The Panathenaia

Erichthonius installs the image and starts the festival

Erichthonius expels Amphictyon, takes the kingship, installs Athena’s wooden image on the Acropolis and institutes the Panathenaia. That is Apollodorus’s sequence: political victory, sacred object, festival. It makes the celebration part of a new ruler’s settlement with the city’s goddess.

Plutarch gives it to Theseus. In the chapter where Theseus dissolves the town halls and council chambers of Attica and settles everybody into one city, he names the city Athens and institutes a Panathenaic festival, and then, separately, institutes the Metoecia on the sixteenth of Hecatombaeon. Thucydides tells the same union and names the resulting holiday the Synoecia, without mentioning the Panathenaia at all. Neither of the two accounts acknowledges the other’s founder.

What went on the robe

The one thing everybody knows about the festival is the robe carried up to the Acropolis for the goddess, and the earliest surviving account of what it portrayed is in a tragedy. Euripides puts it in the mouths of the women of Troy, wondering where they will be enslaved: in the city of Pallas, home of Athena of the lovely chariot, they will yoke horses on her saffron robe, embroidering them on the web in brilliant varied shades, or else the race of Titans, put to sleep by Zeus the son of Cronos with a bolt of flashing flame. The choice the chorus is given is horses or Titans, and the play offers no third subject.

The day the guards did not look twice

The Great Panathenaea was the larger form of the festival, and Thucydides describes its procession from the point of view of two men planning a murder. Harmodius and Aristogeiton waited for that day, he writes, because it was the one occasion on which the citizens who led the procession could be armed in good number without arousing suspicion. Their grievance was itself a festival grievance: Harmodius’s sister had been called forward to carry a basket in a procession and then turned away as unworthy of the honour. The conspiracy was small and the conspirators expected the other armed marchers to come in behind them once it began. They did not, and what Athens later remembered was a tyrannicide rather than a botched coup.

The ship and the amphorae

The apparatus outlived the rite. Pausanias, walking near the Hill of Ares, was shown the ship built for the procession of the Panathenaea, and thought it the second largest he knew of, behind the vessel at Delos with nine banks of oars below the deck. He does not say how it moved.

The prizes are the part of the festival that survives in quantity. Panathenaic amphorae were vessels filled with oil, given, as the Acropolis Museum puts it, to the victors of the contests held at the Great Panathenaia, painted with Athena Promachos on one side and on the other the event they were won at. The museum holds a fragment of one found in 1886 east of the Parthenon, made between 525 and 500 BC and attributed to the Group of Copenhagen 99. It shows two boxers, their hands wrapped in the thin leather strips called strophia, the younger man with his arm raised to admit that he has lost.

The fragment preserves the contest’s last decision more clearly than any complete programme could: one boxer signals defeat and the oil goes to another. The robe moved toward Athena, the wheeled ship embodied the procession, and prize jars left the city with winners. Athens made its festival visible through objects in motion, then archaeology returned one broken verdict to the Acropolis.