Chapter III: Harvest Festivals (1)

THE THARGELIA, KALLYNTERIA, PLYNTERIA.

‘λοιδορούμενοι εὐλογοῦμεν, διωκόμενοι ἀνεχόμεθα, βλασφημούμενοι
παρακαλοῦμεν· ὡς περικαθάρματα τοῦ κόσμου ἐγενήθημεν πάντων
περίψημα.’

Spring-time, it has been seen in the last chapter, is the season for _purification_ by means of the _placation of ghosts_. But spring-time is not the only anxious time for primitive man. As the year wears on, a season approaches of even more critical import, when purification was even more imperatively needed, the season of harvest; in the earliest days the gathering in of such wild fruits as nature herself provides, in later times the reaping and garnering of the various kinds of cereals.

In the North with our colder climate we associate harvest with autumn; our harvest festivals fall at the end of September. September was to the Greek the month of the grape harvest, the vintage, but his grain harvest fell in ancient days as now in the month Thargelion, the latter part of May and the beginning of June. This month is marked to the Greeks by three festivals, the Thargelia, which gave its name to the month, the Kallynteria, and the Plynteria. No festival has been more frequently discussed than the Thargelia, and on no festival has comparative anthropology thrown more light. The full gist of the ceremony has never, I think, been clearly set forth, owing to the simple fact that the Thargelia has usually been considered alone, not in connection with the two other festivals[186]. In the present chapter I shall consider first that element in the festival to which it and the month owe their names, i.e. the first-fruits; second, the ceremony of the Pharmakos, which has made the festival famous; third the connection with the Kallynteria and Plynteria and the light thrown on both by the Roman festival of the Vestalia. Finally from the consideration of the gist of these harvest festivals it will be possible to add some further elements to our conception of Greek religious thought, and especially of the Greek notion of sacrifice.

THARGELION AND THARGELIA.

About the meaning[187] of the word Thargelia there is happily not the slightest doubt. Athenaeus[188] quotes a statement made by Krates, a writer of about the middle of the 2nd century A.D., in his book on the Attic dialect as follows: ‘The _thargelos_ is the first loaf made after the carrying home of the harvest.’ Now a loaf of bread is _not_ a very primitive affair, but happily Hesychius[189] records an earlier or at least more rudimentary form of nourishment: ‘Thargelos,’ he says, ‘is a pot full of seeds.’ From Athenaeus[190] again we learn that the cake called _thargelos_ was sometimes also called _thalusios_. The Thalusia, the festival of the first-fruits of Demeter, is familiar to us from the lovely picture in the Seventh Idyll of Theocritus[191]. The friends meet Lycidas the goatherd and say to him:

‘The road on which our feet are set it is a harvest way,
For to fair-robed Demeter our comrades bring to-day
The first-fruits of their harvesting. She on the threshing place
Great store of barley grain outpoured, for guerdon of her grace.’

Homer[192] tells how the plague of the Calydonian boar came to waste the land of the Aetolians, because Oineus their king forgot to celebrate the Thalusia, and Eustathius, commenting on the passage, says: ‘The first-fruits are the _thalusia_.’ He adds that some of the rhetoricians call the _thalusia_ ‘feasts of the Harvest-Home.’

It is then abundantly clear that the festival of the Thargelia is in the main a festival of the offering of first-fruits on the occasion of harvest, and the month Thargelion the month of harvest rites. Of one of these harvest rites, the carrying of the _Eiresione_[193], we have unusually full particulars.

In the _Knights_ of Aristophanes[194], Cleon and the Sausage-Seller are clamouring at the door of Demos. Demos comes out and asks angrily:

‘Who’s bawling there? do let the door alone,
You’ve torn my Eiresione all to bits.’

The scholiast explains. ‘At the Pyanepsia and the Thargelia the Athenians hold a feast to Helios and the Horae, and the boys carry about branches twined with wool, from which they get the name of _Eiresiones_, and they hang them up before the doors.’ It is very probable that the wool (εἶρος), taken perhaps from a sacred animal, gave its name to the Eiresione, but there were many other things besides wool hung on the branch. Our fullest account comes from the rhetorician Pausanias, who is quoted by Eustathius[195] in his commentary on the _Iliad_. Eustathius is explaining that the term ἀμφιθαλής means a child with both parents alive, and he adds by way of illustration that children of this sort were chosen by the ancients to deck out the Eiresione. He then quotes from the works of Pausanias the following account of the ceremony: ‘The Eiresione is a branch of olive twined with wool, and having hanging from it various fruits of the earth; a boy, both of whose parents are alive, carries it forth and places it in front of the doors of Apollo’s sanctuary, at the feast of Pyanepsia.’ He then goes on to an aetiological legend about Theseus, and finally records the words of the song sung by the children who carried or attended the Eiresione:

‘Eiresione brings
All good things,
Figs and fat cakes to eat,
Soft oil and honey sweet,
And brimming wine-cup deep
That she may drink and sleep.’

The boy who actually carried the Eiresione must have both parents alive, because any contact with death even remote was unlucky; the ghost of either parent might be about. The song is of some interest because of the half-personification of Eiresione. The Maypole or harvest-sheaf is halfway to a harvest Maiden; it is thus, as will be seen later, that a goddess is made. A song is sung, a story told, and the very telling fixes the outline of personality. It is possible to worship long in spirit, but as soon as the story-telling, myth-making, instinct awakes you have anthropomorphism and theology.

