Chapter II: The Anthesteria (1)

THE RITUAL OF GHOSTS AND SPRITES.

Our examination of the unpromising Diasia has so far led us to the following significant, if somewhat vague, results. The festival in all probability did not originally belong to Zeus, but to a being called Meilichios, a snake god or demon. The worship of this being was characterized by nightly ceremonies, holocausts which the sun might not behold, it was gloomy in character, potent for purification. The name of the festival is probably associated with _dirae_, curses, imprecations.

The Diasia, gloomy though it is, is a spring festival and its significance will be yet more plainly apparent if we examine another, _the_ other spring festival of the Greeks, i.e. the Anthesteria, which gives its name to the first spring month Anthesterion.

If we know little about the Diasia, about the Anthesteria[53] we know much. Apollodorus, quoted by Harpocration, tells us that the whole festival collectively was called _Anthesteria_, that it was celebrated in honour of Dionysos, and that its several parts, i.e. its successive days, were known as Pithoigia (cask-opening), Choes (cups), Chytroi (pots). The exact date of the festival is fixed, the three successive days falling from the 11th to the 13th of Anthesterion[54].

On the first day, the 11th of Anthesterion, i.e. the Pithoigia, Plutarch[55] tells us ‘they broached the new wine at Athens. It was an ancient custom,’ he adds, ‘to offer some of it as a libation before they drank it, praying at the same time that the use of the drug (φαρμάκου) might be rendered harmless and beneficial to them.’ This is a clear case of the offering of first-fruits[56]. Among his own people, the Boeotians, Plutarch adds, ‘the day was called the day of the Good Spirit[57], the Agathos Daimon, and to him they made offerings. The month itself was known as Prostaterios.’ The scholiast to Hesiod[58] tells us that the festival was an ancestral one (ἐν τοῖς πατρίοις), and that it was not allowable to hinder either household slaves or hired servants from partaking of the wine.

The casks once opened, the revel set in and lasted through the next day (the Choes or Cups) and on through the third (the Chytroi or Pots). The day of the Choes seems to have been the climax, and sometimes gave its name to the whole festival.

It is needless to dwell on all the details of what was in intent a three days’ fair. A ‘Pardon’ in the Brittany of to-day affords perhaps the nearest modern analogy. The children have holidays, fairings are bought, friends are feasted, the sophists get their fees, the servants generally are disorganized, and every one down to the small boys, as many a vase-painting tells us, is more or less drunk. The drinking bore of course its ritual aspect; there is a drinking contest presided over by the King Archon, he who first drains his cup gets a cake, each man crowns his cup with a garland and deposits the wreath in keeping of the priestess of the sanctuary of Dionysos in the Marshes. On the day of the _Cups_ takes place the august ceremony of the wedding of the wife of the King Archon to the god Dionysos. On that day alone in all the year the temple of Dionysos is opened[59]; the wedding ceremony itself takes place in the Boukoleion.

On the third day, the _Chytroi_ or Pots, there was a dramatic contest known as Χύτρινοι, Pot-contests. During this third day the revel went on; Aristophanes[60] has left us the picture of the drunken mob thronging the streets at the holy Pot-Feast:

‘O brood of the mere and the spring,
Gather together and sing
From the depths of your throat
By the side of the boat
Coäx, as we move in a ring.

As in Limnae we sang the divine
Nyseïan Giver of Wine,
When the people in lots
With their sanctified Pots
Came reeling around my shrine.’

The scholiast on the _Acharnians_[61], a play which gives us a lively picture of the festival, says that the Choes and the Chytroi were celebrated on one day. The different days and acts of the whole Anthesteria were doubtless not sharply divided, and if each day was reckoned from sunrise to sunset confusion would easily arise.

* * * * *

So far a cursory inspection clearly shows that the Anthesteria was a wine-festival in honour of Dionysos. Moreover we have the definite statement of Thucydides[62] that ‘the more ancient Dionysia were celebrated on the 12th day of the month Anthesterion in the temple of Dionysos in the Marshes.’ The reference can only be to the Choes, so that the festival of the Choes seems actually to have borne the name Dionysia. Harpocration[63] goes even further; he says, quoting Apollodorus, that ‘the whole month was sacred to Dionysos.’

A more searching examination of the sources reveals beneath the surface rejoicings, as in the case of the Diasia, another and more primitive ritual, and a ritual of widely different significance. It has escaped no student of Greek festivals that through the Anthesteria there ran ‘a note of sadness.’ Things were not altogether so merry as they seemed. This has been variously explained, as due to the ‘natural melancholy of the spring,’ or more recently as evidence of the fact that Dionysos had his ‘chthonic side’ and was the ‘Lord of souls.’ A simpler explanation lies at the door.

The clue to the real gist of the Anthesteria is afforded by a piece of ritual performed on the last day, the _Chytroi_. The Greeks had a proverbial expression spoken, we are told, of those who ‘on all occasions demand a repetition of favours received.’ It ran as follows: ‘Out of the doors! ye Keres; it is no longer Anthesteria.’ Suidas[64] has preserved for us its true signification; it was spoken, he says, ‘implying that in the Anthesteria the ghosts are going about in the city.’ From this fragmentary statement the mandate, it is clear, must have been spoken at the close of the festival, so we cannot be wrong in placing it as the last act of the Chytroi.

