As a result of their frequent relations with the Greeks after the death of Alexander the Great, the Jews appear to have borrowed from the Gentiles, in the celebration of their Feast of Tabernacles, the use of the Sunshade. The subjoined medal of Agrippa the Old, struck by the Hellenised Jews, in some sort supports this, although Spanheim, in a passage relating to this medal, says he has hesitated a long while as to the signification of the symbols which it represents. Do the ears of corn mark the fertility of the governed provinces, or do they refer to the Feast of Tabernacles? As for the tent on the obverse, it is little probable that it represents a tabernacle according to Moses’ rite, since the roofs of these tabernacles, far from being pointed, were flat and cloven in the midst, so as to allow rain, sun, and starlight to pass through. It must then be the Sunshade, the emblem of royalty; this at least seems probable.
The Parasol played among the Greeks a very important part, as well in the sacred and funeral ceremonies as in the great holidays of nature, and even in the private life of the noble ladies of Athens.
The Parasol in its elegant form may be seen drawn on the majority of Greek vases, either painted with straight or arched branches, concave or convex, or in the shape of a hemisphere or a tortoise’s back. But the Sunshade with movable rods, opening or shutting, existed at that time, as is sufficiently indicated by the phrase of Aristophanes in the Knights (Act v. Scene 2)—“His ears opened and shut something like a sunshade.”
An archæologist might amuse himself with writing a special work on the rôle of the Sunshade in Greece; documents would not fail him; nay, the book would soon grow big, and might bristle with notes from all quarters, abounding in the margins, after the example of those good solid volumes of the sixteenth century, which none but a hermit would have the leisure to read conscientiously to-day. Such is not our business in this light chapter.
One cannot exactly say for what motive the Sunshade was carried by young virgins in all the processions in the Thesmophoria, the festivals of Eleusis, and the Panathenæa. Aristophanes calls the baskets and the white Sunshades “symbolic instruments, destined to recall to human beings the acts of Ceres and Proserpine.”
An archæologist might amuse himself with writing a special work on the rôle of the Sunshade in Greece; documents would not fail him; nay, the book would soon grow big, and might bristle with notes from all quarters, abounding in the margins, after the example of those good solid volumes of the sixteenth century, which none but a hermit would have the leisure to read conscientiously to-day. Such is not our business in this light chapter.
One cannot exactly say for what motive the Sunshade was carried by young virgins in all the processions in the Thesmophoria, the festivals of Eleusis, and the Panathenæa. Aristophanes calls the baskets and the white Sunshades “symbolic instruments, destined to recall to human beings the acts of Ceres and Proserpine.”