What was hung on the Eiresione no doubt depended on the wealth of particular worshippers; we hear of white wool and purple wool, vessels of wine, figs, strings of acorns, cakes; nothing in the way of natural produce came amiss. The Eiresione once fixed over the door remained there, a charm against pestilence and famine, till the next year; then it was changed for a new one. The withered branch must have been a familiar sight at Athens. When in the _Plutus_[196] of Aristophanes the young rough is insulting the old woman and thrusting his torch into her withered face, she cries:

‘For pity’s sake don’t bring your torch so near me,’

and Chremylus says:

‘Yes, right she is, for if she caught a spark
She’d burn up like an old Eiresione.’

The Eiresione, Pausanias says, was fastened before the door of the sanctuary of Apollo. Plutarch[197], in his rather clumsy aetiological account of the Oschophoria, connects the Eiresione with vows paid to Apollo by Theseus on his return from Crete to Athens. Harpocration[198] says ‘The Thargelia was celebrated in the month of Thargelion, which is sacred to Apollo,’ and the author of the _Etymologicon Magnum_[199] states ‘The Thargelia, a festival at Athens. The name is given from the _thargelia_, and thargelia are all the fruits that spring from the earth. The festival is celebrated in the month Thargelion to Artemis and Apollo.’ From Suidas[200] we learn that there was a musical contest at the Thargelia, and that the actors dedicated their prize tripods in the sanctuary of Apollo known as the Pythion.

All this makes it quite clear that at some time or other the festival of the Thargelia was connected with the Olympian Apollo, and more vaguely with his sister Artemis, but the connection is obviously loose and late. The Eiresione was fastened up not only over the door of the sanctuary of Apollo, but over the house-door of any and every Athenian. The house of Demos was no sanctuary of Apollo. Moreover, when the scholiast on Aristophanes[201] is commenting on the Eiresione, he says, to our surprise, that it was carried and hung at the Thargelia and Pyanepsia in honour, not of Apollo and Artemis, but of ‘Helios and the Horae.’ Porphyry[202] does not definitely name the Eiresione, but he is clearly alluding to it when he speaks of the procession that still took place at Athens in his own day to Helios and the Horae. It is evidence, he says, that in early days the gods desired in their service not the sacrifice of animals, but the offering of vegetable first-fruits. ‘In this procession they carried wild herbs as well as ground pulse, acorns, barley, wheat, a cake of dried figs, cakes of wheat and barley flour, and a pot (χύτρος).’

It is abundantly clear that the Eiresione is simply a harvest-home, an offering of first-fruits that was primarily an end in itself, but that could easily be affiliated to any dominant god. It will be remembered[203] that Oineus got into trouble because, when all the other gods had their feasts of hecatombs, he did not offer first-fruits to Artemis, great daughter of Zeus. Oineus, we may conjecture, was the faithful conservative worshipper of earlier gods; the Athenians were wiser in their generation; their ancient service of the primitive Helios and the Horae they somehow affiliated to that of the incoming Olympians.

* * * * *

It remains to ask more precisely what was the primitive significance of the offering of first-fruits. At first sight it may seem as if the question were superfluous. Surely we have here the simplest possible instance of the service of ‘tendance’ (θεραπεία), the primitive sacrifice that embodies the very essence of _do ut des_, a gift given to the god to ‘smooth his face,’ a gift that necessarily presupposes the existence of a god with a face to be smoothed.

Such seems to have been the view of Aristotle[204]. He says in characteristically Greek fashion, ‘They hold sacrifices, and meetings in connexion therewith, paying rites of worship to the gods while providing rest and recreation for themselves. For the most ancient sacrifices and meetings seem to be as it were offerings of first-fruits after the gathering in of the various harvests. For those were the times of year when the ancients were especially at leisure.’ Aristotle clearly takes the view of sacrifice already discussed, that sacrifice is mainly an occasion for enjoyment and the result of leisure, but his remark as to its early connection with first-fruits goes deeper down than he himself knows. Regarded as a θυσία, a sacrifice, the offering of first-fruits presupposes, as we have said, a god or spirit to whom sacrifice is made, and a god of human passions. But it must not be forgotten that in this view we are making a very large assumption, i.e. that of the existence of some such god or spirit. It is instructive to note that among other primitive races ceremonies have been observed which apparently are not addressed to any god or spirit, and yet which seem to contain in them a possible germ of some idea akin to sacrifice.

Such are the ceremonies of the Australian Arunta, observed and described in detail by Messrs Spencer and Gillen[205]. These ceremonies, consisting of lengthy and elaborate mummeries, are called _Intichiuma_, and their object seems to be to secure the increase of the animal or plant associated with a particular totem. The pantomimes enacted seem to be of the nature of sympathetic magic, and they are interspersed with chanted invitations to the particular plant or animal to be fertile. The point of special interest is that the ceremonies are closely connected with certain taboos on particular foods. Mr Lang[206] suggests that the removal of the taboo at the time of the _Intichiuma_ may indicate that the necessary ‘close time’ is over. The imposition of the taboo is on this showing not due to any primary moral instinct in man, but simply a practical necessity if the plant or animal is not to become extinct. The removal of the taboo after a suitable lapse of time is, if man himself is not to become extinct, equally practical and necessary. This sort of taboo is in fact a kind of primitive ‘game law.’ Philochoros[207] gives an instance: ‘At Athens,’ he says, ‘a prohibition was issued that no one should eat of unshorn lamb on the occasion of failure in the breed of sheep.’ If at the end of the close time it was customary to eat a little of a plant or animal, the eating being accompanied by certain solemn ceremonials, the food itself would easily come to be regarded as specially sacred and as having sacramental virtue, and the further step would soon be taken of regarding it as consecrated to certain spirits or divinities. This _may_ have been in part the origin of the offering of first-fruits.