The statement of Suidas in itself makes the significance of the words abundantly clear, but close parallels are not wanting in the ritual of other races. The Lemuria at Rome is a case in point. According to Ovid[65] each father of a family as the festival came round had to lay the ghosts of his house after a curious and complex fashion. When midnight was come and all was still, he arose and standing with bare feet he made a special sign with his fingers and thumb to keep off any ghost. Thrice he washes his hands in spring water, then he turns round and takes black beans into his mouth; with face averted he spits them away, and as he spits them says, ‘These I send forth, with these beans I redeem myself and mine.’ Nine times he speaks, and looks not back. The ghost, they believe, picks them up and follows behind if no one looks. Again he touches the water and strikes the brass of Temesa and begs the ghost to leave his house. When nine times he has said, ‘Shades of my fathers, depart’ (Manes exite paterni!), he looks back and holds that the rite has been duly done. We cannot impute to the Anthesteria all the crude minutiae of the Lemuria, but the content is clearly the same—the expulsion of ancestral ghosts. The Lemuria took place not in the spring but in the early summer, May—a time at which ceremonies of purification were much needed.

A second striking parallel is recorded by Mr Tylor[66]. He says of a like Sclavonic custom, ‘when the meal was over the priest rose from the table and hunted out the souls of the dead like fleas with these words: “Ye have eaten and drunk, souls, now go, now go”.’ Dr Oldenberg[67] calls attention to another analogy. In sacrifices in India to the dead the souls of ancestors are first invoked, then bidden to depart, and even invited to return again after the prescribed lapse of a month.

The formula used at the close of the Anthesteria is in itself ample proof that the Anthesteria was a festival of All Souls; here at last we know for certain what was dimly shadowed in the Diasia, that some portion at least of the ritual of the month Anthesterion was addressed to the powers of the underworld, and that these powers were primarily the ghosts of the dead. The evidence is not however confined to an isolated proverbial formulary. The remaining ritual of the Chytroi confirms it. Before they were bidden to depart the ghosts were feasted and after significant fashion.

The scholiast on Aristophanes[68] commenting on the words τοῖς ἱεροῖσι Χύτροισι, ‘at the holy Pot-feast,’ explains the ceremonies as follows: ‘The Chytroi is a feast among the Athenians; the cause on account of which it is celebrated is explained by Theopompos who writes thus: ... “They have the custom of sacrificing at this feast, not to any of the Olympian gods at all, but to Hermes Chthonios”; and again in explaining the word χύτρα, pot: “And of the pot which all the citizens cook none of the priests tastes, they do this on the (13th) day”; and again: “Those present appease Hermes on account of the dead”.’ The scholiast on another passage in Aristophanes[69] says substantially the same, but adds, again on the authority of Theopompos, that the practice of cooking the dish of seeds was observed by those who were saved from the deluge on behalf of those who perished. The deluge is of course introduced from a desire to get mythological precedent; the all-important points are that the χύτρα, the dish of grain and seeds, was offered to none of the Olympians, not even to Dionysos in whose honour the festival was ostensibly celebrated, but only to Hermes Chthonios, Hermes of the Underworld, and that of this sacrifice _no man tasted_. It was no sacrifice of communion, but like the holocaust made over utterly to dread chthonic powers, and behind this notion of sacrifice to the underworld deities lay the still earlier notion that it was dead men’s food, a supper for the souls.

Before we leave the χύτρα it is necessary to examine more precisely the name of the day, Chytroi. August Mommsen[70] has emphasized the fact, too much neglected, that the name of the festival is masculine, οἱ χύτροι not αἱ χύτραι. The feminine form χύτραι means pots artificially made; the masculine form χύτροι, which occurs far less frequently, means in ordinary parlance natural pots, i.e. holes in the ground. Pausanias[71] speaks of a certain natural bath at Thermopylae which the country people called ‘the Chytroi of the women’; and Herodotus[72] describes it in the same terms. Theophrastos[73] in his _History of Plants_ speaks of a certain plant as growing in a place between the Kephisos and the Melas, ‘the place being called Pelekania, i.e. certain hollows in the marsh, the so-called Pot-holes.’ Hesychius[74], interpreting οἱ χύτρινοι, says they are ‘the hollow places of the earth through which springs come up.’ The word κολυμβήθρα itself, in classical Greek a natural pool, became in mediaeval Greek a font, and it may be noted that the natural chasms that occur in western Yorkshire still locally bear the name of ‘Pots.’

It is possible therefore that the festival took its name from natural holes in the ground in the district of the Limnae where it was celebrated, a district to this day riddled with Turkish cisterns made of great earthen jars (πίθοι). Such holes may have been used for graves, and were in many parts of Greece regarded as the constant haunt of ghosts going up and down. They were perhaps the prototypes of the ‘chasms in the earth’ seen in the vision of Er[75]. Near akin were the megara or chasms of Demeter at Potniae[76], and the clefts on and about the Pnyx where the women celebrated the Thesmophoria (p. 125). Such chasms would be the natural sanctuaries of a Ge and ghost cult.

It is obvious that the two forms χύτροι and χύτραι would easily pass over into each other, and it is hard to say which came first. It is also to be noted that, though the masculine form more often means natural hole, it is also used for artificial pot. Pollux[77], in discussing ‘the vessels used by cooks,’ says that when Delphilos speaks of the big pot (χύτρον μέγαν) at the cook’s, he clearly means the χύτρα, not the foot-pan (χυτρόποδα). Though the form χύτροι ultimately established itself, the associations of χύτρα, artificial pot, seem to have prevailed, and these associations are important and must be noted.

