Chorus and Ritual

Up to now, my analysis of the chorus has been mainly morphological; I have described its internal organization and defined the positions and roles assigned to each of its participants. The relationship between choregos and chorus-members is at the heart of the ensemble. The function of the choregos is to set up and conduct the chorus, and he/she is responsible for the arrangement and coordination of its musical activity; on the basis of its own actions, the chorus forms a whole with a coherent activity. But the choregos him/herself is an integral part of the choral ensemble, and it is in this relation between the leader of the chorus and the chorus-members that the different components of Greek music are unified. The connection that unites the choregos with the chorus-members, therefore, is what gives the system of the lyric chorus its particular cohesion.

In this second section, I shall place the chorus in its ritual and religious setting. The definition of the chorus and its musical activity as a closed system does not exclude its being seen in a wider framework. We have observed that the chorus does not act for itself, but always exists for a specific occasion, most frequently a cult. It therefore possesses a religious aspect that associates it regularly with a deity.

This chapter on ritual is divided into two parts, one devoted to non-Spartan rituals, the other to those attested in Sparta itself. I have made this division because part of this research is aimed at defining those rituals that might have furnished the occasion for the performance of Alcman's fragments 1 and 3, and I shall therefore examine Spartan rites more closely. Given the uncertain relationship between signifier and signified, it is impossible to gather a complete body of evidence; the first part of this chapter, therefore, does not claim exhaustiveness—the material included would anyhow be too vast. I simply give a general classification of the occasions for which women's choruses were organized in ancient Greece, and I attempt to define briefly the qualities of the gods to whom those choruses were dedicated, so that I may then determine the connection between chorus and divinity and the various religious functions of the choral performances by girls and women. {89|90}

The analysis of the function of the choregos has brought to light several descriptions of divine choruses that serve as paradigms for humans. Those most often mentioned are the choruses of Muses and Nymphs; the first is generally led by Apollo, the second by Artemis; these two deities are thus the divine choregoi par excellence of the Greek pantheon.

By definition, the ritual as relating man to divinity is a concept irrelevant to a description of the internal organization of the domain of the gods. Among the gods, a lyric and choral performance need not be motivated by a cult. In the passage of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo mentioned above, the mere arrival of Apollo on Mt. Olympus gives rise to hymns sung by the Muses, dances performed by the Graces and the Seasons, the song of Artemis, and the dance-steps of Ares and Hermes executed under the delighted gaze of Leto and Zeus. Theseus, when he dives into the ocean, finds the house of Amphitrite and Poseidon filled with the Nereides dancing, according to Bacchylides. Dance seems to be their main activity. Similarly, according to the author of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the Nymphs, neither mortal nor divine, live on without end, feeding on divine food and dancing in chorus with the gods. [1] Dancing and singing form part of the image of the Golden Age and constitute one of the main features of the life of the Blessed. According to Pindar, the Hyperboreans, who know neither sorrow nor war, like the men of Hesiod's golden race, live in perpetual bliss, banqueting and sacrificing to Apollo; and their whole country resounds to the feet of young girls dancing in chorus to the lyre and pipe. The choral dance, specifically when performed by adolescents and women, symbolizes for Pindar one of the basic features of a life equal to that of the gods. [2] In Archaic Greek poetry, music is the pleasure of the gods!

If, among men, the return to the Golden Age through choral music needs an occasion that confines it in time, the gods, who live perpetually in the bliss of the Golden Age, need no such temporal limitation for their dances. However, since they eat and marry in the same way as men, it is not surprising that the wedding ceremony and the banquet are the only motives, if motives are indeed needed, for a dance by a divine chorus. In the first book of the Iliad, the banqueting of the gods is accompanied by Apollo's lyre and the singing of the Muses. And in Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides, the divine marriage of Thetis and Peleus is celebrated by the choruses of the fifty daughters of Nereus. [3] {90|91}

According to the dictum reported by Aesop, the Greeks posed a rhetorical question as to whether there was a single occasion when Artemis did not participate in choruses: ποῦ γὰρ ἡ Ἄρτεμις οὐκ ἐχόρευσεν; [4] The occasions are indeed very frequent on which Artemis danced with her chorus of Nymphs, and the festivals consecrated to her, in which it can be presumed choruses of girls and women were involved, were no less numerous. Following my principle of respect for the signifier of the sources, literary or iconographic, I shall refer exclusively to documents describing or representing explicitly female choruses in the service of the goddess.

The chorus of Euripides' tragedies, when made up of women, often speaks of its service to Artemis. It is this goddess whom the chorus of Trojan women feted when the horse was introduced into Troy: Artemis, the virgin of the mountains, the daughter of Zeus (τὰν ὀρεστέραν παρθένον, Διὸς κόραν). Iphigenia, in the play about her sacrifice, asks the young women (νεανίδες) who form the chorus to sing the paean in honor of Artemis, the daughter of Zeus (Διὸς κόρην), in expiation of the murder about to be committed. The chorus of the captive Trojan women in Hecuba wonder about their fate and whether they will ever again join the young Deliades (Δηλιάσι κούραισιν) to celebrate Artemis. The chorus of attendants in Iphigenia in Tauris expresses a similar longing to rejoin the Greek choruses, those choruses in which the young girls (παρθένοι) had been rivals in grace: they danced before marriage, having left their mothers to join the groups of girls of their age (ἁλκίων θιάσους); as the lines at the beginning of the stasimon suggest, these adolescent choruses were dedicated to the service of Artemis. And finally Helen, in the tragedy that bears her name, replies to the chorus of young Greek captives with her in Egypt that she envies the fate of the virgin Kallisto, metamorphosed by Zeus, and the fate of the daughter of Merops (Μέροπος κούραν), whom Artemis chased away from her chorus because of her beauty and then turned into a deer. [5]

In these stories, choruses in the service of Artemis seem to consist mainly of adolescents, implying the virginity characteristic of the goddess and also of her paradigmatic chorus of Nymphs. The common element in these three examples is the use, when naming Artemis, of the expression (Διὸς) κόρη, daughter (of Zeus), an expression also used for individuals of the chorus of Nymphs and for {91|92} the girls in a choral group. [6] Still adolescent, the girls who form the choruses in honor of Artemis are not married. This connection of the virgin goddess with the premarital period is found in the numerous scenes of abduction of an adolescent in Greek mythology.

Indeed most of these scenes take place within the context of adolescent choruses dedicated to Artemis. Hermes falls in love with Polymele, daughter of Phylas, when he sees her dancing and singing in the chorus of Artemis (χορῷ καλὴ Π. Φύλαντος θυγάτηρ). The union of the god and the abducted maiden is virginal (not matrimonial), since there is born of this union a παρθένιος, a child of a maiden, who later becomes the brave general Eudoros. In the Homeric Hymn dedicated to her, Aphrodite passes herself off as a maiden who has not yet known love in order to seduce Anchises; she disguises herself as an adolescent abducted by Hermes from a chorus dedicated to Artemis while she was frolicking with her comrades (πολλαὶ δὲ νύμφαι καὶ παρθένοι παίζομεν). [7] The chorus in Euripides' Helen tells how Kore was abducted from the circular choruses of virgins (κυκλίων χορῶν ἔξω παρθενίων) and immediately searched for by Artemis and Athena; this version of the Persephone myth corresponds to the one in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter: the girl was dancing (παίζουσαν/παίζομεν) and picking flowers in a field with the Oceanides when Hades carried her off to the underworld. If it is not explicitly said that a chorus of Oceanides was performing a ritual in honor of Artemis, the young goddess, accompanied by Athena, nevertheless took part in an adolescent group with choral connotations. [8]

But the mythical paradigm of the abduction of the young virgin is given by Pausanias in his story of the aition of the statue of Artemis Alpheiaia at Letrini between Elis and Olympia. This epiclesis of Artemis originated in the love that Alpheios one day offered to the goddess. Faced with the resistance of Artemis to marriage, Alpheios tried to rape her by clandestinely entering a nocturnal feast that the goddess was celebrating among her Nymphs. Here the person to be raped is not an adolescent singing for Artemis or a Nymph dancing in her retinue, but the goddess herself. However, the plans of Alpheios came to naught because the goddess mingled with her Nymphs and they all covered their faces with mud. In this way the goddess kept her eternal virginity. [9] {92|93}

To these irregular unions between gods and human beings correspond regular unions among humans, springing from the same root. I shall recount three, that of Habrocomes and Antheia, Hermochares and Ktesylla, and Akontios and Kydippe, and, although they are attested in post-Hellenistic romances, I shall analyze them in detail. [10] All of these unions start with a festival honoring Artemis in which the future brides, still virgins, are dancing; in each case, the adolescent girl arouses the desire of her suitor when he sees her among her companions. The obvious marriage control function of these festivals has been explained by Plutarch in connection with a custom among young girls on the island of Keos (Κείων παρθένοις: note the semantic feature 'geographical/family association'); these adolescent girls went together to public festivities (ἱερὰ δημόσια) where they played and danced (παιζούσας καὶ χορευούσας) under the eyes of their suitors. Their relations with their future husbands were thus under constant supervision and, adds Plutarch, in this way seduction and adultery were completely avoided. [11] The exemplary love story of Hermochares and Ktesylla takes place precisely on Keos. The chorus that performs in the rituals for Artemis is therefore made up of adolescent girls past puberty but not yet married. The choral performance in honor of the virgin goddess seems to consecrate the religious aspect of that period in the life of a young girl that extends from puberty to the first legal sexual contact, marked in Greece by marriage.

Among festivals dedicated to Artemis in which female choruses take part, the best documented is that of Artemis at Ephesos. Autocrates, the comic author, in a fragment of the Tympanistai quoted by Aelian, pictures the movements of a chorus of young girls dancing. He describes these young virgins, girls of the Lydians (φίλαι παρθένοι Λυδῶν κόραι), as they gambolled near the statue of the goddess, dancing lightly, making their hair flow and playing music (on the lyre?) with both hands; with their hips they executed a movement similar to that of a dipper when it descends. [12] This dance corresponds to one performed by the Amazons in a myth reported by Callimachus, which perhaps plays the role of {93|94} aition for the ritual alluded to in Autocrates. In his Hymn to Artemis, Callimachus recounts how the Amazons set up a statue to Artemis on the shore of Ephesos. Hippo, the Queen of the Amazons, performed a particular ritual (τέλεσεν ἱερόν) on this occasion, and her followers performed an armed dance called prylis, followed by a circular choral dance (κύκλῳ στησάμεναι χορὸν εὐρύν); the music of the syrinx accompanied their dances, adds Callimachus, giving them the necessary rhythm and cohesiveness. If this dance is not the exact model of the one described by Autocrates—there are too few elements for a definitive comparison—Callimachus sees in the erection of the statue of Artemis by the Amazons the initial act of founding the sanctuary that was subsequently built. [13]

These two sources should be complemented by two other texts that use terms connoting a choral performance without actually mentioning it. They concern rites performed by boys and girls of Ephesos in honor of Artemis. The Etymologicum Magnum, in explaining the epiclesis Daitis, which refers to Artemis of Ephesos, describes both the ritual and the founding legend of this cult. The rite consists of a meal offered to the goddess by the Ephesians. Its origin lies in an offering of salt once made, on a mythical occasion, by adolescent girls and boys of Ephesos (κόραι καὶ ἔφηβοι); under the leadership of Clymena, daughter of the king of the city (Κ. θυγάτηρ βασιλέως: note the line of parentage), boys and young virgins carried a statue of Artemis out of the city and set it up in a field near the sea. After having danced and sung (παιδιὰν καὶ τέρψιν), they wanted to honor the goddess with an offering in place of a meal, and they offered her salt. The following year, the offering was not repeated, and the young people suffered a visitation of cosmic anger (μῆνις) and an epidemic (λοιμός) sent by Artemis. Since then, the offering of a meal was regularly made to expiate the fault committed by the young Ephesians and as propitiation in fear of the scourges sent by the goddess (ἐξηυμενίσαντο τὴν θεόν). [14] The structure of the account in the Etymologicum Magnum ([1] act of devotion to a god, [2] {94|95} transgression of this act, [3] a curse put on the transgressors, [4] expiation/propitiation by a ritual act performed regularly and repeating the original act of devotion) shows that in some way the ritual hinges on its legend of foundation: by the offense and its expiation, the single act of devotion is turned into a repetitive and proper ritual. So much for the form of the story. As we shall see, its substance is characteristic of several rites of adolescence, such as that begun by the Proitides at Lousoi or the one honoring Artemis at Brauron.

The final important source for the festival of the Ephesia is that of Xenophon of Ephesos, quoted above. Even if it is difficult to take a romance as a document on a cultic practice, the coincidence with the information already given confers on this literary description a certain verisimilitude. As we have seen, it was at a festival of Artemis at Ephesos that the model couple, Habrocomes and Antheia, met. The author of the romance specifies that the sanctuary of Artemis where the rite took place was outside the city, seven stades from its walls. That it was outside the circumference of the city corresponds to the information given in the Etymologicum Magnum on the festival of Artemis Daitis, since the original ritual took place in a field, obviously outside the city, probably on the shore if we follow Callimachus. All the boys of sixteen and all the girls of fourteen went in procession (πομπεύειν) along the seven stades between the town and the place of celebration. Each group was led, according to the description given above, by the most beautiful and most representative of them, in this case Habrocomes and Antheia. In the procession, the adolescents carried ritual objects, torches, baskets, and perfumes for the sacrifice. They were followed by horses, dogs, and people carrying hunting gear. People of the region and foreigners brought up the rear of the procession, in the center of which were Habrocomes and Antheia, admired by the onlookers. After the procession and a sacrifice performed at the goddess' temple, the young people could finally meet each other; it was then that the exemplary love of Habrocomes for Antheia began, according to Xenophon of Ephesos. [15]

In Nilsson's opinion, Xenophon's story offers little interest, since the elements that pertain to the Ephesian festival are not original. This is justified to the extent that the description is very general, characteristic of any of the festivals for Artemis involving adolescents. For my thesis, however, it is precisely this accumulation of the semantic features underlying female festivals that makes it attractive. In fact, Xenophon's account, with such details as the arrangement of the procession, the ages of the participants precisely noted, the companionship evident in the two groups, the leading positions of Habrocomes and Antheia, the ritual allusion to the Artemisian activity of hunting, and the presence of a large crowd of onlookers, constitutes a sort of "structural" description of an adolescent ritual dedicated to Artemis. And the author goes so {95|96} far as to give an analysis of its function by indicating that the ritual played the role of organizing new marriages (ἔθος ἦν ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ πανηγύρει καὶ νυμφίους ταῖς παρθένοις εὑρίσκεσθαι καὶ γυναῖκας τοῖς ἐφήβοις). Xenophon's description conforms therefore to the model of the adolescent festival, the function of which is to allow the crossing of the line between puberty and marriage, at the moment of integration into adult life.

If, synchronically speaking, the four accounts of the Ephesia are not entirely satisfactory because their differing particulars cannot be organized into a single ritual, a fifth source offers a diachronic dimension by suggesting a terminus post quem for the date of the festival. In Aristophanes' Clouds, the mention of the celebration held by the girls of the Lydians (Λυδῶν κόραι) for Artemis of Ephesos recalls on the levels of expression and content the account of Autocrates; [16] it sets back the participation of a young girls' chorus in the festival of Artemis at Ephesos to 423 B.C. From Aristophanes to the Etymologicum Magnum, the texts reveal a remarkable consistency.

It is also possible that the Λυδῶν κόραι organized a chorus of young professional dancers at Ephesos, dedicated to the service of Artemis. Such a chorus would be comparable to that of the Deliades, which appeared on various occasions particularly in the cult of Apollo. Mentioned by several playwrights, these girls seem to have been quite famous in the classical period. A fragment of Ion of Chios that most probably refers to those young women describes them as players of the lyre and singers of hymns. [17]

Not far from Ephesos, at Magnesia on the River Meander, several datable ruins and decrees indicate the founding of a new temple dedicated to Artemis Leukophryne. In the classical period, this Artemis was also honored at Athens, in the context of the political relationships of Themistocles with Magnesia on the Meander, and perhaps in Crete. [18] The first decrees found date from 207/6, the last from 129 B.C., but all refer back to the same act of foundation. [19] At {96|97} Magnesia, Artemis Leukophryne had the role of the polis divinity (τῆι ἀρχεγέτιδι τῆς πόλεως Ἀρτέμιδι: 695. 18; τᾶι εὐεργέτιδι καὶ καθαγεμόνι τᾶς πόλιος: 559. 36). This goddess resembles, then, Artemis of Ephesos. [20] The beginning of the decree 695 shows that we have here an ancient cult, since the founding of the sanctuary is described as the renovation of an already existing temple. In fact, after the epiphany of Artemis in 221/20, the xoanon of the goddess was taken to a new building constructed especially for her, namely, the Parthenon. [21] The decrees of 207/6 speak about a festival occurring every four years, organized along the lines of the Pythian Games, and the decree of 129 about an annual festival organized the sixth day of the month Artemision, which corresponds to 6 Thargelion in the Attic calendar, the same date as the Athenian spring festival of the Thargelia. [22] The ritual included sacrifices and an official festivity (πανήγυριν) with competitions in music, gymnastics, and horsemanship. [23] This date was a national holiday; children did not go to school and slaves had the day off. All the townspeople met in the public square attired in their best clothes and crowned with laurel wreaths. The women went to the temple as followers of the goddess, and the priest was responsible for organizing (συντελείτω ὁ νεωκόρος) choruses of young girls to sing hymns in honor of Artemis (χοροὺς παρθένων ᾀδουσῶν ὕμνους). [24] Performances of adolescent female choruses were therefore an integral part of a ritual in which the whole city participated.

Not far from Ephesos, at Samos, Artemis was also honored by choruses of adolescents (ἵστασαν χοροὺς παρθένων τε καὶ ἠϊθέων). This information comes from Herodotus who describes this rite as the consequence of a historical event. [25] It is therefore difficult to speak of a real "myth" of foundation, since the founding of the rite occurred in historical times! However, it plays exactly the {97|98} same role since, according to Herodotus, the event was the cause of a festival that became a regular cultural practice. The historian from Halicarnassus says that Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, in order to punish the Corcyreans for the murder of his seventeen-year-old son Lycophron, had sent to Alyattes of Sardis three hundred children from Corcyra to be castrated. The Samians, during a stopover of the Corinthians on their island, hid the children from their guards and shut them up in the temple of Artemis. The Corinthians, forbidden to take the suppliants from the temple by force, tried to wear them down by starvation; but the Samians lifted the Corinthians' siege by instituting a festival in which choruses of maidens and ephebes carried sesame cakes and honey to the goddess; the children from Corcyra hid the food and ate it and were thus saved. This ritual was performed regularly thereafter. There are present here, although in a different context, two elements of the founding legend of the cult of Artemis Daitis at Ephesos: the offering of food and the rescue that results from it. It looks as if the consumption of foods, associated in ancient Greece with the consummation of the marriage, would rescue the adolescents from the symbolic death represented in the founding event by the castration. In addition, the details given by Herodotus suggest a date for the beginning of the ritual at Samos, since it is contemporaneous with a Samos crater that the Spartans sent to Croesus. We can therefore date the ritual from the middle of the sixth century. [26]

Other great festivals consecrated to Artemis must have included choruses of young girls, but gaps in the literature limit our knowledge severely. Sometimes iconographic evidence exists to fill the gaps. This is the case for the festival of Artemis at Brauron, a festival essential for young Athenian adolescents. The rite has recently been the object of detailed historic and structural studies to which I refer the reader. [27] I will limit myself here to the probable choral aspects of the ritual. {98|99}

The founding legend of this ritual, of which there are several versions, can be reduced to a schema like the one for the ritual of Artemis Daitis at Ephesos: the first act of the ritual in the Athenian rite concerns the presence of a bear in the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron (thirty kilometers from Athens); its death at the hands of youths provokes the anger of the goddess, who sends an epidemic or famine as punishment; this scourge is expiated and propitiated by the sacrifice of the daughter (θυγάτηρ) of a citizen; for the human victim an animal is substituted, and the sacrifice is carried on by the periodic service of young Athenian girls to the goddess. This service consists in imitating the bear (ἀρκτεύειν, μιμήσασθαι τὴν ἄρκτον), thus repeating the original event by mimesis. The sources explicitly report that the intention of this service is to prepare the young women for marriage. So, under the aegis of Artemis, we have a characteristic female rite of adolescence.

The recent excavations at the sanctuary of Iphigenia at Brauron have brought to light several fragments of vases, one of which, dating from around 560, shows three girls holding hands and dancing to a pipe player. [28] This picture corresponds to the model of the choral performance as I have defined it. It can be expanded by a series of vase fragments found on the site of the sanctuary that show very young girls moving towards an altar. [29] It is thus certain, although there is no written evidence for it, that the service of the bear at Brauron included {99|100} choral performances, by the young girls, with the features 'circularity' and 'procession.' On the other hand, the ritual fits the model of the Artemis festival to the extent that it also was the scene of the abduction of girls, whether by the Pelasgians or the Lemnians. [30]

I associate with this service to Artemis the one performed, according to Bacchylides, by the girls of Aegina for the Nymph of the same name, daughter of the River Asopos. On the occasion of this ritual, as we have seen, a girl, probably a choregos, dances while her companions sing of Endais and her descendants. [31] It is typical of lyric poetry to allude to the exploits of heroes, so these songs sung by young girls of Aegina suggest what may have been the subjects of the hymns performed during women's rituals. They offer the additional image of a girls' chorus dancing and singing while the choregos celebrates the divinity.

The female rituals for Artemis are thus mainly the business of adolescent girls. The scenes of abduction so often present in these rites show them to be characteristic of the period in a girl's life at puberty when she arouses men's desire but is not yet accepted into adult life through marriage; the mythical figure of Atalanta, the adolescent who arrives at maturity but flees marriage, is her incarnation. [32] These rituals tend to suppress irregular unions, and to integrate the young girl into sexual life. Artemis appears as the 'nurturing' goddess, kourotrophos in the wider sense of the word. [33] This term has too often been {100|101} used to refer exclusively to her influence over early childhood; however, kourotrophos does not stand just for the care given to nursing infants, but implies divine supervision over the whole of the child's education until he or she passes into adulthood.

Furthermore, most of these festivals honoring Artemis and involving female choruses have an underlying myth that can be reduced to the following schema: 'mythical act of devotion; failure to perform the act; punishment sent by the goddess; expiation/propitiation through a ritual repeating symbolically the original act of devotion at regular intervals.' This is so for the cult of Artemis (Daitis) at Ephesos, Artemis at Brauron, and, to a degree, Artemis at Samos. The punishment sent down for the initial lapse involves the death of the perpetrators, and the ritual expiation of the fault in turn involves a symbolic dying. In the context of adolescence, this death can be understood as the ritual that marks the moment of negation and immersion into chaos in the tripartite structure of tribal initiation ritual. [34] I shall enlarge later the initiatory interpretation of these rites and the exact function of the groups of adolescents forming the choruses in this cultic context.

Women's rituals in honor of Apollo are grouped geographically around the two principal centers of the cult of Apollo in Greece, Delphi and Delos. Pindar's second Paean recapitulates this situation, showing Apollo celebrated by the songs of young girls (π̣[αρ]θ̣ένοι) who gather in choruses (ἱστάμ̣ε̣ν̣αι χορόν) both at Delos and at the foot of the rocks of Parnassus. [35]

At Delphi Apollo was particularly worshipped in the feast of the Stepterion, which may be related to the already mentioned Daphnephoria of Thebes. [36] The theoria of young nobles, one acting as ἀρχιθέωρος, moved from Delphi to Tempe, then from Tempe back to Delphi; the sacrifice performed at Tempe in honor of Apollo was followed by a second procession that recalls in more than one respect the ritual of the Daphnephoria at Thebes. The same adolescents {101|102} carried the laurel bough from Tempe to Delphi, which was then used to make wreaths for the winners of the Pythian Games. The road they followed was called Pythias, and it probably retraced Apollo's legendary journey to Delphi. [37] Like the Theban Daphnephoria, the procession of the Stepterion took place every eight years; the recent discovery of the remains of a Daphnephorion in Eretria, and also in Thebes, one of the stopping places on the Pythian Way, would seem to confirm the connection between the Theban and Delphic rituals. The findings at Eretria are all the more interesting as the architecture of this ancient sanctuary reproduces the pattern of a true laurel hut. [38] Nilsson compares this ritual with the festival of the May Tree (εἰρεσιώνη), held in the spring in several locations in Greece, among them Athens (assuming the εἰρεσιώνη present at the Thargelia in honor of Apollo), Samos (Apollo) and Sparta (Artemis Korythalia); Farnell takes up the idea of the May Tree and makes the Theban Daphnephoria a springtime festival with solar implications and with the purpose of reactivating the forces of nature. [39] The epiclesis Galaxios, under which Apollo was honored in the Theban Daphnephoria, suggests this, since at Delos the month of Galaxion is the same as the first month of spring. [40] {102|103}

Our documents on the Delphic ritual of the Stepterion interpret the procession to and from Tempe as a gesture of expiation for the founding act of the Pythian Games: the murder by Apollo of the dragon occupying the site of Delphi. On the other hand, the Theban Daphnephoria could be interpreted as a local equivalent of the ritual of Delphi. Those rites would then contain the same features of 'expiation' and 'propitiation' as those seen in the aetiological legends of the festivals of Artemis Daitis at Ephesos and Artemis at Brauron. It is noteworthy that Artemis and Apollo have exactly the same powers; like Artemis of Ephesos, who sends calamities on men only to deliver them again, Apollo sends sickness and then cures it: he is the god of misconduct and expiation. [41] This pattern implies that any ritual associated with this area of divine functioning must have two closely connected components: expiation (of the fault committed) and propitiation (to avoid any further lapses). And the ritual of "renewal," because of the change it signifies, must include a phase of purification (of the past) and a phase of propitiation (for the future). One of these elements is represented in the account given by Proclus of the Theban ritual, namely that the hymns sung by the chorus of young girls walking behind the daphnephoros child are songs of supplication (πρὸς ἱκετηρίαν). [42]

Therefore, if it is possible to interpret with Nilsson and Farnell the Theban Daphnephoria and the Delphic Stepterion as spring festivals renewing Nature's forces, this can only be in a metaphorical sense, on the level of "vegetal growth." The supplications of the adolescents during the Theban Daphnephoria suggest that this rite had an initiatory significance. [43] In spite of the scarcity of elements that might attribute such a value to it, this festival was probably a ritual consecration for girls when they separated from the world of childhood, and passed into the segregation phase of tribal initiation. To the extent that the feature 'expiation/propitiation' can be applied to an adolescent context, a very general confirmation might be seen in it. Moreover, the epiclesis of the god honored in the rite of the Daphnephoria, along with Galaxios, associates the sanctuary of Apollo, where the adolescents gathered, with a river: he was venerated under the name Ismenios because his cult was connected with the River Ismenos. [44] To go to the temple, the girls, led by the child daphnephoros, had to leave the town, in other words civilized space; also probably their stay near a {103|104} river symbolized the period of marginality in a liminal space present in every tribal initiation, as it did for the adolescents participating in the initiation ritual of Sicyon, which I shall presently analyze.

