Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

FESTIVALS

certainly embellished after the style of a novel, but vividly and on the whole quite in the spirit of the antique, is described in the romance of Antinous by Aimé Giron and Albert Tozza, which represents a similar festival in Egyptian Thebes, the locale of the romance.

Gymnic contests, popular games, song and dance, later also theatrical performances, were combined with the Eleusinian festival, to be spoken of later. If the Eleusinia, in spite of their sanctity or rather because of it, did not dispense with the erotic undercurrent, so this was in a yet higher degree the case at the five-days’ festival of the ‘Thesmophoria, celebrated only by women in honour of the two thesmophoroi, that is, law-bringing goddesses, Demeter and Persephone. Although some of the details are very obscure, yet it may be said in general that the deeper idea at the bottom of the festival was the memory of Demeter, who as the inventress of agriculture first made generally possible a settlement of human life, and in particular decidedly influenced the life of women and married life. “ Sowing ” and “ begetting children ” are identical among the Greeks in conception and linguistic usage ; hence the festival was celebrated in the month of sowing, called in Crete and Sicily Thesmophorios, in Beeotia Damatrios, in Attica Pyanepsion, corresponding more or less to our October. If we may believe Herodotus (ii, 71), this cult had already been widespread among the Pelasgian original population of Greece. In any case it was common throughout Hellas and extended to the most distant colonies in Thrace, Sicily, Asia Minor, and on the shores of the Black Sea.

In Attica Thesmophoria, which have become partly known to us by the merry comedy of Aristophanes, the Thesmophoriazuse (that is, the women at the festival of the Thesmophoria) were celebrated from the ninth to the thirteenth day of the month Pyanepsion. All the women who desired

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