Hesychius[78] says that by φαρμακή is meant the χύτρα which they prepared for those who cleansed the cities. From the scholiast on the _Choephoroi_ of Aeschylus[79] we learn that the Athenians purified their houses with a censer made of a pot; ‘this they threw away at the meeting of three ways and went away without turning back.’ Here we have of course the origin of ‘Hecate’s suppers.’ These were primarily not feasts for the goddess but purification ceremonies, of which, as no mortal might taste them, it was supposed an infernal goddess partook. The day of the Chytroi was a day of such purifications. From some such notion arose the Aristophanic word ἐγχυτρίζειν, ‘to pot,’ i.e. to utterly ruin and destroy, to make away with. The scholiast[80] explains it as referring to the practice of exposing children, but Suidas[81] knows of another meaning; he says the ἐγχυτρίστριαι were those ‘women who purified the unclean, pouring upon them the blood of the victim,’ and also those who ‘poured libations to the dead,’ those in a word who performed ceremonies of placation and purgation.

It is curious that, though most modern writers from Crusius onwards have recognised that the Chytroi was a _dies nefastus_ and in the main a festival of ghosts, this day has been separated off from the rest of the Anthesteria, and the two previous days have been regarded as purely drinking festivals:—the Pithoigia the opening of the wine-cask, the Choes the drinking of the wine-cups. And yet for the second day, the Choes, literary testimony is explicit. Spite of the drinking contest, the flower-wreathed cups and the wedding of Dionysos, all joyful elements of the service of the wine-god, the Choes was a _dies nefastus_, an unlucky day, a day to be observed with apotropaic precautions. Photius[82], in explaining the words μιαρὰ ἡμέρα, ‘day of pollution,’ says such a day occurred ‘in the Choes in the month of Anthesterion, in which (i.e. during the Choes) they believed that the spirits of the dead rose up again. From early morning they used to chew buckthorn and anointed their doors with pitch.’ Buckthorn, known to modern botanists as _Rhamnus catharticus_, is a plant of purgative properties. The ancient Athenian, like the modern savage, believed that such plants have the power of keeping off evil spirits, or rather perhaps of ejecting them when already in possession. Chewing a substance was naturally a thorough and efficient way of assimilating its virtues. The priestess of Apollo chewed the laurel leaf. It seems possible that she may have primarily had to do this rather as a means of ejecting the bad spirits than to obtain inspiration from the good. Fasting is a substantial safe-guard, but purgation more drastically effective. The prophylactic properties of _rhamnus_, buckthorn, were well known to the ancients. Dioscorides[83] in his _Materia Medica_ writes, ‘it is said that branches of this plant attached to doors or hung up outside repel the evil arts of magicians.’ Possibly, in addition to the chewing of buckthorn, branches of it were fastened to doors at the festival of the Choes, and served the same purpose as the pitch. Pitch, Photius tells us in commenting on _rhamnus_, was on account of its special purity used also to drive away sprites at the birth of a child—always a perilous moment[84].

It is not easy to imagine an enlightened citizen of the Athens of the fifth century B.C., an Aeschylus, a Pericles, chewing buckthorn from early dawn to keep off the ghosts of his ancestors, but custom in such matters has an iron hand. If the masters of the house shirked the chewing of buckthorn, the servants would see to it that the doors were at least anointed with pitch; it is best to be on the safe side in these matters, and there is the public opinion of conservative neighbours to be considered. Be this as it may, it is quite clear that the day of the _Choes_ was a day of ghosts like the day of the _Chytroi_.

But, if the ceremonies of the Choes clearly indicate the ‘unlucky’ nature of the day, what is to be made of the name? Nothing, as it stands. _Choes_, _Cups_, are undeniably cheerful. But, as in the case of Chytroi, there _may_ have been a confusion between approximate forms; the two words χοή, funeral libation, and χοῦς, cup, have a common stem χοϝ. May not χόες have superimposed itself on χοαί, wine-cups upon funeral libations? A scholiast on Aristophanes[85] seems to indicate some such a _contaminatio_. In explaining the word χοάς, he says the meaning is ‘pourings forth, offerings to the dead or libations. An oracle was issued that they must offer libations (χοάς) yearly to those of the Aetolians who had died, and celebrate the festival so called.’ Here the name of a festival Χοάς is oxytone, and though we cannot assume that it was identical with the Athenian Choes, it looks as if there was some confusion as to the two analogous forms.

If we view the Choes as Χοαί, the Cups as Libations, the anomalous and, as it stands, artificial connection of Orestes with the festival becomes at once clear. At the drinking bout of the Choes, we learn from Athenaeus[86] and other authorities, the singular custom prevailed that each man should drink by himself. A mythological reason was sought to account for this, and the story was told[87] that Orestes, polluted by the blood of his mother, came to Athens at the time of the celebration of the Choes. The reigning king, variously called Pandion and Phanodemus, wished to show him hospitality, but religious scruple forbade him to let a man polluted enter the Sanctuaries or drink with those ceremonially clean. He therefore ordered the Sanctuaries to be shut and a measure of wine (χοῦς) to be set before each man severally, and bade them, when they had finished drinking, not to offer up the garlands with which they had been crowned in the Sanctuaries, because they had been under the same roof with Orestes; but he bade each man place his wreath round his own cup, and so bring them to the priestess at the precinct of the Limnae. That done, they were to perform the remaining sacrifices in the Sanctuary. From this, Athenaeus adds, the festival got the name of _Cups_. The mad Orestes in the _Iphigenia in Tauris_[88] tells the same tale and naïvely states that, though he was hurt by the procedure, he dare not ask the reason, knowing it all too well.

The whole account is transparently aetiological. Some mythological precedent is desired for the drinking bout of the Choes, based as it was on a ceremony of funeral libations; it is sought and found or rather invented in the canonical story of Orestes, and he is made to say in a fashion almost too foolish even for a madman:

‘And this I learn, that my mishaps became
A rite for the Athenians; and Pallas’ folk
Have still this custom that they reverence
The Choan vessel.’

