a feast at Athens containing mysteries of Demeter, and Kore, and Dionysos on the occasion of the cutting of vines and the tasting of wine made from them.... The Haloa gets its name, according to Philochorus, from the fact that people hold sports at the threshing-floors; and he says it is celebrated in the month Poseidon[259].... The sports held were, of course, incidental to the business of threshing; but it was these sports that constituted the actual festival. To this day the great round threshing-floor that is found in most Greek villages is the scene of the harvest festival. Near it a booth (skēnē) is to this day erected, and in it the performers rest, and eat and drink in the intervals of their pantomimic dancing[260].
In connexion with ritual dances in honour of Demeter, Frazer draws attention to the remains of “the magnificent marble drapery which once adorned the colossal statue of Demeter and Persephone in the sanctuary of the two goddesses at Lycosura, in Arcadia”; on this are carved rows of semi-human, semi-bestial figures dancing and playing musical instruments; the bodies of these figures are those of women, but their heads, paws and feet are those of a horse, a pig, a cat, or a hare, and apparently an ass[261].
“It is reasonable to suppose,” he says, “that these dancing figures represent a ritual dance which was actually performed in the rites of Demeter and Persephone by masked men and women, who personated the goddesses in their character of beasts[262].”
The story of the two daughters of Eteokles who fell into a well while dancing in honour of Demeter and Kore, and were turned into cypresses, probably owes its origin to the desire to account for the reason why sacred dances were performed under these trees, in which the numen of one or other of these goddesses was supposed to reside[263]. The story is given in Geoponica, XI. 4:
The cypresses have two names, and they are indeed called Charites on account of their delectable quality, and Cypresses on account of their bearing and producing branches and seeds in such regular order. They were the daughters of Eteokles; and when dancing in imitation of the goddesses, they fell into a well; and the earth, commiserating their misfortune, produced flourishing plants like damsels[264].
It is unnecessary to give further examples; generally speaking, among the Greeks dancing at festivals, so far as their religious character is concerned, was performed in honour of some deity. A magical purpose is sometimes to be discerned, though rarely[265]; the ecstatic dance seems sometimes to have had this object, and this, as one would expect, is only the case in the earliest period of Greek religion[266]. We have dealt in [Chap. VII.] with the ecstatic dance and its objects.
V
As illustrating this type of dance among the Romans we may instance the festival of the Ambarvalia; this festival was not celebrated on a fixed date, but varied according to the state of the crops. The duties at the festival were carried out by Fratres Arvales, “the Brethren of the Ploughed Fields.” With solemn prayers, addressed primarily to Mars[267] to keep away all harm from the crops, these Brethren led round in formal procession the victims destined for sacrifice to Mars as the god of vegetation, viz. a pig, a ram, and a bull. The Arval Brothers had a special three-step dance (tripudium) which they performed in honour of Mars and the Lares; it was repeated three times, and during its performance they sang a hymn of praise to the god[268]. A minute account of their three days’ festival is given in the Acta of the year 218 (Elagabalus, CIL, VI. 2104)[269]; the dance, which took place on the second, and most important, day is described as follows: “... Then the priests, shut up in the temple, girding up their togas, took the song-books and, marking the time, danced the three step singing thus ...[270].” Again, at the festival of the Lupercalia, held in February, when the sacrificial feast was ended, the Luperci, crowned and anointed, and, but for an apron of goatskin, entirely naked, ran round the Palatine Hill with thongs cut from the skin of the sacrificed goats in their hands[271]. The feast was held in honour of Faunus (the Greek Pan), who was worshipped under the name of Lupercus, in a grotto in the Palatine Mount called the Lupercal. The running round of the Luperci with the goats’ thongs had a purificatory object[272] (see [p. 101]).
The dances of the Salii may be appropriately mentioned here. Their sacred processions took place in March and October, and continued for over three weeks[273]. Headed by trumpeters and dressed in full battle apparel they marched through the city; at all the altars and temples they halted, and, under the conduct of two leaders, solemnly danced the war-dance in three measures in honour of Mars, singing at the same time[274]. The Salii, however, also performed dances in honour of Saturn, the Roman god of sowing;
“as the Romans,” says Frazer, “sowed the corn both in spring and autumn, and as down to the present time in Europe superstitious rustics are wont to dance and leap high in the spring for the purpose of making the crops grow high, we may conjecture that the leaps and dancing performed by the Salii, the priests of the old Italian god of vegetation, were similarly supposed to quicken the growth of the corn by homoeopathic or imitative magic[275].”