The supplications of young Thebans to Apollo Ismenios-Galaxios during a spring festival probably were meant to call down on the adolescents the protection of the deity and to assure them of their rebirth and physical completion after the period of their initiatory death. Realizing that such an interpretation is based on conjecture, I nevertheless put forward the suggestion that the ritual of the Theban Daphnephoria was meant to introduce the young girls in the chorus to the period of marginality and death in a tribal initiation procedure.

The facts concerning female choral performances in honor of Apollo on Delos do not form a coherent whole. It is possible that they should be linked to several rituals or in any case to different phases in the same festival.

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo is the oldest source for an Apollonian ceremony at Delos: the festival is celebrated by the Ionian men with their wives and children; competitions are organized (στήσωνται ἀγῶνα) including boxing, dancing, and singing. But the high point of the feast is the singing of the "hymn" by the Deliades (κοῦραι Δηλιάδες), the youthful servants of Apollo; in this song the girls celebrate Apollo, as well as Leto and Artemis, and go on to the exploits of men and women whom they remember and whose voices they imitate. [45] This passage, important for the understanding of the role of mimesis and memory in the Greeks' idea of poetry, is partly paraphrased and partly quoted by Thucydides: the Athenian historian reports that on the occasion of the radical purification of Delos in 426 and after a first intervention of Peisistratos in the sixth century, the Athenians took over the Ionian festival, called it the Delia, and celebrated it every four years. [46] Concerning the first form of the ritual as it was celebrated by the Ionians, and as it is described in the Homeric Hymn, {104|105} Thucydides adds that the Ionians and the inhabitants of the neighboring islands arrived at Delos in procession (ἐθεώρουν), as they did later in Thucydides' time at Ephesos for the already-mentioned festival of the Ephesia, and that the different towns sent choruses (χοροὺς ἀνῆγον). He mentions the chorus of the Deliades (τὸν Δηλιακὸν χορὸν τῶν γυναικῶν), without specifying whether it was retained in the reformed version of the Athenians. The historian ends his account by affirming that the Athenians and the island people sent choruses (χοροὺς ἔπεμπον) to Delos from their own cities, following the custom of the Ionians, and added another competition to the original ones, a horse-race.

We owe a third description of the festival to Callimachus, this time separated from its aition. In his version, all the towns in Greece sent choruses to Delos each year (πᾶσαι δὲ χοροὺς ἀνάγουσι πόληες), along with the tributes and the first fruits due to Apollo. [47] According to legend, the first ears of wheat were sent by the Hyperboreans as first fruits; it was the three daughters of Boreas (θυγατέρες Βορέαο, line 293, παρθενικαί, line 298) whose duty it was to make the first journey, accompanied by three young men (ἄρσενες ἄριστοι ἠιθέων). In other legends, these young women are closely associated with the cult of Artemis and Apollo. Their names, Oupis, Loxo, and Hekaerge, correspond to the epicleseis of one or another of these gods; their Naiad nature and their connection with the legend of Iphigenia in Tauris suggest a semantic complex connoting female adolescence. [48]

The same legend is already found in Herodotus, who says that the first fruits were offerings wrapped in wheat and straw. He gives two different traditions of the myth, one that gives the young Hyperboreans, of which there are only two in this version, the names Hyperoche and Laodike (they had an escort of five men), the other that names them Arge and Opis. The first came to Delos with a {105|106} tribute of thanksgiving to Eileithyia for having been present at the birth of Apollo. This tribute could be interpreted as the first fruits mentioned both by Callimachus and Herodotus. The second set were said to have arrived in the island "with the gods themselves," Leto and Eileithyia. [49]

Herodotus and Callimachus continue their accounts with an identical episode: to the daughters of Boreas (Hyperoche and Laodike in Herodotus, Oupis, Loxo and Hekaerge in Callimachus), the young Delian maidens (αἱ κόραι Δηλίων Hdt., Δηλιάδες, κοῦραι Call.) consecrate their hair (ἤλικα χαίτην Call.) just before marriage. [50] To the same young women (but according to Callimachus to the young men who accompanied them), the youths of Delos (παῖδες Hdt. and Call.) consecrate either their hair or their first beard. This rite of consecration of hair by adolescents on the eve of their marriage was widespread throughout Greece. At Troizen, for example, it was part of the heroic cult of Hippolytus, the supreme adolescent hero, about whom I shall have more to say; in his description of this rite, Euripides adds that it was accompanied by a musical performance by unmarried adolescents (κόραι ἄζυγες γάμων) who had dedicated to him locks of their hair. And at Athens, during the festival of the Apatouria, the boys, on joining the ephebes, and the girls, at marriage, consecrated their hair to Artemis. [51] {106|107}

The meaning of the Delian rite of the offering of hair, and its connection with adolescence and the passage to adulthood, represented for the girls by marriage, is quite clear and should allow an overall interpretation of this festival, insofar as the rite is part of the Delia. A connection with Artemis can be added, as indicated by the presence of the tomb of Hyperoche and Laodike in the Artemision; [52] it was on this tomb that the girls and boys placed their hair, according to Herodotus.

For the moment, let us note that the various accounts of the Delia center around three main points: the first is the aition of the festival which includes the legend of the Hyperborean virgins who bring the first fruits to Delos on the first occasion (Hdt., Call.) and the story, only in Herodotus, of the journey of the young Hyperborean girls to be present at the birth of Apollo; these are legendary acts underlying the ritual of the Delia. The second point includes the service of the Deliades; according to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and Thucydides, the girls are in effect the servants of Apollo and in the ritual celebrated by the Ionians sang songs celebrating their master, along with Artemis and Leto. As we shall see, the Deliades held different religious observances for Apollo in different places. We are therefore talking about a professional chorus performing for cults, and, at Delos, their performance should be clearly distinguished from that of choruses sent by cities in Ionia, later by Athens (Hom., Thuc., Call.). Musical performances by these choruses is the third point in our knowledge about the Delia. They are included among the various ritual practices of the festival, such as gymnastic and musical competitions, later, horse-racing, and consecration of the first fruits. Probably the account of Herodotus in which the Delians sang of Opis and Arge in a hymn composed by Olen, the native poet of Delos, and which the Ionians and the island people also sang, can be associated with the Delian rites. This hymn can be viewed as one of the ritual songs performed by the choruses sent to the festival. [53]

There are two unanswered questions pertaining to the Delia concerning the unity of the festival and its meaning. [54] The first is connected with its place in the ritual calendar of Delos. Some French scholars have differentiated between the Delia and the Apollonia by having them celebrated at different times of the year. Nilsson has shown that these two terms referred to a single ritual held in {107|108} early spring during the month of Hieros. [55] Since the documents do not allow for absolute certainty, I simply stand by Nilsson's and Bruneau's deductions.

The significance of the Delia is just as difficult to determine as the date. Their importance and complexity prevent the festival's reduction to one aspect. The legends underlying the festival associate it with the birth of Apollo and the cults of Leto and Eileithyia. In the myth, the connotations are consequently pedotrophic. As regards the ritual, the Deliades are defined as young girls, which leads the interpreter into the realm of adolescence. [56] Unfortunately, the Homeric Hymn does not reveal the qualities invoked for Apollo, Leto and Artemis in the hymn sung by the young girls; only Artemis receives her customary epiclesis of archer. The consecration of the first fruits, doubtless at the beginning of spring, suggests the idea of propitiation perhaps before the plants come into flower. It marks the passage from a dead season to a new one. Besides evident political reasons related to the position of Athens in the League of Delos, this semantic feature of 'renewal' probably translates into one of the motives that caused the Athenians to reorganize the Delia after the complete purification of the island in 425. This purification has itself a sense of propitiation or expression of thanksgiving—propitiation so that the plague is not renewed, or thanks for its end. [57] We have also seen how the cult, celebrated by adolescents of the island in honor of the young Hyperborean virgins who were the first to bring the first fruits to Delos, refers to courotrophy and to the preparation for marriage.

Because of 1) the celebration of the birth of Apollo, 2) the cult honoring Eileithyia, 3) the sense of renewal implied in the offering of the first fruits, and 4) possibly the premarital consecration of their hair by the adolescents of the island to the Hyperborean virgins, the Delia embodied a great seasonal festival of propitiation for the growth of children and adolescents. This latter function is all the more evident because, according to Plato, the celebration of the festival of the Delia was justified by the legend of the expedition of Theseus and his companions to Crete. Plato describes the theoria that went annually from Athens to Delos as an act of thanksgiving for the protection granted by Apollo to the seven girls and the seven boys sent with Theseus to the Minotaur at Knossos. [58] If the victorious return of Theseus from the Labyrinth was celebrated at Delos in a particular rite called the Aphrodisia, already mentioned and to be discussed further below, there is little doubt that the link between the Delia and the {108|109} Theseus myth, most probably established by the Athenians leading the League of Delos, gave the festival an initiatory value. Unfortunately, information about this is too incomplete to determine the precise moment when the initiation process came into play in the Delia.

On the other hand, these aspects of pedotrophy and courotrophy presented by the festival of the Delia should not obscure the fact that the choruses sent there from Ionia and the islands indicate something more. Open to women as well as to children, the festival, on the eve of spring, probably represented a ritual of renewal for the whole city. Nor did the Delia concern a single city, but a large region, and no doubt touched various aspects of social life, from agriculture to the admittance of adolescents to citizenship.

Moreover, Delos was not only the island of adolescent dance, but its metaphor as well. Its central position in the Cyclades is associated with the image of the choral circle since, according to Callimachus, the Aegean isles surround it in the form of a chorus (ἀμφί τε νῆσοι κύκλον ἐποιήσαντο καὶ ὡς χορὸς ἀμφεβάλοντο). Also, the island had a reputation as one "in which the songs of the choruses never end." [59] And, still according to the Hymn to Delos of Callimachus, those "Muses' birds" who are the swans, those "most musical of all birds," celebrate the birth of Apollo circling (ἐκυκλώσαντο) seven times around the island. We come thus, besides the circular choral dance, to the second aspect of Delos' semantic reality: the island's nurturing of Apollo, since it protected both his birth and his childhood (ἁγιωτάτη, Ἀπόλλωνος κουροτρόφος). It is because of this that it receives first fruits and choruses from Greek cities. [60] There is therefore a close link between the nurturing character of Apollo and that of the island that watched over his birth. [61]

Finally, as regards the Delia, it is interesting to note that the observances of the Deliades for Apollo were well known in antiquity. It is twice mentioned by the tragic choruses of Euripides as an example of an ideal choral performance. In Herakles, the chorus of old men singing a paean to the hero of the play is compared to the Deliades (Δηλιάδες εἱλίσσουσαι καλλίχοροι) who sing (ὑμνοῦσι) the paean for Apollo, the son of Leto (Λατοῦς εὔπαιδα γόνον). And the most fervent wish of the captives in Hecuba is to be free to rejoin the young Deliades (Δηλιάσιν κούραισιν) and sing of Artemis with them. [62]

The Deliades, in contrast to the adolescent choruses, formed a group of young professional dancers, as several Delian accounts dating from the beginning of the third century confirm. They appeared not only at the great festival of Apollo but {109|110} also at the rites for Artemis (Artemisia, Britomartia), at the Letaia, the Aphrodisia, the Eileithyiaia, etc.; they were accompanied by a pipe player, engaged for the year and paid. [63] The mythical model of this chorus is perhaps to be found in the group of the nymphs of Delos (νύμφαι Δηλιάδες) which sang the holy chant (ἱερὸν μέλος) of Eileithyia to announce the birth of Apollo. The fame of this chorus was such that it probably performed at rites outside Delos. [64] An Archaic representation of a chorus found in the Artemision at Delos perhaps reflects one of these performances. [65] The professional character of the Deliades proves the possibility of the simultaneous presence in a given ritual of a permanent chorus, and of choruses formed for the particular occasion.

Choregos and kourotrophos, Apollo is close to Artemis. His domain covers partly the same area as that of the virgin goddess as far as adolescence is concerned. The relationship of these two divinities, both children of Leto and Zeus, is reflected in their sphere of activity. [66] It is seen in a festival that took place in Sicyon, where Apollo and Artemis were honored simultaneously. The aition of this adolescent ritual is based on the original dispatch of seven youths and seven girls as suppliants (παῖδας ἑπτὰ καὶ ἴσας παρθένους ἱκετεύοντας) to the bank of the River Sythas. This aition parallels the structure of certain foundation legends of rites for Artemis and for Apollo: the mission of the adolescents was motivated by an epidemic visited upon the Sicyonians when the divinities came to the town after the death of the serpent Python in order to be purified, but out of fear they had to flee to Crete. The propitiation of the two divinities for their return to Sicyon was obtained by sending the young people to the River Sythas; it resulted in the regular observance of a ritual by the adolescents (παῖδες) of the town. During this ritual, the effigies of the divinities were carried into the sanctuary of Peitho (because both divinities were persuaded to go back to Sicyon) on the former Acropolis and then returned to the temple of {110|111} Apollo on the banks of the Sythas. [67] Motivated by the expiation of the same murder of Python as the Delphic ritual of the Stepterion, the dispatch of the adolescents out of the town onto the banks of the river recalls the route of the Theban Daphnephoria and clearly has an initiatory sense. At the river, the young people probably performed a rite aimed at expiating the death of Python and propitiating the epidemic which symbolized the death of the adolescents. The fact that the adolescents appear as suppliants, and that they leave inhabited space for the river, recalls the Apollonian and Artemisian rites already mentioned, at the same time confirming the initiatory interpretation I have offered. Unfortunately, the only source for the rite at Sicyon does not mention a choral performance.

When differences appear between the spheres of Apollo and Artemis in their mediation of growth and adolescence, it can generally be reduced to a difference that reflects the respective sexes of the divinities. Apollo refers to masculinity, in spite of his close ties with the chorus of the Muses, while Artemis is the goddess of female adolescence. Generally speaking, girls' choruses are not seen in the cult of Apollo except where his authority is greatest; Artemis protects boys where she reigns alone. Together in the same cult, they share the same sphere of action, each according to his/her character. For example at Delos, the consecration of hair by young Delians has a clearly Artemisian character although it takes place in an entirely Apollonian context. The presence of the tomb of the young Hyperboreans in the Artemision, where the consecration took place, and the names attributed to these young girls are the exterior marks of the Artemisian aspect of the ritual. These marks are significant for the direct connection of the ritual act with preparation for marriage.

Recalling the distinction made by Dumézil and Detienne, as described in the introduction, between the sphere of action of a god and the ways in which he/she intervenes, one can say that, contrary to Athena and Poseidon, who intervene in the same sphere of action —navigation or cavalry —but in different ways, Artemis and Apollo tend to share the sphere of adolescence and intervene in identical ways. [68] In the myth, Apollo as well as Artemis punishes with a plague, then cures it. In the rite, they are both protectors of childhood and kourotrophoi, Apollo more for boys, and Artemis for girls.

The same sharing of influence is represented by the contradictions in the account of Antoninus Liberalis of the loves of Ktesylla and Hermochares. [69] {111|112}

This account follows the narrative shape of the legends I have cited which recount the adventures of a young girl who arouses the desire of a man while she dances in a chorus dedicated to Artemis. In the story of Hermochares and Ktesylla, it is not during a festival for Artemis but during the Pythia of Karthaia, a city on Keos, celebrated in honor of Apollo, that the suitor saw the young girl dance for the first time; daughter of Alcidamas (Ἀλκιδάμαντος θυγάτηρ), Ktesylla danced around the altar of the god (χορεύουσαν περὶ τὸν βωμὸν τοῦ Ἀπόλλωνος). Two of the semantic complexes defined in our morphology of the Greek chorus can be recognized behind these expressions; the first, defining the status of Ktesylla, has the features 'adolescence' and 'family association'; the second, concerning the choral performance, includes 'circularity' and 'center.' But it is in the sanctuary of Artemis that Hermochares throws Ktesylla the apple with the vow which, spoken aloud and sworn in the name of Artemis, bound the girl to her lover by a promise of marriage. [70] It is also from the sanctuary of Artemis that Hermochares abducted Ktesylla when he heard that the father of the girl had concluded another marriage, in spite of having sworn an oath to give his daughter to Hermochares. The misfortune that finally befell Ktesylla was the result of her father's broken vow. The union of the lovers was quite regular and Ktesylla, after her death, was honored by the Ceans of Ioulis under the names of Aphrodite Ktesylla, and in the other cities on the island Ktesylla Hekaerge. [71]

Above and beyond the indications that this story gives about the privileged relationship of Artemis and adolescent female dance, it shows that Artemis and Apollo can intervene on exactly the same occasion but are bound by their sexual difference: the oath written by Hermochares and spoken by Ktesylla was made in the name of Artemis, while the father's word was given in the name of Apollo. On the other hand, the location of the story, at first during a festival for Apollo, then in a sanctuary belonging to Artemis, shows the reciprocity possible between the two divinities.

The parallel story of the loves of Akontios and Kydippe, for which an Aition by Callimachus gives a happy ending, shows a similar link between Artemis and Apollo. Akontios and Kydippe are also adolescents from Keos, but it is at Delos during the Delia —therefore in an Apollonian context—that Akontios sees Kydippe for the first time and falls in love with her. However, it is during Kydippe's service in the temple of Artemis that Akontios throws her the apple with the marriage vow. It is very probable that the rites performed by Kydippe in the goddess' honor included singing in a chorus. On returning to Keos, Kydippe falls mysteriously ill when her father, who is unaware of her involuntary vow, wants to marry her to another. However, she is saved by the oracle of Apollo, which her father consults and so learns of the existence of the vow. [72] Here the division is clear: the female aspect of the story is under the influence of Artemis and its male aspect, under Apollo's power. The vow made by Kydippe, pronounced in an Artemisian context and in the name of the goddess, is entirely under the goddess' sign. The solution to the obstacle preventing the union of the lovers, represented by the father's project for the girl, depends on Apollo. Both gods are finally responsible for the perfect union of the two adolescents.

With Hera and the rituals dedicated to her, we find the problem of the transition from the status of a virgin to that of a married woman. Hera is defined specifically as the goddess of marriage, and her marriage with Zeus is the paradigm for all human marriages. As a result, she is the protector of the legitimately married woman, and her sphere of influence also covers the reason for matrimonial union in Greece, namely, children. [73] Hera seems obligated therefore to intervene in the spheres of Artemis and Apollo. However, she only does so to the extent that marriage marks the end of adolescence, and that childbirth, its goal, implies the presence of the newborn. Thus Hera, goddess of married women, is also honored under the epiclesis of Παρθένος, the Young Virgin. But, significantly, this cult of Hera Parthenos, either at Hermione in Argolis or at Stymphalos in Arcadia, is never separated from that of Hera Teleia, Hera the Adult. [74]

Adolescence being the period of transition from one condition to another, it is right that this should be the meeting place of several gods. While Artemis and Apollo cover the whole process of growth from birth to the end of adolescence, {113|114} Hera covers only the two extremes of this process: the matrimonial period extending from adolescence to maternity. During this time, the young girl is under the protection of Hera, but also under that of Aphrodite. Birth, growth, adolescence, marriage, maternity —the cycle is a closed circle. Artemis and Apollo on the one hand, Hera and Aphrodite on the other, share the responsibility without there being theoretically any overlap between their respective spheres of action.

Among observances paid to the cult of Hera by women, I shall first consider that of the association of sixteen women of Elis. It has often been used as an analogy when the ritual aspect of Alcman's fragment 1 is in question, in particular to prove the possibility that the lyric chorus could be divided into two half choruses. I have already pointed out that this proof was based on an erroneous interpretation of the text of Pausanias. [75] According to the author, the sixteen women of Elis were responsible for the organization of two distinct choral performances. The first was dedicated to Hippodameia, the second to Physkoa. Weniger, then Nilsson, have shown that the chorus of Hippodameia could be associated with the cult of Hera, with Pisa as its site, in other words Olympia, and the chorus of Physkoa with the cult of Dionysus and the town of Elis. Thus these two choruses appear in different geographic and cult contexts, the former belonging to the Olympic festival of the Heraia, the latter to that of the Thyia. [76] I shall discuss the Dionysiac aspect of these observances later.

In the rich festival of the Heraia at Olympia, three elements are pertinent to my thesis: the connection to Hera of the sixteen women of Elis, about whom the word χορός is not used, but who form an association relevant to my analysis; the ritual function of the chorus of Hippodameia; and the girls' footrace organized by the sixteen Eleans, parallel to the choral performance and taking place during the same festival (the race was previously mentioned in connection with age groups). [77]

The connection of the sixteen women with Hera is justified by their status as married women, as Pausanias explicitly states. Their role was originally political: a legend tells that after the demise of Damophon, tyrant of Pisa, hostility between Pisa and Elis ended. To bring about peace, each of the sixteen districts of Elis delegated the oldest, most esteemed and most sensible woman (ἡλικίᾳ πρεσβυτάτη καὶ ἀξιώματι καὶ δόξῃ). These sixteen women formed a college which, after having settled the differences between Pisa and Elis, was given the duty of organizing the Heraia at Olympia. These women were also active in the {114|115} region was politically restructured into eight phylai, each phyle sent two women to the college, which was active right up to the time of Pausanias.

It is hardly likely that these women performed choral dances themselves. [78] However, it is possible that the choruses of Hippodameia and Physkoa were structured along the lines of the college, even if Pausanias never says that they were women's choruses. Another passage by Pausanias leaves open the possibility of a sacrifice and other ritual practices performed every year by women at the tomb of Hippodameia within the Altis. [79]

The cult of Hippodameia is in any case associated with the idea of a married woman. The feature 'matrimonial' is one of the elements of a second legend serving as aition for the existence of the Elean college. According to this myth, Hippodameia, to express her gratitude to Hera for permitting her marriage with Pelops, [80] brought together the sixteen women and with them inaugurated the festival of the Heraia. This aition is not at variance with the one about the political intervention of the Elean college; the second story describes the founding of the Heraia as an event following the establishment of peace in Elis. Since Hippodameia also belongs to the domain of marriage, she so resembles Hera that some scholars have tried to make them identical and see in one the hypostasis of the other. The chorus organized in honor of Hippodameia should therefore show a marked matrimonial character; it was perhaps made up of women rather than young girls.

It is surprising to find in the context of the Heraia a girls' footrace (ἅμιλλα δρόμου παρθένοις). This race, divided among three age classes, took place in the Olympic stadium. The competitors wore a short tunic leaving the knees and shoulders bare. The winners received a crown of olive leaves and the right to part of the cow sacrificed in honor of Hera. The latter practice shows that the race was under the jurisdiction of the goddess of marriage. And yet its aition connects it with adolescence since, again according to Pausanias, it was Chloris, the daughter of Amphion (Ἀμφίονος θυγάτηρ), one of the Niobids, who won the first prize at the race organized by the sixteen women of Elis. [81] Given the adolescent character of this race, one would expect Artemis to be present, since {115|116} she was indeed at Olympia; there she was mainly connected with the cult of the River Alpheios. [82]

Two solutions are available to the interpreter: to admit that adolescence in general, and not just its upper limit, is included in Hera's sphere of influence, which thus puts her in competition with Artemis, or to acknowledge that in places where a particular god exercises the greatest influence, certain aspects usually included in the sphere of action of other gods falls under the aegis of this divinity. In this way one would be brought to recognize a certain mobility of the signifier in relation to the signified, following a geographical parameter: depending on the location, identical elements of social life can be included in the spheres of action of different gods. The meaning of Hera's cult at Olympia, based on the single source of Pausanias, cannot be definitively decided from this point of view; however, the importance of Hera's temple at Olympia would tip the balance for the second solution. [83] In fact, the premarital character of the myth connected with Hippodameia, to be analyzed in the next chapter, as also the youth of the girls in the race organized by the sixteen women of Elis, marks this rite as typically adolescent. Its inclusion in the festival of the Heraia, while accentuating its character as preparation for marriage, must be attributed to the importance of Hera as the female divinity on the site of Olympia. This overlapping of Hera's influence with that of Artemis is nevertheless exceptional, since generally their two spheres are clearly defined.

