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And then, in certain reliefs, his old barbaric presence vanishes, and we have instead a benevolent and human father of gods and men, trying, as Miss Harrison somewhere expresses it, to look as if he had been there all the time. There was a sacrifice at the Diasia, but it was not a sacrifice given to Zeus.
Whether the grand festival that was meant was in Attica or elsewhere was a question which he never thought of, and which the oracle did not offer to solve. For the Athenians also have a festival which is called the grand festival of Zeus Meilichios or Gracious, viz., the Diasia.
It was not originally the home of an anthropomorphic god, but of a divine animal. In the Diasia we find the old superhuman snake, who reappears so ubiquitously throughout Greece, the regular symbol of the underworld powers, especially the hero or dead ancestor. Why the snake was so chosen we can only surmise. He obviously lived underground: his home was among the Chthonioi, the Earth-People.
There is more magic ritual, more carrying of sacred objects, a fast followed by a rejoicing, a disappearance of life below the earth, and a rising again of life above it; but it is hard to find definite traces of any personal goddess. Now the Diasia were dominated by a sacred snake. Is there any similar divine animal in the Thesmophoria? Alas, yes.
The next day, on reaching Ophrynium, Xenophon obeyed the injunction; sacrificing little pigs entire to Zeus the Gracious, as was the custom at Athens during the public festival called Diasia.
The Diasia was a ritual of placation, that is, of casting away various elements of pollution or danger and appeasing the unknown wraths of the surrounding darkness. The nearest approach to a god contained in this festival is Meilichios, and Meilichios, as we shall see later, belongs to a particular class of shadowy beings who are built up out of ritual services.
Then he wished to know whether any of Phidias's kin were alive, why there had been no Diasia at Athens all these years, whether his Olympieum was ever going to be completed, and had the robbers of his temple at Dodona been caught?
Men seek to obtain oblivion of danger by reducing themselves to the condition of beasts, which have no perception above the immediate wants of the senses. All pursuits that serve to connect the soul with the world whence it came are rejected. The Odeum is shut; there is no more lecturing in the porticos; the temples are entirely forsaken, and even the Diasia are no longer observed.
The surest test to apply in this question is the evidence of actual cult. The Diasia was said to be the chief festival of Zeus, the central figure of the Olympians, though our authorities generally add an epithet to him, and call him Zeus Meilichios, Zeus of Placation. Meilichios from the beginning has a fairly secure one.
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