Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Pleasure and Leisure 267
Egypt, in honor of his deified father. The procession he arranged
under its auspices in 270 b.c.e. was one of the grandest events ever
celebrated in antiquity.
Each festival was a unique expression of worship, tailor-made to
the deity in whose honor it was held. A number of features, however,
were common to many: a procession to a deity’s shrine with
ritual stops along the way; the singing of hymns; the decorating of
a wooden object that embodied the deity’s power; athletic, musical,
and dramatic contests; and, finally, the most essential feature of
all—a blood sacrifice performed on an altar in front of the deity’s
shrine, followed by the distribution of meat among the priests and
worshipers.
Agricultural Festivals
Our knowledge of Greek festivals is not sufficiently detailed to
permit us to fathom the precise significance that they held for the
people who celebrated them. In general, the impulses that propelled
the Greeks to congregate and perform elaborate and complicated
rituals incorporated anxiety and fear on the one hand, relief
and gratitude on the other. The majority of Greeks lived precariously
between famine and surplus. Hardly surprisingly, therefore,
many of their festivals were designed to secure a regular supply
of foodstuffs, though we never gain a detailed insight into why
precisely the celebrants did what they did. Indeed, much of what
they did seems quite baffling to us.
One of the most puzzling was the Thesmophoria, a fall festival
conducted exclusively by women. This was held all over the Greek
world in honor of Demeter, goddess of the grain. The culminating
ritual involved throwing the bodies of sacrificial pigs into snakeinfested
pits. Three days later, women were lowered into the pits to
retrieve the pigs’ putrefied remains, which were then placed on an
altar and mixed with seed grain. This bizarre rite, which was perhaps
seen as a kind of enactment of Persephone’s descent to Hades,
was evidently intended to facilitate the germination of the grain,
but why it took this precise form is a complete mystery.
Other agricultural festivals included the Oschophoria, in which
two youths carried branches known as ôschoi laden with grapes;
the Haloa, held in honor of Demeter in mid-winter, when cakes
in the form of phalluses were eaten; the Rural Dionysia, held in
honor of Dionysos, during which a giant phallus was carried aloft;