The best example of a simultaneous but different involvement of Artemis and Hera is in the legend of the Proitides, of which only the choral ritual will be mentioned here. The account of this legend given by Bacchylides lies at the junction of the spheres of Artemis and Hera; it signifies perfectly the passing from the virginal state, protected by Artemis, to that of a married woman, protected by Hera, as also from the state of wildness which refers metaphorically in ancient Greece to adolescence, to the state of civilization for the girl referred to by marriage. [84] According to this version of the myth, the daughters of Proitos {116|117} (Προίτου θύγατρες) were still young girls (εὔπεπλοι κοῦραι, παρθενίᾳ ἔτι ψυχᾷ) when they penetrated the sanctuary of Hera and committed an act of hybris, boasting of their father's power. To punish them, Hera made them go mad and flee into the mountains. Artemis, invoked by Proitos, intervened, and the girls regained their sanity. In gratitude, the Proitides raised a temple and an altar to Artemis; they founded in her honor a sacrifice and choruses of women (καὶ χοροὺς ἵσταν γυναικῶν).

Still adolescent (κοῦραι), the Proitides seem to be under the protection of Artemis, and indeed only her intervention could save them. But as a fragment of Hesiod shows, Hera, provoked by their lasciviousness, sent a madness that took away the flower of their youth, as they had become young girls who had arrived at the end of their sexual development; [85] thus they are situated exactly at the juncture of the domains assigned to Artemis and Hera. That is why the institution of choruses in honor of Artemis signifies the end of their quarrel with Hera. In addition, according to most of the sources, the story of the madness of the daughters of Proitos ends in their marriage. Having expiated their crime towards Hera with the help of Artemis, the young adolescents are ready for marriage. The narrative schema we know, 'offending a divinity / calamity sent by the divinity / order reestablished by a regular ritual practice,' is present on two different levels, that of the intervention of Artemis and that of Hera's jurisdiction. It marks the passage from one state to another: from adolescence, the Proitides move on to the status of married women; from the jurisdiction of Artemis, they move to that of Hera. [86] The change is thus no longer to the beginning of the marginal period of tribal initiation, but to the terminus of the initiation period, namely the status of an adult. It is likely that the act of hybris committed by the Proitides represents a refusal to acknowledge Hera's domain, in other words, a refusal to marry; the act would therefore signify the moment of negation that precedes any change to a new state.

The temple of Artemis founded by the Proitides has not been identified for certain. According to Callimachus, Proitos dedicated two temples to Artemis in thanksgiving for his daughters' cure; one to Artemis Koria in the mountains of Azania near Cleitor, the other to Artemis Hemera at Lousoi. These sites are both Arcadian. [87] In spite of the uncertainties of the tradition that attributes to Athena {117|118} rather than to Artemis the Azanian cult of Koria, the semantic and morphological derivation of the epiclesis of the goddess celebrated at Cleitor is clear, and it is significant that in one version of the myth the cure of the young girls ends in a dedication of a temple to the goddess "of adolescents." The epiclesis Hemera on the other hand is more interesting in that the ancients had an explanation for it, namely, that Artemis had succeeded in "taming," or "civilizing" (διὰ τῆς Ἀ. ἡμερώθησαν) the daughters of Proitos. We may find an echo of this passage in the epiclesis that Bacchylides attributes to the Artemis who governs the city of Metapontum, where the addressee of his ode comes from: she is said to be at the same time Ἀγροτέρα (wild huntress) and Ἡμ]έ̣ρα (civilized). [88] This image of being tamed after a period of time spent in the wild countryside (Callimachus speaks of ἄγριος θυμός) appears in various accounts of the education of an adolescent girl in Greece and her attainment of adult status as a married woman, and it is illustrated by the taming of animals. I shall try to explain this concept of education as taming in the section on the educational {118|119} character of the Archaic chorus. For the moment, we will keep to the mythical and cultic aspects.

In contrast, it is almost certain that the sanctuary profaned by the daughters of Proitos, the king of Argos and Tiryns, was the great Heraion situated at some distance from Argos towards Mycenae. We have sparse information about the festival celebrated there. It is probably correct to suppose with Nilsson that various rites were held in this sanctuary. Numerous sources seem to agree that the principal festival celebrated in the Argive Heraion was a rite repeating the ἱερὸς γάμος of Zeus and Hera. However, none of the sources is explicit enough to affirm that interpretation categorically. [89]

We have but two brief indications of women's choruses participating at the Argive Heraia. One in the Electra of Euripides mentions the departure of the young Argive girls (παρθενικαί) for the temple of the goddess and the choral dances that they performed there for a sacrifice; this presumably corresponds to the celebration of the festival of the Heraia. The other, found in Pollux the lexicographer, cites an Argive ritual during which women bearing flowers (ταῖς ἀνθεφόροις) sang a sacred song to the accompaniment of a pipe. But this should probably be assigned to the cult of Hera Antheia rather than that of the Hera of the Heraion. [90]

To these brief indications can be added two more. The first is a late text by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in which he says that the festival of Hera at Falerii was enacted along the lines of the Argive festival: the upkeep of the temple was assured by the priestesses (γυναῖκες ἱεραί); a kanephoros, a girl who is still a virgin (ἁγνὴ γάμων παῖς), was responsible for the sacrifices, and the goddess was celebrated in local hymns by choruses of girls (χοροὶ παρθένων ὑμνουσῶν τὴν θεὸν ᾠδαῖς πατρίοις). [91] The second document is made up of various fragments of geometric vases found on the site of the Argive Heraion itself depicting women's choruses performing. The stylization of the drawing unfortunately {119|120} gives no help in deciding whether the figures are those of young girls or adult women. [92]

This information is clearly too vague to draw conclusions about the function of girls at the Argive Heraia. Even if the myth of the Proitides sharply divides the domains of Hera, the goddess of marriage, and that of Artemis, protector of adolescence, the Argive Hera probably played some role in adolescence. Perhaps the procession to the sanctuary and the choral dances performed by the young girls in Electra correspond to the final phase of tribal initiation, the presenting of the new initiates. At any rate, the sequence recalls the Spartan festival of the Hyakinthia, to be discussed later, which certainly had a ritual function of this type. [93] We are nevertheless forced to acknowledge that a divinity can include in its field of action semantic features belonging to a neighboring deity, in proportion to the importance it assumes at a given site. This is probably the case for the Argive Hera, in spite of the definitely adult role attributed to her in the myth of the Proitides. Her authority in Argos allows her to include in her name structural features of other female divinities; in the same way that Artemis reigns at Ephesos, Hera is the guardian of Argos, and her influence probably passed the strict limits of the domain of marriage and covered the whole of female adolescence. [94]

Note that the annual service of seven boys and seven girls (ἑπτὰ κούρους καὶ ἑπτὰ κούρας) on behalf of Hera Akraia at Corinth also encroaches on the normal field of influence of Artemis. [95] Not only was this ritual performed by {120|121} adolescents, its founding legend, as far as it can be reconstructed from different versions, follows the schema of the myths underlying the rites of courotrophy for Artemis. The model 'outrage of a god / calamity sent by the god / expiation/propitiation by a regular ritual' is easily discernible in the Corinthian legend of the children of Medea, which serves as aition for the rite of Hera Akraia; this myth has the following sequence of events: murder of the children (by the Corinthians or by Medea), plague in Corinth, annual rite by seven Corinthian boys and seven girls to appease the anger of Hera Akraia.

It is permissible to presume that the rite included choral singing, although no source mentions it. [96] As Brelich says, the close analogy between this ritual and the founding legend and enactment of the rite of Artemis at Brauron proves that the cult at Corinth contained a rite characteristic of adolescence, in spite of Hera's normally matrimonial interests. Given this structural homology, we can only accept the flexibility of the signifiers Hera and Artemis (on a geographic axis: Hera at Corinth, Artemis at Brauron) in relation to the fixed signified 'adolescence.' [97] In the Peloponnese, Hera occupies a privileged position without equivalent in the rest of Greece, except in her cult celebrated by the Samians. {121|122}

On the other hand, in Lesbos, the cult of Hera was related to the beauty contests of women (γυναῖκες) rather than adolescents. According to Athenaeus, contests of this sort were organized at Tenedos, Basilis on the Alpheus, and at Lesbos. Those at Basilis were dedicated to Eleusinian Demeter, those on Lesbos, to Hera, where they took place in her sanctuary. This last piece of information comes from a scholion explaining the passage of the Iliad where Agamemnon suggests to Nestor that he calm Achilles' anger by giving the hero a gift of seven women from Lesbos (Λεσβίδας) chosen from among those who had won the contests; among these seven women was Briseis. [98] Homer's passage shows how ancient the institution of beauty contests was on Lesbos. It is probable that Hera's sanctuary, where the contest took place, corresponds to the great sanctuary of Zeus, Hera, and Dionysus of which both Sappho and Alcaeus speak; this sanctuary was situated at Mesa or Messon north of Pyrrha at the back of the Gulf of Callona. [99] A fragment of Alcaeus associates the song of the women of Lesbos with the ritual of the Kallisteia. In this poem, without actually mentioning the name of Hera, Alcaeus expresses his desire to withdraw into the {122|123} sanctuary where "the Lesbian girls compete in beauty and where echoes of their ritual cries resound each year" (ἄχω θεσπεσία γυναίκων ἴρα[ς ὀ]λολύγας ἐνιαυσίας). [100] The ritual of the Kallisteia thus contained an important musical event. It is in this context that we should view the epigram in the Palatine Anthology previously mentioned, which describes the arrival at the temple of Hera of the young Lesbian women who formed a chorus there, led by Sappho. [101] The reason for this choral performance, if it is not purely fictive, may differ from the rite of the Kallisteia; the scene described in the epigram nevertheless accords perfectly with the information given by Sappho and Alcaeus themselves.

None of the sources, let it be noted, speaks of young girls; only the morphology of the terms used, Λεσβίαδες and Λεσβίδες, might suggest the participation of adolescents. However, Homer, who also uses the term Λεσβίδες, elsewhere calls the participants women (γυναῖκες). A deity of adult women such as Hera, or Demeter, is in her right place in this context. A more precise interpretation of the function of this ritual will be given later in my discussion of the Spartan cult of Helen. [102]

The religious life of Delos seems to have been dominated in antiquity by the celebration of the festival of the Delia in honor of Apollo. Plutarch and Pollux mention the celebration of another choral performance on the island, dedicated to Aphrodite. The complex ritual of the Aphrodisia at Delos is linked with the myth of the chorus of adolescents formed by Theseus on his return from Crete. I have already discussed this mythical chorus, the aition for the Aphrodisia, in connection with the figure of the choregos. [103] Here I confine myself to the cult aspects.

The legend says that, on arriving at Delos following his victory over the Minotaur, Theseus formed the chorus mentioned above and consecrated to Apollo the statue of Aphrodite given him by Ariadne in Crete. It is this ancient xoanon of the goddess that the Delians crowned with wreaths, performing on this occasion the Crane Dance in a ritual act repeating that of Theseus. The rite took place in summer, in the month of Hekatombaion, and it is described not only in literary texts but also in inscriptions. [104]

Before asking what Aphrodite's function was in this festival, it must be stated that the choral performance, probably by a mixed chorus of boys and girls, has some connection with the cult of Ariadne, and this connection is not unimportant. In the Iliad, as we have seen, Hephaistos depicts on Achilles' shield a mixed chorus of adolescents similar to the one fashioned by Daedalus at Knossos—in white marble, adds Pausanias—for Ariadne. As I indicated, the scholia of this passage show that the chorus was a representation of the one Theseus was supposed to have formed in Crete on leaving the Labyrinth, and which inspired Hephaistos in his work. [105] From there to an affirmation that the only difference between the chorus formed by Theseus in Crete and the one danced at Delos is geographic, and that there exists between Ariadne and Aphrodite only a difference of name, is a small step —and one that tradition invites us to make. Ariadne was indeed associated with the cult of Aphrodite in sites as far apart as Cyprus and Argos, and Theseus himself was said to be the founder of the cult of Ariadne-Aphrodite in Cyprus. [106]

It is curious to find Aphrodite, the goddess of sensuality and beauty, associated with a clearly adolescent festival in an island dedicated to Apollo. In fact, Aphrodite's field of action covers, in the East whence she is supposed to have come as well as in Greece, one aspect of adolescent, particularly adult, female-ness not yet mentioned, namely sexual pleasure; she is defined as the goddess of human and animal sexuality and of vegetal fecundity. [107] This domain complements those belonging to Artemis and Hera: if Artemis protects the growth of children and adolescents, and if Hera blesses legal marriage and birth, Aphrodite arouses desire and love incarnated in the power of Eros; by seduction and sexual pleasure she encourages the reproduction of mankind. Consequently, she represents the force that perpetuates the cycle 'birth —adolescence—marriage—birth' shared by Hera and Artemis. Protector of what we would call "sexuality," she covers all forms taken on by the sexual drive: sensuality, seduction, physical attraction, and so on. Given her influence over adolescents and young married couples, it is not surprising that Aphrodite sometimes assumes characteristics of Artemis and Hera to the point of being confused in some places with one or the other of them. Thus in Sparta there was a xoanon of Aphrodite-Hera and on Keos Ktesylla was honored either under the name of Aphrodite or Hekaerge. [108]

These characteristics of Aphrodite, as well as the Aphrodisian connotations of the figure of Ariadne in Crete and the different versions of the myth of the love of Ariadne for Theseus and Dionysus, show that the Aphrodisia at Delos consecrated a period of courotrophy different from that of the Delia dedicated to Apollo. But in order to understand the precise function of this festival, we must make a detour by way of Athens. Here, the same myth of the victorious exit from the Cretan Labyrinth was the aition for the festival of the Oschophoria. Like the Delian ritual, the Athenian was performed by adolescents who represented the girls and boys brought back safe and sound from Crete by Theseus. Dedicated to Ariadne and to Dionysus in the legend, and to Athena Skiras and Dionysus in the rite, this was preceded by the ritual of the Pyanopsia which was held in honor of Apollo. [109]

Many are the interpreters who thought that they were able to recognize in the unfolding of the legend of the journey of Theseus and his companions from Athens to Crete and then back via the Labyrinth from Crete to Delos and Athens the tripartite scheme of an initiatory ritual. According to them, Theseus' victory over the Minotaur could be interpreted as a resurrection after the initiation death represented for his young Athenian companions by their wanderings in the Labyrinth. This mythical journey would be repeated in ritual by the rite of 6 Mounichion, dedicated to Apollo and commemorating the departure of Theseus for Crete at the beginning of the summer (rite of separation), and by the festivals of the Pyanopsia and of the Oschophoria which celebrated his return at the beginning of autumn (rite of aggregation). It is significant that a symbolic branch was carried at the first as well as at the second festival. [110] But above all, these rituals, according to Plutarch's explanation, repeat the vow addressed to Apollo by Theseus on his departure for Crete, probably on the occasion of the dedication at 6 Mounichion of the supplication branch taken from the sacred {126|127} olive-tree, and granted by the god on his return to Athens. Carried on the occasion of the Pyanopsia, the eiresione, an olive branch decorated with figs, cakes, and receptacles of honey, olive oil, and wine, recalls the first branch of supplication. The Pyanopsia then would represent the ritual act of thanksgiving to Apollo after the death act symbolized by the experience in the Labyrinth and after the act of propitiation preceding it on 6 Mounichion. And, still according to the aetiological description of Plutarch, the performance of the Oschophoria, one day later, was explained as the repetition of the sorrow felt at the announcement of Aigeus' death at the return of the hero from Crete, and the race of Theseus' companions from the harbor of Phaleron towards the city.

The supplication of the adolescents in the Theban Daphnephoria or in the rites of Sicyon seem to represent only the first phase of tribal initiation, but, if we want to follow this interpretive line, the complex Athenian ritual would cover its three principal stages. The departure of Theseus for Crete would be the mythical model for the start of the initiation process (6 Mounichion), his fight with the Minotaur, for the marginal period of trial, and the return of the hero to Athens, for the end of the initiation (7 Pyanopsion). Under these conditions, and since it was dedicated to Athena and Dionysus rather than to Apollo, the Oschophoria that immediately followed the Pyanopsia would have to represent the integration of the new initiates into the adult world, or at any rate the affirmation of the ability of the neo-initiates to become adults. In a recent study devoted to the young Theseus, I tried to show that the initiatory significance attributed to the Athenian ritual complex can be only a reinterpretation of previous disparate rituals. It may have been the same at Delos with the Aphrodisia which, dedicated to a divinity of adult sexuality as were the Oschophoria, celebrated ritually one of the stages in the return of Theseus to Athens. This ritual acceptance of the adolescents into the adult world can be read on the level of myth in the love between Theseus and Ariadne, a love that failed, ending in Ariadne's marriage to Dionysus, the god of adult femininity. The mythical complex surrounding Ariadne, honored under the guise of Aphrodite at Delos, marks the function of the choral ritual of the Crane Dance as preparation for adulthood. On the other hand, in the same way as the Crane Dance mirrored the original dance by the mixed chorus of Theseus, the Athenian rite of the Oschophoria contained a procession repeating, according to Plutarch, the procession of adolescents led by the hero on his return from Crete. This was probably carried out by seven girls and seven boys, or rather five maidens and nine ephebes, two of whom were dressed as girls. [111] And to this procession were certainly added choral dances; in fact, in the Alexandrian classification of {127|128} Archaic lyric production given by Proclus, the oschophorika are listed with the daphnephorika and the tripodephorika as one of the sub-genres of the partheneia. [112] Proclus thus confirms the presence of girls at the Oschophoria and consequently its connection with the Aphrodisia at Delos. In addition, it is probably the fact of the mixed chorus at the Oschophoria that moved the Alexandrian editors to class the songs sung by this chorus among the partheneia.

Probably therefore the function of the Crane Dance in the Aphrodisia was to consecrate the passage of adolescents—those perhaps initiated at the Delia dedicated to Apollo—to adult status. The Ariadne-Aphrodite venerated on this occasion seems to have been the incarnation of the young girl who, after initiation, gives way to her sexual instinct and to adult love; she is not any more the representative of a παρθένος, but of a νύμφη. [113] That is why it was to Apollo and not to another god that Theseus dedicated the statue of Aphrodite that he brought back from the Labyrinth; he was the god of adolescence who had protected the whole initiation enterprise in Crete. The original consecration to Apollo did not, however, prevent Aphrodite from receiving the honors of the Crane Dance. [114] This contact between Apollo and Aphrodite in a unique ritual is explained by the adolescent's transition to adulthood symbolized by this rite. At Athens, this transition is marked by two distinct rites —the Pyanopsia dedicated to Apollo and the Oschophoria dedicated to Ariadne and Dionysus. At Delos, they are combined into one festival, the Aphrodisia, which includes both aspects of the cult.

A fifth deity, Athena, is celebrated by female choruses. It is in her honor that the Argive girls in a troop (ἴλα, line 33) perform the bathing of Pallas described by Callimachus in his hymn to the goddess. [115] The young girls, called παῖδες {128|129} (line 57), κῶραι (lines 27 and 138), Πελασγιάδες (line 4), Ἀχαιϊάδες (line 13) and (παρθενικαί) παῖδες Ἀρεστοριδᾶν (line 34), embody all the semantic features characteristic of those in a chorus of virgins: 'adolescence,' 'collectivity,' 'family association,' 'geographical belonging.' They also have a qualification associated with the ritual they perform: bathers of Pallas (λωτροχόοι τᾶς Παλλάδος, lines 1 and 134). In the mimetic manner characteristic of many Hellenistic poems, the hymn composed by Callimachus is the hymn of invocation that the girls of Argos were reputed to sing during the ritual. Before invoking the appearance of the goddess, they invite their companions to attend the rite. The invocation to the goddess serves as introduction to a long description of the mythical scene underlying the ritual. The first bathing of Athena, of the goddess herself, not of her image, takes place in a virginal context, as in the ritual. The goddess, and her favorite companion, Chariklo, the choregos of the chorus of Nymphs (χοροστασίαι, line 66; ἁγεῖτο, line 67), servants of the goddess, bathe, nude, near the spring Hippocrene. [116] How the story continues is well known: Teiresias, then adolescent (γένεια περκάζων, line 75f.), surprises the two naked females; Athena punishes him by striking him with blindness; Chariklo, his mother, prays to the goddess, who compensates him for his blindness with the power of divination.

The purification of the statue of Athena, presented by Callimachus both as myth and as literary account, appears again in the Athenian ritual of the Flynteria. The sources for this festival give weight to the account of Callimachus, the only source for the Argive ritual: they guarantee his authenticity, and clear him of all suspicion of Hellenistic invention. Deubner offers an exhaustive description of the Athenian Plynteria. [117] I shall isolate only those features that relate it to the Argive ritual. During the month of Thargelion, the ancient xoanon of Athena Polias was carried in a procession of ephebes to the port of Phaleron, where it was bathed in seawater. The bathing itself was done by two girls (κόραι) called λουτρίδες or πλυντρίδες, the bathers or washers. {129|130}

Like the Athena Polias of Athens, the Athena of Argos has a pronounced civic character. The girls who invoke her in the hymn by Callimachus call her mistress of the city (τὰν Παλλάδα τὰν πολιοῦχον, line 53); at the end of the song they beg her to watch over Argos (κάδευ δ’ Ἄργεος, line 140). This feature corresponds to the cult of which she was the object in Argos: there, among other sanctuaries, she had a temple on the Argive acropolis, and there she was honored under the name of Ἀκρία, Athena of the citadel. This position on an acropolis indicates the citizenship aspect of the goddess. [118]

The relationship of this polis divinity to adolescence, and more particularly to female adolescence, raises the problem once again of the limits of her field of action compared with those of neighboring divinities. In Argos there seems to have been an overlapping of the influence of Athena and of Hera, as I have defined it; in Athens, there is a similar overlap, but with the preponderant influence of Artemis.

Let us consider the case of Athens. First the resemblances: Athena like Artemis is a virgin; Callimachus tells us that she too is associated with the Nymphs. From the dominant role of the cult of Athena in Attica and in Athens as the goddess of citizenship in particular for adolescents, [119] one could deduce that the goddess reigned over the domain of adolescence normally given to Artemis in this region —and this all the more easily as Athena appears as a young girl. We would seem to have here a displacement of the signifier, as was presumed to explain certain interventions of Hera at Argos or at Corinth. This however is not the case, since we have seen the importance given to the ritual of Artemis at Brauron in the education of Athenian girls. Attested in Aristophanes among others, those rites show the part played by Artemis in the domain of Athenian female adolescence.

However, the ritual of the Plynteria is not an isolated case. Other festivals dedicated to Athena included young girls as participants, and more precisely in choruses. Athenian girls were naturally involved in the great festival of the Panathenaia. They took part firstly in the pannychis that preceded the great procession: according to Euripides, the girls accompanied the songs of the young {130|131} men (νέων ἀοιδαί) with ὀλολύγματα and dances. The context of this account indicates a choral performance (χορῶν τε μολπαί). [120]

There is another complex of rituals in connection with Athena and the Panathenaia, which denotes more specifically female adolescence. These were performed by the arrhephoroi, four in number. Chosen from the best families of Athens, two of them were responsible for weaving the peplos offered to Athena at the Panathenaia; the two others performed the nocturnal rite of the Arrhephoria. During this rite, the girls went down through a subterranean room to a sanctuary belonging to Aphrodite called in the gardens, a sanctuary that archaeologists have succeeded in identifying on the north slope of the Acropolis. This room led to a spring to which they brought objects in a reed basket — objects they were not allowed to see. They brought back others that one source identifies as cakes in the shape of snakes and phalloi.

In a recent study, Burkert has shown that the myth of the Cecropids could be related to the rite of the Arrhephoria for which it gives the aition, [121] The myth says that these three young virgins, daughters of the first king of Attica, were given charge of a reed chest that they were forbidden to open. One night, however, they disobeyed; seeing in the box the baby Erichthonios and a snake, they were seized by such fright that they threw themselves from the top of the Acropolis. I shall not insist on the obvious parallel between this and the rite performed by the arrhephoroi. What is important is to be aware that these three girls (κόραι) danced in chorus on the slopes of the Acropolis to the sound of Pan's pipes, as described by the chorus in Euripides' Ion. And we know, in addition, that the arrhephoroi had a place specially reserved for ball games (σφαιρίστρα). [122] I previously pointed out how the game of ball, which Nausicaa plays with her companions in the Odyssey, is very similar to choral performance. In Homer's story, the troupe of companions of Nausicaa is compared to the chorus of Nymphs led by Artemis. [123] It is thus almost certain that the rite of the Arrhephoria contained a choral dance during which the girls perhaps sang the myth of the Cecropids.

