[ back ] 314. Alcm. fr. 8 Ρ = 20 C = P. Oxy. 2389, fr. 4, col. II, see also frr. 5.1 (a) and (c) P = 79 C = P. Oxy. 2390, fr. 1, col. I (a) and (c), with the commentary of Garvie, CQ 59, p. 185, and of Calame, Alcman, pp. 383ff.

[ back ] 315. Hsch. s.v. πωλία (Π 4496 Schmidt); the Dioskouroi as λευκόπωλοι or λεύκιπποι· Pind. P. 1.66, Eur. Hel. 638, Ant. fr. 223 Suppl. C 55 Nauck, Hsch. s.v. Διόσκουροι (Δ 1929 Latte); on the relation between the Leukippides and the λευκαὶ κόραι of Delphi, see Usener, art. cit. p. 23 n. 17, pp. 325f.

[ back ] 316. Plut. Mus. 26, Ath. 4.184f = Epich. fr. 88 Kaibel, Plat. Leg. 796b; Paus. 3.13.6f., and Wide, Kulte, pp. 304ff. An agonistic inscription dedicated to Artemis Orthia and dating from the time of Marcus Aurelius mentions a priestess common to both the Tyndaridai and the Leukippides: IG V. 1.305.5. Farnell, Hero Cults, p. 230, goes as far as presuming the institution and regular ritual celebration of a ἱερὸς γάμος between the Leukippides and the Dioskouroi.

[ back ] 317. Alcm. fr. 2 (I) Ρ = 2 C, see Hom. Il. 3.237 and Od. 11.300, also Cypr. fr. 15.6 Bernabé; see also Hes. frr. 198.8 and 199.1 MW.

[ back ] 318. As Ghali-Kahil tries to do, H é lène, pp. 312 and 329. For the collected literary and illustrative sources on Helen’s abduction by Paris, see her exhaustive study and now her article in LIMC IV, s.v. Helene, pp. 498ff. and 515ff. (for the abduction by Theseus, see pp. 507ff.); see also R. Engelmann in Roscher, s.v. Helena II, coll. 1932ff. and 1956ff., and, for the matrimonial context of some of those images, R. F. Sutton Jr., “Nuptial Eros: The Visual Discourse of Marriage in Classical Athens,” JWAG 55/56, 1997/98, pp. 27-48.

[ back ] 319. Aristoph. Lys. 1296ff., Eur. Hel. 1465ff., see above pp. 176 and 186; it will be remembered that the two illustrations of the abduction of the Leukippides cited by Pausanias were on the walls of the temple of Athena Khalkioikos and on the Amyklaian tomb. It would thus seem that the rites and myths attached to the names of Athena Khalkioikos, Amyklaian Apollo, the Leukippides, and Helen form a coherent cult. See now P. Voelke, “Beauté d’Hélène et rituels féminins dans l’Hélène d’Euripide,” Kernos 9, 1996, pp. 281-296, and B. Zweig, “Euripides’ Helen and Female Rites of Passage,” in Padilla, Rites of Passage, pp. 158-180.

[ back ] 320. Theocr. 18.22ff., see above pp. 42f. On the fictive aspect of this matrimonial song, cf. Gow, Theocr. II, pp. 348f.

[ back ] 321. Paus. 3.14.6ff. and 3.15.3. On the uncertain archaeological situation of the Dromos and of the Platanistas, see Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, pp. 214f. and 217f. For the Phoibaion, see Hitzig-Bluemmer, Paus. I, pp. 789f., and below n. 327. Arrigoni, in Le Donne in Grecia, pp. 74ff. and 86, distinguishes two Dromoi, one of which would be reserved for women, but see the testimony of Eur. Andr. 595ff.!

[ back ] 322. Paus. 3.19.9f. and 3.20.2. On the cults rendered in the Archaic period to Homeric heroes on old Mycenaean sites, see C. Bérard, “Récupérer la mort du prince: héroïsation et formation de la cité,” and A. Snodgrass, “Les origines du culte des héros dans la Grèce antique,” in G. Gnoli and J. -P. Vernant, La mort, les morts dans les sociétés anciennes, Paris-Cambridge 1982, pp. 89-106 and 107-120.

