Chapter III (2)

Quite exceptional is the relation of the temple to the precinct. It does not lie in the middle, and is, moreover, separated from the inner part of the precinct by a wall and a door that could be closed. This separating wall is however apparently later than the temple, which possibly at one time stood free within the precinct. The separating wall is only explicable on ritual grounds. It made it possible for the temple to be accessible all the year round, whereas the precinct, save for one day in the year, was closed.

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Are we to give to the ancient sanctuary the name _Lenaion_? To the sanctuary itself probably not. The meaning of _Lenaion_, it would seem, is not ‘sanctuary of the god Lenaios,’ but rather ‘place of the wine-press.’ It is noticeable that writers who could themselves have seen the sanctuary never call it _Lenaion_. Thucydides[217], the writer of the oration _against Neaera_[218], be he Demosthenes or Apollodorus, and again Phanodemus[219], as quoted by Athenaeus, all speak of it as the sanctuary of _Dionysos-in-the-Marshes_. Isaeus[220] calls it the Dionysion-in-the-Marshes. On the other hand, when contemporary authors speak of the dramatic contest which was held not in honour of Dionysos Eleuthereus but at the older Dionysia, they speak of the contest as _at_ or _on_ the Lenaion, never as _in-the-Marshes_. The natural conclusion is that the name _Lenaion_ is applicable to the place where the contests actually took place, namely to the ancient Orchestra and perhaps its immediate neighbourhood. The district of the wine-presses naturally had its dancing place, and that dancing place was called the Lenaion. To this day the peasants of Greece use for their festival-dances the village threshing-floor.

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In the theatre of Eleuthereus Dr Dörpfeld[221] has given back to us the old orchestra. He has shown us deep down below the successive Graeco-Roman and Roman stages the old circular orchestra built of polygonal masonry (Fig. 16). On this old orchestra, with only wooden seats for the spectators, were acted, we now know, the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, nay tradition[222] even says, and we have no cause to doubt its veracity, that Thespis was the first (in 586 B.C.) to exhibit a play in the ‘city’ contest (ἐν ἄστει).

But ancient though it was, before it, as we have seen, came the orchestra in the Limnae. Dr Dörpfeld had hoped that his excavations would give back this orchestra too; this hope has not been fulfilled. Traces have been found of a circular structure on the South slope of the Areopagus and are marked on the plan (Fig. 46), but they are of uncertain date, and, if they mark the site of any ancient building, it is probably that of the Odeion of Agrippa. The old orchestra lay at the North-West corner of the Areopagos.

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Tradition records the beginning of the contests ‘in the city,’ i.e. in the theatre of Eleuthereus, but the beginnings of the other festivals, the Lenaia and the Chytroi, held in the Limnae, are lost in the mists before. The two are in all probability but different names for the same festival, or rather the Chytroi is the whole ceremony of the third day of the Anthesteria and Lenaia the name given to the dramatic part of the ceremonies. But though we do not know the beginning, and though, as will presently be seen, the ‘Pot-Contests’ went back in all probability to a time before the coming of Dionysos, we have hints as to how the end came, how the splendour and convenience of the great theatre of Eleuthereus gradually obscured and absorbed the primitive contests of the orchestra in the Limnae.

It was, we know, the great statesman Lycurgus who, in the 4th century B.C., built the first permanent stone stage in the theatre and made the seats for the spectators as we see them now. So pleased was he, it would seem, with his theatre that he thought it useless and senseless to have plays acted elsewhere. Accordingly in the _Lives of the Ten Orators_[223] we learn that Lycurgus introduced laws, and among them one about comic writers ‘to hold a performance at the Chytroi, a competitive one, in the theatre,’ and ‘to record the victor as a victor in the city,’ which had formerly not been allowed. He thus revived the performance which had fallen into disuse.

Lycurgus meant well we may be sure, but he was a Butad[224], he ought to have known better than to pluck up an old festival by the roots like that and think to foster it by transplantation. The end was certain; the old precinct, deserted by its festivals, was bit by bit forgotten, overgrown, and at last in part built over by the new Iobakchoi.