Burkert has given an insightful interpretation of this ritual, seeing in it a rite of passage, specifically a rite of initiation permitting the young Athenian girl to {131|132} enter the world of adult womanhood. The different characteristics of the ritual of the Arrhephoria and of its aition make it without doubt a rite of adolescence. The signified of this rite is an initiation into sexuality with the connotations of vegetal and animal fecundity implied by it. However, it is difficult to go along with Burkert when he interprets the Arrhephoria as a ritual signifying the accession of the adolescent to adult woman. The age of the arrhephoroi falls, according to Aristophanes, somewhere between six and eleven years, and their service was the first of four steps Athenian girls had to accomplish before arriving at marriage. [124] In spite of Burkert's evidence for the extremely low age of nubile girls among the Romans, it would not do to reverse the chronological order of the initiation stages indicated by Aristophanes. I would be inclined to think of the Arrhephoria as a rite of entry into adolescence rather than a rite of exit; it would represent a first ritual contact with sexuality and with its power of generation. Entry into adolescence is also a rite of passage, and the mythical death of the Cecropids as well as the ritual disappearance underground of the arrhephoroi are justified in this case as symbolic realizations of the status of neutrality and temporary annihilation that accompanies any transition from one state to another. Burkert has himself shown that the start of the Arrhephoria signifies for the girls a break with the family. The arrhephoroi do not leave their childhood under the control of the family to embrace immediately that of the married woman. That would be to forget the whole period of adolescence with its intermediary status, the institutions of which I shall define more exactly.

But at this entrance into adolescence, why Athena rather than Artemis? Again we find the answer in the Ion of Euripides. In this tragedy, the chorus of attendants of Creusa at the beginning of the stasimon in which there is an allusion to the myth of the Cecropids, invokes both Athena and Artemis, the two virgin sisters of Apollo (δύο παρθένοι). [125] The chorus of women asks the virgin goddesses to grant Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus and the mother of Ion, much progeny in order to assure the line of the kings of Athens. In contrast to this intercession, the same stasimon has the story of the exposure of Ion, whom Creusa conceived in a virginal union with Apollo. This birth was the cause of her later infertility. Ion had been placed in a basket identical to the one that held Erichthonios. This event links his story with the myth of the Cecropids. Erichthonios was born from the seed of Hephaistos that Earth received after the god had tried unsuccessfully to rape the virgin Athena. [126] {132|133}

The myth of the Cecropids has therefore to do with illegitimate unions with young girls who, even after the consummation of these unions, remained virgins. Moreover, for the daughters of Cecrops, the revelation of sexuality has a fatal outcome. The features of fecundity that some interpreters have tried to find in this myth and in the rite based on it have a negative value. Such a negative qualification could confirm the interpretation of the Arrhephoria as a ritual consecrating the moment of segregation, then the marginality of the initiation process during which the girl is not yet ready for marriage; either by rape, or through the ill-omened vision of phallic images, she experiences the assaults of a sexuality she is not yet completely ready to assume.

But the important point is that the chorus intercedes jointly with Artemis and Athena for the posterity of the kings of Athens. The two deities were probably both present during the rite of the Arrhephoria, the first as the goddess of female adolescence, the second because the ritual marks the entry of a girl into the period leading to adulthood; Athena would therefore intervene in her political role as guardian of the city. Moreover the double tradition of the service of the kanephoroi who were dedicated, according to the different versions, either to Artemis or to Athena, could be explained structurally by the fact that it represents the final stage in the initiation of Athenian girls. Located at the limit between adolescence and marriage, it would be a field of influence shared by Artemis and Athena. [127] Athena intervenes in the domain of adolescence in a period of apprenticeship for the life of a woman. But adolescence, marriage, and maternity are interesting for her only because Athenian girls are potential mothers of future citizens. In relationship with the different myths that make the Athenians real autochthons, born from the soil of Attica, Athena's domain of influence covers the whole of the cycle of human reproduction. She acts differently than Artemis or Hera, according to her nature as guardian of the polis. [128]

But in Argos? The presence of the virgin Athena beside the wife Hera is less easily explained than in Athens. The two have a marked civic character in Argos, as I have said. Recourse to a historical explanation showing the substitution at a certain time of Hera for Athena as protector of the city is not valid. The myth of the Trojan origins of the Argive statue of Pallas and the connection of the goddess with the cult and legend of Perseus prove how ancient Athena's presence at Argos was. [129] We can do no more than acknowledge the concurrence of the two goddesses in Argos. Perhaps in Athena's rites the accent was more on the quality of girls as future citizens, and in Hera's on the adolescent preparing for life as future wife and mother. The hints that have come down to us about the Argive cult of one or the other are too tenuous to decide. It remains a fact that Hera was the major divinity in the religious life of the Argives.

It is not necessary to insist on the complexity of the figure of Dionysus. The Bacchae of Euripides shows the extent and also the ambiguity of the semantics of this deity. His field of influence covers the whole of the female experience, but turns on two opposing concepts—that of σωφροσύνη, temperance, wisdom, and that of μανία, frenzy, unreason. [130] Given that it is usually assumed that the bacchanalian orgy represents the reversal of civic order, it seems paradoxical to consider the dances of the Maenads as established women's choruses. {134|135} Nevertheless, it has been recently shown that the ritual aspect of community plays an essential role in the groups of Maenads, and rituals such as the Agrio(/a)nia celebrated at Thebes and Orchomenos as well as at Argos show that we are concerned with true rites that have a founding legend. The reversal of the civic order was an integral part of this very order itself. The founding myth for the Agrionia of Orchomenos is the myth of the Minyades; for the Argive rite, one of the versions of the myth of the Proitides, and for the Theban festival, the legend of Pentheus. [131] The Minyades, like the Proitides in the second version of the myth given by Apollodorus, are seized by madness because they refuse the mysteries of Dionysus. Overcome by bacchic frenzy, the daughters of Minyas tear to pieces one of their children in the same way that Agave and her companions tore apart Pentheus in the Theban legend. And the Argive myth also recounts how the women of Argos followed the Proitides, who were still adolescent, in their mad flight and tore apart their own children.

The mythical chorus of the Maenads, the followers of Dionysus, has its replica in the different locations in which the god was celebrated. In the Theban legend, there were three choruses of women seized by bacchic frenzy, each led by one of the three daughters of Cadmos. It is probable that the three Proitides and the three Minyades were also the choregoi for the women who followed them in their wild course through the mountains. [132] The young girls are certainly not excluded from the Dionysiac mysteries, but the bacchic choruses were usually made up of married women: one of the effects of the Dionysiac frenzy was to abolish the differences in the social statuses, and then the delimitation between adolescent girl and married woman. The sparagmos of children by their own mothers was an essential part of the mythical ritual dedicated to Dionysus. It {135|136} represents the negation of the status of the married woman, wife and mother. But this moment of negation or rather regression to the state of an animal, as we have seen, was in turn part of what it denied: the status of married woman also included a period of return to an uncivilized state; it is fundamentally ambivalent. That is why the refusal of the adolescent Proitides and the refusal of the married Minyades to participate in the Dionysiac rites was a rejection of the condition that would be theirs in the future—or already was. The fact that Dionysus intervenes mainly in the domain of the married woman explains how the myth of the Proitides could move between the spheres of Dionysus and of Hera. [133]

These Dionysiac choruses of the myth are nevertheless at the borders of our field of investigation; overcome by bacchic frenzy, they are far from the model of the organized lyric chorus and they are outside the semantic field analyzed here. The ritual Dionysiac chorus shows up in the domain of the dithyramb, and I have explained above my reasons for excluding it from my inquiry. Without wanting to address the diachronic problem of the connection between the lyric chorus and the dithyramb, let me emphasize that the mythical model of the dithyrambic chorus may be made up of young girls, although that is never the case in real life. For example, an epigram attributed to Simonides mentioned above concerns the Seasons, in this case called Dionysiades, we see them combine their songs (ἀνωλόλυξαν) with those of the dithyrambic choruses of the tribe of the Acamantids. [134]

Another ritual chorus of women or girls formed to honor Dionysus is the one instituted by the college of sixteen women of Elis, parallel with the one dedicated to Hera and discussed above. This chorus bore the name of Physkoa, the lover of Dionysus at Elis and the founder of the cult of that god in this part of the Peloponnese. Most likely this chorus performed in the Thyia, the great Dionysiac festival celebrated at Elis. Given this probability, Weniger compares the service performed by the sixteen Eleans to the service of the college of Thyads at Delphi: the analogy is quite striking and is surely not the result of chance. The very name Thyad was a synonym for Maenad or Bacchant from antiquity. [135] The rite of the Elean Thyia offers the image of an established Dionysiac women's chorus, showing no signs of the mad excesses of the Bacchants that myth recounts. It is still possible that the chorus of Physkoa carried attributes belonging to the Maenads. At any rate, Plutarch tells us that the women of the Eleans, possibly the sixteen women of the college themselves, {136|137} sang a song (ὕμνος) in honor of Dionysus, the text of which he gives us. It is a short invocation to the god to appear in his temple and to leap as a bull (θύων, a verb that recalls the denomination of the Thyads); the song begins and ends with the cry of invocation ἄξιε ταῦρε, noble bull. [136]

Dionysus intervenes above all in the field reserved for wives and mothers: he is associated with Athena Skiras in the festival of the Athenian Oschophoria; he is celebrated for the same reason as Hera was by the college of sixteen Eleans; and he is a possible substitute for Hera in the myth of the Proitides. He represents the reversal of the legal matrimonial order, where the reversal is legalized and an integral part of the order itself. Thus at Patras on the banks of the River Meilichos, the children of the region offer up to Artemis the wreaths they wear and then proceed to the temple of Dionysus Aisymnetes, crowned with new garlands. The myth underlying this rite says that the παρθένος priestess of Artemis at Patras made love with her fiance in the temple of the goddess, transforming the sanctuary into a bridal chamber. Artemis sent famine and disease to the population, which was released by means of the human sacrifice of two young people. With its schema 'sacrilege of the deity / sending of a plague / expiation by a rite symbolizing the death of the adolescents,' it shows that the return to the temple of Dionysus of the children who have been purified in the river stands for their integration into the adult world. Leaving their old crowns for Artemis, they renounce the adolescence she embodies to take on the adult status represented by Dionysus, a Dionysus Meilichios, a Dionysus the Sweet, yielding, integrated into the city as its ruler (αἰσυμνήτης). [137]

Integrated in the female cult system, Dionysus is invoked at the same time as Apollo, Artemis, and Hera by the chorus of the women at the Thesmophoria of {137|138} Aristophanes. And this evocation, significantly enough, takes place at the moment the chorus expresses its wish to begin dancing and singing. [138]

Like Dionysus, Demeter is a deity who stands for the whole of the female experience, with the accent on adult femininity understood as a state of achieved civilization. Goddess-mother, goddess of the culture, Demeter protects the sexual life of the woman, as long as this life is ordered within the framework of marriage and the family. In the same way as she favors the cultivation of a fertile soil as opposed to wild nature, Demeter is the guarantee of fecundity for the woman whose sexuality obeys the civic norms. Her influence does not extend to marriage itself, but to what the Greeks thought of as its principal goal: the legal procreation of future citizens. [139] The order represented by Demeter as mother is exactly the one overturned by the cult of Dionysus. Demeter is close to Hera and even if the beauty contests on Lesbos took place in the sanctuary of Hera, at Basilis on the Alpheios, they were dedicated to Eleusinian Demeter. [140]

There is no mention of a choral performance in the Skira or the Thesmophoria, which were the principal festivals at Athens dedicated to Demeter. However, it is to be noted that the chorus of the Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes was made up of noble women (εὐγενεῖς γυναῖκες), and the koryphaios of the Frogs speaks of girls and women (κόραις καὶ γυναιξίν) who have celebrated a night festival in honor of the goddess (παννυχίζουσιν θεᾷ). [141] As these two comedies show, dance was certainly not excluded from rites for Demeter, but it was for married women with the status of citizens. Dancing and singing are at any rate confirmed in Eleusis; there was a well there, already called in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter καλλίχορος, for the beautiful choruses. Pausanias explains the term saying that the women (γυναῖκες) of the {138|139} Eleusinians danced and sang there for the goddess (χορὸν ἔστησαν καὶ ᾖσαν εἰς τὴν θεόν). [142]

Elsewhere, the scholia to another passage by Aristophanes show the Athenian women shouting insults to each other from wagons carrying them to Eleusis to celebrate the mysteries of Demeter. Probably this custom could be a basis for interpreting the institution of women's choruses at Aegina mentioned by Herodotus. Instituted to honor Damia and Auxesia, whose statues had been stolen from Epidaurus, these choruses, led by male choregoi, mocked each other (χοροῖσι γυναικηίοισι κερτόμοισι). [143] From many points of view, Damia and Auxesia are close to Demeter and Kore, and were substituted for them in towns such as Troizen. [144]

Near to the figure of Demeter, the Great Mother had a sanctuary that was supposed to be next to the house of Pindar in Thebes. The person who sang the Third Pythian, who may be the poet himself, promises that for Hieron he will invoke the help of the Mother, the goddess that young girls (κοῦραι) celebrated (μέλπονται) along with Pan in nocturnal festivals (ἐννύχιαι) near his house. Following the critical tradition of reconstructing the biography of the Archaic poets on apparent information given in their work, the scholiast commenting on these lines suggests that Rhea, identified traditionally with the Great Mother, had a temple near the poet's house; in a second version, the scholiast explains in the same fictional vein that Pindar himself had built a sanctuary for the Mother of the gods and Pan. [145] The goddess is invoked here because she has the power to {139|140} give and withdraw illness and, in particular, to cure madness (μανία). In this she resembles Artemis, who sends famine and epidemics to her servants in Ephesos, while curing the Proitides of their madness. This overlapping of the influence of Artemis and the Theban Mother perhaps explains the presence of girls in the cult of a goddess who is principally the protector of adult women, being the one who gives birth to all life. Again according to the scholia of the third Pythian, the daughters of Pindar (Πινδάρου θυγατέρες), Protomache and Eumetis, were supposed to be among the adolescents participating in the ritual. [146]

It is particularly interesting to note that these same scholia add that Pan is celebrated as Rhea's paredros in one of the Separate Partheneia of Pindar, of which they cite a passage. Another fragment, from the same book of poems, describes Pan as the most accomplished of the chorus-members among the gods (χορευτὴν τελεώτατον θεῶν). [147] There is therefore a close correspondence between the account in the Third Pythian of the participation of a chorus of young girls in a ritual celebrated in honor of the Theban Mother, and the fact that the poems written for Pan were classified by the Alexandrians in the book of the Separate Partheneia. It is therefore likely that some of these poems were composed by Pindar for the girls celebrating the Great Mother.

The above example of the relation of a rite performed by a girls' chorus to the Alexandrian category of the partheneion leads to the conclusion of this first half of the chapter devoted to the cult context. Just as in the case of the Theban Daphnephoria, the compositions classified by the Alexandrians within the partheneia and associated poems were used in a great variety of cults. Their only common characteristic was that they were performed by a chorus of young girls.

In spite of the enormous variety of choral performances by women, the characteristics of the deities for whom they performed help us to make distinctions and to classify, to a degree, those "partheneia," based on the circumstance of their performance. The first were dedicated to Artemis and Apollo; they were generally performed by young adolescents during rituals marking the stages of what I have described as a process of tribal initiation: the {140|141} adolescents sang a propitiatory song during the rite marking the beginning of the initiation, and at the closing ceremony they sang a song of thanksgiving for the successful completion of the process. But the closing ceremony of initiation was generally followed for the initiates by a ritual of integration into their new condition as adults. It is no longer Artemis or Apollo watching over the event, but Aphrodite, the goddess of love who inspires the grown girl, or Hera, the goddess of legal marriages who marks the exact moment for adolescents of their arrival at adult status; these two goddesses are also celebrated by choruses of girls, but grown, almost adult girls. Between these two poles, Athena plays an intermediate role, overseeing the civic aspect of the transition to adulthood. And finally, Dionysus and Demeter, the gods who protect above all the period after marriage, are celebrated by choruses of women rather than of girls.

This division among various gods of the moments marking the life of a woman from pre-puberty to wifehood differs according to the city under discussion. I shall now examine what this division looks like in Sparta.

The gloomy colors in which our scholarly manuals and, at times, the political regimes that find it useful, paint the traditional image of Spartan life contrast vividly with the richness of the evidence that has come down to us of the musical and artistic activity of the Lacedaemonians. [148] This activity was not always as important in the life of the city, it is true. For the time being, I shall limit myself to Athenaeus, who said that, among the Greeks, the Spartans were the strongest in maintaining their musical traditions; the author of the Deipnosophists takes as proof a line of Pratinas who describes the Spartan as a cicada always ready to join the chorus. [149] Athenaeus continues by explaining that the musical activity of the Lacedaemonians compensated for their restraint and the austerity of their customs: with this explanation, Athenaeus introduces his reader to the conventional imagery of Spartan order. For an opinion on the compatibility of music and war, I shall refer the reader to the next chapter and to my analysis of the social function of the chorus and the role played by singing and dancing in ancient Sparta. {141|142}

As in the rest of Greece, musical and choral activity in Sparta was as much the responsibility of women as of men. As regards the women's, it was mainly young girls who sang in choruses generally dedicated to Artemis. Beyond the privileged relationship between Artemis and adolescence, which I have attempted to show, the goddess held a special position in Sparta, equally as important as Hera's position in Argos or Athena's in Athens.

The reader who follows in the steps of Pausanias through Laconia will note that the cult of Artemis existed in the most varied sites on Spartan territory. At the time under discussion, Artemis was revered in all corners of Laconia, in Karyai in the north, on the frontier with Arcadia near Las in the south, towards Cape Tainaron, at Limnai in the west, on the Messenian frontier, at Epidauros Limera in the southeast, on the banks of the Aegean Sea across from the island of Santorini. [150] The goddess was celebrated under many different epicleseis with a wide variety of functions. Using the methodology described above, I shall limit the analysis to cults in which the service of a female chorus is expressly mentioned. Hence the partial character of my study, which of course does not deny that choruses of young girls sang to Artemis Soteira in Boiai, Artemis Dereatis on the Taygetos or Artemis Dictynna in Sparta. [151] Before examining the cults of Artemis directly associated with the city of Sparta, which will be examined in a wider cultic and ritual framework than merely the cult offered to the virgin goddess, I shall discuss two cults of Artemis located within the confines of Spartan territory—one at Limnai, the other at Karyai.

There were two places by the name of Limnai on Spartan territory. The one on the Spartan plain was one of the four or five obai that made up the city of Sparta. The other was on the Messenian side of the Taygetos, in a small valley stretching from the mountain to the Gulf of Messenia, south of the present Kalamata. Leading down from the Langada pass, this valley follows the course of the Sandava, ancient Choireios. Parallel to the valley of the Nedon, which the modern road from Laconia to Messenia follows, it represented the southern frontier of the territory of Messenia. [152] The Messenian Limnai had a large {142|143} sanctuary where Artemis was honored under the name Limnatis, [153] The Spartan Limnai should perhaps be related to another sanctuary of Artemis, called Limnaion by Strabo. I shall address later the connections that can be made between the Spartan cult of Artemis, particularly Artemis Orthia, and the cult on the other side of the Taygetos.

The name Limnai itself defines the Artemis venerated on this site as a goddess of the wild water, water gushing from a spring or flowing in a river. This aquatic aspect is a semantic feature as characteristic of Artemis as of her followers, the Nymphs, and it can be found in the whole of Greece where Artemis was often given the name of the watercourse beside which her sanctuary was constructed, conforming to the reputation of the goddess for frequenting damp, wild places. The epiclesis Limnatis was given to Artemis at different points in the Peloponnese such as Sicyon, Patras and Tegea. [154] Add to this her connections with mountains and untamed nature that distinguished her in Limnai. The sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis probably lay at the bottom of a gorge where the valley curves towards the southwest, near the modern village of Pigadhia, for access to the sea. The cult was therefore practiced in a wild setting, closely relating to the character of the divinity inhabiting the region. [155]

In his account of the causes of the first Messenian war, it is in this sanctuary that Pausanias places the rape by the Messenians of the young Lacedaemonian girls (παρθένους) who were celebrating Artemis. Pausanias gives two versions of the event, one Laconian, the other Messenian. [156] According to the first, the Laconian girls present at the ritual for Artemis Limnatis were raped by the Messenians, who also killed the king of Sparta, Teleklos, when he tried to intervene. This version adds that, after having been raped, the young girls committed suicide for shame. The Messenians report that Teleklos had plotted to overthrow the aristocracy controlling Messene and rule the country. Profiting by the gathering of Messenian lords at the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis, the {143|144} Spartan king chose young beardless Spartan youths (ἀγένειοι νεανίσκοι) whom he armed and disguised as girls (ὡς παρθένους). Sent to the temple of Artemis, they went in to where the Messenians were sleeping to assassinate them, but they were discovered by their adversaries who killed them, along with Teleklos who accompanied them. The Lacedaemonian version is repeated by Strabo, who gives it as the cause of the first Messenian war. [157] Since this war began between 743 and 736, according to modern historians, the Lacedaemonian version offers a relative measure of how far back the presence of young Spartan girls in the sanctuary of Limnai goes, and of the antiquity of the rite performed there for Artemis. [158] Incorporating in their plot the rape and suicide of young girls or an act of transvestism of males, these two semi-historical stories look like two different aitia of the cult celebrated for Artemis Limnatis.

Actually, in the different passages in which he mentions the rite that the Spartan girls were performing when they were raped, Strabo gives us a description of the cult. He speaks of sacrifice (θυσία) and, more generally, of religious service (ἱερουργία); he adds that the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis was the location of a great festival and of a joint sacrifice offered by Messenians and Lacedaemonians together (κοινὴν συνετέλουν πανήγυριν καὶ θυσίαν). Pausanias uses the more general term for festival (ἑορτή) to describe the ritual. Neither of them mentions a choral performance. However, two facts allow us to presume that the Lacedaemonian girls raped by the Messenians were performing a choral dance for Artemis Limnatis.

In his Hymn to Artemis, Callimachus mentions several cult sites where he shows Artemis surrounded by her chorus of Nymphs, and the words he uses suggest 'circularity' and 'center,' features characteristic of the chorus. One of these sites is Limnai. This mythical image was widespread and was reflected in the rites performed by adolescents in honor of Artemis, which leads me to think that at Limnai, too, this model was mirrored in the festival mentioned by Pausanias and Strabo. In addition, the incursion into the sanctuary of Limnai and the rape of the Laconian girls recall the scenes of abduction often committed on choruses of girls dancing in honor of Artemis. In Laconia itself, this schema is repeated in legends associated with the cults of Artemis at Karyai and Artemis Orthia at Sparta. [159] In these three stories, the Spartan maidens are dancing in a chorus when their ravishers surprise them. {144|145}

This rape scene at the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis, as in other similar scenes of abduction and rape already mentioned, evokes adolescence inasmuch as in this period of pubescence the young girl arouses desire but refuses the advances of men; those she provokes resort to violent action, and the violence of the abduction and of the rape has to be understood as a metaphorical domestication, by force and through sexuality, of the untamed young girl. [160]

To this typically adolescent characteristic of the legend, associated as a kind of aition with the cult of Limnatis, can be added a votive epigram containing all the features I have defined as signifying female virginity. [161] This epigram, addressed to Artemis Limnatis without further qualification, might express the vows of a young Spartan girl or of any young girl of Patras, Tegea or Sicyon. It is significant in that it describes the objects that an adolescent girl (κόρα), Timareta, daughter of Timaretos (παῖς Τιμαρετεία), dedicates to Limnatis the virgin (κόρα), daughter of Leto (Λητῴα), before her marriage (πρὸ γάμοιο). It is obvious that the words used betray the semantic features 'adolescence' + 'female' and 'family association' which describe exactly and significantly both the young girl Timareta and Artemis. Among the objects dedicated to the goddess are the tambourines (τύμπανα) of the young maiden, her ball (σφαῖρα), the net that held back her hair (κεκρύφαλος), and her dolls (κόρας). The adolescent significance of the ball game is already present in Homer in the scene in which Nausicaa, like Artemis surrounded by her Nymphs, plays with her attendants; the consecration of the hairnet can be aligned with the consecration of hair by the Delian girls to the Hyperborean virgins, hypostases of Artemis. [162] The presence of the dolls, not previously seen, is an obvious symbol of childhood; their description as κόραι again repeats the word that is applied in the epigram to both Timareta and Artemis; as for the tambourines, I shall explain their function later, in the study of the cult of Artemis Korythalia. [163] All the objects dedicated by Timareta are thus associated with adolescence. Their dedication to Artemis signifies for the young girl the end of the period that they symbolize, and at the same time probably the transition to adulthood through marriage. The semantic constellation contained in these anonymous lines depicts the function of the cult of Artemis Limnatis as a preparation for the adolescent to adulthood. This image corresponds to the image of violence of which the girls celebrating Limnatis were victims.

A third element can possibly be added. In the Messenian version of the rape at the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis, as recounted by Pausanias, it is possible to see a real contamination of a historical event by the founding legend of the cult that is its context, even perhaps the historicization of the legend. The Messenian version, with its Spartan youth disguised as girls, recalls the numerous scenes of {145|145} cross-dressing in certain founding myths of adolescent rites. [164] For instance, Plutarch, in telling the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, reports that among the seven Athenian maidens and seven youths that accompanied Theseus to Crete there were two boys disguised as girls. They went on the expedition as girls, and then, during the ritual of the Oschophoria explained by the Cretan cycle, the same transvestites are to be found heading the cultic procession. [165] In terms of ritual, taking on the characteristics of the opposite sex for a short time is typical of a transitional phase; it signifies the reversal of the order characteristic of the period which is located between separation and reintegration into a new order. In the myths and rites of puberty, cross-dressing takes on an additional value, since it corresponds to the sexual ambiguity in Greek eyes of the first years of puberty. I shall follow this up in the next chapter.