The removal of a taboo is assuredly not the same thing as the worship of a god, but it is easy to see how the one might slide over into the other. A taboo is by common consent placed upon the harvest fruits till all are ripe: such harvest-fruits are _sacred_, forbidden, dangerous. Why? As soon as primitive man has fashioned for himself any sort of god in his own image, the answer is ready, ‘The Lord thy God is a jealous God.’ Primitive man is so instinctively anthropomorphic that it seems to me rash to assert that the notion of taboo _precedes_ that of sacrifice. The natives of Central Australia appear to have taboo without the notion of sacrifice, i.e. of any spirit to whom sacrifice is made; another race might have a primitive notion of a spirit to be placated without the notion of taboo; or the two might be inextricably blended and only our modern habit of pitiless analysis separate them.

Late writers on ritual, and it is only late that there are such writers, always explain taboo as consecration rather than prohibition. Festus[208] says ‘they called the juice of the vine _sacrima_ because they sacrificed (or consecrated) it to Liber with a view to the protection of the vineyards and the vessels and the wine itself, just as they sacrificed to Ceres a first harvest from the ears they had first reaped.’ Here the ‘sacramental’ wine is clearly a sacrifice of the Olympian kind; but in the Pithoigia, already discussed, the more primitive notions of release from taboo and ‘aversion’ of evil influences clearly emerge. ‘Libation of the new wine is poured out that the use of the magical thing (φαρμάκου) may become harmless and a means of safety[209].’ In the Thargelia we have no definite information as to a solemn _eating_ as well as offering of first-fruits, but this element will appear when we reach the great harvest festival commonly known as the Eleusinian Mysteries.

* * * * *

It remains to note some details as to the material of sacrifice. The general principle is clear and simple. The god fares as his worshipper. Porphyry[210], in discussing the various kinds of animals sacrificed, observes with much common sense, ‘No Greek sacrifices a camel or an elephant to the gods, because Greece does not produce camels and elephants.’

It might not be necessary to state a fact so obvious but that writers on the subject of ritual seem haunted by the notion that certain animals are sacrificed to certain gods because they are in some mystical sense ‘sacred to them,’ and this notion has introduced much needless complexity. It is quite true that locally we find certain taboos on the sacrifice of certain animals, the cause of which is unknown, but these taboos are local and by no means uniform. Moreover the animal ‘sacred’ to the particular god is by no means always the material of sacrifice; the owl, for reasons to be later discussed, is ‘sacred’ to Athene, but we hear of no sacrifice of owls. Broadly then, as noted before, the material of sacrifice is conditioned, not by the character of the god, but by the circumstances of the worshipper.

The principle that the god fares as his worshipper is however crossed by another, _he sometimes fares worse_. This was noticed by writers on ritual such as Porphyry[211] and Eustathius[212], and they explain it as a sort of survival of a golden age of simple manners, dear to the conservatism of the gods. This conservatism of the gods mirrors, of course, the natural and timid conservatism of their worshippers. They have begun by offering just what they eat themselves, and, from the fact that they have once offered it, they attach to this food special sanctity. They advance in civilization, and their own food becomes more delicate and complex, but they dare not make any change in the diet of their gods; they have learnt to bake and eat fermented bread themselves, but the gods are still nurtured on barley grains and porridge. Porphyry[213] reduces the successive stages of sacrifice to a regular system of progressive vegetarianism. First men plucked and offered grass, which was like the ‘soft wool’ of the earth; then the fruit of trees and their leaves, the acorn and the nut; then barley appeared first of the grains, and they offered simple barley-corns; then they broke and bruised grain and made it into cakes. In like fashion they made libations first of water, then of honey, the natural liquid prepared for us by bees, thirdly of oil, and last of all of wine; but after each advance the older service remained ‘in memory of the ancient manner of life.’ Last, through diverse influences of ignorance and fear, came ‘the luxury of flesh and imported forms of diet[214].’

The incoming of the luxury of flesh diet was, it has already been noted, due not to ignorance and fear but to the inroad of a flesh-eating Northern race whose splendid physical stature and strength Porphyry was little likely to appreciate. They were not wholly flesh-eaters; hence, as has been seen, they offered the sacrifice of the barley grains (οὐλοχύται), and offered these at a time when they were themselves eating some form of manufactured bread. The primitive character of the rite is, I think, marked by the ritual precedence. The οὐλοχύται, the sprinkling of grains, has usually been explained as the sprinkling of meal on the heads of the victims, as the equivalent of the _mola salsa_ of the Romans; but Eustathius is probably right when, in commenting on the sacrifice of Nestor[215], he says, ‘the sprinkled grains are in memory of the food of old times which consisted in grains, i.e. barley-corns’. ‘Hence,’ he adds, ‘one of the ancient commentators explains the sprinkled grains as barley-corns.’ That οὐλοχύται were nothing more nor less than the actual barley-corns is also shewn by a passage from Strato[216]. A cook, who apparently from his use of archaic terminology is according to his master more like a male sphinx than a cook, calls for οὐλοχύται:

‘Οὐλοχύται—why what on earth is that?’

And the answer is

‘Just barley-corns.’

The first act in a Homeric sacrifice was uniformly prayer and the sprinkling of grain[217], and it is important to observe that Eustathius[218] expressly notes this as a previous sacrifice (πρόθυμα); the οὐλοχύται were, he says, a mixture of grain and salt poured on the altar before the sacrificial ceremony began. By the ‘sacrificial ceremony’ Eustathius means the slaying of the animal victim. It is important to note that the grain was poured _on the altar_ and was therefore in itself a sacrifice, as it is sometimes stated that it was merely thrown on the head of the victim. The statement of Eustathius is confirmed by the account in Euripides[219] of the sacrifice made by Aegisthus to the Nymphs. Here, before the elaborate slaying of the bull, we have, just as in Homer, the sprinkling of the grain, and _it is sprinkled on the altar_. The Messenger tells Electra that when all was ready Aegisthus

‘Took the grains for sprinkling and he cast them
Upon the altar and these words he spake.’