[ back ] 323. For the location of the Menelaion at Therapnai, see Hitzig-Bluemmer, Paus. I, pp. 837f., also F. Bölte, RE 5 A (1934), s.v. Therapnai, col. 2353, H.W. Catling, “New Excavations at the Menelaion, Sparta,” in U. Jantzen (ed.), Neue Forschungen in griechischen Heiligt ü mern, Tübingen 1976, pp. 77-91, and Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, pp. 249f. and 253, with complementary information on recent excavations made at Therapnai. On the proximity of the Phoibaion and Therapnai see also Hdt. 6.61.

[ back ] 324. On the cult of Helen in the Platanistas, see Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 426f., Ziehen, RE 3 A, coll. 1481ff., and Gow, Theocr. II, pp. 358f. Paus. 3.19.9f. cites the founding legend of a Rhodian cult of Helen Dendritis. On the probable iconographic representations of Helen between the Dioskouroi in the form of a tree, see F. Chapouthier, Les Dioscures au service d’une d é esse, Paris 1935, pp. 90 and 149.

[ back ] 325. According to a system of aetiological etymology current in the Hellenistic period, Theocritus explains the name Dromos without directly referring to it. The ritual practices around Helen’s plane-tree certainly are not connected with her marriage, as Kaibel, Hermes 27, pp. 255f., and Merkelbach, Philologus 101, p. 20, think, but with her situation before marriage. The lotus wreath hanging on the plane-tree was picked on the spot where the girls raced and it is certainly in memory (μεμναμέναι, l. 41) of this race that Helen’s companions dedicate the wreath. Moreover, at Elis, the plane-tree was explicitly associated with the Dromos where the young athletes exercised before taking part in the Olympic Games: Paus. 6.23.1. On the other hand, at Kaphyai in Arcadia, a revered plane-tree near a spring was called Menelais, from the name of the king of Sparta: Paus. 8.23.4f.

[ back ] 326. See below pp. 237ff., and Choeurs II, p. 122.

[ back ] 327. It is apparently not possible to see a precinct consecrated to Phoibe in the Phobaion near the Dromos, see Ziehen, RE 3 A, coll. 1484f. and 1508, and above n. 321.

[ back ] 328. See above p. 187; the gloss of Hsch. s.v. ἐν Δριώνας (Ε 2823 Latte) might possibly refer to the race presided over by Helen (see above n. 304). Along these lines Meineke suggested correcting the lemma of this gloss to ἐν δενδρῶνας.

[ back ] 329. See above p. 184. We have seen (above n. 266) that the gloss of Hesychius s.v. κάνναθρα (Κ 675 Latte) referred to a festival for Helen and not to the Hyakinthia. Might this common use of the ritual chariot be a link between these two festivals? Or is this an error of the lexicographer?

[ back ] 330. On the merits of entering adulthood implied by participation in the rite of the footrace, see Vidal-Naquet, Le chasseur noir, pp. 166ff. L. L. Clader, Helen: The Evolution from Divine to Heroic in Greek Epic Tradition, Leiden 1976, pp. 63ff., has tried to draw the etymology of the name Ἑλένη back to a root *wel – meaning ‘shoot,’ ‘sprig’; see now Austin, Helen, pp. 86ff., on Helen as heroine or goddess.

[ back ] 331. Menelaus and Helen together in a cult in Therapnai: Isocr. 10.63. Other sources in Wide, Kulte, pp. 340ff.; on Helen’s cult in Therapnai see Ziehen, RE 3 A, coll. 1481ff., Bölte, art. cit. n. 323, coll. 2357ff., and Clader, op. cit. n. 330, pp. 69f. Brelich, Paides, pp. 162ff., confuses the two Spartan cults of Helen and gives an unacceptable account of them.

