CUP (2021) h/b 500pp £105.00 (ISBN 9781108485272)
For more than 950 years, the ‘Festival of All Athenians’ was celebrated in two forms: the penteteric (four-yearly) Great Panathenaia, inaugurated in 566 BC, which attracted participants from across the Greek-speaking world, and the Little Panathenaia, celebrated exclusively by Athenian citizens and residents in each of the other three years. Believed to celebrate Athena’s role in the victory of the gods over the giants, both incarnations of the festival included athletic, hippic and music contests, rituals, and a procession from the Cerameicus to the Acropolis culminating in extravagant sacrifices to the goddess.
Like any long-lived institution, the festival adapted to suit the age: the killing of the ‘tyrant’ Hipparchus during the Panathenaia of 514 BC added to its lustre after Hippias’ expulsion; Cleisthenes’ constitutional reforms allowed Athenians to participate by tribe (and perhaps by deme); fifth-century cavalry reforms introduced more elaborate equestrian events into the programme, while imperialism utilised the festival to showcase Athens as the metropolis of Ionian Greeks; survivors of The Thirty used it to proclaim their democratic credentials; and in the Hellenistic and Roman ages wealthy foreign benefactors made not only the hippic contests but the procession their own, even introducing a mechanical ship on which to convey Athena’s sacred robe.
Yet, unlike other great panhellenic festivals such as the Olympic Games where all events were open to all comers, even the ‘international’ Great Panathenaia included elements exclusive to Athenian citizens, while rules dictating not only who might or might not participate in specific aspects of the games, rituals and procession but the distribution of meat after sacrifices created a hierarchy biased towards select sections of Athenian society.
Such rules (which changed over time) were important, S. argues, because by including or excluding specific groups they helped define the identity not only of those groups but of Athenian society as a whole. But what is ‘identity’? While most ‘discussions of Athenian identity are … characterised by the idea that “everyone knows more or less” what the term “identity” means, and so the processes by which identities are created and maintained are not explicated…’, For S. this is not good enough. Taking her cue from Social Identity Theory, she sets out meticulously to comb the festival to discover how its different elements might highlight and strengthen different aspects of identity from those of individuals such as winners in athletic contests to those of social groups such as ephebes, girls approaching marriageable age, demes and tribes, whose representatives participating in the festival ‘serve to unify the group by making visible what the group shares, and to bring out the differences between groups’. At the civic level, because non-Athenian spectators (including metics) were barred from the pyrrhikhê (an event in which participants ‘in some sense… “became” the goddess [Athena] for a very short time’) ‘the event … emphasised that the Athenians, as their name suggested, enjoyed a close special relationship with their guardian divinity, while visitors, the inhabitants of other cities, did not’.
The Panathenaia, in other words, was a stage on which were shown not just events honouring Athena but (as individuals and groups took on the role of participants or spectators, some only once, others multiple times) the complex and shifting identities and relationships of her citizens and guests. ‘With their multiple groups and events,’ S. writes, ‘the procession and the games are important moments for identity creation, and they also facilitate comparison and contrast both by participants and by spectators. Furthermore, taking part in the festival allows participants to practise their membership in the relevant group(s), so that they share a knowledge of what that membership entails.’
Setting out her methodology at the beginning of the book (‘we must draw on approaches developed in the social sciences in order to understand the ancient (Greek) material’) S. observes with admirable candour, ‘this approach will be challenging for some readers of the book’. Indeed, while anyone with an interest in the festival and its place within Athenian and wider Greek life will find the first five chapters, which include excellent discussions of the character and long history of the Great and Little Panathenaia, their similarities and differences, extremely valuable, some may consider the final two chapters (‘Creating Identities at the Great Panathenaia: Athenian Men’ and ‘Creating Identities at the Great Panathenaia: Other Residents and Non-Residents’) in which S. re-examines the festival specifically through the lens of Social Identity Theory (not infrequently revisiting earlier material and hypotheses already covered at some length) to be less immediately rewarding.
Some may question, too, the bases of some of S.’s conclusions. Although she devotes one of her eight appendices to the Parthenon Frieze (the others range from consideration of Hellenistic Archons to the text of Agora XVIII C197), averring that ‘the use of the contemporary procession as a model for the design of the frieze allows us to employ this depiction as evidence for the way in which the Athenians processed up to the Akropolis at the Great Panathenaia in the middle of the fifth century’, her argument seems at times circular, the evidence remains equivocal, and her conclusions force her to assume otherwise unattested changes in the gender of certain participants within years of the sculptures’ creation. Others may find her occasional uncontextualized use of literary evidence similarly problematic—if the Parthenon frieze is not ‘photographic’ evidence, Aristophanic comedy (for example) is not social verity. Others, too, might wish that there had been more focus on ways in which prominent politicians used the Panathenaia deliberately to shape Athenian self-image.
Despite these quibbles this is an important book, a significant contribution to the study of not only the Panathenaia but Athenian society. With 40 illustrations, many of them excellent colour reproductions, 33 tables (recording everything from references to the distribution of sacrificial meat at the Little Panathenaia to visual evidence for musical games in the archaic period to Panathenaic amphorae showing athletic events for beardless boys), a bibliography, index locorum, index of collections and general index, this is a beautifully presented, magisterial volume, which will wield significant influence over future study of the Panathenaia and which deserves a place on the shelves of any scholar interested in Greek society, religion or identity.
David Stuttard