The sprinkling of _salted_ meal (_mola salsa_) was, if we may believe Athenaeus[220], a later innovation. He tells us distinctly, quoting Athenion as his authority, that the use of salt for seasoning was a comparatively late discovery and therefore excluded from certain sacrifices to the gods.

‘Whence even now, remembering days of old,
The entrails of their victims for the gods
They roast with fire and bring no salt thereto,
Because at first they knew no use for salt.
And even when they knew and loved its savour
They kept their fathers’ sacred written precepts.’

The sacrifice of the animal victim never in Homer takes place without the ‘previous sacrifice’ of grain-sprinkling and prayer, but prayer and grain-sprinkling can take place, as in the prayer of Penelope[221], without the animal sacrifice. This looks as though the animal sacrifice were rather a supplementary later-added act than a necessary climax. Later, when animal sacrifice became common and even as a rule imperative, the real sacrificial intent of the preliminary grain-sprinkling would naturally become obscured and it would be brought into connection with animal sacrifice by the practice of sprinkling grain on the heads of the victims.

By Plutarch’s[222] time the sprinkling of grain was regarded as something of an archaeological curiosity. He asks in his _Greek Questions_ ‘Who is he who is called among the Opuntians _krithologos_,’ i.e. the ‘barley collector’? The answer is ‘Most of the Greeks make use of barley for their very ancient sacrifices when the citizens offer first-fruits. And the man who regulates these sacrifices and gets in these first-fruits is called _krithologos_.’ He adds a curious detail illustrative of the two strata of worship, ‘and they had two priests, one to supervise divine things, one for those of things demonic.’ In like archaic fashion, when Pisthetairos[223] would inaugurate the blessed simplicity of bird-rule, he revives the ancient ritual of the sprinkling of barley-corns:

‘O better than worship of Zeus Most High
Is the service of Birds that sing and fly.
They ask for no carven temple’s state,
They clamour not for a golden gate.
The shrine they ask of a mortal’s vow
Is leave to perch on an olive bough.
In the little thickets of ash and oak
They dwell anigh us. We humble folk
Never need fare to the far-off lands
Of Ammon or Delphi, but lift our hands
Under our vine and our fig-tree’s shade.
For a slender grace let our prayer be said,
As we cast up our barley in little showers
And a little grace from the Birds is ours.’

The barley grain sprinkled is part of the ritual of the Olympians, but in the case of the two survivals to be next considered, the _pelanos_ and the _nephalia_, their use was almost wholly confined to, and characteristic of, the lower stratum of worship, that of ghosts and sprites and underworld divinities.

After the sacrifice of the natural fruits of the earth, the παγκαρπία, comes the most primitive form of artificial food, i.e. the _pelanos_, a sort of porridge.

We speak of Bread and Wine as sacramental _elements_, but both are far removed from being elemental. Leavened bread, the Greek ἄρτος, is a product of advanced civilization, and with a true conservative ritual instinct the Roman Church prescribes to this day the use of the unleavened wafer. Athenaeus[224], citing the author of a play called the _Beggars_, tells us that when the Athenians set a meal in the Prytaneum for the Dioscuri they serve upon the tables cheese and barley-porridge (φυστήν) and chopped olives and leeks, making remembrance of their ancient mode of life. And Solon bids them supply to those who had free meals in the Prytaneum barley cake (μᾶζαν), but at feasts to place in addition loaves of bread (ἄρτον), and this in imitation of Homer. For Homer, when he brought the chiefs together to Agamemnon, says ‘they stirred up meal.’ The words ‘they stirred up meal,’ φύρετο δ’ ἄλφιτα, do not occur in our text, but the author of the _Beggars_ clearly refers to the ordinary Homeric meal, and takes us straight back to the real primitive meaning of _pelanos_. On the shield of Achilles[225] we have the picture of a harvest feast:

‘The heralds dight the feast apart beneath a spreading oak,
The ox they slew, and much white barley-meal the women folk
Sprinkled, a supper for the thralls.’

The lord and his fellows feast on flesh-meat, the workmen have their supper of primitive porridge. So the Townley scholiast clearly understands the passage; he comments: πάλυνον, ἔμασσον ἢ ἔφυρον, ‘they sprinkle, i.e. they knead or mix together.’ It is noticeable that he employs the exact word, ἔφυρον, quoted by Athenaeus as in the text of Homer[226]. To explain the passage as ‘sprinkle on the heads of the victims or on the roast flesh’ is to miss the whole antithesis between master and man. Eustathius[227], that close observer of primitive fact, saw what was being done in Homer and doubtless still by the poor of his own days. He says ‘to sprinkle barley-meal does not mean bread-making but a sort of paste in ordinary use among the ancients.’ To any one who has watched the making of porridge, the shift of meaning from παλύνειν, to _sprinkle_, to φύρειν and μάσσειν, to stir and to knead, is natural and necessary. You first sprinkle the meal on the water, you then stir it, so far you have porridge; if you let it get thicker and thicker you must knead it and then you have oat-cake. It has of course frequently been noted that a _pelanos_ may be either fluid or solid, and herein lies the explanation. When the _pelanos_ is thick and subjected to fire, baked, it becomes a _pemma_, an ordinary cake. The Latin _libum_[228], a cake, is a strict parallel; it was primarily a thing out-poured, a _libation_, then a solid thing cooked and eaten.

A _pelanos_ was then primarily the same as _alphita_, barley-meal. The food of man was the food of the gods, but the word was early specialized off to ritual use. There is, I believe, no instance in which a _pelanos_, under that name, is eaten in daily life or indeed eaten at all save by Earth and underworld gods, their representative snakes and other Spirits of Aversion[229]. The comic poet Sannyrion[230] puts it thus:

‘We gods do call it pelanos,
You pompous mortals barley-meal.’

