The Panathenaia festival

The Panathenaia, τὰ Παναθήναια, honoured Athena, the goddess of the city. A smaller festival took place every year, and every four years came a much bigger one, the Great Panathenaia. It fell in the month of Hekatombaion, around July and August.

What did people do? They walked together in a long procession, a πομπή, from the Kerameikos through the Agora and up to the Acropolis. Girls from leading families served the goddess, and the daughters of μέτοικοι, foreigners living in Athens, carried stools. Animals were led along for sacrifice. A law of about 335–330 BC for the yearly festival orders the meat to be shared among the Athenians. The Great Panathenaia also had contests in music, sport and horse racing.

Who started it? Plutarch says that the hero Theseus created this shared sacrifice when he joined the people of Attica into one city, but that is legend. Museums usually link the great contests to a reorganisation of the festival in 566 BC.

At the centre of the Great Panathenaia was a gift, the πέπλος, a woven robe for Athena. The Greek Ministry of Culture's Parthenon Frieze site says it was woven with gold thread by the Arrephoroi and the Ergastinai, and was carried like a sail on a wheeled ship. Plato's Socrates says it was full of embroidered scenes of battles among the gods (Euthyphro 6b–c). The traveller Pausanias saw a ship made for the procession near the Areopagus (1.29.1). The Council once judged the robe's designs, until that job passed to a law court (Athenian Constitution 49.3).

The procession could also turn political. Thucydides (6.56–58) tells how Hipparchus, brother of the tyrant Hippias, insulted Harmodius: his sister was invited to carry a basket in a procession, then sent away. Harmodius and Aristogeiton waited for the Great Panathenaia, the one day when citizens could gather in arms without raising suspicion. They killed Hipparchus while he was arranging the procession. The usual date is 514 BC.

Ten officials, the ἀθλοθέται, ran the Great Panathenaia. The Athenian Constitution (60) says they organised the procession and the contests, and had the robe and the amphoras made. Winners in music received silver and gold, winners in the εὐανδρία, a contest of manly excellence, received shields, and winners in athletics and horse racing received olive oil.

The oil came from Athena's sacred olive trees, the μορίαι, and the same text says that destroying one was once punished by death. It filled a large jar, the ἀμφορεύς, of nearly forty litres. One side shows Athena armed between columns, with the words τῶν Ἀθήνηθεν ἄθλων, “of the prizes from Athens”. Harvard Art Museums say that winning boxers received 60 amphoras, but that figure rests on modern estimates: the men’s part of the prize list IG II² 2311 (about 375 BC) is lost, and the surviving part gives a winning boy boxer 30. Scholars also argue whether these “amphoras” were real jars or a measure of oil.

Homer had his place too: the orator Lycurgus says a law had his epics recited at every Great Panathenaia (Against Leocrates 102). Around 330 BC the same Lycurgus built the stadium for the athletic games.

The Parthenon frieze, about 160 metres long, was set in place between 443 and 438 BC. The Greek Ministry of Culture describes it as the procession of the Great Panathenaia, with musicians, water carriers and tray carriers, and with the handing over of the robe at the centre of the east side. Jenifer Neils takes the ten cows on the south side as the ἑκατόμβη for Athena.

Not everyone agrees. Joan Connelly has argued that the frieze shows a myth, King Erechtheus sacrificing his daughters, while Neils and Evelyn Harrison defend the Panathenaic reading. A report on a 1990s symposium called the positions of Connelly and Harrison irreconcilable. So treat the frieze as evidence to argue over, not as a photograph.

Much of the festival's vocabulary is still in use. A γιορτή, from ἑορτή, is a festival and also the name day that friends wish you well for. λάδι comes from ἔλαιον through ἐλᾴδιον. εκατόμβη still names the ancient sacrifice, but it now also means a huge number of victims, «εκατόμβες θυμάτων», a sense shaped by French hécatombe.