[ back ] 332. Hdt. 6.61f.; see now Austin, Helen, pp. 32ff. Ariston reigned in Sparta towards the middle of the sixth century. This date gives some indication of the age of the cult at Therapnai. Hsch. s.v. Ἑλένεια (Ε 1992 Latte) mentions a Laconian feast of Helen: it could as well be a ritual held at Therapnai as the Platanistas ritual; see also Hsch. s.v. Θεραπνατίδεια (Θ 335 Latte): ἑορτὴ παρὰ Λάκωσι. Bölte, art. cit. n. 323, coll. 2358f., presumes with justification that this feast was celebrated in honor of Θεραπνᾶτις, the goddess of Therapnai, in other words Helen. [ back ] Note that the legend associated with the sanctuary of Eileithyia at Argos attributes to Helen the founding of this temple: Paus. 2.22.6. The legend tells that, after being freed by the Dioskouroi, Helen, pregnant by Theseus, gave birth to Iphigenia, whom she left at Argos with Clytemnestra. The birth was supposed to have taken place before her marriage to Menelaus. The association of Helen with the Argive Eileithyia confirms the significance of her control over the life of the adult woman.

[ back ] 333. This Argive legend goes back to Stesichoros (fr. 191 P) and contradicts the absence of rape in the Laconian versions of the episode of Helen’s abduction by Theseus, reported by Plutarch: see above pp. 159ff. See also Diod. Sic. 4.63, who says that Helen was returned to her brothers a virgin, other sources of this myth in Engelmann, art. cit. n. 318, col. 1935. However, the Argive version states that Theseus was considered to be the legitimate father of Iphigeneia (sources in H. W. Stoll in Roscher, s.v. Iphigenia, coll. 301f.). This probably hints at a marriage between Theseus and Helen, a marriage confirmed by the lines in Stesichorus (fr. 223 P) which describe the daughters of Tyndareus as δι- and τρίγαμοι, and the lines in Pindar (fr. 243 M) summarized by Pausanias (1.41.5) in which the poet shows that the aim of Theseus in abducting Helen was to become the brother-in-law of the Dioskouroi. The legend associated with the sanctuary of Aphrodite Nymphia supposedly founded by Theseus on the road to Troizen on the occasion of his wedding with Helen (Paus. 2.32.7) is clearly witness to this. The tradition of the rape is, however, also represented: see EGud. 285.45ff. Sturz = Euph. fr. 90 Powell. [ back ] Moreover, the Argive sanctuary dedicated to Eileithyia by Helen was beside that of the Dioskouroi. There the heroes were represented with their children and the Leukippides, their wives: Paus. 2.22.5, cf. Musti and Torelli, op. cit. n. 307, pp. 286f. [ back ] On the legendary beauty of Helen, see Engelmann, art. cit. n. 318, coll. 1953f. On its illusions, see N. Loraux, Les expériences de Tirésias: Le féminin et l’homme grec, Paris 1989, pp. 232ff. For an association of Helen as goddess with the sunlight (on a comparative basis), see M. L. West, Immortal Helen, London 1975, pp. 5ff.

[ back ] 334. See above pp. 28f.; see also the passage of Apollodorus cited above (3.10.7, see above n. 215) in which the expression γενομένην κάλλει διαπρεπῆ signifies the moment in which Helen becomes desirable in the eyes of Theseus. The acquisition of beauty is the sign of entering puberty and the nubile state.

[ back ] 335. Paus. 3.7.7.

