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

vn] The King as Year- God 223
it bore some fixed relation to the year, and to the seasonal cycle
of vegetable life in nature. In other words the term of office was
a 'year'—a term which, as we have seen (p. 189), may denote
a lunar or solar year or a longer period of two, four, or eight solar
years—a trieteris, penteteris, or ennaeteris. During this period,
long or short as it might be, the tenant of the office represented,
or rather was, the power which governed the rains of heaven and
the fruits of earth ; at the end of it he was either continued for
a new eniautos, or violently dispossessed by a successor. Further,
since the eniautos itself could be concretely conceived as a daimon
carrying the horn of plenty 1— the contents and fruits of the 'year'
in the more abstract sense—we may think of the temporary ' king
as actually being the eniautos-daimon or fertility spirit of his
'year.' When the year is fixed by the solar period, we get
festivals of the type of the Roman Saturnalia or the Greek
Kpovia (with which the Saturnalia were regularly equated in
ancient times), and the single combat appears as the driving
out of winter or of the dying year by the vigorous young spirit
of the New Year that is to come. It is as eniautos-daimon, not
at first as ' incarnate god ' or as king in the later political sense,
that the representative of the fertility powers of nature dies at
the hands of the New Year. In this combat we may see, in a
word, the essential feature of a Saturnalian or Kronian festival.
This view is supported by a curious feature, to which Mr Cook
calls attention, in the vase-painting of Salmoneus figured above on
p. 80. Salmoneus, the weather-king, arrayed, as we have seen,
with the attributes of the Olympic victor, wears on his left ankle
an unmistakable fetter. We may suspect, as Mr Cook remarks,
that this is part of his disguise as a would-be god, and it shows
that the god imitated is not Zeus, but the fettered Kronos, Kpov o?
7re8?;T7??. Once a year, at the Saturnalia, the statue of Saturn
slipped the woollen fetter with which it was bound throughout
the rest of the year 2 .
Hesiod 3 tells us that, after Kronos had vomited forth the
stone which he swallowed instead of his son, Zeus entering on his
1 See supra, p. 18fi, and infra, p. 285.
- Macrob. Sat. 1. vin. 5, Saturnum Apollodorus alligari ait per annum laneo
vinculo et solvi ad diem sibi festum, id est mense hoc Decembri. For the fettered
Kronos see Roscher, Lex., s.v. Krotios, col. 1467.
3 Theofj. 501. The lines are regarded by some editors as interpolated. For the
release of Kronos see Hesiod, Erga, 169 b (ed. Ez. 1902).
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