* * * * *

The precinct had lost prestige by the time of Pausanias[225]. Had the temple of Dionysos-in-the-Marshes been above ground he would assuredly not have passed it by. Near to where the precinct once was he saw a building, a circular or semi-circular one, which may have been a last Roman reminiscence of the orchestra, and still of note though it did not occupy the same site; he notes ‘a theatre which they call the Odeion.’ It is probable that this was the theatre built by Agrippa and mentioned by Philostratos[226] as ‘the theatre in the Kerameikos, which goes by the name of the Agrippeion.’

* * * * *

Before leaving the sanctuary in-the-Marshes, a word must be said as to the Anthesteria or, as Thucydides calls it, ‘the more ancient Dionysiac Festival.’ I have tried elsewhere[227] to show in detail that the Dionysiac element in the Anthesteria was only a thin upper layer beneath which lay a ritual of immemorial antiquity, which had for its object the promotion of fertility by means of the placation of ghosts or heroes. On the first day, if I am right, the _Pithoigia_ was an Opening not only of wine-jars but of grave-jars; the second, the _Choes_, was a feast not only of Cups but of Libations (χοαί); the third, the _Chytroi_, not only a Pot-feast, but a feast of Holes in the ground and of the solemn dismissal of Keres back to the lower world. That the collective name of the whole feast _Anthesteria_ did not primarily mean the festival of those who ‘did the flowers,’ but rather of those who ‘revoked the ghosts[228].’

But in trying to distinguish the two strata, the under stratum of ghosts, the upper of Dionysos, I never doubted that the Pot Contest on the day of the _Chytroi_ belonged to Dionysos. Dionysos and the ‘origin of the drama’ are canonically connected. It has remained, therefore, something of a mystery how Dionysos, late-comer as he was, contrived to possess himself of the ancient ghost-festival and impose his dramatic contests on a ritual substratum apparently so uncongenial. Religions are accommodating enough, but some sort of analogy or possible bridge from one to the other is necessary for affiliation.

The difficulty disappears at once if we accept Professor Ridgeway’s[229] recent theory as to the origin of tragedy. The drama according to him is not ‘Dorian,’ and, save for the one element of the Satyric play, not Dionysiac. It took its rise in mimetic dances at the tombs of local heroes. When Dionysos came to Athens with his Satyr attendants he would find the Pot-Contests as part of the funeral ritual of the Anthesteria. He added to the festival wine and the Satyrs. Small wonder that comedy, as in the _Frogs_, was at home in the Underworld, and could in all piety parody a funeral[230] on the stage.

* * * * *

Thucydides has given us four examples of sanctuaries outside the _polis_ which are ‘towards that part’ of it, but again, as in the first clause, he seems to feel that if he has spoken the truth it is not the whole truth, so he saves himself from misunderstanding by an additional clause, ‘_and other ancient sanctuaries are placed here_.’

It would be idle to try and give a complete list of all the sanctuaries that were situated in this particular region, still more idle to decide of what particular sanctuaries Thucydides was thinking. The precinct of Aglauros and the Anakeion on the North side, the sanctuary of the Semnae and the Amyneion on the West, the sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemos and that of Themis on the West and South-West are all ‘towards’ the approach. Three out of these, the Amyneion, the sanctuary of the Semnae, and the sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemos, are of such interest in themselves and so essential to the forming of a picture of the sanctities of ancient Athens that a word must be said of each.

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_The Amyneion._ The Amyneion, or sanctuary of Amynos[231], is known to us only through monumental evidence, brought to light in the recent excavations. Its discovery is one of the things that make us feel suddenly how much of popular faith we, relying as we must almost wholly on literature, may have utterly lost.