To us the pomposity seems on the side of the gods.

As there was a time when leavened bread was not, and men ate porridge cooked or uncooked, so before the coming of the vine men drank a honey drink. And as the conservative gods, long after men ate fermented bread, were faithful to their porridge, so long after men drank wine they still offered to the gods who were there before the coming of the vine ‘wineless libations,’ nephalia[231].

The ritual of the underworld gods is in many respects identical with that of the ghosts out of which they are developed, but with this difference—ghosts are less conservative than fully developed gods; the habits and tastes of ghosts are more closely akin to those of the men who worship them. Quite early, it would appear, man offered to ghosts the wine he loved so well himself.

Atossa[232] brings for the ghost of Darius a _pelanos_, as was meet. She brings also all manner of ‘soothing gifts’ (μειλικτήρια), but she pours wine also:

‘A holy heifer’s milk, white, fair to drink,
Bright honey drops from flowers bee-distilled,
With draughts of water from a virgin fount,
And from the ancient vine its mother wild
An unmixed draught, this gladness; and fair fruit
Of gleaming olive ever blossoming
And woven flowers, children of mother earth.’

The dead fare as the living; wine is added to milk and honey and olive oil and water, but wine perhaps significantly as an innovation is never _named_. Atossa seems also consciously to insist over much on its being wild, primitive, ancient, and therefore permissible. We are reminded of the religious shifts to which the Romans were put by the introduction of wine into their daily life and thence into their ritual. Plutarch[233] in his _Roman Questions_ says that ‘when the women poured libations of wine to Bona Dea, they called it by the name of milk,’ and Macrobius[234] adds ‘that wine could not be brought in under its own name, but the wine was called milk and the vessel containing it a honey-jar.’

The ghosts of the dead admit and even welcome the addition of wine, but actual chthonic divinities are stricter. When Oedipus[235] came to the precinct of the Semnae, the Chorus bid him make atonement, because, though unwittingly, he has violated the precinct. He asks the precise ritual to be observed. The answer, though it is thrice familiar, is so important for the understanding of chthonic ceremonies that it must be given in full:

‘_Oed._ And with what rites, O strangers? teach me this.

_Chor._ First, fetch thou from an ever-flowing fount,
Borne in clean hands, an holy drink-offering.

_Oed._ And next, when I have brought the holy draught?

_Chor._ Bowls are there next, a cunning craftsman’s work,
Crown thou their lips and handles at the brim.

_Oed._ With branches, woollen webs, or in what wise?

_Chor._ Of the ewe-lamb take thou the fresh-shorn wool.

_Oed._ So be it, and then to what last rite I pass?

_Chor._ Pour thy drink offerings, facewards to the dawn.

_Oed._ With these same vessels do I pour the draught?

_Chor._ Yes, in three streams, the last pour wholly out.

_Oed._ And filled wherewith this last? teach me this also.

_Chor._ _Water and honey—bring no wine thereto._

_Oed._ When the dark shadowed earth hath drunk of this?

_Chor._ Lay on it thrice nine sprays of olive tree
With both thine hands, and make thy prayer the while.

_Oed._ That prayer? vouchsafe to teach, for mighty is it.

_Chor._ Pray thou that, as they are called the Kindly Ones,
With kindly hearts they may receive and bless.
Be this thy prayer, thine own or his who prays
For thee. Whisper thy prayer nor lift thy voice,
Then go, look not behind, so all is well.’

The Kindly Ones, though their name is only adjectival, have crystallized into divinities; they are no longer ghosts, and none may tamper with their archaic ritual.

For the dread counterpart of the Eumenides, the Erinyes, there is the same wineless service, witness the reproach of Clytaemnestra. The Erinyes have deserted her, yet she has given them of the ritual they exact[236]:

‘Full oft forsooth from me have ye licked up
Wineless libations, sober balms of wrath.’

To offer wine was the last outrage done by the parvenu Apollo to ancient ritual, hence the bitter protest[237]:

‘Thou hast bewildered the old walks of life,
With wine the Ancient Goddesses undone.’

The wineless service of the Eumenides in the _Oedipus Coloneus_ is of course no mere invention of the poet. At Titane near Sicyon Pausanias[238] came to a grove of evergreen oaks and a temple of the goddesses whom, he says, the Athenians call Semnae, but the Sicyonians Eumenides, and every year on one day they celebrate a festival in their honour, ‘sacrificing sheep with young and a _libation of water and honey_.’

The scholiast in the _Oedipus Coloneus_[239] gives a list of the divinities to whom at Athens wineless sacrifices were made. He quotes as his authority Polemon. ‘The Athenians were careful in these matters and scrupulously pious (ὅσιοι) in the things that pertain to the gods, and they made wineless sacrifices to Mnemosyne the Muse, to Eos, to Helios, to Selene, to the Nymphs, to Aphrodite Ourania.’ The list is at first surprising. We associate _nephalia_ with the Underworld powers, but here it is quite clear that, in primitive days, side by side with the Earth-gods were worshipped sky-gods, but in their own simple being as Dawn and Sun and Moon, not as full-blown human Olympians. Mnemosyne[240], it will later be seen, had a well of living water herself; she needed no wine. The Heavenly Aphrodite is more surprising, but her honey libation is further attested by Empedokles[241]. He tells of the days long ago when the god Ares was not, nor King Zeus, nor Kronos, nor Poseidon, but only

‘Kypris the Queen
Here they adored with pious images,
With painted victims and with fragrant scents,
With fume of frankincense and genuine myrrh.
Honey of yellow bees upon the ground
They for libation poured.’

