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

ix] The Stepterion 425
god. To celebrate the Python's death there is to be a Bouphonia.
The priestess with the sacred double-axe in her hand brings up
the bull. Apollo has cast aside his laurel-branch and is preparing
to chant a Paean to himself. Artemis looks on in the background.
Of much more importance than any monument of art is the
account we have from Plutarch of the ritual of the Stepterion.
The Stepterion 1 . In the Greek Questions 1 Plutarch does not
state the actual ritual of the Stepterion. He makes allusive
mention of it and attempts a rather confused and feeble explana-
tion. He has evidently not made up his mind as to what the real
gist of the festival is.
Now the Stepterion would seem to be an imitation of the fight of the
god against the Python and of his flight to Tempe after the fight, and of his
banishment. Some say that he took flight, being in need of purification after
the murder, others say that he was following hard on the Python who was
wounded and escaping, and that he failed by a little to be in at the death. For
he came up with the Python when he was just dead of his wound, and his son,
whose name they say was Aix, had just performed for him his funeral rites.
Of such events or of something of this sort is the Stepterion an imitation.
Plutarch, confused in his mind though he seems to be, is
about right. The Stepterion was not exactly an ' imitation ' of an
actual fight with a particular monster the Python, but it was an
imitation or rather a perpetual reenactment of ' something of this
sort.' In another passage, though half unconsciously, he himself
lets out the truth.
In his discourse on the Cessation of the Oracles" Plutarch
gives vent to his distress about the unworthy stories that are
told of the gods, their rapes, their wanderings, their hidings,
their banishments, their servitudes.
' These,' he says, ' are not of the gods, but they are the sufferings of
daimones and their changes and chances which are commemorated on
account of their virtue and force.'
It may be incidentally observed that no one of Plutarch's day
1 The sources for the Stepterion are given in Nilsson's Griechische Feste, 1906,
p. 150. Dr Nilsson rightly criticizes my previous explanation of the rite as based
on the slaying of the snake, but his own explanation is not to me satisfactory. By
far the best account of the Stepterion is given by Dr H. Usener, Heilige Handlung.
Ilion's Fall, in Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft, 1904, pp. 317—328, to which
I refer for all details, e.g. the Doloneia and the figure of Aix, which do not affect
my present argument. I owe much to Dr Usener's argument, though I cannot
accept all his conclusions.
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koX dvva/xiv aurCbv.