If after leaving the precinct of Dionysos in-the-Marshes we follow the main road for about 35 metres, we come on a precinct (Fig. 30) of much smaller size and of quadrangular shape, which abuts on the road and along the North side of which a narrow foot-path leads up to the Acropolis. The precinct-walls are of hard blue calcareous stone from the Acropolis and neighbouring hills, and the masonry is good polygonal. The entrance-gate (A), which has been rebuilt in Roman times, is at the North-West corner. A little to the East of the middle of the precinct, and manifestly of great importance, is a well (B). The natural supply of this well was reinforced by a conduit-pipe, which leads direct into it from the great water-course of Peisistratos, which will later (p. 119) be described. Near the well are remains of a small hero-chapel, and within this was found the lower part of a marble sacrificial table (C), decorated with two snakes. The masonry of the precinct wall, the well, and the shrine all point to a date at the time of Peisistratos. Even before the limits of this precinct were fairly made out the excavators came upon a number of fragments of votive offerings of a familiar type. Such are reliefs representing parts of the human body, breasts and the like, votive snakes, and reliefs representing worshippers approaching a god of the usual Asklepios type. Conspicuous among these was a fine well-preserved relief (Fig. 31), depicting a man holding a huge leg, very clearly marked with a varicose vein, exactly where, doctors say, a varicose vein should be. The inscription[232] above the figure is unfortunately so effaced that no facts emerge save that the dedicator, the man who holds the leg, was the son of a certain Lysimachos, and was of the deme Acharnae. The style of the letters and of the sculpture dates the monument as of about the first half of the 4th century B.C. It was clear enough that the excavators had come on the precinct of a god of healing, and a few decades ago the precinct would have been labelled without more ado as ‘sacred to Asklepios.’ We should then have been left with the curious problem, Why had Asklepios two precincts, one on the South, one on the West? We know that Asklepios made his triumphant entry into the great precinct on the South slope in 421 B.C.; if he had had a precinct on the West slope since the days of Peisistratos, why did he leave it?

But now-a-days in the matter of ascription we proceed more cautiously. We know that votive-reliefs of the ‘Asklepios’ type are offered to almost any local hero, that local heroes anywhere and everywhere are hero-healers[233]. Hence local hero-healers were gradually absorbed and effaced by the most successful of their number, Asklepios. In literature we hear little of the hero-cult of an Amphiaraos, but his local shrine went on down to late days at Oropus. Fortunately in our precinct we have inscriptions that leave us no doubt. On a stele[234] (Fig. 32) found there we have an inscription as follows: ‘Mnesiptolemè on behalf of Dikaiophanes dedicated (this) to Asklepios Amynos.’

At first we seem no further; we have the familiar Asklepios worshipped under the title of Amynos, Protector, Defender. A second inscription[235], however, makes it certain that _Amynos_ is not merely an adjective attached to Asklepios, but the cultus title of a person separate from Asklepios. This inscription, of the latter half of the 4th century B.C., is in honour of certain persons who had been benefactors of the _thiasos_ (ὀργεῶνες) of _Amynos and of Asklepios and of Dexion_. We know who Dexion was; he was Sophocles, heroized, and he, the mortal, came last on the list. Sophocles had a shrine apart, or it may be a separate shrine within the larger one. The same inscription[236] goes on to order that the honorary decree was to be ‘engraved on two stone stelae, and these to be set up, the one in the sanctuary of Dexion, the other in that of Amynos and Asklepios.’

Sophocles[237] though, to us, he is first in remembrance, comes last in ritual precedence; Amynos is first. The history of the little shrine is instructive. Not later than Peisistratos, and how much earlier we do not know, the worship was set up of a local hero with the title Protector, _Amynos_. At some time or other, perhaps shortly after the pestilence at Athens, which the local Protector had been powerless to avert, it was thought well to call in a greater Healer-Hero, Asklepios, who meanwhile had attained in the Peloponnesos to enormous prestige. The experiment was tried carefully and quietly in the little precinct. Amynos kept his own precedence. No one’s feelings are hurt; the snake of the Peloponnesos is merely affiliated to the local Athenian hero-snake, the same offerings are due to both, the _pelanoi_, the votive limbs. But the new-comer is too strong; Asklepios waxes, Amynos wanes—into an adjective. Asklepios outgrows the little precinct and betakes himself to a new and grander sanctuary on the South slope.

