When the revel tipsy throng, all crapulous and gay,
To our precinct reeled along on the holy Pitcher day.
Brekekekex, ko-ax ko-ax.”[[17]]
The license of some of the Dionysiac holidays was in reality a break in the even tenor of Athenian temperance. At other times there seems to have been little more drunkenness among them than among the Spartans, whose uninterrupted self-restraint aroused the admiration of Plato.
From the crapulous and often naked verses of Aristophanes to the austerely beautiful marbles of Phidias is a gamut that includes all the characteristics of ancient festivals, in their appeal to both the natural and the spiritual man. Religious sincerity, civic pride, and buffoonery, jostled one another. Music, literature, and athletics added discipline and beauty.
These things as a coherent whole are long since dead. The Easter festival of to-day, like the Panathenæa, absorbs the entire city and has its hours of gaiety as well as its hours of solemnity, but it lacks the attendant contests in music, poetry, and gymnastics. If, however, it includes less of a citizen’s life than Athena’s festival, it is more Panhellenic than even the Eleusinian Mysteries, its prototype in religious significance. The Mysteries appealed to all Greeks, but invited them to gather at one spot. Those who have seen Easter ushered in at midnight by King and Metropolitan in front of the Cathedral of Athens, and who have also shared with peasant and parish priest in the announcement within some village church on a lone island of the Ægean, realize that in every part of modern Greece as never in old Greece all classes and conditions of men are at the same hour engaged in a common observance.
But the excited crowds that fill the city streets and make the Cathedral Square look like a deep cornfield stirred by a strong west wind, and the gathering of villagers in the open place in front of their tiny church alike betray one quality that is no more Christian and new than it is Pagan and old. An unquestioning and swift hospitality to strangers is as much in evidence as is the lighted taper borne by each man, woman, and child. In Athens this is but a proof on a crucial occasion of a temper which reveals itself in response to every need. By this Ionic grace, inherited from the noble civilization of Homer and eagerly exemplified by the open-minded Athenians at the height of their prosperity, the foreigner is transported back to the old city more surely than by the street names and signs in the alphabet of Xenophon, or even than by the vision, wherever his eye turns, of the ageless rock of the Acropolis.
ATTICA