The fifth day of the games was wholly reserved for contests open to Athenian citizens alone. There was the pyrrichos (a dance in full armor), the apobates race, an equestrian event called the anthippasia, a boat race, the euandria (a beauty contest for mature men), and a torch relay race. These tribal contests evoked sacred memories of the earliest ancestors, emphasizing their physical and aesthetic excellence, their strength and agility in battle, and their grace in dance and comportment. Above all, tribal events stressed military readiness and power; foreign teams and visitors were compelled to watch a celebration of Athenian supremacy designed, at least in part, for their discomfort.
The pyrrhic dance competitions required contestants to dance nude, hold a shield, and imitate movements from combat: dodging, jumping, crouching, striking, hitting, and lunging.51 There were separate heats for boys, beardless youths, and men. The dance was attributed to Athena herself, who, according to her birth story, sprang from the head of Zeus in full armor and dancing the pyrrhike. It was understood to be a dance of joy anticipating her victory in the Gigantomachy.52
The anthippasia involved a mock cavalry battle.53 Riders from five tribes competed against those of the other five, arranging themselves in rows on horseback and riding through each other’s lines. This grand spectacle was evocative of the great battles of the epic past. So, too, were horseback javelin throws, which required contestants to hit a target while galloping at full speed.54
Perhaps the most surprising of the tribal events, at least for the modern reader, is the male beauty contest.55 Prizes for the euandria included an ox and, according to Aristotle, shields.56 The ox suggests the entire tribe feasted together following the victory, which might mean that the euandria was a team event in which the beauty, size, and strength of one group of men were tested against those of groups from other tribes. Xenophon tells us that the euandria at Athens was, as such things went, utterly “unmatched in quality.”57 This competition celebrated the Athenian ideal of personal conduct known as kalokagathia, a compound of two adjectives, kalos (“beautiful”) and agathos (“good” or “virtuous”). We hear of one Athenian who won three separate events at the Panathenaia: the torch race, the tragedoeia (tragic acting competition), and the euandria. This man, it would seem, had it all: looks, strength, athleticism, acting talent, and, no doubt, a certain charisma.58 One only wonders how well he played the kithara.
Just after sunset on the fifth day, the tribal torch races, or lampadephoria, were run. These seem to have been run by young ephebes, starting from out beyond the city walls in the Academy and speeding through the Dipylon Gate and the Agora, making their way up to the Acropolis.59 This would have brought a thrilling visual display of firelight in the darkness, to say nothing of agility, speed, teamwork, and athleticism. Forty runners representing each of the ten tribes raced for sixty meters in the relay, handing off the flaming torches until a distance of twenty-five hundred meters had been covered.
The torch race served the greater purpose of transferring fire from the altar of Prometheus in the Academy to the altar of Athena on the Acropolis. Thus, the event reenacted the stealing of fire and the lighting of the first sacrificial altar by Prometheus, father of King Deukalion and ancestor of all Athenians. The first runner to reach the Acropolis won the honor of lighting Athena’s altar for the sacrifices that would be offered there the next day. His tribe would share in the feast of an ox, as well as a hundred drachmas in cash. Each of the forty runners on the winning team received an additional thirty drachmas and a water jar.60
LATER THAT EVENING, citizen youths and maidens climbed the summit of the Acropolis for an all-night vigil, the pannychis, a most intense group experience.61 For the girls, just past puberty, this was perhaps the first time they had ventured out from the confinement of their households at night to be in the company of young men. On the Acropolis rock they sang and danced the whole night through, no doubt taking turns in circle dances organized according to their tribes, dances that were a mainstay of their paideia from an early age.
It was through the repetitive movements of dance, set to music and the memorized words of hymns, that young people learned the myth-histories of their community, perhaps why Plato says that choral dancing represented “the entirety of education.”62 Indeed, song-dance lay at the very heart of Greek paideia. As arms and legs moved to the beat of practiced notes and words, incorporated within the heightened intensity of ritual performance, the body found, as it were, its cosmic coordination point, locating the self within the incomprehensibly vast scheme of Athenian time and space. Who am I? Where do I come from?