If we suppose that the Cups (χόες) were originally Libations (χοαί), the somewhat strained punctilio of the host becomes at least intelligible. Orestes is polluted by the guilt (ἄγος) of his mother’s blood, he finds the people in the Limnae[89], close to the Areopagos, celebrating the Χοαί, the libations to the dead; till he is purified from kindred blood he cannot join: all is simple and clear.

If the Choes were in intent χοαί, the Cups Libations, the ceremony has an interesting parallel in a rite performed at the Eleusinian mysteries. Athenaeus[90], in discussing various shapes of cups says: ‘The plemochoë is an earthen vessel shaped like a top that stands fairly steady; some call it, Pamphilos tells us, the cotyliscus. And they use it at Eleusis on the last day of the mysteries, which takes its name Plemochoai from the cup. On this day they fill two plemochoae and set them up, the one towards the East, the other towards the West, and pronounce over them a magic formula. The author of the _Peirithous_ mentions them, whether he be Ktesias the Tyrant or Euripides, as follows:

“That these plemochoae down the Chthonian chasm
With words well-omened we may pour.”’

It is at least significant that a compound of the word χοή should both give its name to a festival day and to a vessel used in chthonic ritual.

The Chytroi and Choes then bear unmistakeably a character of gloom, and in their primary content are festivals of ghosts. But what of the Pithoigia? Surely this day is all revel and jollity, all for Dionysos?

Had we been dependent on literature alone, such would have been our inevitable conclusion. In Plutarch’s account of the Pithoigia (p. 33), the earliest and fullest we possess, there is no hint of any worship other than that of the wine-god, no hint of possible gloom. Eustathius[91] indeed tells of a Pithoigia or Jar-opening which was ‘not of a festal character, but in every respect unlucky,’ but this is the Pithoigia, the Jar-opening, of Pandora. Here we have a hint that a Pithoigia need not be an opening of wine-jars; there are other jars, other openings, but save for the existence of one small fragile monument the significance of the hint would have escaped us.

In the vase-painting in fig. 7 from a lekythos in the University Museum of Jena[92] we see a Pithoigia of quite other and more solemn intent. A large _pithos_ is sunk deep into the ground. It has served as a grave. In primitive days many a man, Diogenes-like, lived the ‘life of the jar’ (ζωὴ πίθου), but not from philosophy, rather from dire necessity. During the Peloponnesian war, when the city was crowded with refugees, a jar (πιθάκνη) was a welcome shelter[93]. A man’s home during his life is apt to be his grave in death. In the Dipylon Cemetery at Athens, at Aphidna[94], at Corfu, at Thoricus, and in many another burying place, such grave _pithoi_ have come to light. From the grave-jar in fig. 7 the lid has been removed; out of it have escaped, fluttering upward, two winged Keres or souls, a third soul is in the act of emerging, a fourth is diving headlong back into the jar. Hermes Psychopompos, with his magic staff in his hand, is evoking, _re_voking the souls. The picture is a speaking commentary on the Anthesteria; we seem to hear the mandate ‘Out of the doors! ye souls; it is no longer Anthesteria!’ The Pithoigia of the Anthesteria is the primitive Pithoigia of the _grave_-jars, later overlaid by the Pithoigia of the _wine_-jars.

The vase-painting in fig. 7 must not be regarded as an actual conscious representation of the Athenian rite performed on the first day of the _Anthesteria_. It is more general in content; it is in fact simply a representation of ideas familiar to every Greek, that the _pithos_ was a grave-jar, that from such grave-jars souls escaped and to them necessarily returned, and that Hermes was Psychopompos, Evoker and Revoker of souls. The vase-painting is in fact only another form of the scene so often represented on Athenian white lekythoi, in which the souls flutter round the grave-stele. The grave-jar is but the earlier form of sepulture; the little winged figures, the Keres, are identical in both classes of vase-painting.

The nature of these Keres will be further analysed when we come to the discussion of primitive demonology. For the present it is enough to note that the Keres in the vase-paintings and the Keres of the Anthesteria are regarded as simply souls of dead men, whereas the little winged phantoms that escape from Pandora’s jar are indeed ghosts, but ghosts regarded rather as noisome sprites than as spirits; they are the source of disease and death rather than dead men’s souls. The jar of Pandora is not so much a grave as a store-house of evil; the _pithos_ as store-house not only of wine but of grain and all manner of provisions was familiar to the Greeks. The ordinary _pithos_ was pointed at the base and buried permanently in the earth like a Turkish cistern; a row of such pithoi, like those recently unearthed at Cnossus, might serve equally as a wine-cellar or a granary or a cemetery.

The attributes of Hermes in the vase-painting in fig. 7 are noticeable. In one hand he holds his familiar herald’s staff, the kerykeion. But, and this is the interesting point, he is not using it; it is held in the left hand, inert; it is merely attributive, present out of convention. The real implement of his agency in revoking the souls is held uplifted in the right hand; it is his rhabdos, his magic wand.

This _rhabdos_ is, I think, clearly to be distinguished from the kerykeion, though ultimately the two became contaminated. The kerykeion or herald’s staff is in intent a king’s sceptre held by the herald as deputy; it is a staff, a walking-stick, a βάκτρον, by which you are supported; the _rhabdos_ is a simple rod, even a pliable twig, a thing not by which you are supported but with which you sway others. It is in a word the enchanter’s wand.

It is with a rhabdos that Circe[95] transforms the comrades of Odysseus into swine; it is as magical as the magic potion they drink:

‘Straight with her rhabdos smote she them and penned them in the sties.’

