Ancient Art and Ritual

by Jane Ellen Harrison

The second day of the “Cups,” joyful though it sounds, was by the Athenians counted unlucky, because on that day they believed “the ghosts of the dead rose up.” The sanctuaries were roped in, each householder anointed his door with pitch, that the ghost who tried to enter might catch and stick there. Further, to make assurance doubly sure, from early dawn he chewed a bit of buckthorn, a plant of strong purgative powers, so that, if a ghost should by evil chance go down his throat, it should at least be promptly expelled.

For two, perhaps three, days of constant anxiety and ceaseless precautions the ghosts fluttered about Athens. Men’s hearts were full of nameless dread, and, as we shall see, hope. At the close of the third day the ghosts, or, as the Greeks called them, Keres, were bidden to go. Some one, we do not know whom, it may be each father of a household, pronounced the words: “Out of the door, ye Keres; it is no longer Anthesteria,” and, obedient, the Keres were gone.

But before they went there was a supper for these souls. All the citizens cooked a panspermia or “Pot-of-all-Seeds,” but of this Pot-of-all-Seeds no citizen tasted. It was made over to the spirits of the under-world and Hermes their daimon, Hermes “Psychopompos,” Conductor, Leader of the dead.

We have seen how a forest people, dependent on fruit trees and berries for their food, will carry a maypole and imagine a tree-spirit. But a people of agriculturists will feel and do and think quite otherwise; they will look, not to the forest but to the earth for their returning life and food; they will sow seeds and wait for their sprouting, as in the gardens of Adonis. Adonis seems to have passed through the two stages of Tree-Spirit and Seed-Spirit; his effigy was sometimes a tree cut down, sometimes his planted “Gardens.” Now seeds are many, innumerable, and they are planted in the earth, and a people who bury their dead know, or rather feel, that the earth is dead man’s land. So, when they prepare a pot of seeds on their All Souls’ Day, it is not really or merely as a “supper for the souls,” though it may be that kindly notion enters. The ghosts have other work to do than to eat their supper and go. They take that supper “of all seeds,” that panspermia, with them down to the world below, that they may tend it and foster it and bring it back in autumn as a pot of all fruits, a pankarpia.

“Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.”

The dead, then, as well as the living—this is for us the important point—had their share in the dromena of the “more ancient Dionysia.” These agricultural spring dromena were celebrated just outside the ancient city gates, in the agora, or place of assembly, on a circular dancing-place, near to a very primitive sanctuary of Dionysos which was opened only once in the year, at the Feast of Cups. Just outside the gates was celebrated yet another festival of Dionysos equally primitive, called the “Dionysia in the Fields.” It had the form though not the date of our May Day festival. Plutarch[39] thus laments over the “good old times”: “In ancient days,” he says, “our fathers used to keep the feast of Dionysos in homely, jovial fashion. There was a procession, a jar of wine and a branch; then some one dragged in a goat, another followed bringing a wicker basket of figs, and, to crown all, the phallos.” It was just a festival of the fruits of the whole earth: wine and the basket of figs and the branch for vegetation, the goat for animal life, the phallos for man. No thought here of the dead, it is all for the living and his food.

Such sanctities even a great tyrant might not tamper with. But if you may not upset the old you may without irreverence add the new. Peisistratos probably cared little for, and believed less in, magical ceremonies for the renewal of fruits, incantations of the dead. We can scarcely picture him chewing buckthorn on the day of the “Cups,” or anointing his front door with pitch to keep out the ghosts. Very wisely he left the Anthesteria and the kindred festival “in the fields” where and as they were. But for his own purposes he wanted to do honour to Dionysos, and also above all things to enlarge and improve the rites done in the god’s honour, so, leaving the old sanctuary to its fate, he built a new temple on the south side of the Acropolis where the present theatre now stands, and consecrated to the god a new and more splendid precinct.

He did not build the present theatre, we must always remember that. The rows of stone seats, the chief priest’s splendid marble chair, were not erected till two centuries later. What Peisistratos did was to build a small stone temple (see Fig. [2]), and a great round orchestra of stone close beside it. Small fragments of the circular foundation can still be seen. The spectators sat on the hill-side or on wooden seats; there was as yet no permanent theātron or spectator-place, still less a stone stage; the dromena were done on the dancing-place. But for spectator-place they had the south slope of the Acropolis. What kind of wooden stage they had unhappily we cannot tell. It may be that only a portion of the orchestra was marked off.

Why did Peisistratos, if he cared little for magic and ancestral ghosts, take such trouble to foster and amplify the worship of this maypole-spirit, Dionysos? Why did he add to the Anthesteria, the festival of the family ghosts and the peasant festival “in the fields,” a new and splendid festival, a little later in the spring, the Great Dionysia, or Dionysia of the City? One reason among others was this—Peisistratos was a “tyrant.”

Now a Greek “tyrant” was not in our sense “tyrannical.” He took his own way, it is true, but that way was to help and serve the common people. The tyrant was usually raised to his position by the people, and he stood for democracy, for trade and industry, as against an idle aristocracy. It was but a rudimentary democracy, a democratic tyranny, the power vested in one man, but it stood for the rights of the many as against the few. Moreover, Dionysos was always of the people, of the “working classes,” just as the King and Queen of the May are now. The upper classes worshipped then, as now, not the Spirit of Spring but their own ancestors. But—and this was what Peisistratos with great insight saw—Dionysos must be transplanted from the fields to the city. The country is always conservative, the natural stronghold of a landed aristocracy, with fixed traditions; the city with its closer contacts and consequent swifter changes, and, above all, with its acquired, not inherited, wealth, tends towards democracy. Peisistratos left the Dionysia “in the fields,” but he added the Great Dionysia “in the city.”