The precinct and worship of Amynos, though it has no mention in literature, is preserved to us perhaps through its association with the dominant worship of Asklepios; but Amynos was probably only one among many heroes who had their chapels and their family worships scattered along the main road of the city where countless little buildings remain unidentified (Fig. 35). If the supposition suggested above (p. 99) be correct these local heroes must have had choral dances about their tombs, those choral dances affiliated by the late-comer Dionysos, and ultimately leading to the development of the drama. At the festival of the Anthesteria these local ghosts would be summoned from their tombs on the day of the Pithoigia; on the day of the Chytroi they would be fed and their descendants would hold a wake with revels and dancings.

* * * * *

_The Sanctuary of the Semnae Theai or Venerable Goddesses._ The site of this sanctuary is practically certain. Euripides[238] in the _Electra_ makes the Erinyes, when they are about to become Semnae, descend into a chasm of the earth near to the Areopagos. Near to the Areopagos there is one chasm and one only, that is the deep fissure on the North-East side, the spot where tradition has long placed the cave of the Semnae[239]. A cave they needed, for they were under-world goddesses. Their ritual I have discussed in detail elsewhere[240]; here it need only be noted that it was of great antiquity and had all the characteristic marks of a chthonic cult. As under-world goddesses the Venerable Ones bore the title also of _Arai_, Imprecations; they were for cursing as well as blessing; the hill it is now generally acknowledged took its name from them rather than from the war-god Ares. Orestes it will be remembered[241] came to the Areopagos to be purified from his mother’s blood, and he found the people celebrating the Choes; he found them, if our topography be correct, close by, in the precinct of Dionysos-in-the-Marshes.

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_The Sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemos._ Harpocration[242] in explaining the title _Pandemos_ tells us that Apollodorus in the sixth book of his treatise _About the Gods_ said that this was ‘the name given at Athens to the goddess whose worship had been established somewhere near the ancient agora.’ His conjecture that the goddess was called Pandemos because all the people collected in the agora need not detain us, but the topographical statement coming from an author who knew his subject like Apollodorus, is important. We have to seek the sanctuary of Pandemos somewhere on or close to the West slope of the Acropolis, somewhere near the great square which as we shall see (p. 131) stood in front of the ancient well-house and formed the ancient agora.

Pausanias[243] mentions the worship of Aphrodite Pandemos in a sentence of the most tantalizing vagueness. After leaving the Asklepieion he notes a temple of Themis and in front of it a monument to Hippolytus. He then tells at length the story of Phaedra and next goes on ‘When Theseus united the various Athenian demes into one people he introduced the worship of Aphrodite Pandemos and Peitho. The old images were not there in my time, but those I saw were the work of no obscure artists.’ Immediately after he passes to the sanctuary of Ge Kourotrophos and Demeter Chloe and then straight to the citadel.

Of the actual sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemos not a trace has been found. From the account of Pausanias coupled with that of Harpocration we should expect it to be somewhere below the sanctuary of Ge and above the fountain Enneakrounos, near which was the ancient agora, and of course outside the Pelargikon. When the West slope of the Acropolis was excavated[244] in the upper layers of earth about 40 statuettes of Aphrodite were found, and these must have belonged to the sanctuary. Inscriptions[245] relating to her worship were found built into a mediaeval fortification wall near Beule’s Gate. These, as not being _in situ_, cannot be used as topographical evidence, but they give us important information as to the character of the worship of Pandemos.

The first[246] of these inscriptions (Fig. 33) dates about the beginning of the fifth century B.C. ‘[...]dorus dedicated me to Aphrodite a gift of first fruits, Lady do thou grant him abundance of good things. But they who unrighteously say false things and....’ Unfortunately here the inscription breaks off so the scandal will remain for ever a secret. Aphrodite, it is to be noted, is prayed to as a giver of increase. She does not seem yet to have got her title of Pandemos, but as this occurs in the two other inscriptions found with this one, and they probably all three came from the same sanctuary, this Aphrodite is almost certainly she who became Pandemos.

The second inscription (Fig. 34), dating about the middle of the 4th century B.C., is carved on an architrave adorned with a frieze of doves carrying a fillet. The architrave is broken midway. Only the left-hand half is represented in the figure. This inscription[247] again is partly metrical, forming an elegiac couplet.

‘This for thee, O great and holy Pandemos Aphr[odite,
We adorn with gifts, our statues.’