With the rhabdos Hermes[96] led the ghosts of the slain suitors to Hades. He held in his hand

‘His rhabdos fair and golden wherewith he lulls to rest
The eyes of men whoso he will, and others by his hest
He wakes from sleep. He stirred the ghosts; they followed to their doom
And gibbered like the bats that throng and gibber in the gloom.’

This magic wand became the attribute of all who hold sway over the dead. It is the wand, not the sceptre, that is the token of life or death, as Pindar[97] shows:

‘Nor did Hades the king
Forget his wand to wave
Whereby he doth bring
Shapes of men dying
Adown the hollow roadway of the grave.’

The rhabdos as magic wand was πεισίβροτος, _enchanter_ of the dead, before it became as sceptre πεισίβροτος, _ruler_ of mortals.

Eustathius tells us in the passage already discussed[98], that the kerykeion was also called πομπός, conductor, and that it was carried in the hands of those who performed ceremonies of purification. He is trying, it will be remembered, to derive the words διοπομπεῖν and ἀποδιοπομπεῖν. When an ancient author is trying to derive words, we are bound to accept his statements only with the utmost caution; still in this particular instance there seems no reason for suspecting the statement that the kerykeion was called πομπός; it is dragged in quite gratuitously, and does not help out the proposed derivation. What Eustathius says is this: ‘At the end of the month Maimakterion they perform ceremonies of sending, among which was the carrying of the magic fleece, and there take place then throwings out of purifications at the crossways, and they hold in their hands the _pompos_ (i.e. conductor), the which they say is the kerykeion, the attribute of Hermes.’ The object of the whole ceremony is ‘to send out polluted things.’ It is, I think, significant that the kerykeion, or rather to be strictly accurate the rhabdos[99], was carried in apotropaic ceremonies, presumably with a view to exorcise bad spirits, which as will appear later were regarded as the source of all impurities. It is the other face of revocation; the rhabdos is used either for the raising or the laying of ghosts, for the induction (ἐπαγωγή) of good spirits, for the exorcism (ἀποτροπή) of bad.

In discussing the Anthesteria on a previous occasion[100], I felt confident that in the opening of the grave-jars we had the complete solution of the difficulty of the unlucky character of the day Pithoigia. It seems to me now in the light of further investigation that another ritual element may have gone to its determination.

Plutarch[101], in discussing the nature of the sacred objects committed to the care of the Vestal Virgins, makes the following notable statement: ‘Those who pretend to have most special knowledge about them (i.e. the Vestal Virgins) assert that there are set there two jars (πίθοι) of no great size, of which the one is open and empty, the other full and sealed up, and neither of them may be seen except by these all-holy virgins. But others think that this is false, and that the idea arose from the fact that the maidens then placed most of their sacred things in two jars, and hid them underground below the temple of Quirinus, and that the place even now is called from that by the title _Pithisci_ (Doliola).’ We have two other notices of these Doliola. Varro[102] says: ‘The place which is called Doliola is at the Cloaca Maxuma, where people are not allowed to spit. It is so called from the jars beneath the earth. Two accounts are given of these jars: some say they contain the bones of dead bodies, others that after the death of Numa Pompilius certain sacred objects (religiosa quaedam) were buried there.’ Festus[103] gives substantially the same account, but he says that the sacred objects were buried there when the Gauls invaded the city.

Of jars containing ‘sacra’ we have in Greece no knowledge, but it is significant to find that Zeus, who was the heir to so much antique ritual, had on his threshold in Olympus two jars, one containing good the other evil[104]:

‘Jars twain upon Zeus’ threshold ever stood;
One holds his gifts of evil, one of good.’

With some such notion as that of the Pithoigia must have been connected the ceremony of the opening of the _mundus_ or round pit on the Palatine. Festus[105] tells us that on three days in the year, August 24, October 5, November 6, the _lapis manalis_ that covered it was removed. Varro, quoted by Macrobius[106], adds: ‘when the _mundus_ is open, the gate of the doleful underworld gods is open.’

* * * * *

It has been shown that the ritual of each of the several days points determinedly ghost-wards. The names in each case _admit_ at least of chthonic interpretation. It remains to examine the collective name _Anthesteria_.

The ancients sought and found what was to them a satisfactory etymology. Istros, writing in the third century B.C. and quoted by Harpocration, says that Anthesterion is the blossoming month because then ‘the most of the things that spring from the earth blossom forth[107].’ The _Etymologicon Magnum_[108] offers an easy-going alternative: feast and month bear their names either because the earth then began to blossom, or because they offered flowers at the festival.

It was not the habit of those days to trouble about ‘verb-stems’ and ‘nouns of the agent in τηρ,’ but it is surprising to find that the dubious guess hazarded by Istros should have passed so long unchallenged by modern science, the more so as flowers have but a general and accidental connection with the ritual of the feast. Are scholars really content with an etymology that makes of the Anthesteria the festival of those who ‘did the flowers’?

In a recent paper in the _Hellenic Journal_[109] Dr A. W. Verrall has faced the difficulty and offered a new solution. The names of festivals, he points out, are no exception to the rule that nouns in τηριο are normally formed from verb-stems through the ‘noun of the agent’ in τηρ, and take their sense from the action described by the verb, as σωτήριος, λυτήριος, βουλευτήριον. In like fashion the names of festivals ending in τηρια describe the action in which the ceremony consisted, or with which it was chiefly connected. Thus ἀνακλητήρια is a feast or ceremony of ἀνάκλησις, ἀνακαλυπτήρια of ἀνακάλυψις and so on. _Prima facie_ then a derivation of _Anthesteria_, should start from the assumption that the stem is verbal.