[ back ] 336. Sapph. frr. 16 and 23.5 V, other references in Ghali-Kahil, H é lène, pp. 36ff.; see also Eur. Hec. 635f. (καλλίστη). On the link connecting beauty with Helen and Aphrodite, see Gentili, Poesia e pubblico, pp. 123ff., and Austin, Helen, pp. 51ff.; for Farnell, Cults II, p. 675, Helen is one of the numerous hypostases of Aphrodite. [ back ] In Homer Od. 4.121 f., Helen is compared with Artemis. This dual association with Aphrodite on the one hand and Artemis on the other is a perfect explanation for the dual nature of Helen venerated as girl and woman. E. A. S. Butterworth, Some Traces of the Pre-Olympian World in Greek Literature and Myth, Berlin 1966, pp. 179ff., argues that Artemis and Aphrodite were both included in the figure of Helen; but he has tried with absurd associative arguments to reduce this contradiction by explaining it historically as the “defection of ‘Aphrodite’ … from the celestial cult” (p. 186). [ back ] In the passage by Hyg. Fab. 80.1 (see above n. 312), the Leukippides are carried off by the Dioskouroi just when they appear to be the most beautiful of young girls and capable of arousing burning desire in the heroes. As for Helen, the quality of beauty that arouses masculine desire is present at the time the girl is ready to marry. [ back ] In Arcadia, an Artemis Kalliste was, it is true, venerated; Paus. 8.35.8. But her cult probably resulted from syncretism with the one associated with Kallisto. The myth tells how the Nymph, hunting companion of Artemis, had been raped by Zeus, conceived a child, and was transformed into a bear: see I. McPhee, LIMC V, s.v. Kallisto, pp. 940ff., and Forbes-Irving, Metamorphoses, pp. 67ff., 72ff., and 202ff. Kallisto, like Helen, changes from παρθένος to pregnant adult woman: see Dowden, Death and the Maiden, pp. 182ff. The debate between W. Sale, “Callisto and the Virginity of Artemis,” RhM 108, 1965, pp. 11-35, and G. Maggiulli, “Artemide—Callisto,” Mythos: Scripta in honorem Marii Untersteiner, Genova 1970, pp. 179-185, concerning the contradiction between the traditional virginity of Artemis and the rape of her hypostasis Kallisto makes no sense: we have seen that in Greece the subject of rape of a virgin was an integral part of the mythical image of female adolescence: see Brelich, Paides, p. 263 n. 69; P. Borgeaud, Recherches sur le dieu Pan, Roma-Genève 1979, pp. 51 ff.; and below p. 253 n. 164. In the literature, the epithet καλλίστη can refer to Aphrodite (Eur. Hel. 1348f., IA 553, Phaeth. 232, Theocr. 3.46) or to Artemis (Eur. Hipp. 66 and 70f., with the commentary by Barrett, op. cit. n. 51, p. 170); it is also used for Hebe (Pind. N. 10.18) or for Eirene (Eur. Or. 1682f.).

[ back ] 337. See above pp. 122f. E. Ziebarth, Aus dem griechischen Schulwesen: Eudamos von Milet und Verwandtes, Leipzig-Berlin ²1914, p. 144, makes a similar assumption when he thinks that these beauty competitions were the final examination in schools for girls.

[ back ] 338. See above p. 69f.

[ back ] 339. See above pp. 42f. and 72.

[ back ] 340. Paus. 3.14.7, 3.20.2 and 3.14.9, see Hdt. 6.61. On the Spartan cults of the Dioskouroi, see Wide, Kulte, pp. 304ff., and Furtwängler, art. cit. n. 316, col. 1164f. In the iconography, the triad formed by the Dioskouroi and Helen has been studied by Chapouthier, op. cit. n. 324; for the latter, the image of the triad has its origin in Helen’s cult at Sparta (pp. 143ff.). Like Helen, the Dioskouroi were supposed to have lived near the Eurotas: Theogn. 1087f., Aristoph. Lys. 1301 f. (on this last passage see above p. 193).

[ back ] 341. Alcm. fr. 7.6ff. Ρ = 19 C, see sch. Eur. Tr. 210 (II, p. 353 Schwartz); Pind. P. 11.61ff. and I. 1.31 with sch. ad loc. (III, p. 204 Drachmann), see Bölte, art. cit. n. 323, coll. 2359ff. and 2365. Helen was also associated with the Theoxenia held for the Dioskouroi by the Spartans: see Eur. Hel. 1667ff. and Pind. O. 3.1, with Ziehen, RE 3 A, col. 1477, Kannicht, op. cit. n. 269, p. 432f., and Austin, Helen, pp. 185ff.