Where exactly on the Acropolis did the dances of the pannychis take place? While no surviving texts offer a conclusive answer, there is a basis for reasonable speculation. Between the north fortification wall and the Erechtheion stretches a rectangular “plaza,” bounded at the west by the temple’s north porch and at the east by a flight of a dozen steps. This self-contained space would have been ideal for performance (facing page).63 The steps and staircases looking down into the plaza would have served perfectly as “bleachers” for spectators. Fascinatingly, this square was paved over as early as the Bronze Age, indicating its use as a setting for spectacle might have been very long-lived.64 It might well have been preserved across the ages as a special “theatral zone.”
Plan of Erechtheion showing location of Poseidon’s trident strike, Athena’s olive tree, and performance space. (illustration credit ill.97)
Shielded from wind and noise on four sides, this square offered ideal acoustics for choral singing and dancing. There was also its proximity to the mythically charged landscape of the Acropolis’s north slope, the very spot where the high drama of legendary princesses had played out. Here, above the cave of the Long Rocks, where Apollo made love to Kreousa and where the infant Ion was abandoned, girls might join hands in a circle dance on the eve of the Panathenaic procession. One might hear the piping of Pan drifting up from his cave in accompaniment, just as it had for the dances of the daughters of King Kekrops in the passage from Euripides’s Ion quoted in chapter 1.65 And then there was the memory that the daughters of Kekrops and possibly the oldest daughters of Erechtheus leaped from the Acropolis cliffs to their deaths.66 Last, it is here within the ramparts of the north fortification wall that salvaged column drums, metopes, and architrave blocks from the destroyed Archaic temples were displayed (this page). Landscape, myth, history, and ritual spectacularly collide in this uniquely charged place of memory.
Can we know what songs the girls sang as they joined hands in their choral dance? The beautiful choral ode of Euripides’s Children of Herakles may give us a hint. To be sure, it is sung by a chorus of old men, a rarity in Greek tragedy, but one that we also find in Euripides’s Erechtheus. Nonetheless, the ode may hold for us some vestige of the kinds of hymns that might have been sung at the Panathenaia, including at the pannychis. The chorus invokes the full heavenly cosmos to join it:
O earth, O moon that stays aloft the whole night long. O gleaming rays of the god that brings light to mortals, be my messengers, I pray, and raise your shout to heaven, to the throne of Zeus and in the house of gray-eyed Athena! For we are about to cut a path through danger with the sword of gray iron on behalf of our fatherland, on behalf of our homes, since we have taken the suppliants in.
…
But, lady Athena, since yours is the soil of the land and yours is the city, and you are its mother, its mistress, and its guardian, divert to some other land this man who is unjustly bringing the spear-hurling army here from Argos! By our goodness we do not deserve to be cast from our homes.
For the honor of rich sacrifice is offered to you, nor do the waning day of the month, or the songs of the young men or the tunes to accompany their dancing ever slip from our minds … On the windswept hill [of the Acropolis], loud shouts [ololugmata] resound to the beat of maiden dance steps the whole night long.
Euripides, Children of Herakles 748–758, 770–78367
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sp; There is much to gather here about the Panathenaic pannychis. At the very start of the hymn, the chorus invokes the celestial bodies of Earth, Moon, and Sun as messengers to Zeus. Later, it specifies the timing of the festival, that it begins “the day on which the moon wanes.” Indeed, the lunar calendar shows a waning crescent moon for the twenty-eighth of Hekatombaion. This would have made for very faint illumination of the Acropolis during the all-night vigil. The stars above would have been seen to shine all the more vibrantly.
The crescent moon is featured prominently on Athenian silver coinage, appearing on the earliest of the owl coins, minted in around 510–505 B.C.68 During the 470s, the crescent is introduced in the upper left field of Athenian tetradrachms, just beside Athena’s owl (this page). While this crescent has sometimes been interpreted as a reference to Athenian victories at Marathon or Salamis, this is unlikely.69 We know the Battle of Marathon took place under a full moon and, furthermore, that the crescent appeared on Athenian coins already in the last decade of the sixth century, well before the Persians landed on Greek shores.