To the ritual act of cross-dressing, as in the Messenian story, can be added that of deception, of ἀπάτη, also characteristic of adolescence. In the story, the apate is represented by the dagger that the adolescents hide under their tunics to assassinate the Messenian dignitaries in the sanctuary of Limnatis. The connotations of such an act of daring, performed in several Greek cities by the ephebe before being integrated into the adult military order as a hoplite, [166] are explained in a myth such as that of Aspalis. [167] This myth tells how Astagytes, while still a child (ἀντίπαις ὤν), wanted to avenge his sister Aspalis who, as a young girl (παῖς), hanged herself out of fear that the tyrant of the town would {146|147} abduct her and rape her as was his custom with his young subjects before they married (ἐμίγνυτο πρὸ γάμου κατὰ βίαν). To do this, the youth dressed in his sister's clothes and, armed with a sword lying flat against his left thigh, [168] he entered the house of the tyrant, whom he killed. He is fêted by the citizens of the town as a result, and Aspalis, to whom a statue is raised near that of Artemis, is honored as Aspalis Ameilite Hekaerge.

It is the insistence of Pausanias on the Spartan youths' lack of beards (γένεια οὐκ εἶχον, ἀγενείους νεανίσκους) that opens the door to a comparison with the legends recounted above. The presence of cross-dressing and the apate represented by the weapons and the entry at night manifestly characterize it as a story explaining an adolescent ritual practice. If looked at in the context of the schema common to all initiatory rites and particularly to tribal initiation rites with the three phases of reversal, segregation, and reintegration, it is tempting to see in the deaths of the Spartans a symbolic initiatory death before rebirth as hoplites in the adult world. Since the Spartans are disguised as girls, the Messenians kill women, not men. In other words, they symbolically destroy the female aspect in the adolescents who leave the state of sexual indifferentiation of childhood to embrace adulthood. [169]

If we return to the Spartan version, the suicide of the girls after being raped by the Messenians is a striking parallel to the murder of the boys; it is my opinion that this murder gives us the authority to interpret the suicide in a similar way and to see in it also the symbol of an initiatory death. Aspalis, in the legend that supports my interpretation of the Messenian version, is forced to commit suicide in her desire to avoid being raped. Rape (submitted to or not) and suicide are linked, [170] and it is probable that, if the violence of the rape refers symbolically to an attempt to domesticate the adolescent, suicide, by refusing adult sexuality, signifies entry into the period of puberty; it is thus the symbol of an initiatory death in the same way as the murder of the boys seems to represent the transition from childhood to adolescence. In this way it can be presumed that the two versions of the causes of the first war with Messenia are a kind of historicization of two founding myths associated with the cult of {147|148} Artemis Limnatis; and in fact the Roman inscriptions found in Messenia and Boiai mention the presence of an ἀγωνοθέτης and choruses of boys (παῖδες / νέοι) in the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis. [171] The result is a correspondence between myth and ritual, and through the legend made into history can be seen the myth explaining the ritual.

The varied information about the cult of Artemis Limnatis offers a closer interpretation of this ritual than that given by Nilsson at the beginning of the century. [172] Artemis indeed could connote fecundity, inhabiting cool, humid gorges, in a fertile and rich natural setting. But she is not alone in the Greek pantheon to fill this function. Artemis is actually the goddess of growth rather than of fecundity. She connotes humidity for its nutritive qualities rather than for its power to fertilize, and she exercises her nurturing power on a wild nature, apart from the means of agricultural cultivation and civilization. In the dry climate of Greece, places watered by a spring or a stream that does not dry up even in summer are the exception. They are like oases where continuous spring reigns and where nature flourishes in a constantly renewed youthfulness, without the intervention of the culture. This springtime of nature is echoed by the one known to humans: adolescence finds in the humid places inhabited by Artemis and the Nymphs a context that signifies what adolescence itself signifies, namely, the natural and free development of the forces of growth and blossoming.

The exuberance of spring is also the setting for the bacchic orgy. In the Bacchae, Euripides describes the valley in which Pentheus surprises the Maenads as a gorge with steep sides, watered by numerous springs and shaded by tall trees. [173] These Artemisian and Dionysiac landscapes are paralleled by the presence of bacchanalian elements in certain rituals of the cult of Artemis. I shall account for these elements and define their function later. For the moment, I shall just mention that in Sparta cymbals dedicated to Limnatis have been found. Remember that tambourines were dedicated by the girl of the epigram to the same goddess before marriage. [174] Traditional attributes of the Maenads, the tambourine and cymbals are essential symbols of Dionysiac cult. However, dedicated to Artemis, as seen in the epigram, along with dolls and balls, the {148|149} tambourine also represents female adolescence in the Artemisian system of values. Like the cymbals, it becomes the meeting point of two deities.

And finally, the location of the sanctuary of Limnatis on the boundary between the territories of Laconia and Messenia defines it as a sanctuary of the periphery, of distance from the order of the city, and a further sign of the adolescent and initiatory character of the cult celebrated there. There is more; a note of Tacitus tells us that this sanctuary was not only on the boundary between two hostile countries, but also in the interior of the ager Dentheliatis. [175] This area, a sort of no man's land, was apparently constantly disputed by Messenians and Lacedaemonians until Roman times. In his study of the armed struggle between Eretria and Chalcis for possession of the Lelantine Plain and that between Argos and Sparta for the Thyreatid, Brelich shows the mythical and ritual values of this type of war. [176] These traditional struggles in a liminal setting, associated by authors who write about them with historical events, take on a very precise political and religious function. In relation to the cults of Artemis and Apollo they serve the agonistic education of young warriors. This function is similar to that of the cult of Artemis Limnatis, as we have seen in the apate of the Messenian version of the cause of the first war. This story, astride both founding myth and historical discourse, corresponds in its structure to the stories of the wars for the Lelantine Plain and the Thyreatid which also combine both historical and legendary elements. Thus these stories, among which Brelich includes the ones about the first Messenian war and the cult of Artemis Limnatis, confirm by form and content the adolescent character of the cult.

Like the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis in a mountainous region on the border between Laconia and Messenia, the sanctuary of Artemis Karyatis, near Karyai, was in the mountains separating Laconia and Arcadia, near the road leading from Sparta to Tegea. [177] The whole of the site of Karyai was dedicated to Artemis and to the Nymphs. The sanctuary was open to the sky; in its center there stood a statue of Artemis inscribed with her title Karyatis. According to the {149|150} sources, the Spartans made sacrifice there or more generally held a feast. [178] The central element of this annual feast was choral dances by Spartan maidens in honor of the goddess. Pausanias describes the rite with two terms that belong to the sphere of chorality: to organize (χοροὺς δὲ αἱ Λακεδαιμονίων παρθένοι κατὰ ἔτος ἱστᾶσι), and local (ἐπιχώριος ὄρχησις), which imply the semantic features 'to institute' and 'geographical belonging.' [179]

The dance of Spartan maidens at Karyai acquired a certain fame throughout Greece and the appearance of the word Karyatides for those who performed the dance suggests the formation of a permanent chorus attached to the cult of Artemis Karyatis, similar to the Deliades at Delos. Attempts at describing the dance, aided by the attitudes of the famous caryatids, architectural elements supporting the entablature of a building, have so far failed due to lack of source material; the use of the word Karyatides for an architectural component probably simply originates in the fame of the maidens dancing for Artemis. [180] In any case, a ring with a seal showing dancing Karyatides, given to Ctesias, the doctor of Artaxerxes II, by Klearchos, according to an anecdote of Plutarch, shows that at the end of the fifth century the image of the caryatids was associated with the Spartan community. This ring, in Klearchos' mind, represents a symbol of the friendship of Ctesias for his parents and his Spartan friends. Pollux, too, cites the dance of the Karyatides in honor of Artemis as a typical Laconian dance. [181] Professional or not, the chorus of Karyatides is certainly a specifically Spartan institution.

In addition to the dance, the Karyatides also sang. This at any rate is reported in the sources that explain the origin of bucolic poetry by the replacement, in the time of the Persian wars, of the traditional chorus of maidens by local shepherds. Latin writers explain that the day on which the chorus of adolescent girls was to sing the traditional hymn in honor of Artemis Karyatis (eo die quo solitus erat chorus virginum Dianae Caryatidi hymnum canere), shepherds sang a pastoral, becoming substitutes for the girls who had fled terrorized by the war. [182] {150|151}

Like the cult of Artemis Limnatis, the cult of Artemis Karyatis is associated with a scene of violence perpetrated on the maidens celebrating the goddess. Pausanias tells that Aristomenes, the champion of the revolt of the Messenians against the Spartan occupation, attacked Lacedaemonia by night but was deflected by the miraculous apparition of Helen and the Dioskouroi, then placed himself and his soldiers in ambush near the sanctuary of Artemis at Karyai. [183] Surprising the Spartan girls who were dancing there for the goddess (παρθένους χορευούσας τῇ Ἀρτέμιδι), he carried off those whose fathers occupied the most visible positions in Sparta. Stopping to pass the night in a Messenian village, he entrusted the girls to his young soldiers (νεανίσκοι) who, perhaps under the effect of drink, tried to rape them (πρὸς βίαν ἐτρέποντο τῶν παρθένων). Intending to respect Greek custom, Aristomenes killed most of these soldiers and returned the captives intact for a large ransom.

In this story, the relationship between myth and history is still more complex than in the case of the rape of the Lacedaemonians and the murder of Teleklos in the sanctuary at Limnatis. Aristomenes is a Messenian hero who was the object of intense idealization after the liberation of Messenia in 370/369 B.C. It is generally admitted that, according to Rhianos, the author of the Messeniaka, Aristomenes was the leader of the revolt at the beginning of the fifth century, whereas Ephorus, and Callisthenes in his Hellenica, place him in the second Messenian war, associated with Tyrtaeus. Although Pausanias follows the events of the poem by Rhianos, he goes along with the second date. [184]

The impossibility of identifying the story with a historical event shows the semi-mythical nature of Aristomenes. It also shows that the story contains certain features of a traditional nature, all the more since the event has not been defined historically. Here again it is not impossible that the account of the "historical" event has been fleshed out with elements belonging to the founding myth of the cult. Such a process is all the more probable since the invasion of the temple of Karyatis, symbol of the Messenian revolt, repeats the theme of the causes of the first war with Messenia and the subjugation of the country symbolized by the Spartan invasion of the sanctuary of Limnatis. And if it is true that Pausanias takes a good deal of his information in the first part of the book dedicated to Messenia from the epic poem of Rhianos, in other words the {151|152} Messenian version of the facts, [185] then the story of Karyai, with a Messenian bias, is the complement of the Messenian version of the events of Limnai. Just as at Limnai, the murder of the Spartan boys disguised as girls (in fact an initiatory episode) seems justified from the Messenian point of view as a legitimate defensive reaction to the Spartan trick, so also at Karyai, the abduction and attempted rape (also initiatory) are not marked negatively, since Aristomenes forbids the soldiers to rape the girls and returns them to Sparta. By abducting the girls Aristomenes simply intended to affect the ruling class in Sparta, just as in the Messenian version of events at Limnai the Spartan ruse was directed at the highest dignitaries of Messenia. The story by Pausanias of the Messenians at Karyai shows how two sequences from the founding myth of adolescent rituals, abduction and rape, can be absorbed into a tale with a historical character, the aim of which is the ideological defense of a political action.

Defining the boundaries between historical events, legendary stories and their ideological value can give us a preliminary interpretation of the cult of Artemis Karyatis. The dance of the Karyatides, whose name ending in -ίδ- implies the features 'collective' and 'geographical belonging,' the abduction and attempted violence depict this cult as characteristic of female adolescence. It remains to be known whether the ritual described by the sources symbolizes separation in the tribal initiation rite or reintegration and admission to the adult order.

Brelich considers it possible to integrate the episode of abduction and rape with the few elements we possess of what must have constituted the founding legend of the cult of Artemis Karyatis. [186] In a commentary by Lactantius on the Thebaid of Statius, the chorus of maidens dancing for Artemis at Karyai (cum luderent virgines), fearing some misfortune would overcome them (meditatus ruinam chorus), took refuge in a nut tree and hanged themselves from a branch. Lactantius adds that the Greeks call this species of nut tree carya. He says that the goddess and her sanctuary take their name from this tree. [187] The suicide of the Karyatides naturally recalls that of the Spartan virgins after being raped by the Messenians near the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis. This suicide, in the adolescent context of the rite of Karyai, can be interpreted as the symbol of an initiatory death in the same way as that at Limnai. This semantic similarity suggests that the misfortune the Karyatides were escaping was abduction and rape. Certainly in the Limnai story the suicide of the girls is provoked by rape, whereas at Karyai, it is the fear of rape. The latter motive is not without parallels. {152|153} It is the cause of the suicide of Aspalis in the myth that I have connected with the cult of Limnatis. In the same way, rape, either suffered or feared, stands in opposition to the accepted idea of dominated sexuality in the case of the adult woman. The conjecture advanced by Brelich would then be confirmed and it would be believable that the misfortune feared by the young suicides of Karyai was the experience of a violent sexuality for which they were unprepared.

If the suicide of the Karyatides suggests an initiatory death, the myth attached to the sanctuary of Artemis Karyatis and consequently the rite it founds appears to signify the first stage of initiation, that is, the withdrawal from the old order. From a narrative point of view, the etymological explanation of the Lactantius story justifies its interpretation as the aition for the Karyai rite.

Another mythological element in a later source hints at the probable relation of the cult of Artemis Karyatis to that of Dionysus. Servius relates that Apollo wanted to thank Dion, king of Laconia, for his hospitality and the cult instituted for him, so he conferred on the three daughters of the king, Orphe, Lyko, and Karya, the gift of divination. Dionysus was on his way to Sparta but fell in love with Karya and made her his lover. Karya's sisters were opposed to the love of the god: he abducted them in anger, took them to Taygetos, and changed them into stones. As for Karya, the god changed her into a nut tree. According to Servius, it was Artemis who told this to the Laconians and that is why they founded a sanctuary dedicated to Artemis Karyatis. [188] The myth contains various matters of interest. First, there is the sequence of adult violence invading the domain of intact sexuality of the adolescent, as we saw in Lactantius' myth. The semantic and syntactic analogy between the two myths continues with the death of the maidens, which appears to be the consequence of violence done to them. In both cases, the death is associated with a nut tree; but in the first myth it is suicide, in the second, a metamorphosis. The transformation into a tree is one of the essential moments of a whole series of stories about the first sexual experience of adolescence. [189] It may be significant that the three daughters of Dion, although not specifically described by Servius as adolescent, fall under the jurisdiction of Apollo because of the gift of divination he gave them. Dionysus, in {153|154} his semantic character as divinity of the young adult woman, would then introduce adult sexuality into the sphere of adolescence that is under the jurisdiction of Apollo or Artemis. The resistance that Dionysus meets in the sisters of Karya, and its mortal consequences for the girls, are certainly characteristic elements of adolescent myths. Once again, a pubescent girl awakens the desire of a man, but cannot assume normal sexual relations with him. [190]

The presence of Dionysus in the Karya legend has led some scholars studying the Artemis Karyatis cult to conclude that there was a close association between the cults of the two deities, even that this legend proved the Dionysiac aspect of the cult of Artemis Karyatis. [191] The story of Karya, like the legends associated at Patras with Artemis Triklaria and Dionysus Aisymnetes, shows us how important it is to distinguish clearly the respective fields of action of these two deities. Their intervention in the same sphere does not mean that their functions are the same; it signifies on the contrary the point of contact between two distinct periods of human life, adolescence and adulthood, the first embodied by Artemis, the second by Dionysus.

The only indication that might identify the dance of the Lacedaemonian maidens in honor of Artemis with a bacchic dance comes from two very different sources. The first is the title of a play or a poem by Pratinas, Δύμαιναι ἢ Καρυάτιδες, the Dymainai or the Karyatides; the second is a gloss of Hesychius which defines the Dymainai as Bacchants who danced at Sparta in chorus (χορίτιδες). [192] In examining the cult of Limnatis we have seen that the Nymphs and the Maenads have various features in common to the extent that the followers of Artemis blend together with those of Dionysus. This semantic proximity mainly concerns the environment in which the two groups exist. The {154|155} Nymphs, like the Maenads, live in humid and shaded places. They are part of wild nature and enliven the mountains and forests with their dances. [193]

Although their environments may be comparable, the functions of the Nymphs and Maenads are not necessarily the same. This led the lexicon of Hesychius into the utmost error. Certainly during the puberty of Spartan girls, the period of segregation in a mountainous area such as Karyai signifies a return to the natural state, over which Artemis presides, and a reversal of the order of the civic community by a temporary deferment of normal social life. Dionysiac activities also represent a rupture with society and a temporary return to savagery. At this point Artemis and Dionysus seem to occupy the same spheres; however the contexts are different to the extent that the Artemisian reversal has to do with adolescent rites of passage, whereas the Dionysiac touches the whole community of women at regular intervals. The two cults therefore cannot be confused at all. On the other hand, the similarity of environments means that in the time of the Persian wars the substitution of a pastoral song for the dancing Karyatides could take place. [194]

In the chapter on the choregos I said that a chorus made up of members called Dymainai was mentioned in several recently published papyrus fragments of commentaries on poems by Alcman. In the fragment analyzed in the preceding chapter, the Dymainai formed a chorus led by Agesidamos. [195] In another fragment, the chorus of Dymainai is cited as the group which very certainly performed the poem commented on. [196] The reference to the chorus comes as a sort of preliminary note to the explanation of the poem and is found just after the invocation to the Muses which opened Alcman's composition and before the exegesis of the cosmogonical development. As we shall see later, the name Dymainai, according to Alcman's commentator, derives from the name of one of the three Dorian tribes that made up the Spartan community, the Dymanes, and perhaps also from a village called Δύμη, one of the obai forming the city of Sparta. [197] A third fragment, less complete than the others, links the Dymainai on several occasions with what seems to be a chorus of Pitanatides, young girls {155|156} from the Spartan obe of Pitane. The two repetitions of the word παρθένος confirm that the chorus or choruses were made up of adolescents. [198]

The evidence provided by these fragments is useful for more than one reason. First, since the Dymainai are designated as a chorus of adolescents, the interpreter need not follow Hesychius concerning the Dionysiac character of this chorus. [199] Also, if one agrees that the double title of the play by Pratinas names the same chorus, these fragments show that the choruses dancing at Karyai were formed by adolescent girls from the town of Sparta, and their participation depended on the political structure in the city; I shall develop this point later. Finally, they lead us to think that the cult of Karyai existed in the seventh century and that some of the poems of Alcman composed for the Dymainai were intended for this ritual.

From the boundaries of the Lacedaemonian territory it is time to return to its center, Sparta itself. Artemis was honored there in more than one place, with numerous titles varying from one place to another. Without counting Orthia, Pausanias mentions no less than six cults in six different locations throughout the city. [200] As far as it is possible to locate them, these cult sites are generally at a distance from the city center. But Artemis, with Apollo and Leto, had her {156|157} statue in the market place, and thus had a presence in the heart of the city, within the space the Spartans called the Chorus (χορός). [201]

Among the cults mentioned, that of Artemis Orthia was far and away the most important. The number of sources referring to it, and the relatively large number of archaeological discoveries made on the site of the sanctuary, show it to have been at the center of the religious and social life of the Lacedaemonians. The excavations of the site have revealed cult activity since the tenth century B.C. and since the construction of a new altar and of a first temple in the middle of the eighth century. This temple was reconstructed during the sixth century, showing important activity through the whole Archaic period. [202]

Pausanias reports that the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia was in a place called Limnaion. It is easy to connect the aquatic and swampy character, also appropriate to the Limnai site on the outskirts of Laconia. It is more than likely that the place called Limnaion is related to the village of Limnai, one of the four or five obai joined together to form the city of Sparta. The obe of Limnai probably lay along the banks of the Eurotas. Strabo describes the surroundings of Sparta as being marshy and therefore called Limnai, the marshes; he mentions a temple of Dionysus built in the village of Limnai which stood on marshy ground. [203] The village of Limnai was thus associated with the damp place its name denotes.

It is, however, the excavations undertaken on the site of the sanctuary of Artemis that make the relation between the signifier and signified of Limnaion certain. [204] Even today we can see the foundations of the temple of Orthia next to the Eurotas. The humidity of this reedy area is in sharp contrast to the arid dryness of the Laconian countryside. The traveller from the north who goes there in summer is surprised to find, after having visited the thistly acropolis, grass of a green unmatched by the cisalpine fields. The sanctuary is down by the river on the furthest edge of town and is thus defined as a boundary sanctuary, comparable to Limnatis and Karyatis in their positions on the frontiers of Laconian territory. {157|158}

The sanctuary of Artemis Orthia was particularly famous in antiquity for the bloody whipping (διαμαστίγωσις) that Spartan ephebes were obliged to undergo. [205] The ancients as well as the moderns were so impressed with this image that it has become one of the symbols of the traditional severity of Spartan customs. [206] It seems that the rite of flagellation of the ephebes was one of the important elements of the return to the origins and to Lykourgos, and in Sparta continued into the Roman period. [207] Several historians of Greek religion have shown that, in comparing this rite with similar customs among peoples called "primitive," it is one among many trials Spartan boys had to undergo before attaining their status as adult citizens. [208] From an ethnographic point of view, the rite of flagellation in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia could be defined as a rite of initiation, and more precisely a rite of tribal initiation. It refers to one of the three phases characteristic of all rites of passage. Between the separation from the old order (childhood) and the reintegration into the new order (adulthood), it represents among other things the phase of (symbolic) death, of segregation, of "immersion in chaos," to use the terms of Eliade.

Historians and specifically historians of religion have seen in the Spartan agoge an education system by age groups that almost all so-called "primitive" societies know. Texts give precise names to the seven age groups in which the sons of Spartan citizens were enrolled from fourteen to twenty years of age. [209] Reference to several of these classes found on inscriptions (late, it is true) in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia show the meaning of the rite of flagellation in the {158|159} Spartan agoge. [210] The essential role of the agoge being to prepare adolescents for citizenship, the sanctuary of Orthia seems to have been one of the centers of the religious life and also of the civic life of ancient Lacedaemonia. The cult honoring Artemis is a sign that religion took upon itself in ancient Sparta, as in most societies with a tribal structure, the political and military education of the future citizen.

This civic character is confirmed by one of the myths explaining the origin of the flagellation rite, which relates a struggle round the altar of the goddess between the inhabitants of the four villages that formed Sparta in the beginning. Those who were not killed fell ill and the oracle ordered the altar of Orthia to be regularly washed in human blood, probably so that the sickness would end. [211] The story, reported by Pausanias, fits into the schema of almost all the myths about the origin of the cults of Artemis with their expiation/propitiation of a scourge sent by the god for punishment of a crime, and the ritual practice depending on a unique mythical event. This aition refers to the current image of the cult of Artemis without specifying a particular function. However, the fact that the whole of the Spartan community was involved indicates the political character of this strange cult.

But it was not only a cult for ephebes—young girls also had their part in it— although the little information we have belongs to the "mythical." It is in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia in Sparta that Plutarch places the abduction by Theseus of the young Helen. [212] Plutarch gives three versions of this myth.

In the first, Helen was abducted by Idas and Lynceus, sons of Aphareus, to give her to Theseus. The latter refused to give her up to her brothers, the Dioskouroi. The motives for the gift and the refusal are not known. This version is found in the context of the struggle between the Tyndaridai, Lacedaemonian heroes, and the Apharetidai, Messenian heroes, particularly in connection with {159|160} the abduction of the Leukippides; I shall discuss later the cult founded by the Spartans for these two heroines.

In the second version, Tyndareus entrusts the girl to Theseus to protect her from being abducted by Enarsphoros, one of the sons of Hippocoon. [213] Tyndareus, father of the Dioskouroi, in this version is the defender of the kidnapped girl rather than the Apharetidai of the first version.

The last version of the myth, the best supported according to Plutarch, puts the responsibility for the abduction of Helen as she danced in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia squarely on Theseus and his companion Peirithoos. Having left Sparta, Theseus consigned Helen to Aphidna until he could marry her. A slightly different form of this version was already known to Alcman, in which the story ends with the return of Helen to Sparta, saved by the Dioskouroi brothers. [214]

The two latter versions in Plutarch's text emphasize the youthfulness of Helen when she was taken away. One tells that when she was entrusted to Theseus she was still a child (ἔτι νηπίαν), the other that she was not yet pubescent (οὐ καθ’ ὥραν, οὔπω γάμων ὥραν ἔχουσαν). [215] As for Theseus, he was no longer the young man of the legends underlying the Pyanopsia and the Oschophoria, but a mature man of fifty. If one applies these mythical facts to the ritual practices in the temple of Orthia, it is evident that, as in the cult of Artemis at Brauron, the girls dancing for the goddess were still children. This extreme youthfulness contrasts with that of the girls taking part in the cults of Artemis Limnatis and Karyatis who, raped or fearing rape, were certainly pubescent. In the various versions of the myth of Helen, her abduction is never followed by rape.

