Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides

by Jane Ellen Harrison

Within thy shepherd caves.

Exactly where that sanctuary of Aglauros was excavations have not established. At the point where the cavern is closed by the little modern church, begins a stairway, consisting of seventeen steps (θ-κ-λ-μ-), cut in the rock. These steps manifestly lead up to the steps already known, which lead down, twenty-two in number, from the Erechtheion. This is probably the ‘opening’ (ὄπη) down which the deserting women in the Lysistrata[186] were caught escaping. Still further East is a long narrow subterranean passage, a natural cleft in the rock π-π′, and at the end of this, just above the modern Church of the Seraphim, is supposed to be the sanctuary of Aglauros. Here were found a niche in the rock, the basis of a statue, and some fragments of black-figured vases. Here again there is communication with the Acropolis, but only by a ladder ascending the cliff for about twenty feet at a precipitous point. Moreover the upper part of the stone stairway is of mediaeval date so that it is not likely that the ascent was an ancient one.

The Sanctuary of Ge.—The site of this sanctuary can, within very narrow limits be determined.

Pausanias, in describing the South side of the Acropolis, after passing the Asklepieion, notes the temple of Themis and the monument of Hippolytus. Apropos of this he mentions and probably saw a sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemos ([p. 105]); he then says ‘there is also a sanctuary of Ge Kourotrophos and Demeter Chloe’; immediately afterwards he passes through the Propylaea. The sanctuary of Ge must therefore have been at the South-West corner or due West of the Acropolis, and presumably somewhere along the winding road followed by Pausanias (see Plan, p. 38). From the account of Pausanias[187] we should gather that Ge Kourotrophos, Earth the Nursing-Mother, and Demeter Chloe, Green Demeter had a sanctuary together; perhaps they had by the time of Pausanias, but the considerable number of separate dedications[188] to Demeter Chloe makes it probable that at least in earlier days these precincts, though near, were distinct.

The union of Ge Kourotrophos and Demeter Chloe is not the union of Mother and Maid, it is the union of two Mother-goddesses. Of the two Demeter belongs locally not to Athens but to Eleusis. Ge Kourotrophos is obviously the earlier and strictly local figure. But Demeter of Eleusis, from various causes, political and agricultural, developed to dimensions almost Olympian, and her figure tended everywhere to efface that of the local Earth-Mother, hence we need not be surprised that the number of dedications to Demeter is larger than that of those to Kourotrophos. Kourotrophos appears among the early divinities enumerated by the woman herald in the Thesmophoriazusae[189], and the scholiast, in his comment on the passage, recognizes her antiquity: ‘either Earth or Hestia; it comes to the same thing; they sacrifice to her before Zeus.’ Suidas[190] states that Erichthonios was the first to sacrifice to her on the Acropolis, and instituted the custom that ‘those who were sacrificing to any god should first sacrifice to her.’

The Sanctuary of Dionysos-in-the-Marshes.

The name Dionysos at once carries us in imagination to the famous theatre on the South side of the Acropolis ([Fig. 16]), and we remember perhaps with some relief that this theatre is, quite as much as the Pythion, ‘towards’ the ancient city; it lies right up against the Acropolis rock. We remember also that Pausanias[191], in his account of the South slope, says ‘the oldest sanctuary of Dionysos is beside the theatre.’ He sees within the precinct there two temples, the foundations of which remain to-day; one of them was named Eleutherian, the other we think may surely have belonged to Dionysos-in-the-Marshes. It is true that the ground about the theatre is anything but marshy now, nor could it ever have been very damp, as it slopes sharply down to the South-East. Still, from an ancient name it is never safe to argue[192]; in-the-marshes may have been a mere popular etymology from a word the meaning of which was wholly lost.

But a moment’s reflection shows that the identification, though tempting, will not do. Thucydides himself ([p. 66]) seems to warn us; he seems to say, ‘not that precinct which you all know so well and think so much of, not that theatre where year by year you all go, but an earlier and more venerable place, and, that there be no mistake, the place where you go on the 12th day of Anthesterion, and where your ancestors went before they migrated to colonize Asia Minor.’

It is most fortunate that Thucydides has been thus precise, because about this festival on the 12th day of Anthesterion we know from other sources[193] certain important details which may help to the identification of the sanctuary.

The festival celebrated on the 12th of Anthesterion was the Festival of the Choes or Pitchers[194]. On this day, we learn from Athenaeus[195] and others, the people drank new wine, each one by himself, offered some to the god, and brought to the priestess in the sanctuary in the Marshes the wreaths they had worn. On this day took place also a ceremony of great sanctity, the marriage of the god to the wife of the chief archon—the ‘king’ as he was called. The actual marriage took place in a building called the Boukoleion, the exact site of which is not known; but certain preliminary ceremonies were gone through by the Bride in the sanctuary in-the-Marshes. The author of the Oration ‘against Neaera[196]’ tells us that there was a law by which the Bride had to be a full citizen and a virgin when she married the king, she was bound over to perform the ceremonies required of her ‘according to ancestral custom,’ to leave nothing undone, and to introduce no innovations. This law, the orator tells us, was engraved on a stele and set up alongside of the altar in the sanctuary of Dionysos in-the-Marshes, and remained to his day, though the letters were somewhat dim.