1.10: Communal Rituals--The Panathenaea and the City Dionysia

At the core of celebratory festivals in ancient Greece and Rome were the religious components, "in the root sense of religio, Latin for the ‘tie' that binds people and places to the gods." The citizenry of the ancient world held a consistent perception of their gods and goddesses as human-like in their affect and dispositions, yet more imperious, more rash, and more mysterious than their mortal counterparts. Befitting their grandiosity, the immortals likely fed from acts of devotion, and "they required [from] their worshippers specific actions (rituals). These usually involved blood sacrifice or other offerings, performed in particular places and times as the means to please or placate them. Festivals provided important public occasions for such ritual worship” (Rehm).

Inside the initial marble columns of the Parthenon is a secondary set of columns, topped by an Ionic frieze that runs around the exterior. The frieze, sculpted by Pheidias, offers a pictorial narrative of the festival of the Panathenaea, held each July in celebration of their patron goddess complete with parades and competitions of poetry, drama and athleticism. In the frieze, citizens of Athens are depicted as various ceremonial roles in the veneration of their patron goddess, including the sacrificial cattle and goats. The depictions lead toward the apex “of the procession, on the east side (i.e., over the entrance of the cella housing the statue) the ceremonial robe (pelops) was presented to the priestess of Athene, and nearby sat the Olympian immortals, enthroned, taking part in the joyous celebration of civic piety” (Morford and Lenardon 168-69).

Akin to our Olympics, every fourth year the Great Panathenaea was held, as an even grander version of the annual event, featuring musical contests, athletic contests, horse races, and extended recitations of Homer’s epics the Iliad and the Odyssey, two works which represented the interconnections between the Athenian’s anthropomorphic vision of their gods, their personal traits that define their character, and the gods’ influence upon city life. The impact of these two epics cannot be underscored enough. The Greeks—not just Athenians—felt the works belonged to all Hellas. Even though Homer finds more empathy for the Trojans, and much less for the Greek armies, the Iliad was still a work of proud literature for the nation, as it reflects values of the people. Knowing the influence of Homer’s works, Phidias used the poet’s descriptions of the gods in his friezes. The gods, in various states of repose, appear to enjoy the attentions of the Panathenaea, especially Athene, whose eminence among the Olympians and her celebrity value to the polis “are consciously exploited to affirm the Athenian’s identity as a divinely favored people and to validate both their distinctive customs and their right militarily to dominate less powerful Greek city-states” (Harris and Platzner 20).

Another festival, the City Dionysia, honors another child of Zeus. Like Athene, Dionysis [thee-ON-y-sus] was also born from his father, but from his loin or thigh rather than his head. Perhaps because of this unique location of birth, Dionysis represents the sensual pleasures, such as inebriation, libations, ecstatic dance and liberation from social constraints. As such, it is natural that his patronage includes vines, wine and theater. His festival honors his cult name: Eleutherios Dionysis, which connects his roots to Eleutherai, a border town set between Thebes and Attica. Suitably, eleutheria translates to “freedom,” a meaningful and necessary contrast to his sister, Athene, who is distinguished by her controlled, tactical intelligence. The Ancient Greeks practiced polytheism—many gods, with multiple aspects each to cover the vast needs of surviving an ancient world—and the differences in the Panathenaea and the City Dionysia demonstrate these distinctions.

Where theatrical productions at the Panathenaea leaned toward the epic drama, lauding heroes and their reverence of their patron gods, (i.e. Hector and Apollo, and Odysseus and Athene), those dedicated to Dionysus favored comedies, satyr plays, in addition to tragedies, and narrative poems and dithyrambs (a wildly passionate choral hymn sung and danced by fifty men or fifty boys). These were performed at a special theater built for the god on the side of the Acropolis, nestled next to his sacred temple. Those who make the arduous climb up the steep hill to visit the Parthenon will first see the temple and theater of Dionysus where the plays of Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antingone were first performed.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Theater of Dionysus. (Photo by Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia)

Like the Panathenaea, the City Dionysia also began with a procession leading to the god’s sanctuary for ritual sacrifices of animals and offerings (such as phalli) to the statue of the god. The blood sacrifices worked to invoke a tone of celebration prior to the festivities, and to stoke the appetites for the feast that would follow. The energy elicited from the procession of lavishly adorned citizens, officials and visitors, the many animals and the cult images of Dionysus united the religious, the social and the political experiences of the polis, serving to both mark the god’s influence upon the city and to “offer apotropaic protection for the community” (Rehm).

The role of these festivals, like the myths that structurally support their artistic output, remind the ancient and modern audiences that these myths were a facet of religious practices and a means to standardize social behavior, but perhaps more importantly, they offered a vital link to their history, furnishing their ancestral memories with meaningful traditions. For the ancient Greeks, as with many ancient cultures, “the mythic past was indistinguishable from the historical past and included everything from the world’s beginnings to the aftermath of the Trojan War” (Harris and Platzner 25).