But though here and there a very early ‘Heavenly One’ claimed the honey service, it was mostly the meed of the dead. Porphyry knew that honey was used to embalm the body of the dead because it prevented putrefaction, and this custom of honey burial is echoed in the myth of Glaukos and the honey-jar. The marvellous sweetness of honey lent itself to the notions of propitiation and placation—‘sweets to the sweet’ or rather, as it seemed to the practical primitive mind, ‘sweets to the spirits to be sweetened,’ the Meilichioi, ghosts and heroes to be appeased[242].

One more element in archaic ritual yet remains to be considered—the fireless sacrifice.

Fire, it has been seen, was used in the Homeric burnt sacrifice _for sublimation_. By fire, Eustathius[243] says in speaking of the burning of the dead among the northern nations, ‘the divine element was borne on high as though in a chariot and mingled with the heavenly beings.’ In like fashion we may suppose the burnt victim was freed from the grosser elements and in purified vaporous form ascended to the gods of the upper air. This is what Porphyry[244] means when he says that in burnt sacrifice we ‘immortalize the dues of the heavenly gods by means of fire.’ Fire again in the service of the underworld gods was used, it has further been seen, for utter destruction, for the holocaust. But in certain rituals established, it may be, before the discovery of fire, it was definitely prescribed that the sacrifice should be fireless. Diogenes Laertius[245] relates that according to tradition there was but one altar in Delos at which Pythagoras could worship, the ‘Altar of Apollo the Sire,’ which stood behind the great Altar of the Horns, because on this altar wheat and barley and cakes are the only offering laid and the sacrifice is without fire and there is no sacrificial victim—so Aristotle stated in his _Constitution of the Delians_. This altar was also known as the Altar of the Pious. The foundation of the great blood-stained Altar of the Horns may still be seen in Delos; the primitive Altar of the Sire has left no trace, but in some bygone time a voice, it would seem, had been heard on Mount Cynthus saying, ‘Thou shalt not hurt nor destroy in all my Holy Mountain.’

What ancient worship of a ‘Sire’ Apollo had taken to himself in Delos we do not know, but in remote Arcadia a fireless sacrifice of a specially simple kind went on right down to the time of Pausanias[246] in honour of a home-grown goddess, Demeter. At Phigalia Pausanias visited the cave-sanctuary of the Black Demeter; indeed he says in his pious way it was chiefly for her sake that he went to Phigalia, and he adds ‘I sacrificed no victim to the goddess, such being the custom of the people of the country. They bring instead as offerings the fruit of the vine and of other trees they cultivate, and honey-combs and wool which is still unwrought and full of the natural grease; these they lay on the altar which is set up in front of the cave, and having laid them there they pour on them olive oil. Such is the rite of sacrifice observed by private persons and once a year by the Phigalian people collectively.’ Everything here prescribed is in its most natural form, grapes rather than wine, honey-comb rather than honey, unwrought wool not artificial fillets, and the service is fireless. It was a service to content even Pythagoras.

That there was between the early fireless sacrifice and the burnt sacrifice of the Olympian in some prehistoric time a rivalry and clashing of interests, is clear from the Rhodian tradition of the Heliadae. Pindar[247] tells how:

‘Up to the hill they came,
Yet in their hand
No seed of burning flame,
And for the Rhodian land
With fireless rite
The grove upon the citadel they dight.’

And the scholiast commenting on the passage says: ‘The Rhodians going up to the Acropolis to sacrifice to Athene, forgot to take fire with them for their offerings (ἐναγίσμασι) and made a fireless sacrifice. Hence it came about that, as the Athenians were the first to sacrifice by fire, Athene thought it best to live with them.’ Athene was always a prudent goddess, ready to swim with the tide; she was ‘all for the father,’ all for the Olympians, and she had her reward. Philostratos[248] tells the same story with something more of emphasis. He contrasts the Acropolis of Athens and the Acropolis of Rhodes; the Rhodians had only a fireless cheap service, the people of Athens provide the savour of burnt sacrifice and fragrant smoke; the goddess went to live with them because ‘they were wiser in their generation (σοφωτέρους) and good at sacrificing.’ From Diodorus[249] we learn that it was Cecrops who introduced the fire-sacrifice at Athens. On Cecrops were fathered many of the innovations of civilized life, among them marriage. He was halfway between the old and the new, half civilized man, half snake. He, Pausanias[250] significantly tells us, was the first to give to Zeus the name of the Highest. He too became all for the Olympian.

These forms of primitive sacrifice—the _pelanos_, the barley grains, the _nephalia_, the fireless rites—have been considered at some length because, though in part they went over to the Olympians, they remain broadly speaking and in their simplest forms characteristic of the lower stratum and of the worship of underworld spirits. Moreover it is these primitive rites which were, as will later be seen, taken up and mysticized by the religion of Orpheus.

It remains to consider the second and by far the most important element in the harvest festival of the Thargelia, the ceremony of the Pharmakos.

THE PHARMAKOS.

That the leading out of the _pharmakos_ was a part of the festival of the Thargelia we know from Harpocration[251]. He says in commenting on the word: ‘At Athens they led out two men to be purifications for the city; it was at the Thargelia, one was for the men and the other for the women.’ These men, these pharmakoi, whose function it was to purify the city, were, it will later be seen, in all probability put to death, but the expression used by Harpocration is noteworthy—they were led out. The gist of the ceremony is not death but expulsion; death, if it occurs, is incidental.

The ceremony of expulsion took place, it is again practically certain, on the 6th day of Thargelion, a day not lightly to be forgotten, for it was the birthday of Socrates. Diogenes Laertius[252] says in his life of Socrates: ‘He was born on the 6th day of Thargelion, the day when the Athenians purify the city.’ The pharmakos is not expressly named, but it will be seen in the sequel that the cleansing of the city by the expulsion of the pharmakos was regarded as _the_ typical purification of the whole year. The etymology of the word will be best considered when the nature of the rites has been examined[253].