The crescent moon may instead signal the Panathenaic festival and, in particular, the twenty-seventh through the twenty-eighth of Hekatombaion, the night of the waning moon, when Athenian maidens and youths gathered on the Acropolis for their vigil. Euripides gives us a hint in the Erechtheus. A fragmentary line preserves a question the king puts to Praxithea, who appears to be handling some crescent-shaped wheat cakes: “Explain to me these ‘moons’ made from young wheat as you bring/take a lot of cakes from your house.”70 Could such cakes have been offered as part of the rites of the Panathenaia? Were they fashioned into little “moons” to reflect the lunar aspect under which the festival culminated?
Importantly, Praxithea summons the women of Athens to sound the shrill cry of the ololugmata, beckoning Athena to be present: “Ululate, women, so that the goddess may come with her golden Gorgon to defend the city.”71 We are reminded of another priestess of Athena, Theano of Troy, who, as she placed a peplos on the knees of Athena’s statue, was joined by the women of the city raising the ritual cry, “Ololu!”72 And there is also a specific reference to ololugmata in the choral ode of Children of Herakles quoted on the previous page. Here, the “shrill cries” of the maidens resound to the beat of their dance steps.
The word ololugmata derives from the Greek verb ololuzein, meaning “to cry aloud,” and is related to the Sanskrit ululih, “a howling.” The English word “ululation” and the Gaelic uileliugh (“a wail of lamentation”) come to us through the onomatopoeic Latin ululare, meaning “to howl or wail.”73 Indeed, the Latin word ulula means a kind of owl,74 as does the Old English word ule.
Today, ululation is still customary among women in Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula, and India. The cry is most often used in weddings and funeral rituals. In the Muslim world, it is specifically used at funerals of martyrs. Produced by the rapid movement of the tongue and the uvula while simultaneously emitting a shrill vocal scream, the sound is both alarming and haunting.
In the ancient Greek world, women vocalized the ololugmata at moments of ritual climax.75 In sacrifice, it was unleashed at the very instant when the animal victim’s throat was slit. Like the sound of the aulos, the women’s cries might have been a means of muffling the shriek of the dying animal. It is somewhat surprising to find the word used in the choral ode of Children of Herakles. Yes, ololugmata can be cries of joy, but they are certainly closely associated with death and sacrifice.76 The deliberate use of this word could suggest here a dark message; the remembrances of this night, it seems, are not of unalloyed joy and light. Could the maidens have shouted the ololugmata to evoke the sacrifice of Erechtheus’s daughter, the girl whose throat was cut by her father upon Athena’s altar? It is hard to imagine that, here, on the Acropolis rock, from which there is a tradition that the daughters of Kekrops and the older daughters of Erechtheus leaped to their deaths, Athenian maidens would not have been mindful of the sacrifice of the mythical princesses, commemorating them with song and dance.
As they performed behind the northern ramparts of the Acropolis, the girls would have looked up at an astounding celestial display. The upper culmination of the star group Drako, the Serpent, coincided precisely with the period during which the Panathenaia was held. It is, as Efrosyni Boutsikas has pointed out, no coincidence that the final days of the Panathenaic festival overlapped precisely with this most significant astronomical phase of Drako, the serpent killed by Athena in the cosmic battle of the gods and the Giants, a boundary event vibrantly commemorated in this sacred feast.77 By the time the pannychis commenced, Boutsikas observes, the constellation would have been visible in an upright position, having just crossed the meridian.