“But we need not assume that the verbal stem is ἀνθεσ-. Perhaps ἀνθεσ- itself needs analysis; and for the first syllable there is an obviously possible origin in the preposition ἀν- (ἀνά), of which so many examples (e.g. ἄνθεμα = ἀνάθεμα) are preserved in the poets. The verb-stem will then be θεσ-, which is in fact a verb-stem and has more than one meaning. The meaning which would perhaps in any case have suggested itself first, and which now seems especially attractive, is that which appears in the archaic verb θέσασθαι or θέσσασθαι _to pray_ or _pray for_[110], and in the adjectives πολύθεστος and ἀπόθεστος. Prayers and invocations addressed to the dead were a regular part of the proceedings by which they were brought back to the world of the living. The compound ἀναθέσσασθαι would, after the analogy of ἀνακαλεῖν and the like, bear the sense _to raise by prayer_ or _to recall by prayer_, literally ‘to pray up’ or ‘pray back.’ And ἀνθεστήρια, derived from ἀναθέσσασθαι, would be the _feast of revocation_, the name, as usual, signifying the action in which the ceremony consisted and which was the object of it[111].”

In connection with this new and illuminating etymology, it is interesting to note that even in their misguided derivation from ἄνθος the ancients themselves lay stress not so much on the flowers as on the rising up[112], the ἀνθεῖν ἐκ τῆς γῆς. Under the word Ἄνθεια the _Etymologicon Magnum_ says ‘a title of Hera when she sends up (ἀνίησι) fruits,’ where there seems a haunting of the true meaning though none of the _form_[113].

Dr Verrall declines to assert positively the derivation of _Anthesteria_ he propounds, but a second philological argument brings certain conviction. Mr R. A. Neil suggests that the root which appears in Greek as θες may appear as _fes fer_ in Latin. This gives us the delightful equation or rather analogy ἀν-θεσ-τήρια, _in-fer-iae_. Of course _inferiae_ is usually taken as from _inferi_, _infra_ etc., but no Latin word ought to have medial _f_ except when preceded by a separable prefix. To make certainty more certain we have the Feralia, the festival of All Souls, kept from the 13th to the 31st of the month of Fe(b)ruary. The month of _purification_ is the month of rites to the dead, in a word _purgation is the placation of souls_. This is true for Latin and Greek alike and will emerge more clearly when we come to study in detail the ritual of the month of February.

ANTHESTERION AND FEBRUARY.

The general analogy between the months of Anthesterion and February, and the fact that both alike were unlucky and given over to the service of the dead, was clear to the ancients themselves. The scholiast on Lucian’s _Timon_[114], commenting on the word _Diasia_, says: ‘The day is unlucky ... there were among the Greeks certain days which brought with them complete idleness and cessation of business, and which were called unlucky (ἀποφράδες). On these days no one would accost any one else, and friends would positively have no dealings with each other, and even sanctuaries were not used. These times were so accounted on the analogy of the month of February, when also it was the custom to sacrifice to those below, and all that month was dedicated to the dead and accompanied by gloom, everything going on in an unusual fashion just as the Athenians celebrated the Diasia in gloom.’ Clearly to the scholiast the Diasia is but one element of a month given over to the dead.

The meaning of Anthesterion, the significance of its ceremonies, have been effectively overlaid by the wine-god and his flower garlands, but with the Romans there was no such superposition and consequently no misunderstanding. They clearly realized two things, that February was the month of the dead, and that it was the month of purification. Plutarch in his _Roman Questions_[115] asks ‘Why was Decimus Brutus wont to sacrifice to the dead in December, whereas all other Romans offered libations and sacrifices to the dead in the month of February?’ In his twenty-fifth Question[116], while discussing the reasons why the days following respectively the Calends, Nones and Ides of each month were unlucky, he tells us that the Romans ‘used to consecrate the first month of the year to the Olympian gods, but the second to the gods of the earth, and in this second month (February) they were wont to practise certain purifications and to sacrifice to the dead.’ Athenaeus[117] states that ‘Juba the Mauretanian said that the month of February was so called from the terrors of the lower world, with regard to means taken for riddance from such alarms at the time when the winter is at its height, and it is the custom to offer libations to the dead on several days.’ Juba the Mauretanian must have known quite well that in February the winter was not at its height. He states correctly the fact that February was a month devoted to ceremonies for the riddance of terrors from the underworld, but carelessly adds an impossible reason for the selection of this particular month.

Ovid is of all witnesses the most weighty because his testimony is in part unconscious. In the opening words of the second book of the _Fasti_[118], after an invocation to Janus, he goes straight to the question of what the Romans meant by the word _februum_; he notes that the term was applied to many things, wool, a branch from a pine-tree, grain roasted with salt, and finally concludes that ‘any thing by which the soul was purged was called by his rude ancestors _februum_.’

‘Denique quodcumque est, quo pectora nostra piantur,
Hoc apud intonsos nomen habebat avos.’

The month he feels sure got its name from these ‘februa’ or purifications, but he asks ‘was it because the Luperci purified all the soil with the strips of skin and accounted that a purification or atonement, or was it because when the _dies ferales_ were accomplished then _owing to the fact that the dead were appeased_ there was a season of purity?’

‘Mensis ab his dictus secta quia pelle Luperci
Omne solum lustrant idque piamen habent?
Aut quia placatis sunt tempora pura sepulcris,
Tunc cum ferales praeteriere dies?’