The ceremony of the pharmakos has been often discussed, but I think frequently and fundamentally misapprehended. It appears at first sight to involve what we in our modern terminology call ‘Human Sacrifice.’ To be told that this went on in civilized Athens in the 5th cent. B.C. shocks our preconceived notions of what an Athenian of that time would be likely to do or suffer. The result is that we are inclined to get out of the difficulty in one of two ways: either we try to relegate the ceremony of the pharmakos to the region of prehistoric tradition, or we so modify and mollify its main issues as to make it unmeaning.

The issue before us is a double one and must not be confused. We have to determine what the ceremonial of the pharmakos was, and next, did that ceremonial last on into historic times?

My own view is briefly this: that we have no positive evidence that it did last on into the 5th century B.C., but that, if the gist of the ceremonial is once fairly understood, there is no a priori difficulty about its continuance, and that, this a priori difficulty being removed, we shall accept an overwhelming probability. The evidence for the historical pharmakos is just as good as e.g. the evidence for the chewing of the buckthorn at the Anthesteria.

It should be noted at the outset that the pharmakos, i.e. the human scape-goat, though it seems to us a monstrous and horrible notion, was one so familiar to the Greek mind as to be in Attic literature practically proverbial. Aristophanes[254] wants to point the contrast between the old mint of sterling state officials and the new democratic coinage: he says, now-a-days we fill offices by

‘Any chance man that we come across,
Not fit in old days for a pharmakos,
These we use
And these we choose,
The veriest scum, the mere refuse,’

and again in a fragment[255]:

‘_Your_ kinsman! how and whence, you pharmakos,’

and in the _Knights_[256] Demos says to Agoracritos:

‘I bid you take the seat
In the Prytaneum where this pharmakos
Was wont to sit.’

Pharmakos is in fact, like its equivalent ‘offscouring’ (κάθαρμα), a current form of utter abuse, disgust and contempt.

Moreover its ritual import was perfectly familiar. Lysias[257] in his speech against Andokides is explicit: ‘We needs must hold that in avenging ourselves and ridding ourselves of Andokides we purify the city and perform apotropaic ceremonies, and solemnly expel a pharmakos and rid ourselves of a criminal; for of this sort the fellow is.’

For the fullest details of the horrid ceremony we are indebted to a very late author. Tzetzes[258] (A.D. 1150) in his _Thousand Histories_ describes it as follows: ‘The pharmakos was a purification of this sort of old. If a calamity overtook the city by the wrath of God, whether it were famine or pestilence or any other mischief, they led forth as though to a sacrifice the most unsightly of them all as a purification and a remedy to the suffering city. They set the sacrifice in the appointed place, and gave him cheese with their hands and a barley cake and figs, and seven times they smote him with leeks and wild figs and other wild plants. Finally they burnt him with fire with the wood of wild trees and scattered the ashes into the sea and to the winds, for a purification, as I said, of the suffering city. Just as, I think, Lycophron records it of the Locrian maidens, speaking somewhat after this manner, I do not remember the exact verse, “when, having consumed their limbs with fuel from fruitless trees, the flame of fire cast into the sea the ashes of the maidens that died on the hill of Traron.”’

Tzetzes is not inventing the ceremonies, and in his awkward confused way he goes on to tell us his source—the iambic poet Hipponax. ‘And Hipponax gives us the best complete account of the custom when he says, ‘_to purify the city and strike_ (the pharmakos) _with branches_’; and in another place he says in his first iambic poem, ‘_striking him in the meadow and beating him with branches and with leeks like a pharmakos_’; and again in other places he says as follows: ‘_we must make of him a pharmakos_’; and he says, ‘_offering him figs and a barley cake and cheese such as pharmakoi eat_’; and ‘_they have long been waiting agape for them, holding branches in their hands as pharmakoi do_’; and somewhere else he says in the same iambic poem, ‘_may he be parched with hunger, so that in (their) anger he may be led as pharmakos and beaten seven times_.’

Tzetzes quotes for us six fragmentary statements from Hipponax, and the words of Hipponax correspond so closely in every detail with his own account that we are justified in supposing that his account of the end of the ceremonial, the burning and scattering of the ashes, is also borrowed; but the evidence of this from Hipponax he omits.

Hipponax makes his statements apparently, not from any abstract interest in ritual, but as part of an insult levelled at his enemy Boupalos. This is made almost certain by another fragment of Hipponax[259] in which he says, ‘as they uttered imprecations against that abomination (ἅγος) Boupalos.’ The fragments belong obviously to one or more iambic poems in which Hipponax expresses the hope that Boupalos will share the fate of a pharmakos, will be insulted, beaten, driven out of the city, and at last presumably put to death. Hipponax is _not_ describing an actual historical ceremony, but to make his insults have any point he must have been alluding to a ritual that was, in the 6th century B.C., perfectly familiar to his hearers.

Some of the statements of Hipponax as to the details of the ritual are confirmed from other sources, and are given in these with certain slight variations which seem to show that Hipponax was not the only source of information.

Helladius[260] the Byzantine, quoted by Photius, says that ‘it was the custom at Athens to lead in procession two pharmakoi with a view to purification; one for the men, one for the women. The pharmakos of the men had black figs round his neck, the other had white ones, and he says they were called συβάκχοι.’ Helladius added that ‘this purification was of the nature of an apotropaic ceremony to avert diseases, and that it took its rise from Androgeôs the Cretan, when at Athens the Athenians suffered abnormally from a pestilential disease, and the custom obtained of constantly purifying the city by pharmakoi.’

