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

OTHER FESTIVALS

spirits, spirits of fruitfulness and vegetation. Their dances were imitated by their human worshippers ; performances in dumb-show, which appear to accompany these spirits everywhere, were also given.

Now there is nothing remarkable in finding something of this kind in the cult of a goddess of fruitfulness, such as Artemis was. Her retinue is of course female, except in one uncertain case. The female spirits which correspond to the satyrs and the like, have become so ennobled that the kinship can hardly be recognized any longer ; but we must remember the Homeric hymns to Aphrodite (v, 262) (“the Sileni united in love with the Nymphs ”’) and the illustrations on vases, which museums cannot exhibit publicly.

Such dances belonged to the cult of Artemis Corythalia; but her festival, the Tithenidia, is called a “ Festival of Nurses’’. It is possible that the dances were performed at another festival of the same goddess; but nothing prevents us from claiming them as part of the Tithenidia, for the cult of the goddess extended far more widely than the name of the festival suggests. There is a trace of this in the fact that the Tithenidia was also a festival of fruitfulness of general importance. While the nurses carried the little boys to Artemis Corythalia, in the city a kind of “ feast of tabernacles ” was held (called koms: cf, Ath., iv, 138e, 1392) as at the Hyacinthia. These huts also occur outside Greece at the festivals of gods of fruitfulness, especially harvest festivals; and the huts at the Carnea (cxddes) may also be compared (see Ath., iv, 141e). Why only male children were carried out to the goddess, and by their nurses, not by their mothers, we do not know, but it creates the impression that the festival had somewhat deteriorated. In any case it was believed that the goddess would bestow her blessing upon the little ones and that they would prosper more under her protection.

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