Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

vi] The Year and the Seasons 185
cattle from the pastures, and summer when they were driven up
again to the hills somewhere about March. When and where
agriculture is important, the year opens with the season of
ploughing and sowing. The Greeks themselves had at first two,
not three, Horae. In early days it is not realized that the Seasons,
and with them the food-supply, depend on the Sun. The Seasons,
the Horae, are potencies, divinities in themselves, and there are
but two Seasons, the fruitful and the fruitless.
The year and the seasons derive then their value, as was
natural, from the food they bring. They are not abstractions,
divisions of time ; they are the substance, the content of time.
To make of eviavros a god, or even a daimon, seems to us, even
when he is seen to be not a year but a Year-Feast, a chilly
abstraction, and even the Horae as goddesses seem a little remote.
But to the Greeks, as we see abundantly on vase-paintings, their
virtue, their very being, was in the flowers and fruits they always
carry in their hands ; they are indistinguishable from the Charites,
the Gift- and Grace-Givers. The word Hora, it is interesting to
note 1
, seems at first to have been almost equivalent to Weather.
In a drought the Athenians, Philochoros 2 tells us, sacrificed to the
Horae, and on this occasion they boiled their meat and did not
roast it, thereby inducing the goddesses to give increase to their
crops by means of moderate warmth and seasonable rains. As
warders of Olympos it is theirs to ' throw open the thick cloud or
set it to 3.'
Athenaeus 4 has preserved for us a fragment of the fourth book
of the History of Alexandria by Kallixenos the Rhodian. In it
is described a great spectacle and procession exhibited by Ptolemy
Philadelphos in honour of Dionysos 5 . One group in the procession
is of interest to us. The procession was headed by Silenoi clad,
1 0. Gruppe, Gr. Myth. n. 1063, note 3. Dr Gruppe compares the Latin tempus,
tempestas, which again shows clearly the focus of the primitive mind on the
practical side of times and seasons.
2 Ap. Athen. xiv. 73 'A6r)vcuoi 5\ ws 7]