Both the ceremonials, the Lupercalia and the Feralia, were, he knows, cathartic: that Fe(b)rua and Feralia were etymologically and significantly the same naturally he does not guess. Still less could he conjecture that etymologically February and Anthesterion are in substance one.

The two great February festivals[119] to which Ovid alludes are of course the Feralia and the Lupercalia, celebrated respectively on the 21st and 15th of February.

The Feralia was but the climax of a series of days beginning on Feb. 13th and devoted to ceremonies of the worship of ancestors, Parentalia. It is curious that, though the Lemuria (May 9-13) were marked as Nefasti, none of the days of the Parentalia were so marked: still from the 13th to the 21st marriages were forbidden, temples closed, and magistrates appeared without their insignia; clearly there was some lingering dread of ghosts that might be about. Parentalia and Feralia alike were ceremonies wholly devoted to the placation of ghosts.

In the Lupercalia, on the other hand, it is purification rather than placation that is the prominent feature in the rites. Much in the Lupercalia is obscure, and especially the origin of its name, but one ritual element is quite certain. Goats and a dog were sacrificed, two youths girt themselves in the skins of the slain goats, they held in their hands strips of the hides of the victims. They ran round a certain prescribed portion of the city, and as they ran smote the women they met with the strips of skin. These strips of skin were among the things known as _februa_, _purifiers_, and by their purifying power they became fertility charms.

‘Forget not in your speed, Antonius,
To touch Calpurnia, for our elders say
The barren touchèd in this holy chase
Shake off their sterile curse[120].’

There has been much needless discussion as to whether in ceremonies where striking and beating occur the object is to drive out evil spirits or to stimulate the powers of fertility. Primitive man does not so narrowly scrutinize and analyse his motives. To strike with a sacred thing, whether with a strip of skin from a victim or a twig from a holy tree, was to apply what the savage of to-day would call ‘good medicine.’ Precisely how it worked, whether by expulsion or impulsion, is no business of his.

When the Catholic makes the sacred sign of the Cross over his food, is he, need he be quite clear as to whether he does it to induce good or to exorcise evil? The peasant mother of to-day may beat her boy partly with a view to stirring his dormant moral impulses, but it is also, as she is careful to explain, with intent to ‘beat the mischief out of him.’ In the third Mime of Herondas[121] the mother is explicit as to the expulsive virtue of beating. Her boy is a gambler and a dunce, so she begs the schoolmaster to

‘Thrash him upon his shoulders till his spirit,
Bad thing, is left just hovering on his lips.’

She is in the usual primitive dilemma: his spirit is bad but it is his life; it is kill and cure.

The strips of goat-skin were _februa_[122], purifying, and thereby fertility charms. As such they cast sudden illumination on the ‘magic fleece’ already discussed. The animal sacrificed, be it sheep or goat or dog, is itself a placation to ghosts or underworld powers; hence its skin becomes of magical effect: the deduction is easy, almost inevitable. The primary gist of the sacrifice is to appease and hence keep off evil spirits; it is these evil spirits that impair fertility: in a word _purification is the placation of ghosts_.

The question ‘What was purity to the ancients?’ is thus seen to be answered almost before it is asked. Purity was not _spiritual_ purity in our sense—that is foreign to any primitive habit of thought, nor was it physical purity or cleanliness—it was possible to be covered from head to foot with mud and yet be ceremonially pure. But so oddly does the cycle of thought come round, that the purity of which the ancients knew _was_, though in a widely different sense, _spiritual_ purity, i.e. freedom from bad spirits and their maleficent influence. To get rid of these spirits was to undergo purification. In the month of February and Anthesterion the Roman or Greek might, _mutatis mutandis_, have chanted our Lenten hymn:

‘Christian, dost thou see them
On the holy ground
How the hosts of Midian
Prowl and prowl around?
Christian, up and smite them!’

Till the coming of the new religion of Dionysos, the Greek notion of purity seems not to have advanced beyond this negative combative attitude, this notion of spiritual forces outside and against them.

* * * * *

The question yet remains ‘Why did this purification need to take place in the spring?’ The answer is clear. Why did our own near ancestors have spring cleanings?

‘Winter rains and ruins are over
And all the season of snows and sins,
...
While in green underwood and cover
_Blossom by blossom the Spring begins_.’

Winter is a reckless time with its Christmas and its Saturnalia. There is little for the primitive agriculturist to do and less to fear. The fruits of the earth have died down, the gods have done their worst. But when the dead earth begins to awake and put forth bud and blossom, then the ghosts too have their spring time, then is the moment to propitiate the dead below the earth. Ghosts were placated that fertility might be promoted, fertility of the earth and of man himself.

It is true that the primitive rites of February and Anthesterion, of Romans and Greeks, were in the main of ‘riddance.’ The ghosts, it would seem from the ritual of the Choes and Chytroi, the chewing of buckthorn, anointing with pitch, the mandate to depart, were feared as evil influences to be averted; but there is curious evidence to show that at the time of the Anthesteria the coming of the ghosts was regarded as a direct promotion of fertility. Athenaeus[123], quoting the Commentaries of Hegesander[124], tells us of a curious tradition among the natives of Apollonia in Chalkis. ‘Around Apollonia of Chalkidike there flow two rivers, the Ammites and the Olynthiacus and both fall into the lake Bolbe. And on the river Olynthiacus stands a monument of Olynthus, son of Herakles and Bolbe. And the natives say that in the months of Elaphebolion and Anthesterion the river rises because Bolbe sends the fish apopyris to Olynthus, and at that season an immense shoal of fish passes from the lake to the river Olynthus. The river is a shallow one, scarcely overpassing the ankles, but nevertheless so great a shoal of the fish arrives that the inhabitants round about can all of them lay up sufficient store of salt fish for their needs. And it is a wonderful fact that they never pass by the monument of Olynthus. They say that formerly the people of Apollonia used to perform the accustomed rites to the dead in the month of Elaphebolion, but now they do them in Anthesterion, and that on this account the fish come up in those months only in which they are wont to do honour to the dead.’ Here clearly the dead hero is the source of national wealth, the honours done him are the direct impulsion to fertility. The gloomy rites of _aversion_ tend to pass over into a cheerful, hopeful ceremonial of ‘tendance.’