[ back ] 342. Pind. N. 10.52, other references above n. 317.

[ back ] 343. A. J. B. Wace (et al.), “The Menelaion,” ABSA 15, 1908, pp. 108-157 with pl. V, see Bölte, art. cit. n. 323, coll. 2355ff., who tries to retrace a very conjectural cult history of the sanctuary (coll. 2363ff.), and Kiechle, Lakonien, pp. 7ff. H. Waterhouse and R. Hope Simpson, “Prehistoric Laconia: Part I,” ABSA 55, 1960, pp. 67-107 (p. 72), and “Part II,” ABSA 56, 1961, pp. 114-175 (p. 174), show that there is an interruption of activity on the site between Late Helladic III B-C and Laconian I. For a more general history of the cult, see J. H. Croon, “Artemis Orthia en Elena,” Hermeneus 39, 1967/68, pp. 128-134; see also the complementary references given above n. 323.

[ back ] 344. See Wace, art. cit. n. 343, pp. 127ff. G. Karo, “Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Griechenland,” ARW 16, 1913, pp. 253-292 (pp. 264ff.), sees depictions of Helen in the terra-cotta statuettes of a woman on horseback. This type of ex-voto should be considered with skepticism. I note, however, without being able to infer from it the existence of choral performances for the cult of Therapnai, that one of the figurines represents a woman holding a lyre; Wace, art. cit. n. 343, p. 130 with pl. VII, 20.

[ back ] 345. See above pp. 159f.

[ back ] 346. Alcm. fr. 7 P = 19 C (see Cuartero, CFC 4, pp. 390ff., and above n. 341) with Harpocr. s.v. Θεράπναι (p. 151, 13 Dindorf) and Sud. s.v. Θεράπναι (Θ 231 Adler), and Alcm. fr. 14 (b) and (a) P = 5 and 4 C, see Calame, Alcman, pp. 352ff.

[ back ] 347. An. Gr. I, pp. 305, 25ff. Bekker, Ath. 4.141ef and 14.635e = Hellan. FGrHist. 4 F 85a (cf. Terp. test. 1 Gostoli) and Sosib. FGrHist. 595 F 3, IG V. 1.222; other sources in Wide, Kulte, pp. 63ff., and Burkert, Religion, pp. 354ff. See also Krummen, op. cit. n. 217, pp. 108ff. Interpretive essays by Wide, Kulte, pp. 73ff. (“Weinlese- und Sühnefest”); Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 118ff. (probably like the Thargelia, “ein agrarisches Fest und ein Sühnfest”); Ziehen, RE 3A, coll. 1458 and 1513 (“Ernte- und Sühnefest”); Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 524ff. (the Karneatai form an association of boys “entre le passage par les rites de l’adolescence et la période du mariage”); and Brelich, Paides, pp. 148ff. and 179ff. (“festa di rinnovamento, dell’immissione dei nuovi iniziati nella società,” “conclusione dell’agoge“). See also Bölte, RhM 78, pp. 141ff., and Pettersson, Apollo at Sparta, pp. 57ff. and 73ff. (“rite of aggregation”).

[ back ] 348. Hsch. s.v. Καρνεᾶται (Κ 838 Latte), Paus. 3.14.6. On the problem of the location of the principal sanctuary of Apollo Karneios at Sparta, see Ziehen, RE 3 A, col. 1458, and Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, pp. 216f. At Thera, a Laconian colony, the temple of Apollo Karneios stood beside the gymnasium. This cult was related to that of Hera Dromaia: see Brelich, Paides, p. 183 with n. 207, and Calame, I Greci e l’eros, pp. 78ff. with n. 31. On the meaning of Karneios, see now I. Malkin, Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean, Cambridge 1994, pp. 149ff.

