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Updated: May 11, 2025
You will not be allowed to enter the theatre while the Athenians keep the second day of their festival Anthesteria; but to balance this privation, you are forbidden to vote, and are thus freed from all blame belonging to unjust and capricious laws."
The Anthesteria was held at that season of the year when, as Pindar sings in an ode composed to be sung upon the occasion, "the chamber of the Hours is opened and the blossoms hear the voice of the fragrant spring; when violet clusters are flung on the lap of earth, and chaplets of roses braided in the hair; when the sound of the flute is heard and choirs chanting hymns to Semele."
In the Anthesteria it was a moment of nature that was seized and idealized; here, in the Panathenaea, it is the forms of social life, its distinctions within its embracing unity, that are set forth in their interdependence as functions of a spiritual life.
The Greek citizen was surrounded by a host of the eminent dead who kept him in touch with the past and offered him ideals of life. Another attitude toward the dead is indicated by the great apotropaic spring festival, the Anthesteria of Athens, the object of which was to rid the city of the ghosts that then wandered about.
Both here, and still more markedly in the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, we regularly find the most lovely of all goddesses, Demeter and Persephone, habitually I will not say represented by, but dangerously associated with, a sacred Sow. The third feast, the Anthesteria, belongs in classical times to the Olympian Dionysus, and is said to be the oldest of his feasts.
+602+. Among religious ceremonies the expulsion of evil spirits was naturally attended with danger, and work was prohibited. Such was the custom in Athens at the Anthesteria and on the sixth day of the Thargelia, and in Rome at the Lemuria.
We must cast away the old year; we must put our sins on to a φαρμακός or scapegoat and drive it out. When the ghosts have returned and feasted with us at the Anthesteria we must, with tar and branches of buckthorn, purge them out of every corner of the rooms till the air is pure from the infection of death.
On Seed Jars, Wine Jars and Funeral Jars, see Themis, pp. 276-88, and Warde Fowler, 'Mundus Patet, in Journ. Roman Studies, ii, pp. 25 ff. Cf. below, p. 28 f. Frazer, The Magic Art, ii. 137, thinks it not certain that the γάμος took place during the Anthesteria, at the same time as the oath of the γεραιραί.
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