The man and woman and the black and white figs are variant details. Helladius is our sole authority for the curious name συβάκχοι: what this means is not certain. The term may have meant ‘pig-Bacchoi.’ The Bacchoi, as will later be seen, were sacred and specially purified persons with magical powers, and the term may have been applied to mark analogous functions. Crete was the home of ceremonies of purification.

Harpocration, in the passage already quoted, confirms the view that there were two pharmakoi, but he says they were both men: one for the women, one for the men. The discrepancy is not serious. It would be quite easy if necessary to dress up a man as a woman, and even a string of white figs would be sufficient presentment of gender; _simulata pro veris_ is a principle of wide acceptation in primitive ritual.

The beating of the pharmakoi was a point of cardinal importance. It was a ceremonial affair and done to the sound of the flute. Hesychius[261] says, ‘The song of the branches is a measure that they play on the flute when the pharmakoi are expelled, they being beaten with branches and fig sprigs. The pharmakos was actually called “he of the branches.”’ It must have been a matter of very early observation that beating is expulsive. You beat a bush, a bird escapes; you beat a garment, the dust comes out; you beat a man, the evil, whatever it be, will surely emerge. We associate beating with moral stimulus, but the first notion is clearly expulsive.

Probably some notion of the application or instigation of good as well as the expulsion of evil early came in. This may be conjectured from the fact that rods made of special plants and trees were used, notably leeks and fig-trees. Plants with strong smells, and plants the eating of which is purgative, are naturally regarded as ‘good medicine’; as expulsive of evil, and hence in a secondary way as promotive of good.

Pythagoras[262] taught that to have a leek hung up over a doorway was a good thing to prevent the entrance of evil, and Dioscorides[263] records the same belief. Lucian[264] makes Menippus relate how before he was allowed to consult the oracle of the dead he was ‘purged and wiped clean and consecrated with leek and torches.’

The _locus classicus_ on beating with leek is of course the beating of the god Pan by his Arcadian worshippers. Theocritus[265] makes Simichidas sing:

‘Dear Pan, if this my prayer may granted be
Then never shall the boys of Arcady
Flog thee on back and flank with leeks that sting
When scanty meat is left for offering;
If not, thy skin with nails be flayed and torn
And amid nettles mayst thou couch till morn.’

And the scholiast remarks, ‘they say that a festival was held in Arcadia in which the youths beat Pan with leeks when the officials sacrificed a small victim, and there was not enough to eat for the worshipper; or the Arcadians when they went out hunting if they had good sport paid honour to Pan; if the reverse they maltreated him with leeks because, being a mountain god, he had power over the produce of the chase.’ The first explanation confuses cause with effect, the second is undoubtedly right. Pan is beaten because, as lord of the chase, he has failed to do his business.

It is sometimes said that Pan is beaten, and the pharmakoi beaten, in order to ‘stimulate their powers of fertility.’ In a sense this is ultimately true, but such a statement gives a false and misleading emphasis. The image and the pharmakoi are beaten partly to drive out evil influences, partly, it should not be forgotten, to relieve the feelings of the beaters. When the evil influences are beaten out, the god will undoubtedly do better next time, but it is only in this sense that the powers of fertility are stimulated. The pharmakos has no second chance. He is utterly impure, so that the more purifying influences, the more good medicine brought to bear upon him, the better; but he is doomed to death, not to reform. In the Lupercalia, already discussed (p. 51), the women are struck by the _februum_ as a fertility charm, but even here the primary notion must have been the expulsion of evil influences.

The beating, like the pharmakos, became proverbial. Aristophanes[266] makes Aeacus ask how he is to torture the supposed Xanthias, and the real Xanthias makes answer:

‘Oh, in the usual way, but when you beat him
Don’t do it with a leek or a young onion.’

Here undoubtedly the meaning is, ‘don’t let this be a merely ceremonial beating, a religious performance,’ and the allusion gains in point by the fact that the supposed slave was a real god to be treated worse than a pharmakos. Lucian[267] says that the Muses, he is sure, would never deign to come near his vulgar book-buyer, and instead of giving him a crown of myrtle they will beat him with myrrh and mallow and _get rid of him_, so that he may not pollute their sacred fountains. Clearly here the vulgar book-buyer is a pharmakos.

We have then abundant evidence that the pharmakos was beaten; was he also put to death? Tzetzes, as has been seen, states that he was burnt with the wood of certain fruitless trees, and that his ashes were scattered to the sea and the winds. The scholiast on Aristophanes[268] also states expressly that by δημόσιοι, i.e. people fed and kept at the public expense, was meant ‘those who were called pharmakoi, and these pharmakoi purified cities by their slaughter.’ So far his statement is of the most general character, and it need not have been inferred that he was speaking of Athens, but he goes on, ‘for the Athenians maintained certain very ignoble and useless persons, and on the occasion of any calamity befalling the city, I mean a pestilence or anything of that sort, they sacrificed these persons with a view to purification from pollution and they called them purifications’ (καθάρματα). Tzetzes said a pharmakos was excessively ungainly (ἀμορφότερον), the scholiast, worthless and useless. Aristophanes himself regarded them as the ‘scum’ of humanity.

The scholiast is of course a late and somewhat dubious authority, and did the fact of the death of the pharmakos rest on him and on Tzetzes alone, we might be inclined to question it. A better authority is preserved for us by Harpocration[269]; he says, ‘Istros (_circ._ B.C. 230), in the first book of his Epiphanies of Apollo, says that Pharmakos is a proper name, and that Pharmakos stole sacred _phialae_ belonging to Apollo, and was taken and stoned by the men with Achilles, and the ceremonies done at the Thargelia are mimetic representations of these things.’ The aetiology of Istros is of course wrong, but it is quite clear that he believed the ceremonies of the Thargelia to include the stoning of a man to death.