[ back ] 349. The presence of a girl at the Karneia of Sparta would be founded on the unique testimonium of a krater from south Italy representing a boy and a girl dancing (?) around a pillar designated as Karneios: see Burkert, Religion, p. 355 with n. 6. The foundation myth of the Karneia at Cyrene as recounted by Call. Ap. 80ff. could imply the participation of young girls.

[ back ] 350. Paus. 3.11.9, Ath. 15.678b = Sosib. FGrHist. 595 F 5 (see Plat. Leg. 667cd) with commentary by Jacoby, FGrHist. IIIB, p. 646, Plut. Lyc. 21.3 and Mor. 238ab, quoting carm. pop. fr. 870 P. See Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 140ff.; Bölte, RhM 78, pp. 124ff.; Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 531ff.; Den Boer, Lac. Studies, pp. 221ff.; Michell, Sparta, pp. 186f.; Brelich, Paides, pp. 139ff. and 187ff.; and the new detailed discussion of this puzzling evidence by Robertson, Festivals, pp. 147ff.

[ back ] 351. And old men, according to the correction of the text of Ath. 15.678c suggested by Kaibel in the apparatus of his edition. On the presence of a chorus of adults in the Gymnopaidiai, see Xen. Hell. 6.4.16.

[ back ] 352. Sud. s.v. Γυμνοπαιδεία (Γ 486 Adler), An. Gr. I, p. 32, 18ff. Bekker; probably also after Thermopylai: EM 243 .3ff. (Θυρέαν corr. Ruhnken). See Brelich, Guerre, pp. 22ff. and 30ff. (see above p. 105), and Paides, pp. 189f.; also Parker, in Sparta, pp. 149f. The Gymnopaidiai are connected at different historical moments with the struggle for the Thyreatis: see Wade-Gery, art. cit. p. 63 n. 164, pp. 79ff. The report that Tyrtaeus, according to Poll 4.107 = Tyrt. test. 15 Prato, had been the initiator of the τριχορία at Sparta, in other words of the division of choruses into three age groups, probably refers to the organization of the Gymnopaidiai and corroborates its military character.

[ back ] 353. Plut. Mus. 9, see Latte, Salt., pp. 77f.; Jeanmaire, Couroi, pp. 441 ff.; Brelich, Paides, pp. 186f.; and Parker, in Sparta, pp. 149f. Other parallels in Vidal-Naquet, Le chasseur noir, pp. 167f.; see now Pettersson, Apollo at Sparta, pp. 42ff. and 73ff., who sees in the Gymnopaidiai the “rite of liminality” following the separation during the Hyakinthia and the aggregation at the Karneia.

[ back ] 354. Xen. Resp. Lac. 13.2f., see Wide, Kulte, pp. 13f., Ziehen, RE 3A, col. 1487; Pol. 4.35, see Wide, Kulte, p. 49, and Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 90f.; Hsch. s.v. Ταιναρίας (Τ 33 Schmidt), Paus. 3.12.5, etc., see Nilsson, Gr. Feste, pp. 67ff.

[ back ] 355. On this subject see Vernant, art. cit. p. 27 n. 33, pp. 14ff.

[ back ] 356. Paus. 3.13.9; see Musti and Torelli, Pausania III, pp. 209f.

[ back ] 357. Alcm. fr. 60 Ρ = 126 C, see Ath. 15.680f and 678a, Hsch. s.v. πυλεών(α) (Π 4353 Schmidt), with Wide, Kulte, pp. 27ff., Ziehen, RE 3A, coll. 1473f., and Choeurs II, pp. 107f. and 127.

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Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious Roles, and Social Functions

Chorus and Ritual

3.1. Non-Spartan rituals

3.1.1. Choral festivities among the gods

3.1.2. Rites dedicated to Artemis

3.1.3. Apollo

3.1.4. Hera

3.1.5. Aphrodite

3.1.6. Athena

3.1.7. Dionysus

3.1.8. Demeter

3.1.9. The chorus and the pantheon