The few figurative representations of Helen's abduction by Theseus and Peirithoos only partly confirm the events in the legend put together from literary texts. A red-figure water pitcher and a black-figure cup probably show the chorus {160|161} of young girls from which Helen was removed. [216] We may presume that this chorus was dedicated to Artemis Orthia as was the one in the story reported by Plutarch. However, in most of these representations Theseus looks like an ephebe or a young adult rather than a man of fifty, while Peirithoos always wears the beard of a mature man. As for Helen, the images of her never show her as the child the literary sources claim she was, but as an adolescent.

A further mythical fact, unfortunately very brief, links the Nymph Taygete with the goddess Orthosia, an epiclesis that the inscriptions found on the site of the temple of Artemis Orthia in Sparta show to be equivalent to Orthia. In his account in the Third Olympian of the myth about the founding of the Olympic Games, Pindar talks of the hind with golden horns that Herakles had to bring back from Arcadia to Eurystheus after Taygete had consecrated it to the goddess Orthosia. The legend recounts that this consecration took place after Artemis had transformed Taygete into a hind to allow her to escape the assaults of Zeus; the god however managed to couple with the Nymph and a son was born to her and bore the name Lakedaimon, supposedly the founder of Sparta. [217] In Pindar's text, Orthosia is presented as an autonomous divinity, different from Artemis, who intervenes independently in the same context. It is only the scholia on this passage that identify her with the divine huntress and particularly with the Artemis venerated on Mt. Orthion in Arcadia. Even if the goddess Orthosia mentioned by Pindar is Arcadian, the legend of Taygete, the origins and meanings of which are distinctly Lacedaemonian, shows that the figure of Orthia/Orthosia, like Artemis, is related to the image of the Nymph and to the scheme characteristic of the myths of adolescence: the rape followed by the death/metamorphosis of the violated virgin.

This myth, which incorporates Orthia into the common ritual image of adolescence, should prevent us from interpreting the age difference of the young girls in the Spartan cult of Orthia, as seen in the myth of Helen's abduction, and {161|162} the adolescents dancing for Limnatis or Karyatis as indicative of a difference in the respective functions of these cults. Moreover, concerning the ephebes, if the inscriptions found in the sanctuary of the goddess are to be believed, only the four last age groups in the agoge were represented in the rituals for Orthia; that is, ephebes who were between sixteen and nineteen years old. [218] The very young age suggested by the myth of Helen's abduction for the girls participating in the cult of Orthia consequently does not correspond to that of the boys. It is therefore impossible to use the different ritual practices performed by adolescents to define, by analogy, the function of the rites performed by the girls at the same altar.

Among the various stories attached to the cult of Orthia reported by Pausanias, one legend tells that the xoanon of the goddess venerated at Sparta was brought from Tauris by Orestes and Iphigenia. The statue, stolen by the two heroes, was erected at Sparta and not at Brauron as the Athenians claimed. [219] Artemis Orthia shares this origin not only with the Artemis at Brauron but also with the Artemis at Argos. [220] Because of these origins, the cult of Orthia is related to other Hellenic cults of Artemis that include ritual practices performed by young girls. However, once again, there is a lack of information to justify a complete parallel and to assume with certainty that choruses of young virgins were present in the sanctuary near the River Eurotas.

To round out the myths, a final legend reported by Pausanias tells that besides the epiclesis of Orthia, Artemis was also called Lygodesma because her xoanon was found in a clump of agnus castus trees (vitex or agnus castus) growing near the water. The trunks, explains Pausanias, kept the statue upright (ὀρθός), whence the double epiclesis of Lygodesma and Orthia. [221] {162|163}

A similar aition explains the presence at Samos of the ancient statue of Hera that Admete, the daughter of Eurystheus, had found on the seashore supported by agnus castus trees, after the fruitless attempts of the Tyrrhenians to take it to Argos; this aition also served as a foundation myth for the annual festival of the Tonaia during which the statue of the goddess was carried from her temple onto the beach where it had been found and where it was purified. [222]

These cult references to the agnus castus offer two different interpretations of the epiclesis Lygodesma. First, the fact that the vitex belongs to the category of trees that attach the cult of Artemis Orthia, as also that of Caryatis or Cedreatis at Orchomenos, to noncultivated trees. [223] This feature is a common characteristic in numerous cults of Artemis. The presence of the vitex in the Spartan sanctuary is all the more understandable since this tree grows in swampy regions; hence its location on the banks of the Eurotas. However, the aition reported by Pausanias is probably due less to any tree cult or to the wood from which the xoanon may have been carved than to the original form of the temple of Orthia; the construction of this first sanctuary apparently included the branches of bushes growing in the swampy area where the goddess was worshipped. So the temple of agnus castus would then be analogous to the laurel hut which probably protected the statue of Apollo in various locations, according to some legends, and traces of which have recently been found in Eretria. [224]

But this conjecture does not help tell us the function of the agnus castus in the cult of Orthia. In antiquity the tree was known for its numerous medicinal qualities; according to Aelian and others, some of these qualities were related to the sexual life of women, [225] associated with the opposing categories of chastity and fertility. On one hand, the leaves of the tree were reputed to temper sexual desire; thus the couches on which the Athenians who observed sexual continence during the Thesmophoria lay were made of agnus castus branches. On the other hand, the same agnus castus was known to favor menstruation and lactation. Seemingly opposed, these qualities are really not contradictory: the period of fecundity in women is incompatible with the development of an excessive {163|164} sexuality. [226] Thus the agnus castus can control sexual impulses while stimulating the powers of bleeding and hence of fecundity in a woman.

The role of this tree in the cult of Hera or in the Thesmophoria, both rituals for married women, is clear, but its role is less obvious in the cult of Artemis. The only comparison in my documentation brings together the agnus castus and the rods used to beat the boys. This gives rise to the traditional interpretation of the Lebensrute, the rod that activates the forces of growth and fecundity in the young initiates. [227] But what is decisive in the whipping of the young boys on the altar of Artemis Orthia is the bleeding. By analogy, for the female part of the Orthia ritual, the presence of the chaste tree in the foundation myth might be explained by the fact that young girls dedicated themselves to the goddess at their first menstruation; the specific qualities of the vitex would be used to regulate their future procreative role as mothers. This is of course pure conjecture, supported only by the procreative function that ancient authors, such as Plutarch, attribute to the Spartan woman. But it has been proposed recently that the ambivalent virtues of the agnus castus could be a symbolized representation of the transition of the young girl from the time of menarche to adulthood: from a "strangled, nonbleeding parthenos," the girl would become a "released bleeding gyne.” [228] {164|165}

It remains for me to explain the etymology of the word Orthia. The numerous attempts of the ancients to explain this word show that the interpretation of this cult has always created confusion for its interpreters. For the Greeks, Artemis was called Orthia at Sparta because she induced safety (ὅτι ὀρθοῖ εἰς σωτηρίαν), because she helped set straight the newborn (ὀρθοῖ τοὺς γεννωμένους), because she restored women who had given birth (ὀρθούσῃ τὰς γυναῖκες καὶ εἰς σωτηρίαν ἐκ τῶν τοκετῶν ἀγούσῃ), because she re-established the city (τῆς τὴν πολιτείαν ἀνορθούσης), renewed the lives of human beings (ὀρθοῦν τοὺς βίους τῶν ἀνθρώπων), or because she came originally from the mountain in Arcadia called Orthion. [229]

Modern interpreters have also exercised their wits on the origin of this epiclesis. Except for a few attempts to connect the name Orthia with phallic symbolization, most philologists and historians of religion started with the explanations given by the ancients. [230] The most general feature that can be abstracted from these etymologies is 'safety': Artemis is the goddess who saves. [231] This accords well with her character as punisher then savior. More particularly, Artemis appears as the divinity who assures the health of the citizens and the community as a whole. This could provide the missing link for defining the founding legends and the rites attached to the cult of Orthia as indicating tribal initiation. In the initiatory rites and their underlying myths, the period of death is followed by a period of reintegration and rebirth, as in all rites of passage. In the case of Artemis Orthia, this death phase is represented in myth by the slaughter of the inhabitants of the four obai of Sparta or the madness of Astrabakos and Alopekos, and in ritual by the bloody beating of the ephebes as a substitute for the original human sacrifice on the altar of the goddess. The death {165|166} of the ephebes, represented by the flagellation, is then the initiatory death of the child followed by a rebirth of the young Spartan as citizen. [232]

The majority of scholars relates the etymology of Orthia to childbirth. In a famous passage on maieutics, Plato states that protection in childbirth is one of the basic functions of Artemis who presides over this event, although she herself never experienced it (ἄλοχος οὗσα τὴν λοχείαν εἴληχε). [233] And Plato adds that mid wives, who are the lay representatives of Artemis, are themselves women who are beyond childbearing age. Wide is therefore probably not wrong in relating the function of Artemis Orthia as midwife to that of Iphigenia. [234]

However, there are two texts of Euripides that give an exact explanation of Artemis' function in childbirth (Λοχία). In the Suppliants, the chorus, made up of mothers whose children were killed beneath the walls of Thebes, weep because they will no longer be under the protection of Artemis Lochia; they mourn because, with the death of the Seven, their posterity has been taken away from them. In Iphigenia in Tauris, Artemis Lochia is depicted by Iphigenia's attendants in a landscape of palm trees, laurels and olive shoots (θαλλόν). [235] The complaint of the suppliants and the image of the young branches among which Artemis Lochia lives show that this divinity protects childbirth as the first act of the process of growth for which she is responsible. The scholia {166|167} specify that Artemis Orthia saves women who have given birth (so that they can be pregnant again?) and at the same time "sets straight" the newborn. Similarly, modern etymology has shown that the root of the term Orthia could be related to several Indo-European verbs meaning 'to make grow.' [236] This is confirmed by a passage in the Hymn to Artemis by Callimachus who explains that the anger of the virgin goddess may cause illness and as a consequence the death of a woman in childbirth or, if she escapes that, the birth of a child who does not hold up (οὐδὲν ἐπὶ σφυρὸν ὀρθὸν ἀνέστη). [237]

Artemis is thus defined as protecting the newborn and promoting the forces of growth contained in childbirth. To this extent she is distinguished from Eileithyia and her function as liberator of the pregnant woman. [238] This difference between the two deities is expressed in the passage by Diodorus Siculus, cited above, who, in describing the functions of the divine children of Zeus, attributes to Eileithyia care for women in childbed and to Artemis care of the newborn. [239] It is this latter function that lends Artemis her title of kourotrophos. {167|168}

The cult of Artemis Orthia thus concerns two moments in the development of future citizens, early childhood and adolescence. We lack the information to establish whether girls were involved in the rituals marking these two periods. [240] The age of Helen, in the story of her abduction by Theseus, suggests a third moment, that of prepuberty.

On a diachronic level, the problems of the Spartan cult of Artemis Orthia are numerous. Excavations at the temple site offer some help by providing the interpreter with a precise historical framework. As I have mentioned, they allow us to retrace the history of the sanctuary from the tenth century. Apart from three gems, no Mycenaean object was found there, which leads one to think that the cult of Orthia was a Dorian import. [241]

If the vases found in the sanctuary indicate a style that attained the heights of richness and delicacy towards the beginning of the sixth century (beginning of the sixth century also for ivory figures, end of the fifth for lead figures), [242] the votive stelai erected on the occasion of the agon, placed around the altar of the goddess and bearing the names of the different age classes of the Spartan agoge, are no older than the fourth century and most are from the Roman period. [243]

The thematic consistency of the terra-cotta, ivory, and lead figures portraying Orthia as "mistress of the animals" leads to the conclusion that the outstanding features of this cult, as I have tried to define it through mostly later sources, show the same consistency and also go back to the Archaic period. This supposed correspondence between archaeological documents and literary sources is confirmed by how the goddess worshipped on the banks of the Eurotas is {168|169} named: just as only the later literary sources identify Orthia with Artemis, the inscriptions found in the sanctuary carry the designation Artemis Orthia, in place of Orthia alone, only from the middle of the first century A.D. [244]

As I said in the introduction, the gloss of a single line in the first fragment of Alcman is the basis for the opinion of many scholars that the poem was performed in the Orthia rituals. Chronologically, it is possible. And it would be strange for Alcman never to have written a composition for a cult that occupied a central place in the life of the Spartan community. However, two philological points need to be made before introducing the emendation in line 61 of fragment 1, making this a ritual poem dedicated to Orthia. The emendation requires the change from ορθριαι, as given in the papyrus, to ορθιαι proposed by the scholion. The objections given by philologists to this emendation are the following: the long ι of Ὀρθία does not fit the trochaic meter of the beginning of line 61, and linguistically the form ϝορθία only appears in inscriptions from the sixth century, whereas inscriptions going back to the seventh century only use the form ϝορθασία, which corresponds to the Ὀρθωσία in Pindar's Third Olympian, or ϝορθαία (/-εία). [245] The question should be addressed in the larger framework of the whole fragment. Philologically, the insurmountable morphological obstacle raised by the term Orthia prevents the insertion of this poem in the cult of Artemis Orthia. Central to Archaic Sparta's religious and social life as the cult may have been, Alcman's poetic activity, in the present state of our documentation, seems paradoxically to have no connection with it.

There was another Artemis sanctuary in Sparta, located near a river. Athenaeus mentions a temple to Artemis on the banks of the Tiassos, basing his information on a work by the geographer Polemon (end of the third century B.C.). Here the goddess was honored under the title Korythalia. Athenaeus adds that the temple was not far from the area reserved for Kleta, allowing a precise location to be established. The area was known to Pausanias, who mentions a sanctuary dedicated to the Laconian Graces Phaenna and Kleta, the same Graces known to Alcman, without citing the temple of Artemis itself. The sanctuary was situated at the meeting of the road to Amyklai and a river that Pausanias calls Tiasa and that surely corresponds to the Tiassos of Athenaeus, and it was thus outside the precinct of the town, near a river called in myth the daughter of Eurotas. [246] The principal rite celebrated for Korythalia concerned male children {169|170} (τὰ ἄρρενα παιδία). They were carried to the sanctuary by their nurses who sacrificed piglets to the goddess; the rite was called Tithenidia, a name most likely formed on τιτθή, 'nurse.' The sacrifice of a piglet was accompanied by a ritual meal called κοπίς, accomplished in the same way as banquets of the same name organized for the Hyakinthia at Amyklai. [247] The children, therefore, for whom the cult was specifically intended, were represented by their nurses.

This strange ritual poses various problems. Let us begin with an analysis of the epiclesis of Artemis in this cult. The term Korythalia derives from korythale, a laurel branch used in rituals and defined by the metaphor implied by the term and by analogy with the eiresione, the Athenian equivalent of the Spartan korythale. [248] According to the ancients, the korythale, the budding branch (κόρος, θάλλειν), was carried on becoming an ephebe and on entering marriage, because these ceremonies were about the growth of boys and girls (ἡβησάντων τῶν νέων καὶ θυγατέρων). In accordance with the signified implied by the name, it appears then as the symbol of the growth process in children and adolescents, and was intended to be stimulated by the ceremonies in which it was carried and by the divinity presiding over the rituals. Artemis herself is called Korythalia, goddess of the flowering of young branches, because she promotes growth in babies. This name is not pure metaphor, though: Artemis also promotes the growth of noncultivated vegetation itself; as we have previously noted, she is concerned as much with the savage vegetable world as with the animal or the human. [249] The quality of protector of growth on all levels that the signified Korythalia attributes to the figure of Artemis is found in Athenian rituals during which the eiresione was carried. The parallel functions of the eiresione or the korythale and the probable initiatory character of the rites of 6 Mounichion and of the Pyanopsia could confirm the interpretation given by the ancients of the {170|171} symbolic value of the korythale. [250] Naming the protector goddess of the Tithenidia, a festival for babies, as Korythalia shows that the rites which fell under her jurisdiction covered the whole process of growth from early childhood to adulthood.

The participation of dancers, young girls or women, in the cult of Artemis Korythalia—the reason for my including this festival in the discussion —is based on a single source, namely a gloss of Hesychius. According to this lexicographer, these dancers were called κορυθαλίστριαι, the dancers for Korythalia. [251] Nilsson has taken another gloss of Hesychius that mentions the participation of satyr-like dancers in this same cult and associates with the dance of the korythalistriai a whole list of descriptions of orgiastic dances by Spartan women; [252] he deduces in a rather general way that the cult of Korythalia has the bacchic features of "fertility festivals." The evidence is too weak to link these sources, which I shall analyze shortly, to the cult of Korythalia alone with any certainty.

The only allowable conjecture is that of identifying the korythalistriai with the nurses celebrating the Tithenidia. It is not impossible that these women, besides sacrificing to the goddess, performed orgiastic dances to bring down, by a kind of sympathetic ritual, the forces of growth upon the children present and perhaps upon those to come. Whatever we may suppose about such "magical" practices, it is significant that one of the two nurses of Apollo, according to a note in Plutarch, was named Korythaleia. [253] The identity of the signifiers lets us attribute a function analogous to the nurses taking part in the Tithenidia, to the nurse of Apollo and to Artemis Korythalia defined as a nurturing Artemis. This confirms the essential function of Artemis Korythalia as kourotrophos. [254]

The presence of nurses, thus of adult women, in the cult of Artemis Korythalia can only be justified insofar as these women are the intermediaries assuring the growth of young Spartans. Imbued with this function, they guarantee that for each child Artemis' role of promoting growth will be exercised. Just as Korythaleia was the nurse of Apollo, so they are the {171|172} Korythaliai of the future citizens and, supposing that the conjecture proposed above holds, their orgiastic dances could stimulate the powers of growth possessed by the goddess and transmit those powers to the babies.

It is therefore not possible to interpret the Tithenidia as a simple festival of fertility based only on the bacchic flavor of the dances of the korythalistriai. Such an interpretation would not take into account the particular function of these dances in an Artemisian context; it would confuse a whole series of rites that have a specific and distinct role by sticking the same "fertility rite" label on them all. In the same way as the function of savage nature differs according to whether it is the context for Artemis or Dionysus, and in the same way as the divine dancers in such a landscape assume the role of Nymphs or of Maenads according to the deity they attend upon, so do the ritual dances described as bacchic play a different role in an Artemisian or a Dionysiac context.

Dances with an orgiastic character appear in several parts of Greece. [255] Even in Sparta, Artemis Korythalia is not the only one to be honored with bacchanalian dances. I have mentioned that dances by young Spartan girls at Karyai for Artemis Karyatis could have the same character; that, at any rate, would explain why they disappeared and were replaced by bucolic songs in the fifth century. On the other hand, the existence of an epigram attesting to the consecration of tambourines to Artemis Limnatis introduces similar Dionysiac connotations. [256] The use of tambourines links the Dionysiac element to the ritual character of the dance. Located in the mountains, in the foothills of Taygetos, and near a spring, the cult of Artemis Dereatis, known only from a brief note of Pausanias, also included dances thought of as indecent by the ancients. [257] Finally, such dances were probably not foreign to the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia; votive terra-cotta masks, found round the temple, can be linked to a gloss of Hesychius which mentions female Laconian masks worn by disguised dancers to perform satyr-like dances. Recently these masks, representing young unbearded men and hoplites, but also old women and caricatured figures, have been interpreted as referring to the ambivalent means used in the initiatory education of the young Spartans: the sufferings of the {172|173} athletic and military trials, the fear provoked by satyr-like and grotesque figures. [258] These masks recall in any case the wooden masks worn by the κυριττοί to celebrate Artemis Korythalia.

It therefore seems possible to find traces of orgiastic elements in each of the principal Laconian cults of Artemis. However, Artemis is not a Laconian substitute for Dionysus, since the latter had a right to the city in Sparta, as I shall explain. [259] It is only possible to understand the presence of dances of a satyr-like nature in the Artemis cult if they are viewed as a kind of transitory negation of the order of civilization with an initiatory function. The growth of children, as of vegetation and animals, has to be nourished from birth to adulthood by ever new forces acting upon the untamed part of the young "sprouts," and since Artemis is concerned with the whole process of growth, it is normal that the ritual practices inviting such reversals of the order of adult civilization, "Dionysiac" or not, should be part of her cult.

To summarize: above and beyond the differences in function as described, the orgiastic dances performed by the emulators of Nymphs and Maenads have one thing in common, independent of their part in the cults of Dionysus or Artemis, namely that they always take place in natural surroundings. In both Artemisian and Dionysiac rites, this contact with uncultivated nature represents a break with the ordered world of the city and an immersion in a world where all cultural values are inverted or confused. This break is significant in all rites of passage, of which it is the second phase; it is the period of segregation from a world organized by men, and a return to chaos. The recurrence in Artemisian rites of ritual elements such as orgiastic dances, a mythical chorus of young girls incarnating life in the forest and mountain, nature in its wild state, all these elements suggest that these rites are rites of passage. But then the appearance of {173|174} these elements in a particular cult, that of Artemis, specifies their significance. They are not just any rites of passage: they belong to the sub-class of adolescent rites, rites of tribal initiation. Included in the ritual practices for Artemis, orgiastic dances, besides activating the powers of nature, also indicate the break with the cultural order implied by the transition of the proteges of the goddess from one state to another. [260]

Philostratos, by attributing to the Hyakinthia the same importance that the Isthmian Games had for the Corinthians and the Pythian Games for the people of Delphi, indicates the central position that this festival occupies in the cult calendar of Sparta. As confirmation, we recall that during this festival the Lacedaemonians were accustomed to observe a period of respite, and in 479 for example they refused to help the Athenians, who were being hard pressed by the Persians, before the Hyakinthia were at an end. [261]

Athenaeus gives a detailed description of the ritual practices for this festival, taken from two works of the second century B.C., the Laconica by the historian Polycrates and the work by the geographer Polemon dedicated to the Ceremonial Chariot mentioned by Xenophon. [262] As Nilsson showed, and more recently Brelich, the contrast between the practices as described in the two sources used by Athenaeus is only superficial. [263]

The festival, which lasted for three days, included a ritual phase of mourning followed by a feast of rejoicing. The first day supposedly took the form of a funerary ritual honoring the memory of the hero Hyakinthos. On that day, no bread was eaten, there were no wreaths for the banquet, and no paean was sung in honor of Apollo. [264] The day of fasting was followed by public festivities on a grand scale which Polycrates describes as a sort of many-colored spectacle (θέα ποικίλη); all the various members of the city took part. On this day there were musical and dance performances in which all the young people of the town participated. The children (παῖδες) played the lyre, they sang songs accompanied {174|175} on the aulos, one of which—perhaps the paean not sung on the first day—was dedicated to Apollo; [265] others, on horseback, appeared in the theater. The ephebes (νεανίσκοι) were divided into numerous choruses and sang local poems (τῶν ἐπιχωρίων τινὰ ποιημάτων ᾄδουσιν: here we find the feature 'geographical belonging'); they were joined by dancers who performed traditional dances (κίνησιν ἀρχαϊκήν) to the sound of the pipe and the singers' voices.

Young girls were not forgotten. The songs and dances of the boys seem to have taken place in one spot, in a theater of which Polycrates does not give us the exact location; the girls, however, were the central attraction of the procession organized at this time in which the whole city took part, according to Polycrates. Of the girls (παρθένοι), some took part in the parade (πομπεύουσι) on special chariots with particularly rich decoration, others were on chariots used in races. A gloss that probably crept into Athenaeus' text explains that the decorated chariots had the form of a wooden arch. Plutarch goes further and describes them as being shaped like griffons and stags—he-goats. The word κάνναθρον describing the special chariots derives from κάννα 'reed,' and it is legitimate to conclude with the ancient lexicographers that the frame was constructed by interlacing reeds and by moulding them to the shape of an unusual animal. Doubtless such a chariot was for the most prominent of the adolescents in town, since Xenophon tells how the daughter of Agesilas, king of Sparta, went to Amyklai, in other words to the Hyakinthia, on a kannathron. He describes the vehicle as πολιτικόν, showing the civic value of these constructions used solely for rituals. [266]

The mention of this procession and the existence of a road called Road of Hyakinthos confirm that the festival took place at a distance from Sparta, at Amyklai, in the precincts of the sanctuary of Amyklaian Apollo. According to Pausanias, Hyakinthos was buried in a tomb that formed the pedestal of the monumental statue of Apollo. [267] The procession must have brought all the participants in the festival in a line stretching from Sparta to Amyklai. {175|176}

On the same day, or more probably on the third day of the festival, there was a grand sacrifice followed by a ritual meal called κοπίς, like the one in the Tithenidia. [268] The most important citizens invited all those belonging to their household and those in their service. According to Polycrates, the town was quite empty on this occasion, since no one wanted to miss the sacrifice. So all segments of Spartan society were concerned with the festival of the Hyakinthia.

In the Hyakinthia young girls were not limited to the procession to the sanctuary of Apollo and Hyakinthos. When the chorus in Euripides' Helen imagines the heroine returning to her native town, it describes her meeting with the Leukippides on the banks of the Eurotas or in front of the temple of Pallas, and her part in the festivites (κώμοις) celebrated during the joyful nocturnal feasts for Hyakinthos. A passage of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, to which I shall return concerning Helen, confirms the presence of young Lacedaemonian girls in the sanctuary of Apollo at Amyklai. [269] Euripides' use of the term κῶμος confers on the nocturnal dances of the Lacedaemonian girls Dionysiac connotations.

