My cheek with its flicker of shade.”[[16]]
Athens, like most southern cities, impresses an Anglo-Saxon as having many holidays which “interrupt business”; but only during the New Year and Easter festivals can he begin to imagine a resemblance to the civic life of ancient Athens, which was almost a continuous pageant. “The gods,” said Plato, “in pity for the life of toil, man’s natural inheritance, appointed holy festivals whereby men alternate their labour with rest.” But at certain seasons, especially in the spring and autumn, the festivals were so congested that the days of labour must have been far from burdensome. Almost all the festivals had a religious origin, celebrating deities and heroes of political importance, like Athena or Theseus, or forces of nature embodied in Dionysus or Demeter. But, like Christmas, they gave abundant opportunity both for public enjoyment and for the cultivation of communal and family sentiment. Sophocles had in mind all their human charm when he made the blind Œdipus lament the future of his little daughters:—
“For to what gath’rings of your townsfolk shall you come,
Or to what festivals from whence you shall not turn
Back homeward bathed in tears, instead of any share
In all the holiday?”
The festivals were often connected with the activities of country folk, with planting and reaping, the vintage and the winepress, and yet at the same time played an important part in a highly cultivated city life. Some of them were confined to women, like the Thesmophoria, celebrated by matrons in honour of Demeter, the patroness of fruitful marriages, and used by Aristophanes as occasion and stage-setting for an attack on the misogyny of Euripides; or like the Tauropolia, in honour of Artemis, which suggested to Menander a lover’s opportunity. Others, such as the Hermæa, at which Socrates first met the young Lysis and discoursed on friendship, were celebrated by young men at the palæstras, or by school-boys. The “Mean Man” of Theophrastus was “apt not to send his children to school when there was a festival of the Muses, but to say that they were sick, in order that they might not contribute.” Still others, like the Panathenæa, which occurred in July, the first month of the calendar year, united all classes and ages in a magnificent display of civic loyalty. Public taste at its highest made the presentation of plays the chief element in the Greater Dionysia in March, but the drama had originated in the December festival of the country Dionysia, which continued to be celebrated with a jollity and abandon that probably lost nothing in the descriptions of Aristophanes. The same poet also found plenty of material to his liking in the Anthesteria, another Dionysiac celebration, in which Pots and Pitchers figured in drinking competitions and in offerings to the dead. The statue of Dionysus in the Marshes was escorted to the outer Cerameicus, and by the time it was brought back again, a day later, the crowd was doubtless in the state described by the chorus of Frogs in the underworld:—
“The song we used to love in the Marshland up above
In praise of Dionysus to produce,
Of Nysæan Dionysus, son of Zeus,