During this annual culmination of Drako, its two brightest stars, those located in the Serpent’s head, would have been best viewed from the north porch of the Erechtheion.78 And so, if we locate our “theatral space” just beside this porch, the singing and dancing of Athenian maidens would be situated directly beneath this astral spectacle. (A fascinating parallel, the constellation Hyades, the same as the star group Hyakinthides into which the daughters of Erechtheus are catasterized, is best viewed from the area east of the Parthenon and altar of Athena.)79
Of course, the suggestion that the choral dances of the pannychis took place in a theatral square at the north of the Erechtheion is purely speculative. It is impossible to prove that a space was used for dancing in the absence of live performers. Nonetheless, consideration of open spaces where spectacles might have occurred repays the effort and teaches us much about ritual circulation and movement. Indeed, ritual kinesis shaped sacred spaces that today sit silent and elusive, void of the action that defined their original function. The archaeological imagination can come alive through the integration of the visual, the acoustic, the mythopoetic, the architectural, and the topographic to bring deeper understanding of the experience of place and time within the ancient landscape.80
AS DAWN BROKE the following day, marchers would assemble just outside the city walls in the Kerameikos to begin their Panathenaic procession. There the crescent moon hanging in the eastern sky would fade away as the heavens lightened. The parade route stretched roughly one kilometer, starting at the Dipylon Gate, crossing the Agora, and climbing the Acropolis (insert this page, top). The Sacred Way measured ten to twenty meters in width to accommodate the great number of processionists.81 The honor of leading the marchers was reserved for a young woman of parthenos status, that is, a girl just past puberty but not yet married. She was handpicked by the chief magistrate himself from among the daughters of the oldest families in Athens.82 It was a great distinction to be singled out in this way as one of the fairest daughters of the city’s elite. It was the responsibility of this young woman to carry upon her head a basket containing the implements of sacrifice: knife, oils, ribbons, barley. One wonders if the visual spectacle of a young parthenos, leading the procession and carrying the sacrificial paraphernalia on her head, might not have somehow evoked the memory of one very special parthenos who, in deep antiquity, marched (with all eyes upon her) to the altar of Athena for sacrifice at her father’s hand.
An Attic black-figured cup, dating to the mid-fifth century, shows just such a basket bearer approaching a flaming altar within Athena’s sanctuary. The goddess and her priestess stand behind the altar while a man leans over it to shake the priestess’s hand (insert this page, top).83 What are we looking at? Raising her arms to steady her burden, the little basket bearer is clearly the leader of the procession of sacrificial victims (bull, sow, and ram), musicians, and soldiers that follow behind her. Here, the deep past and the contemporary rituals that commemorated it merge in an iconography that accesses both mythical times and the historical present.
One cannot help but notice a certain correspondence between maiden basket bearers and the sculptured karyatids that first appear in Greek sanctuaries in the sixth century, when sacred spaces were form
alized on a monumental scale.84 The richly dressed karyatids of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, for example, show high basketlike elements upon their heads.85 These so-called kalathos (basket) karyatids may reflect the appearance of actual young women who circulated past them on festival days, leading processions up the Sacred Way.86
The same can be said for the karyatids of the south porch of the Erechtheion (facing page). Atop their heads are pads that cushion the weight of the lintel. Shown dressed in their festival finery, the Erechtheion karyatids served as mirrors in marble for the maiden basket bearers who led processions up the Acropolis.87 The aim of the procession was, after all, to invite the deity to the festival. By making the pageant continually present through the permanent fixtures of karyatids, Athenians would have rendered the invitation to Athena perpetual, and with it the goddess’s benevolent presence.88
Sacred images carried high in processional display would have met the karyatids at eye level and, perhaps, have been seen to interact with them. It is helpful here to consider the great temple processions of southern India that, to this day, transport statues of divinities along sacred parade routes, stopping at station points along the way.89 In the Chittirai festival at Madurai, statues of the goddess Meenakshi and her consort Shiva perambulate across a cultic landscape before they are installed at the inner sanctum of the temple. At the Meenakshi-Sundaresvara temple, stone images of King Tirumalai Nayak and his wives emerge from the architecture to become one with the processions that pass before them.90 This model can help us understand how the Erechtheion karyatids functioned within their ritual space. Each year at the Plynteria, or “Washing,” festival, the olive wood statue of Athena was taken from the Acropolis and transported to Phaleron for bathing in the sea. Held high in sacred procession, it would have been carried right past the Erechtheion karyatids, at their eye level, allowing for a kind of sacred dialogue between the stone maidens and the goddess’s image.
The Parthenon Enigma Page 30