Some sources of rather eccentric origin agree with the indications given by the chorus in Helen suggesting the existence in the Hyakinthia of a ritual particularly reserved for girls and women. The first source is St. Jerome, which is significant, even if substantially wrong. From the festival of Karyai he transfers to the Hyakinthia the abduction by Aristomenes of the young Spartan virgins during the Third Messenian War (rapuit de choris ludentium virginum quindecim). [270] Like Euripides, St. Jerome speaks of a night-time ritual and choruses of girls. This geographical displacement is only possible because St. Jerome knew that there were choruses of adolescent girls also at the Hyakinthia. Further, two later decrees (second century A.D.) found on the site of the cult of Amyklaian Apollo concern the nomination of a woman as ἀρχηίς and θεωρός for the festival of the Hyakinthia; the woman chosen for the position was elected on the basis of her discretion, dignity, and all the other qualities required of a woman of standing (σωφροσύνης τε καὶ σεμνότητος καὶ τῆς ἄλλης πάσης ἀρετῆς τῆς ἐν γυναιξὶν ἕνεκα). [271] The terms describing her function include leading the procession and directing the festival as a whole (ἀγών).

In addition, a passage from Plutarch, in which he does not refer explicitly to the Hyakinthia but may well mean this festival, since he speaks of a festival {176|177} involving the entire population (πάνδημον ἑορτήν), shows women celebrating a festival at the same time as adolescent girls, people of the household, and the newborn. This festival ended with a nocturnal rite performed near the sanctuary of Apollo in a big banquet tent (ἐν ἀνδρῶνι διεπαννύχιζον, τὸ μυστήριον ἐπετέλουν). [272] This rite might represent the counterpart of the great sacrificial feast celebrated by men at the Hyakinthia with their kin and servants. In describing the Spartan sanctuary of the Leukippides, Pausanias suggests that the women of the town wove a tunic for Amyklaian Apollo every year. This sacred practice took place in a special room which must have been in or near the sanctuary of Hilaeira and Phoibe, and which was called Χιτών. [273] This contribution to the festival of Apollo by women gives us to understand that they also had their part in the ritual practices performed then.

Two archaeological documents support this. First, numerous terra-cotta female figurines found on the site of Apollo's sanctuary at Amyklai, some of which go back to the Mycenaean period and, second, a stele dating from the third century B.C. and found on the same site. [274] This stele has carved on it a sacrifice scene and a choral scene representing five figures among whom we can identify a dancing woman, a second female figure playing the pipe, and a third holding a plectrum. The part played by the Spartan girls at the Hyakinthia was therefore not limited to the procession on the kannathra. It also included choral dancing. [275]

This rough sketch of ritual practices culled from heterogeneous sources has not yet given us an idea of the cultic and social function of this festival. The only characteristic not seen in other festivals I have discussed is the involvement of all sectors of the civic body, from children to adults of both sexes. To begin to understand such a complex ritual, one must first ask to which divine being this festival was dedicated. Heretofore the problem has generally been dealt with historically. The formation in -νθ- in the term Ὑάκινθος has been taken as proof that the hero represents a pre-Hellenic deity, celebrated from the time of the {177|178} Minoan founding of the town and gradually displaced by Apollo with the spread of the Greek pantheon. [276] Without wishing to enlarge on conjectures about the history of the Hyakinthia, I will simply say that in the Archaic and Classical periods pertinent to my thesis the two supernatural beings cohabited at Amyklai, also in the physical meaning of the word, since the tomb of Hyakinthos was in the pedestal of the monumental statue of Apollo, as has been pointed out. This statue, says Pausanias, was not the work of Bathycles, who had constructed in the mid sixth century the famous throne of Amyklai; rather, it was an Archaic work with a rough form reminiscent of the protogeometric xoana. [277] It is thus certain that from the beginning of the Archaic period the cults of the two supernatural beings were associated without their being identified with each other. [278]

Independent of the dual presence of the god and of the hero, two elements offer historical perspectives showing the antiquity and civic importance of the festival. According to Aristotle, the armor of Timomakhos, hero of the capture of Amyklai by the Spartans, was regularly put on view during the Hyakinthia. The definitive conquest of Amyklai, a town which had succeeded in maintaining its independence in spite of the Dorian invasion of the Laconian plain, has been placed in the middle of the eighth century. [279] The presentation of the armor is a sign of the civic and political value placed on this Amyklaian cult, and excavations show that it existed before the Spartan "conquest." The original meaning of the cult was certainly modified when it was absorbed into the Spartan cults. [280] {178|179}

The process of absorption was very rapid, as is proved by a second historical event that linked the founding of the Lacedaemonian colony of Tarentum to the flight of the Parthenians after a failed attack at the Hyakinthia. The colonization of Tarentum by the sons of Spartan women who had not taken part in the First Messenian War has been dated fairly exactly: the ancients assigned this event to the year 706. [281] In less than fifty years the Hyakinthia had become the civic festival described in later accounts. In fact, according to the legend narrated by Strabo, those involved in the Parthenian plot chose to revolt during the Hyakinthia because the whole population (οἱ τοῦ δήμου) was present at that moment.

The Hyakinthia as a Spartan festival was established permanently by the end of the eighth century. Of the two deities it celebrated, each had his own cult. The first day of the festival, austere and funerary, was dedicated to Hyakinthos, the second and third to Apollo, with the musical and sacrificial festivities already mentioned. This division is emphasized by Pausanias, who explains that before making the sacrifice (θυσία: sacrifice to an immortal) to Apollo, a sacrifice (ἐναγίζουσι: sacrifice to a mortal hero) was made to Hyakinthos within the tomb itself. [282]

The separation of the two supernatural beings, one a god, the other a hero, is also present in the myths associated with the Hyakinthia, each having his own character and function.

One of the scenes on the tomb of Hyakinthos represents Demeter, Kore and Hephaistos, the Moirai and the Seasons, along with Aphrodite, Athena, and Artemis leading the hero and his sister Polyboia, depicted as a young virgin (ἔτι παρθένον), up to the sky. [283] This relief probably dates from approximately the same period as the statue of Apollo, the pedestal of which was the tomb of Hyakinthos. It is at least not earlier than the middle of the sixth century when Bathycles constructed and sculpted the throne that served as support for the statue. This ascension scene of Hyakinthos and of his sister Polyboia to Olympus represents the final event in the legendary history of the two heroes. The most ancient form of the myth is given in a brief allusion in Euripides' {179|180} Helen and tells how Apollo accidentally killed Hyakinthos in competing with him at throwing the discus. [284] Some sources, all from the Hellenistic period, add that Hyakinthos was the beloved of Apollo. [285] Most interpreters of the Hyakinthia see in this later addition of the love of the god for the hero a proof of the gradual absorption of the originally independent cult of Hyakinthos into that of Apollo. By turning the hero from an adult deity into a young effeminate lover, the myth of Hyakinthos would have been made banal and reduced to a sheer motif of Alexandrian literariness. [286] True, Pausanias in describing the reliefs on the tomb says that Hyakinthos wore a beard, whereas later, Nicias, a sculptor at the end of the fourth century, depicted him in the flower of adolescence looking like Apollo's Ganymede. [287] But it is generally overlooked that Pausanias also notes that Polyboia on the relief looks like an adolescent, and so it is likely either that Hyakinthos is wearing not his full adult beard, but his first youthful beard, as a young man about to become adult, or that he is taken to the sky as an adult. The myth thus seems to show Hyakinthos and Polyboia as adolescent heroes already during the Archaic period [288]

The existence at Knidos of an Artemis Hyakinthotrophos is an additional indication of the image of childhood and adolescence the hero must have {180|181} embodied. [289] On the other hand, the daughters (παῖδας) of Erechtheus, whom the Athenians sacrificed in order to rid their city of famine and plague sent by Zeus, were called Hyakinthides. A later version of the myth probably took the term literally and turned the daughters of Erechtheus into the daughters of Hyakinthos, displacing the latter, one knows not why, from Sparta to Athens. This designation, however, probably referred to a function of the girls in an adolescent ritual. The ritual character of the denomination Hyakinthides is all the more probable in that in Euripides' Erechtheus, Athena declares that she will give to the sacrificed virgins the name of Ὑακινθίδες θεαί and that the Athenians will honor them every year with sacrifices and choral dances performed by young girls (παρθένων [χορεύ]μασιν). The name Orthaia assigned to one of them possibly means that they represented hypostases of Artemis in the same way as Oupis and Hekaerge, the young Hyperboreans worshipped at Delos. [290]

In spite of the ambiguities, the various elements surrounding the figure of the Amyklaian hero sketch out a myth and a cult of adolescence. One cannot deny a priori that Hyakinthos was honored in the beginning as an adult. But the scene on his tomb and the text of Euripides' Helen persuade me to believe that since the eighth century at any rate, as the Hyakinthia developed as a Spartan rather than a local festival, Hyakinthos is represented with adolescent features.

However, the funerary aspects of the cult caused Rohde to classify the cult with other rituals for chthonic divinities. Following him, Nilsson emphasizes the joyful character of the second day of the festival and sees a cult invoking the forces of vegetation. He makes it a spring festival, the Spartan equivalent of the Athenian Thargelia. Brelich, struck by the contrast between the mourning of the first day and the joy of the second, stresses the structural aspect of the contrast and sees it as the sign of transition from one order to another, thus making the Hyakinthia an initiation rite and a feast of renewal. And Brulé, comparing the {181|182} Lacedaemonian festival with the Great Panathenaia at Athens, sees in both of them festivals of renovation of the whole civic community. [291]

This contrast between the funerary sacrifice to Hyakinthos and the joyful rituals offered to Apollo is surely central to any interpretation of the festival of the Hyakinthia. Viewed as the necessary succession of two ritual phases in the same festival, it seems to translate a sort of passage from death to life. If one accepts Brelich's initiatory interpretation, which seems to explain the presence of Apollo, the Hyakinthia could be the final ceremony of a process of tribal initiation. From the annihilation of the old order, from death and mourning, we pass to a new life marked by the joy of resurrection. This process is dramatized in the myth of Hyakinthos: the youth, killed by Apollo, the god of adolescence, in a competition of discus throwing, consequently in an adolescent exercise, is carried off to the sky where he takes on the new status of hero. After a short period of death, he is reborn and begins a new life with his sister Polyboia. The Hyakinthia may have been the annual ritual repetition of this mythological drama, which provided the festival's significance.

There are many rites in the Hyakinthia which could be seen as a celebration of the end of initiation for young citizens in Sparta. It has been said that the paean to Apollo could be sung before or after a trial representing some sort of danger, as a hymn of propitiation or gratitude. It would then take its place after a successful outcome of the trial. In addition, the children with their musical and choral performances would prove to the assembled city what they had learned during the period of initiation. The local and traditional character of the songs and dances stood in direct relation with the past of the city that the children thus revitalized at each festival. These features of 'spectacle' and 'public' also define the children riding on horseback through the theater and the girls in procession riding on the kannathra. In spite of the conjectural character of these suggestions, I would not be surprised if the spectacle mentioned by Polycrates as a high point in the second day of festivities was actually a presentation to the townspeople of the new boy and girl initiates. As Hyakinthos and Polyboia, the young Lacedaemonians were born again on the second day to a new life, for which they expressed their thanks to Apollo. Their imminent integration into the adult community was of interest to one and all, hence, as Polycrates says, the town emptied itself entirely on the occasion of the spectacle. {182|183}

A comparison of the food eaten in the ritual banquets during the Hyakinthia and the Athenian Pyanopsia offers a striking parallel for the interpretation I have just put forward. Polemon says that, in additon to the goats sacrificed to Apollo, the Spartan citizens at Amyklai ate special bread resembling a cake made of oil and honey known as ἐγκρίς, pieces of cheese, sausage, and blood sausage, dried fruits including figs, beans, and green beans, and some sources add black broth (ζωμός). [292] In the Pyanopsia, one of the central rites consisted in eating a sweet porridge made of grains and vegetables. Also, the eiresione carried on this occasion in honor of the god Apollo was decorated with figs, bread rolls, cakes, and little jars containing honey, oil, and wine. [293] Certainly, in and of itself, this food has no meaning; however, appearing simultaneously in the same meal and in the context of an Apollonian ritual, they are charged with significance. In the Pyanopsia festival, itself named for a soup of grains and vegetables eaten on this occasion, the food symbolized the panspermia at the end of the harvest in October. Although there is no text to support it, one could be tempted to attribute to the food eaten on the second day of the Hyakinthia an analogous significance, in which case the κοπίς of the Hyakinthia, because of the consumption of the fruits of the earth produced during the summer, would mark the end of the harvest season. [294] {183|184}

The analogy between the Hyakinthia and the Pyanopsia is not limited to food, which is significant on one level, nor to agricultural topics. I have indicated that the Pyanopsia could have been interpreted as a final rite in the initiation process of adolescents insofar as it is linked to the myth of Theseus' return from Crete with his young companions. This would explain why the rite has been perceived since antiquity as an act of thanksgiving to Apollo for having protected Theseus and his companions who had escaped from the Cretan labyrinth. [295] This interpretation of the Pyanopsia would correspond to the initiatory value I gave to the presentation of the adolescents to the townspeople, and to the transition from a period concerned with death to a state of renewed life found in both the myth of Hyakinthos and the two contrasting phases of the Spartan Hyakinthia. [296]

Once more, the post-war publications of papyri shed new light on the poet Alcman and give us reasons, although slight and subject to discussion, to connect his name with the festival of the Hyakinthia. The same fragment of an hypomnema, containing several lines of the poem in which the choregos Agesidamos and the chorus of Dymainai appear, reproduces a few supplementary lines, in support of a discussion of the poet's Lydian origins, where the words Amyklai, near the Eurotas and Atarnides can be read. These lines begin with the feminine ἄκουσα, and it is very probable that the poem was sung by a chorus of young girls; the chorus might have been situated at Amyklai and might be describing its own activity there, or it might be describing another female chorus singing at Amyklai (ἄκουσα τᾶν ἀηδ[όνων). [297] Whether this fragment is by {184|185} Alcman or not—the attribution of the poem depends on how one interprets the first words of the commentary—the commentator certainly used these lines as proof of the compatibility of Alcman's foreign origins and his activity as chorus-master of the girls and boys (διδάσκαλος τῶν θυγατέρων καὶ ἐφή[βω]ν) of Sparta, preparing civic choruses (πατρίο[ις] χοροῖς). One can deduce that the fragment gave the example of a poem in which Alcman describes himself or is described as a foreigner, and is linked to a chorus engaged in a typical Spartan festival. In the hypomnema the festival is called the Hyakinthia; as regards Alcman's name, I suggest it can be seen in the Ἀταρνίδα in line 15. [298] Foreign poet, but one involved in the civic and religious life of Sparta, Alcman seems to have been active in both the festivals of Artemis Karyatis and the Hyakinthia. I shall return to the pedagogical role the poet seems to have played for the chorus, according to the papyrus commentary.

Although no female chorus is involved in the cult honoring the Leukippides, the association of the eleven Dionysiades with the two sisters in the cult of Dionysus Kolonatas offers an invitation to clear up the problems arising from the myths and the cult associated with the ambiguous figures of these twin cult figures —ambiguous because both myth and cult place these two and their priestesses among the young girls and among the married women.

First, the cult: the Leukippides, Hilaeira and Phoibe, had a temple in the precincts of Sparta, in a quarter situated, according to Pausanias, near the Limnaion. The priestesses of this cult, also called Leukippides and probably also numbering two, are young girls, παρθένοι. The figure of Leda should, in a way, be associated with this cult, or her daughter Helen, since on view in the temple of the twins was the egg brought forth by the heroine. [299]

In addition, the priestesses of the Leukippides were associated with the cult of Dionysus and the group of eleven servants of this cult, called the Dionysiades. The Spartan Dionysus had his principal sanctuary in the center of the town, not {185|186} far from the temples of Apollo Karneios and Athena and Zeus Amboulioi, on the site called Kolona (the hill), which gave the god his epiclesis Kolonatas. [300]

It is difficult to determine what the cult of the Leukippides Hilaeira and Phoibe consisted of. The only indication of a ritual practice is given by the chorus in Euripides' Helen, quoted with regard to the festival of the Hyakinthia. Here the chorus evokes the meeting of Helen with the Leukippides on her return to Sparta. They describe the meeting as taking place either among the choruses on the banks of the Eurotas, or in front of the temple of Athena, or during the nocturnal festivities of the Hyakinthia. Leaving aside the festival at Amyklai, the two other places have been respectively identified with the Dromos, the ritual function of which I discuss below, and the temple of Athena Khalkioikos, which was the main cult site for the goddess with the blue-green eyes at Sparta. [301] The scene evoked by the chorus takes place in mythical time, and it is probable that the Leukippides celebrated in song are the cult figures themselves and not their priestesses. The evocation of the Leukippides on the Dromos at any rate confirms the connection with the cult of Helen, hinted at by Leda's egg laid on the roof of the temple.

We are better informed about the Spartan cult of Dionysus. According to Pausanias, this cult served as a framework for two different practices: on the one hand, a double sacrifice made by the Dionysiades and the Leukippides to the anonymous hero who introduced Dionysus into the city and to Dionysus himself, and on the other, a footrace (δρόμου ἀγῶνα) in which the eleven Dionysiades competed.

There have been numerous conjectures as to the identity of the pre-Dionysiac hero honored on the hill of Kolona at the same time as Dionysus. In line with the different suggestions as to the father of the Leukippides, the names of Phoibos, Leukippos, and Helios have been put forward, [302] but the oldest version of the myth of the Leukippides, reported in the Cypria, makes these adolescents the daughters of Apollo. This is the version we could use in order to {186|187} identify the hero honored at Kolona. It is quite probable that he assumed an Apollonian character. [303]

As for the footrace, it could be compared with two others. First, two glosses of Hesychius speak of a race run by young Spartan girls (παρθένοι); one of them explicitly names them Dionysiades, adding that the race took place during the Dionysia. [304] Second, we have seen that at Olympia the college of sixteen women of Elis had to organize, among other things, a race for separate age groups of girls which took place during the Heraia. [305] This race, run by girls, as was that of the Dionysiades, took place in the context of a cult for an adult god. It probably had the same function of adolescent initiation into adult life and into marriage as the rite of the chorus of Physkoa, also organized by the college of sixteen Eleans and performing at Elis, on the occasion of the Thyia dedicated to Dionysus. The race of the Spartan Dionysiades might represent the ritual and the civilized counterpart of a mythical and bacchic race such as that of the Proitides or that of the Minyades. I have already discussed the transition of adolescence to the state of married woman embodied by these two myths of free-form races in the mountains which can be complementary to rituals celebrated by girls and women for Dionysus inside the civic space. [306]

The presence of the Leukippides, the priestesses of the two adolescent divinities Hilaeira and Phoibe, in the cult of Dionysus, the god of adult women, is somewhat contradictory. The same contrast between adolescence and adulthood is found in the legends associated with the mythical figures of the Leukippides. Described by Euripides and Pausanias as young girls (κόραι, παρθένοι), the Leukippides were venerated near Argos as mothers (μητέρες) at the same time as the Dioskouroi whose wives they were. [307] The apparently contradictory semantic features of the Argive cult of the Leukippides send us back to the very large and complex myth surrounding the two divinities in Lacedaemonia, in which they appear both as adolescents and as married women.

In discussing the myth of Helen's abduction, I mentioned the differing versions of the Leukippides myth which are connected with the events of their {187|188} abduction by the Tyndaridai and their marriage with these figures. [308] The oldest version of the legend has been reconstructed and corresponds to the version partly present in the Cypria and in Pindar, and it is found narrated in Lycophron. In this version, the Apharetidai laugh at the Dioskouroi during a banquet given by the latter on Paris' journey to Sparta, because they carried off the daughters of Leukippos (of Apollo in the version of the Cypria) and married them without giving their father a gift (τῶν κορῶν ἁρπαγεισῶν ἄνευ ἕδνων). Cut to the quick, the Dioskouroi steal cattle from the sons of Aphareus for a gift. Then comes the famous fight between the Tyndaridai and the Apharetidai, related by Pindar in the Tenth Nemean. In the most recent form of the myth, the Leukippides, promised to the sons of Aphareus, were on the contrary abducted by the Tyndaridai, who had been invited to the wedding banquet of the Messenian "men" and the Spartan "women." A lesser known version has the Dioskouroi abduct the Leukippides in order to marry them (ἁρπάσαντες ἔγημαν) and father two children.

The event common to these different versions is that the abduction of the Leukippides results in their marriage to the Dioskouroi. The abduction does not have the fatal consequences present in the myths associated with the festivals of Artemis Limnatis or Karyatis. Abduction here is not equivalent to rape, nor does it mean the death of the young girls, but a regular union with the heroes who protected the city. The connection between this and the celebrated Spartan custom of the fiance abducting his future wife before marrying her is evident. [309] For once the myth seems to be the direct reflection of the institutional reality. But the significance of the myth as regards marriage goes beyond this immediate connection with the social referent.

Among the figurative representations of the mythical episodes of the Leukippides mentioned by Pausanias, the scene of their abduction seems to have drawn as much attention as their marriage with the sons of Tyndareus. [310] It is surely not by chance that in Sparta the two scenes of the abduction of the Leukippides given by Pausanias were to be found on the bronze parts of the temple of Athena Khalkioikos and on the famous throne of Apollo at Amyklai in the sanctuary where the Hyakinthia were celebrated. These two sanctuaries were associated with female adolescence. Furthermore, two abduction scenes, one {188|189} on a krater dating from around 440, and one on a hydria of Meidias from around 410, are a significant addition to the literary evidence of this myth. [311]

It is difficult to identify all the characters on the krater. The center of the frieze has three young girls who could represent a chorus or a group of two surrounding the third daughter of Leukippos, Arsinoe. From this point, two quadrigae move away, each carrying one of the Tyndaridai and one of the Leukippides. A woman waving farewell and a seated man could be the parents of the Leukippides, while a person standing behind one of the quadrigae and holding laurel branches is certainly Apollo. The other quadriga is accompanied by a woman with the same coiffure as the woman identified as the mother of the Leukippides. Is this Artemis, complementing the figure of Apollo on the other side of the scene, or an adult divinity? The interpreter can only conjecture. The Dioskouroi are represented as young men with their first beard and are also crowned with laurel. There is no hint of violence in the scene, and the abduction seems to be completely accepted by the characters present.

In the scene painted by Meidias, however, the abduction takes place under the eyes of Aphrodite, of Peitho, of Agave, and of Zeus, who are gathered round an altar. The two quadrigae of the Dioskouroi are placed above the deities on each side of a statue of an unidentifiable goddess. If Zeus and Aphrodite watch the scene unmoved, Peitho flees the abduction, which symbolizes the opposite of what she stands for: convincing the loved one to accept her lover's seductive advances. In spite of uncertainty about some of the identities in these scenes, the presence of Apollo in one of the friezes and that of Zeus and Aphrodite in the other shows that the abduction of the Leukippides on a religious level oscillates between the domain of adolescence and the semantic values of the adult world.

This oscillation may be explained by the fact that the myth seizes the moment when a young girl, taken from her parents and her circle of friends, submits to becoming an adult through marriage. [312] Incorporated in a succession {189|190} of narrative elements of differing semantic value, the abduction of the Leukippides no longer signifies the entrance into the period of adolescence, as in the myths behind the cults of Artemis Limnatis or Karyatis, but rather the exit. It is not marked negatively as a sign of death, an initiatory death, but positively as the sign of accession to a new life.

After this, it is easier to see what place the two heroines play in the cult of Dionysus Kolonatas. On the point of becoming adult, they have the right to be initiated into the mysteries of Dionysus. If we accept the suggestion that the hero they honor before sacrificing to Dionysus is a hypostasis of Apollo, if not Apollo himself, one could even propose that the Apollonian pre-sacrifice was the last honor given to adolescence before passing to the adult cult of Dionysus. Morphologically, the structure of the ritual of the cult would be identical to that of the Hyakinthia, in which the sacrifice to Hyakinthos represented the moment of annihilation before recognition by Apollo and the civic community of a completed adolescence. But, semantically, the cult appears in a different light; the myth behind it suggests that it was addressed to young girls ready to marry, or to young wives who had just been carried off. In relation to the Hyakinthia it stands at a later point in the development of women: if the Hyakinthia marked the end of adolescence and the completion of tribal initiation, the cult of Dionysus Kolonatas could represent one of the rituals marking the entrance of young initiates to the condition of adult women and their full acceptance of this condition.

We should note that a lyric fragment attributed to Bacchylides and entitled The Leukippides shows women, probably the Leukippides themselves, forming a chorus in honor of Aphrodite. [313] The total lack of context prevents us from knowing whether this is a mythical scene (Leukippides as heroines) or a ritual (Leukippides as priestesses). The only parallel pertinent to the relationship between Aphrodite and the Leukippides is the abduction of the latter, in which Aphrodite appears at the side of Zeus. The devotion of the Leukippides to the goddess of sexual maturity is an additional sign of their ambiguous position between adolescence and adulthood. This recalls the importance assumed by Ariadne-Aphrodite in the story of Theseus, with its initiatory flavor.