Beneath in prose and in smaller letters come the names of the dedicators. Pandemos is here quite plainly the official title of the goddess.

The third and latest inscription[248] is carved on a stele of Hymettus marble. It is exactly dated (283 B.C.) by the archon’s name, the elder Euthios. It records a decree made while a woman called Hegesipyle was priestess. The decree, which is too long to be here quoted in full, ordains that the _astynomoi_ should at the time of the procession in honour of Aphrodite Pandemos ‘provide a dove for the purification of the temple, should have the altars anointed, should give a coat of pitch to the roof and wash the statues and prepare a purple robe.’

Aphrodite Pandemos was a ‘great and holy goddess,’ giver of increase. She was no private divinity of the courtesan; the second inscription tells us that she was worshipped by a married woman, who is her priestess. It is literature and not ritual that has cast a slur on the title Pandemos; the state honoured both her and Ourania alike ‘according to ancestral custom.’ Plato[249] in his beautiful reckless way will have it that because there are two Loves there are two Goddesses, ‘the elder one having no mother, who is the Heavenly Aphrodite, the daughter of Ouranos; to her we give the title Ourania, the younger, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione, and her we call “Of-all-the-People,” Pandemos.’

The real truth was that Aphrodite came to the Greeks from the East and like most Semitic divinities she was not only a duality but a trinity.

When Pausanias[250] was at Thebes he saw the images of this ancient Oriental trinity and he knew whence they had come. ‘There are wooden images of Aphrodite at Thebes so ancient that it is said they were dedicated by Harmonia and that they were made out of the wooden figure-heads of the ships of Cadmus. One of them is called Heavenly, another Of-all-the-People, and the third the Turner-Away.’ The threefold Aphrodite came from the Semitic East bearing three Semitic titles: she was the Queen of Heaven[251], she was the Lady of all the People, Ourania and Pandemos, what the third title was which the Greeks translated into Apostrophia we do not know; as already noted it took slight hold. At Megalopolis[252] we see how the third title of the trinity faded. There close to the house where was an image of Ammon made like a Herm and with the horns of a ram, there—significant conjunction—was a sanctuary of Aphrodite in ruins, with the front part only left and it had three images, ‘one named Ourania the other Pandemos, _the third had no particular name_.’ So it was that the Greeks lost the trinity and kept, all they needed, the duality.

The Greeks themselves always knew quite well whence came their Heavenly Aphrodite, she of Paphos, and she of Kythera. Herodotus[253] is explicit. He is telling how some of the Scythians in their passage through Palestine from Egypt pillaged the sanctuary of Aphrodite Ourania at Ascalon. ‘This sanctuary,’ he says, ‘I found on enquiry is the most ancient of all those that are dedicated to this goddess, for the sanctuary in Cyprus had its origin from thence, as the Cyprians themselves say, and that in Kythera was founded by Phenicians who came from this part of Syria.’ Pausanias[254] says ‘the first to worship Ourania were the Assyrians, next to them were the dwellers in Paphos of Cyprus, and the Phenicians of Ascalon in Palestine. And the inhabitants of Kythera learnt the worship from the Phenicians.’

The Oriental origin[255] of Ourania, Queen of Heaven, the armed goddess, the _Virgo Caelestis_, was patent to all; but Aphrodite in her more human earthly aspect, as Pandemos, goddess of the people and of all increase, was so like Kourotrophos, like Demeter, that she might easily be thought of as indigenous. Yet her ritual betrays her. For the purification of her sanctuary we have seen there was ordered a dove. Instinctively we remember that when Mary Virgin[256] went up to the temple of Jerusalem for her purification she must take with her ‘a pair of turtle-doves or two young pigeons.’ In the statuettes of Paphos, Aphrodite holds a dove in her hand; the coins of Salamis in Cyprus are stamped with the dove[257]. At the Phenician Eryx when the festival of the Anagogia[258] came round, and Aphrodite Astarte went back to her home in Libya, the doves went with her, and when they came back at the _Katagogia_, a white multitude, among them was one with feathers of red gold, and she was Aphrodite.