To resume, the Anthesteria was primarily a Feast of All Souls: it later[125] became a revel of Dionysos, and at the revel men wreathed their cups with flowers, but, save for a vague and unscientific etymology, we have no particle of evidence that the Anthesteria was ever a Feast of Flowers. The transition from the revocation of ghosts with its dire association to a drunken revel may seem harsh, but human nature is always ready for the shift from Fast to Feast, witness our own Good Friday holiday.

THE RITUAL OF Ἐναγισμοί.

In the light of the ceremonies of the spring month February and Anthesterion, it is now possible to advance a step in the understanding of Greek ritual terminology and through it of Greek religious thought.

In the first chapter the broad distinction was established between sacrifice to the Olympians of the upper air—sacrifice which involved communion with the worshipper, and sacrifice to chthonic powers which forbade this communion—in which the sacrifice was wholly made over to the object of sacrifice. The first, the Olympian sacrifice, is expressed by two terms, θύειν and ἱερεύειν; the second, if the sacrifice is burnt, by ὁλοκαυτεῖν, and as will presently be seen by σφάζειν, also more generally by the term ἐναγίζειν.

As regards the Olympian terms, it is only necessary to say definitely what has already been implied, that θύειν strictly is applicable only to the portion of the sacrifice that was actually burnt with a view to sublimation, that it might reach the gods in the upper air; whilst ἱερεύειν applies rather to the portion unburnt, which was sacred indeed, as its name implies, to the gods, but was actually eaten in communion by the worshipper. With the growing prevalence of burnt sacrifice and the increasing popularity of the Olympians and their service, the word θύειν came to cover the whole field of sacrifice, and in late and careless writers is used for any form of sacrifice burnt or unburnt without any consciousness of its primary meaning.

The term ἱερεύειν is strictly used only of the sacrifice of an animal; ἱερεῖον is the animal victim. Among the Homeric Greeks sacrifice and the flesh feast that followed were so intimately connected that the one almost implied the other; the ἱερεῖον, the animal victim, was the material for the κρεοδαισία, the flesh feast. So prominent in the Homeric mind was the element of feasting the worshipper that the feast is sometimes the only stated object. Thus Odysseus[126] gives command to Telemachus and his thralls:

‘Now get you to my well-built house, the best of all the swine
Take you and quickly _sacrifice_ that straightway we may dine.’

Here the object is the meal, though incidentally sacrifice to the gods is implied. It is not that on the occasion of sacrifice to the gods man solemnly communicates, but that when man would eat his fill of flesh food he piously remembers the gods and burns a little of it that it may reach them and incline their hearts to beneficence.

In the Homeric sacrifice there is communion, but not of any mystical kind; there is no question of partaking of the life and body of the god, only of dining with him. Mystical communion existed in Greece, but, as will be later seen, it was part of the worship of a god quite other than these Homeric Olympians, the god Dionysos.

Before we leave the ἱερεῖον, the animal sacrificed and eaten, one word of caution is necessary. It is sometimes argued that animal sacrifice, as contrasted with the simpler offerings of grain and fruits, is the mark of a later and more luxurious civilization. Such was the view of Porphyry[127] the vegetarian. Flesh-eating and flesh sacrifice is to him the mark of a cruel and barbarous licence. Such too was the view of Eustathius[128]. In commenting on the οὐλοχύται, the barley grain scattered, he says, ‘after the offering of barley grain came sacrifices and the eating of meat at sacrifices, because after the discovery of necessary foods the luxury of a meat diet and imported innovations in food were invented.’ As a generalization this is false to facts; it depends on the environment of a race whether man will first eat vegetable or animal food; but as regards the particular case of the Greeks themselves, the observations of Porphyry and Eustathius are broadly true. The primitive dwellers in Greece and round the Mediterranean generally lived mainly on vegetarian diet, diversified by fish, and the custom of flesh-eating in large quantities was an innovation brought from without[129] (ἐπείσακτον). Athenaeus[130] in his first book discusses the various kinds of food, and dwells with constant astonishment on the flesh-eating habits of the Achaean heroes of Homer. He quotes the comic poet Eubulos as asking

‘I pray you, when did Homer ever make
An Achaean chief eat fish? ’tis always flesh,
And roasted too, not boiled.’

Achaean chiefs, he notes—and in this they resemble their northern descendants—‘do not care for made-dishes, kickshaws and the like. Homer sets before them only roast meat, and for the most part beef, such as would put life into them, body and soul.’ It is true Athenaeus is arguing about the simplicity of the Homeric as contrasted with later Greek life, but the fact he states is beyond dispute, i.e. that the Homeric diet was mainly of flesh and unlike the vegetarian and fish diet of the ordinary Greek. Given a flesh diet for man, and the sacrifice of flesh to the gods he makes in his own image follows.

The terms θύειν and ἱερεύειν belong then to sacrifice regarded as a feast; it remains to consider the term ἐναγίζειν, in the definition of which we come, I think, to the fullest understanding of the ideas of the lower stratum of Greek religion.