The link established between certain cults and Alcman's work applies to the Leukippides. In a very brief fragment of the hypomnema mentioned above, some lines representing the end of the commentary of a poem contain the name of {190|191} Phoibe and perhaps also that of Apollo. [314] It is of course impossible to know whether this allusion refers to the myth of the Leukippides or to their cult.

Like the Leukippides, white mares, the Tyndaridai, white stallions, are both adolescent and mature men, the incarnation of youth, but a youth already adult. [315] Protectors of the town of Sparta, warriors who gave martial songs to the Laconian warriors, they appear under the same epiclesis in the cult of Zeus and Athena Amboulioi; significantly, however, they are not associated either with Artemis or with Apollo. [316] Therefore they belong to the realm of adult citizens, soldier citizens. Their adulthood appears again in their relationship to marriage.

A mythical tradition going back to Alcman portrays them as excellent horse-tamers, [317] and this must surely be taken at its word, given the numerous illustrations of the twin heroes on horseback. There is also a metaphorical meaning: the Dioskouroi taming the mare-Leukippides. By marrying them, they turn the young girls into tamed women, in other words adult women. This idea of marriage as taming is apparent in a whole series of metaphors incorporating the image of the mare, contrasting the unmarried girl and the young wife. I shall return to this in the following chapter. For now it suffices to say that in accordance with the illustration on the Lisbon krater where the Dioskouroi have light beards, they represent young recently married men. Young soldiers and young husbands, they are the model of the Spartan ephebe who has just become a citizen, just as the Leukippides stand for the young initiate taking on the status of the adult married woman.

In Sparta, Helen has the same ambiguous quality of both adolescence and adulthood as do the Leukippides. The story of Helen's abduction by Theseus from the temple of Artemis Orthia shows us the child or adolescent girl, while {191|192} the legend of her abduction by Paris reveals the adult woman, wife of the king of Sparta. This ambivalence is reflected in the religious realm; at her first abduction, she was serving Artemis, at her second, she is under the control of Aphrodite and of Peitho. There is of course no way to justify historically the seeming contradiction between these two myths, [318] which has more to do with the double aspect of this figure central to Lacedaemonian legendary tradition.

The famous Laconian evocation at the end of the Lysistrata depicts the dances of young Spartan girls (κόραι) who, like mares (πῶλοι) and Bacchants, toss their hair and disport themselves along the banks of the Eurotas. Under the aegis of Amyklaian Apollo, Athena Khalkioikos and the Tyndaridai, these dances are led by Helen, the daughter of Leda (Λήδας παῖς), the divine and resplendent choregos (ἁγνὰ χοραγὸς εὐπρεπής), whose role has been previously analyzed.

This description is similar to the one given by the chorus in Euripides' Helen of the return of the heroine to Sparta. The dances of young girls (κόρας) in which Helen, exiled in Egypt, would have taken part, took place, as we have mentioned with reference to the Leukippides, near the Eurotas, where they are associated precisely with those twin goddesses, in front of the temple of Athena Khalkioikos or during the Hyakinthia, which is in the precinct of the sanctuary of Amyklaian Apollo. Thus Apollo, Athena, and the Dioskouroi/Leukippides are the divinities associated in two great classical texts with the choral dances in which Helen participates. [319]

These two literary descriptions cannot be used to reconstitute a cult of Helen, but they contain several points in common with the picture that the twelve chorus-members singing the Epithalamium of Helen by Theocritus make of their activity as girls among other adolescents. [320] The chorus imagines the young Lacedaemonians gamboling on the banks of the Eurotas and forming a troop (νεολαία) of four-times-sixty adolescents, all of the same age. There are no dances in this passage, only a footrace (δρόμος). Among these girls Helen occupies a privileged position: she spins and weaves better than the others and can celebrate Artemis and Athena on the lyre better than anyone else. However, adds the chorus that sings her praises, Helen is now the young wife of Menelaus. At this point in the text there is a significant break (marked by the passage from {192|193} she to you, then by the μέν ... δέ of lines 38ff.): the chorus evokes the past, then moves on to the present. As a young wife, Helen no longer joins in the activities of adolescence and has withdrawn from the group of which she was the erstwhile jewel. This is the reason why, as the movement of Theocritus' text clearly shows, as soon as the new status of married woman embraced by the heroine is mentioned, the chorus of young girls express their intention of honoring her memory for the first time in a cult. On the very spot of their former races, adolescent girls will celebrate Helen by dedicating to her a lotus wreath and pouring a libation of oil on the roots of the plane-tree which will henceforth be the heroine's tree and will mark the site of her cult.

Thus, at the moment when Helen's adolescence is a thing of the past and she has become an adult woman, a mythical value is given to her activity as an adolescent and it becomes a sort of aition giving rise to the ritual destined to perpetuate her memory. I shall now investigate whether there is a similarity between the information Theocritus gives about the cult and what we know from other sources. But before studying the rites of this cult, I want first to establish its locality.

Pausanias gives us some ideas as to where the Spartan cult of Helen took place. South of the town was the Dromos where Spartan young men (νέοι) trained for races; it was under the protection of the Dioskouroi. The Dromos was next to the place known as the Platanistas, so called for the plane-trees planted there. The water surrounding this place, says Pausanias, gave it the aspect of an island, and here the ritual fights of ephebes, instituted by Lykourgos, were held. Before a fight began, the ephebes sacrificed in a neighboring sanctuary called Phoibaion and ended the rituals in the Platanistas. Still according to Pausanias, the sanctuary of Helen was near the Platanistas beside the tomb of Alcman, and we shall see that the rituals practiced by the neoi and the adolescents that provided the framework for the sanctuary are not unimportant when it comes to determining the function of Helen's cult. [321]

However, Helen as cult object was also present on the opposite bank of the Eurotas at Therapnai in the precinct of Menelaus where she had been buried along with her husband. [322] These seemingly disparate elements can be organized into a geographical whole. The Dromos was probably on the southeast side of {193|194} the city towards the plain of the Eurotas, maybe near the spot where the Magoula empties into the river. This could coincide with the description of the Platanistas as a place surrounded by water and would also be consistent with the situation of Therapnai on the hills facing the depression at the southeast of Sparta on the opposite bank of the Eurotas. [323] It seems then that Helen had two cult sites in Lacedaemonia—one near the Platanistas, the other in the Menelaion in Therapnai. I shall now examine the meanings of these cults and their rituals.

The cult site of the "Helen of the Plane-Tree," for which Theocritus gives the aition, can with certainty be identified with the sanctuary of Helen seen by Pausanias in the vicinity of the Platanistas. [324] The geographical proximity of the sanctuary and the island in the Eurotas or in the Magoula also has an obvious linguistic correspondence: Helen of the Plane-Tree belongs to the Platanistas (plane-trees).

Theocritus' text is a particularly valuable source for the ritual. We have seen that the heroine, to whom the youthful Lacedaemonians render homage by hanging a wreath on the plane-tree dedicated to her, is not the wife Menelaus carried off but the adolescent who shone among the four-times-sixty girls running along the banks of the Eurotas. This race, symbolized in the figure of Helen as a young girl, becomes the mythical model of similar races; and these agones, repeating the one in which the heroine excelled, assume a ritual function by recalling Helen and her original race. Since Theocritus locates this race on the banks of the Eurotas and at the same time situates the cult rendered to Helen in the very same place, its status as mythical paradigm and its ritual function are assured (lines 22f. and 39). The race probably took place in the Dromos, very near Helen's sanctuary, and it was certainly part of the ritual, along with other practices described by Theocritus, associated with Helen's cult. [325] {194|195}

The older authorities, Aristophanes and Euripides, associate Helen not with a race but with adolescent dances which also took place near the Eurotas. Such a contradiction between Athenian classical authors on one side and Theocritus the Alexandrian poet on the other can be explained in two ways. First, historically, one can imagine that Aristophanes' and Euripides' descriptions refer back to an ancient period in which the lifestyle of Spartan adolescent girls and women was not yet modelled on that of men. Theocritus emphasizes that Helen's companions anoint themselves before the race like men (line 23), and Pausanias mentions the detail that the races they trained for took place in the Dromos. Gymnastic exercises of a masculine order would have been substituted for the original choral dances among these girls. [326] The other explanation is synchronic and admits the coexistence of dances and the race. The information we have is too meager to allow a definite decision. A solution will be suggested in the following chapter.

It is, however, certain that the Helen venerated in the cult of the Platanistas is still a young girl, although one who is about to marry. She thus stands in the same relation to adolescence as do the Leukippides. [327] And it is with these heroines that Euripides associates Helen in the description of the dances on the banks of the Eurotas. Aristophanes compares the girls for whom Helen is the choregos to mares (ἇτε πῶλοι ταὶ κόραι, line 1309). As I have remarked and as we shall see later, the image of the mare being mastered illustrates the relation of feminine adolescence to marriage which, conceived as taming, ends adolescence and subdues the woman.

Aristophanes also compares these young girls dancing with Helen to Bacchants. This is not an identification, nor is it sufficient to turn the cult of Helen of the Plane-Tree into a Dionysiac cult or to liken the race talked of by Theocritus to the race of the Dionysiades; as I have already said, this race, like that organized at Olympia by the college of the sixteen women of Elis, probably had a prematrimonial character. [328] On the other hand, the association of Helen with Amyklaian Apollo and Athena Khalkioikos in Aristophanes and Euripides is significant. To the extent that the Hyakinthia can be interpreted as a festival of {195|196} the end of initiation, [329] the presence of Helen in this festival would make her a girl newly initiated but ready for marriage. Finally, the association with Athena Khalkioikos, to the extent that her cult can be defined in the absence of information, links the figure of Helen to the civic qualities of the virgin goddess enthroned on the acropolis. Athena is a young girl, but warrior and protector of the city, in other words a girl who, as Helen, has passed through adolescence and has been admitted to the body of citizens.

The association of Helen with her brothers the Dioskouroi, the preeminent protectors of the town of Sparta, suggests analogies that might confirm this interpretation. However, the fact that the girls led by Helen played in the Dromos on the spot reserved for the races of the neoi, where the Dioskouroi, mythical models for young citizens, also probably ran, according to Aristophanes, could constitute another hint: the girls emulating Helen would have similar qualities to the neoi, the young, newly initiated citizens not yet completely integrated into the adult order. [330]

Carried over the Eurotas to the hills of Therapnai and combined with the cult of Menelaus, Helen's cult changes its character. [331] There she is no longer a young girl, but a married woman; her cult is not that of a hero now, but of a goddess. There is only one reference to this cult in an anecdote of Herodotus concerning Ariston the king of Sparta. [332] The temple of Helen at Therapnai, {196|197} easily identified in the text of Herodotus since the author locates it specifically above the Phoibaion, is associated with the history of the most beautiful woman in Sparta (γυνὴ καλλίστη). This woman, married, since she is the wife of a friend of Ariston, and desired by the king, did not always have outstanding beauty. According to Herodotus she was the ugliest of the children in the city. However, her nurse took pity on her ugliness and presented her each day at the temple of Helen. One fine day, Helen, in woman's guise (γυναῖκα), came to the nurse and carressed the head of the child who, from that moment on, was transformed. In this way, says Herodotus, the child reached marriageable age (ἐς γάμου ὥρην ἀπικομένην) and married the friend of Ariston. Subsequently, Ariston stole her from her husband, just as Helen was taken from Menelaus by Paris.

In this story, Helen appears as the goddess who conferred beauty on female children. Beauty is not conferred for itself, but for the purpose of attracting a husband. Thus Helen made children into what she herself was, the most beautiful of women and the most beautiful of wives. [333] In the traditional system of education of Athenian girls, as described by Aristophanes, beauty was the {197|198} supreme quality characterizing the complete young woman. [334] The meaning here is the same: the change from ugliness to beauty is a metaphor for the change from the state of sexual neutrality to becoming the object of male desire. As Pausanias says, in relating the same anecdote as Herodotus, the ugliest girl (παρθένον αἰσχίστην) becomes the most beautiful woman (γυναικῶν τὸ εἶδος καλλίστην). [335]

The Helen of Therapnai thus becomes not so much the simple model of a married woman like Hera, but the woman whose beauty equals that of Aphrodite, who, as seductress and instigator of adult sexual desire, also intervenes in matters of marriage. Thus in all melic poetry and particularly in that of Sappho, Helen is the incarnation of seductive beauty. But such beauty cannot be understood as the irresistible power of love that belongs to Aphrodite. [336] {198|199}

It is within this religious context, I think, that one should interpret the beauty contests for women, held especially on Lesbos. [337] The reason they were not for adolescents but for adult women, and on Lesbos took place under the auspices of Hera, is that acquiring the feature 'beauty' marked the end of puberty and a readiness for marriage. It is therefore probable that the women who competed were under the spell of Aphrodite and ready to embrace adult status through marriage. Similarly, one can understand the presence of a (possible) representation of Helen as the choregos of a chorus of young girls on the metopes of Hera's temple at Paestum. [338] The figure of the young choregos stands between the adolescence of the chorus and the adulthood of Hera.

However, one is justified in wondering if there is not a contradiction between the idea of 'beauty' attached to the woman ready for marriage and my statements concerning the role of the choregos, whose qualities as leader of a chorus of young girls also included the same feature. [339] Rather than a contradiction, I see here a new characteristic that can be attributed to the choregos, namely, that this young girl with the feature 'beauty' stands apart from the rest of the chorus and is at the point of being integrated into adult society through marriage. It is certainly not by chance that Helen appears as the incarnation of the choregos in the texts I have cited. In the same way, Antheia and Nausicaa, marked by the feature 'beauty' in their roles as choregos, are girls for whom marriage is imminent.

I have said that in the myth of Helen's abduction by Theseus, the Tyndaridai are the saviors of the heroine. This association of the two brothers with their sister reappears on the level of cult, since the Dioskouroi, present everywhere in Sparta, were honored especially in places near where Helen was honored; for example on the Dromos, where the twin gods, worshipped as "starters," probably presided over the races of the neoi, or at the Phoibaion not far from Therapnai, where the Dioskouroi had a temple in the enclosure of which the ephebes made sacrifice, as I have mentioned, before going to contend at the Platanistas. [340] {199|200} According to a fragmentary commentary on a poem by Alcman, the Dioskouroi were even honored at the same time as Menelaus and Helen at Therapnai; however, this cultic association seems to have happened only in the Archaic period, since only Alcman and Pindar mention it. [341] For an unknown reason, the cult of the Tyndaridai was moved in order to be situated near the Phoibaion and on the Dromos. Whatever the reason, the presence of the Dioskouroi at the races of young citizens and at the fights of the ephebes is not surprising, since in Sparta as in the rest of Greece the twin heroes were regarded as models for the young warrior and for the young champion in sports. The inventors of military music, the Dioskouroi administered, according to Pindar, all the games organized in Sparta εὐρύχορος. [342] Although this cannot serve as proof, one could say that just as the double cult of Helen was addressed to young girls and at the same time to married women or to women about to marry, the Dioskouroi presided over contests intended for adolescents as well as for men who, as young soldiers and as young citizens, had just ceased to be ephebes. The sons and daughter of Tyndareus all seem to promise a transition whose masculine aspect expresses itself in the accession to citizenship and to the status of soldier, and whose feminine counterpart is embodied in the acquisition of full sexual maturity which, denoted by the quality of beauty, has its corollary in the status of wife and of mother according to the usual Greek gender distinctions.

The excavations undertaken at the beginning of the century at the site of Therapnai permit us to reconstruct the large outlines of the history of the Menelaion. [343] This site, like that of Amyklai and unlike that of Artemis Orthia, was already inhabited during the Mycenaean period. It was probably used, already in that period, as a setting for a sanctuary. The number of ex-voto, particularly lead figurines, found in the sanctuary and going back to Laconian I {200|201} and II attests to the remarkable development of the cults of Helen and Menelaus that had to have happened during the seventh century, that is to say during the period when Alcman lived. This Archaic flourishing of the sanctuary at Therapnai is all the more significant in that these lead figurines are identical in form and content to the ex-voto figurines found on the site of the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. As for Orthia, the large majority of these figurines represents either armed men with the round hoplite shield, or women dressed in long chitons, winged or carrying wreaths in their hands. [344]

The identity of the ex-voto figurines offered to both the deities poses the problem of the relations between the two cults. It is impossible to assume that the cult of Artemis Orthia was specifically Spartan, imported by the Dorians and little by little replacing the one of Helen in the Menelaion. The number of ex- voto figurines found on the sites of the two cults is witness to their coexistence and their parallel vitality during the whole of the Archaic period. By substituting a structural explanation for the historical one, we could infer that the rituals for Helen in the Platanistas and at Therapnai extended the process of training the adolescents begun at the altar of Orthia. However, this continuity can only be seen through the rites of passage of youths: the cult of Helen showed itself to be essentially for women, while the cult of Orthia is difficult to define as a ritual probably for young girls. The only clue to the transition from the female cult of Orthia to that of Helen is furnished by Helen herself who was dancing in the sanctuary of Artemis when Theseus carried her off. [345] It is true that her young age offers chronological continuity, with adolescence in the cult at the Platanistas and adulthood at Therapnai, but the clue is too tenuous for certainty. Once again, our lack of information stymies us.

The new papyrus fragments of Alcman show us the poet being active at the Spartan festivals, including the cult of Helen at Therapnai. The fragment of a hypomnema already mentioned comments on a poem in which Menelaus, Helen, and the Dioskouroi were honored on the site of Therapnai. Another fragment from an indirect source speaks of the "holy sanctuary of well-fortified Therapnai." [346] This description was handed down by grammarians and quoted at the same time as the beginning of a song which perhaps belonged to the same poem and in which the chorus, or the poet, asks the Muse to sing (ἄρχε) for the maidens (παρσένοις) a new song. Here the feature 'to begin,' characteristic of the role of the Muses, is apparent. However, the connection between the two quotations is based only on their mention in the same context and on their corresponding metrical structure, so the interpreter has no authority to conclude, in spite of the temptation, the presence in the Menelaion of a chorus of maidens singing a partheneion composed by Alcman.

In this overview of Spartan rituals in which choruses of young girls play a role, most of the ritual practices I have examined are part of a formative process in the transition of future members of the city from childhood to adulthood. I have used the universal form of tribal initiation rites as a comparison with Laconian rituals, and some readers may consider this a mechanical application. Is this not a trick of interpretation? Is this procedure not basically a reductive analysis?

Since the rituals chosen depended on the presence of choral dances performed by girls or women, and since it was established that choral activity was essentially adolescent, it is natural that our attention has been focused on festivals preparing for or consecrating the transition of adolescents to maturity. There are, however, two great Spartan festivals which I have had to omit in order to remain faithful to the criteria chosen at the beginning (presence of choral dances by young girls), namely the Karneia and the Gymnopaidiai.

Here again, the omission is not haphazard. The Karneia, celebrated at the end of our August, was dedicated to Apollo Karneios. The rites lasted for nine days. We know at least three of them: a footrace for boys (νέοι) called σταφυλοδρόμοι, the grape-harvest runners; a ritual feast celebrated by adults (ἄνδρες) representing phratries divided into groups of nine in nine tents and acting as a μίμημα, an imitation, of the military agoge; musical competitions, the first winner of which was Terpander, and gymnastics competitions. [347] This festival was organized by young, not yet married citizens (ἄγαμοι). It was thus aimed at young men who had completed the different stages of the agoge and were due to be integrated into adult life by performing military service. The fact that Apollo Karneios had a sanctuary in the same place as Artemis Hegemone, near the Dromos, in the neighborhood of the temple of the Dioskouroi and the Graces, is significant: the Dromos, we should remember, was used as a running track for the neoi, the young adults. [348] The Kameia concerned young soldiers. Where the Hyakinthia mark the end of initiation with the presenting of the new initiates to the city, the Karneia, as Brelich points out, represent the integration of initiates to the adult life of the soldier and citizen. Girls probably have no place here. [349]

As for the Gymnopaidiai, the answer is less clear. According to the different sources we have, the choral performances in them were by ephebes (ἔφηβοι), children/adolescents and adults (παῖδες, ἄνδρες), children/adolescents, adults and old men (παῖδες, ἀκμάζοντες, γέροντες). [350] The evidence for the participation of children and adults [351] is given by the Laconian historian Sosibios, who is probably more trustworthy than the numerous later sources who see in the Gymnopaidiai a ritual only for children and adolescents. Their interpretation, which tends to be etymological, may have been influenced by the name of the ritual. In honor of Apollo, the choruses performed songs composed by the great poets of Archaic Sparta such as Thaletas, Alcman or Dionysodotos. Their dances took place on the agora, in the area called the Choros, the Dance Area, opposite the statues of Pythian Apollo, Artemis, and Leto.These choral performances certainly had a military significance, since a tradition began after the battle of Thyrea in 544 of singing paeans in honor of the fallen warriors. Brelich has pointed out the ritual element taken on by the constant struggle of the Spartans against the Argives for the possession of the frontier territory of Thyreatis. [352] The connection of the Gymnopaidiai with a war that was ritual and traditional rather than fortuitous suggests that this festival had its origins in the military training of citizen-soldiers. On the other hand, the analogy of this festival with the Arcadian Apodeixeis and the Endymatia of Argos, during which young citizens discarded their adolescent clothes to put on the costume of an adult, might suggest integration into the soldier's life of the recently inducted ephebes, a function similar to that of the Karneia. [353] Whatever role this ritual played, the elements I have mentioned have nothing to do with female adolescence. The presence of adult men, let alone old men, makes this a festival that goes far beyond the integration of future soldiers into adult life, and probably Apollo's presence there has more to do with his propitiatory function before a military campaign than with his role as protector of children and adolescents.

Other rites are only partially known, although they may have been important in ancient Sparta, for example the sacrifice offered by the king to Zeus Agetor before the departure of a military expedition, rites of a political character in honor of Athena Khalkioikos, or the festival celebrated for Poseidon at Cape Tainaros. [354] It is clear that Lacedaemonian religion was not focused entirely on the process of adolescent initiation. Nevertheless, those rites certainly impressed the ancients by their strangeness and resulted in a relative unevenness in our information about Laconian festivals.

An attempt to organize the rites examined here into a cult calendar leads to a relatively coherent pattern, but because of the often hypothetical interpretations I have given of these festivals, my synthesis can only be conjectural.

The reconstruction of rites marking the initiation cycle for Spartan girls begins with a large question mark. It would be tempting to place the start of the cycle in the rites dedicated to Artemis Orthia, and most of the evidence about this cult, generally spotty and contradictory as it is, indeed points in the direction of prepuberty; however, it is impossible to be more specific.

On the other hand, the two parallel cults of Artemis Limnatis and Artemis Karyatis very probably mark the beginning of puberty for young adolescents. By being situated on the confines of Spartan territory, these sanctuaries were all designed for the period of separation seen in all tribal initiation rites. The myths associated with these rites confirm this hypothesis to the extent that, with the refusal of adult sexuality and the onset of the moment of annihilation and death, they mark the separation of pubescent girls from childhood and their entry into a period of chaos and denial of both the old order and the new order of adulthood.

The rituals of the Hyakinthia, in contrast, mark the presentation to the citizens of the boys and girls who are the principal element, probably signifying the end of seclusion and tribal initiation. At any rate, this process seems to follow the sequence 'mourning—joy' which constitutes the structure of the festival. The completed process of initiation must be filled out with rites consecrating the integration of the initiates into the adult world. This is the role played by the cults of the Leukippides and Helen. It is significant that in Aristophanes, as in Euripides, these heroines are associated with Apollo Amyklaian, deity of adolescence, and with Athena Khalkioikos and the Tyndaridai, who embody the qualities of young citizens. Also, by their contact with the rites of Dionysus and their acquisition of the quality of beauty, a sign of the physical maturity characteristic of the cults of the Leukippides and Helen, young girls enter into possession of the features connected in Greece with the gender representation of the adult woman. These two cults thus stand at the axis between the end of initiation and the entry into the world of adults.

With the Tithenidia, the cycle, as it were, closes, since some of the girls, now adult, reappear as nurses of the newly born, future citizens. The closing of the cycle would be perfect if the nurses then brought their baby girls into the sanctuary of Artemis Korythalia; however there is no mention of this.

But the picture still lacks the ritual celebration of the moment of marriage. Under this aspect, the festivals celebrated in honor of the Leukippides and Helen play only a partial role for girls, in comparison with the boys' establishment as soldiers in the Karneia and perhaps the Gymnopaidiai. For girls, marriage seems to correspond exactly to boys' military service for the city. [355]

The presence to the north of the Spartan Acropolis of an ancient xoanon of Aphrodite-Hera, to which mothers made sacrifice when their daughters married, attests to the existence in Sparta of cult rites linked to the marriage ceremony. [356] It is tempting to bring this information together with the fragment of Alcman in which a girl or young woman offers a deity, identified from another text as a probable Hera, a wreath of ἐλίχρυσος and κύπειρος. [357] For the moment, it will suffice to remark that this rite has not been analyzed yet, for the reason that none of the sources associates it with choral dances. Nevertheless, it is the sign of the existence of ritual practices performed in relationship to the marriage ceremony, which, in ancient Greece, as now, had a private and above all occasional character preventing it from being included in a calendar of rituals. In Sparta, the secret abduction of the young bride withdrew the ceremony from the eyes of the public, where it generally resided in Greece.

My brief attempt at a synthesis shows the possibility, at least hypothetical, of reconstructing an initiation cycle for the future brides of the citizens. I shall now analyze its institutional forms and examine the education that adolescent girls received in Sparta.