Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides

by Jane Ellen Harrison

‘To him, Limnaios, do they keep the feast

With choral dances.’

The ‘dwelling’ may be some building that contained the wine-press; the temple happily has been found, and its position in relation to the precinct is strange and significant.

The foundations of the temple came to light in the South corner of the precinct. It is of small size (3·96 by 3·40 m.), and consists of a quadrangular cella and a narrow pronaos. From its small size it seems unlikely that the pronaos had any columns. The masonry is very ancient. The walls are polygonal, and the blocks of calcareous stone of which they are made are on the South-West side unusually large. In the foundations of the side-walls a few poros blocks occur. There are no steps serving as foundation to either cella or pronaos. From this Professor Dörpfeld concludes that in all probability this temple is earlier than the temple of Dionysos Eleuthereus, close to the skenè of the theatre. The temple of Eleuthereus belonged to the time of Peisistratos; it is more carefully built than the one newly discovered, and it has one step. Early though the newly discovered building undoubtedly is, it was preceded by a yet earlier structure, the walls of which, marked on the plan, lie beneath its foundations.

Quite exceptional is the relation of the temple to the precinct. It does not lie in the middle, and is, moreover, separated from the inner part of the precinct by a wall and a door that could be closed. This separating wall is however apparently later than the temple, which possibly at one time stood free within the precinct. The separating wall is only explicable on ritual grounds. It made it possible for the temple to be accessible all the year round, whereas the precinct, save for one day in the year, was closed.

Are we to give to the ancient sanctuary the name Lenaion? To the sanctuary itself probably not. The meaning of Lenaion, it would seem, is not ‘sanctuary of the god Lenaios,’ but rather ‘place of the wine-press.’ It is noticeable that writers who could themselves have seen the sanctuary never call it Lenaion. Thucydides[217], the writer of the oration against Neaera[218], be he Demosthenes or Apollodorus, and again Phanodemus[219], as quoted by Athenaeus, all speak of it as the sanctuary of Dionysos-in-the-Marshes. Isaeus[220] calls it the Dionysion-in-the-Marshes. On the other hand, when contemporary authors speak of the dramatic contest which was held not in honour of Dionysos Eleuthereus but at the older Dionysia, they speak of the contest as at or on the Lenaion, never as in-the-Marshes. The natural conclusion is that the name Lenaion is applicable to the place where the contests actually took place, namely to the ancient Orchestra and perhaps its immediate neighbourhood. The district of the wine-presses naturally had its dancing place, and that dancing place was called the Lenaion. To this day the peasants of Greece use for their festival-dances the village threshing-floor.

In the theatre of Eleuthereus Dr Dörpfeld[221] has given back to us the old orchestra. He has shown us deep down below the successive Graeco-Roman and Roman stages the old circular orchestra built of polygonal masonry ([Fig. 16]). On this old orchestra, with only wooden seats for the spectators, were acted, we now know, the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, nay tradition[222] even says, and we have no cause to doubt its veracity, that Thespis was the first (in 586 B.C.) to exhibit a play in the ‘city’ contest (ἐν ἄστει).

But ancient though it was, before it, as we have seen, came the orchestra in the Limnae. Dr Dörpfeld had hoped that his excavations would give back this orchestra too; this hope has not been fulfilled. Traces have been found of a circular structure on the South slope of the Areopagus and are marked on the plan ([Fig. 46]), but they are of uncertain date, and, if they mark the site of any ancient building, it is probably that of the Odeion of Agrippa. The old orchestra lay at the North-West corner of the Areopagos.

Tradition records the beginning of the contests ‘in the city,’ i.e. in the theatre of Eleuthereus, but the beginnings of the other festivals, the Lenaia and the Chytroi, held in the Limnae, are lost in the mists before. The two are in all probability but different names for the same festival, or rather the Chytroi is the whole ceremony of the third day of the Anthesteria and Lenaia the name given to the dramatic part of the ceremonies. But though we do not know the beginning, and though, as will presently be seen, the ‘Pot-Contests’ went back in all probability to a time before the coming of Dionysos, we have hints as to how the end came, how the splendour and convenience of the great theatre of Eleuthereus gradually obscured and absorbed the primitive contests of the orchestra in the Limnae.