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J. C. B. Petropoulos, Heat and Lust: Hesiod’s Midsummer Festival Scene Revisited
Foreword
Preface
Abbreviations
1. The Problem Stated: A Look at Hesiod’s Feast and Beyond
2. The Harvest
3. The Threshing
4. The Village of Avdemi: A Case Study in Wanton Women?
5. Enter the Cicada
6. Hesiod’s Festival Reconsidered
7. Towards a Conclusion: The Farmer and His Wife
Appendix 1. Commentary on WD 582-596
Appendix 2. On Zephyros (WD 594)
Appendix 3. On the Fountain, Sexual Mischief, and the Migration of Reapers
Appendix 4. Commentary on WD 448-452
Appendix 5. Commentary on WD 486-490
Appendix 6. Commentary on Athenaeus 8.360B = carmen populare 848 (PMG)
Appendix 7. Harvest Songs
Appendix 8. The Avdemi Songs
Table: Canicular Period
Bibliography
Appendix 3. On the Fountain, Sexual Mischief, and the Migration of Reapers
The fountain or well was one of the few places where a woman might encounter an unrelated man and consequently a likely locus for sexual mischief: see Richardson, pp. 179-180 on Homeric Hymn to Demeter 98 f. Hesiod's κρήνη may well be a sexual detail, not merely a topographical one. In demotic song the βρύση, as it is called, is the commonest rendezvous point for the sexes. Marriage proposals and even seductions are said to occur here. [1] (In fact, until recently village etiquette discouraged nubile women from going to the village well or fountain except in a group.) In many stories the Neraides—the archetypal seductresses of popular tradition—make their aquatic epiphanies before the βρύση and tempt and even harm men. [2]
Hesiod's κρήνη may, incidentally, be further evidence for the migration of reapers, since travellers would naturally stop at a spring for rest and refreshment: Iliad 2.305 f.; Odyssey 6. 291 f., 9.140 f., 17.204 f., 13.102 f.; Homeric Hymn to Demeter 98-100.
Footnotes
[ back ] 1. Also cf. Richardson 1986. 64-65.
[ back ] 2. As do the Lamies: cf. Stewart 1990. passim.