Agora XV, #78 of 273/2 is a well-preserved and early example of what becomes a long series of decrees in which the prytanists of a tribe or their officials receive a crown from the state for the excellent performance of their duties.[24] Such “prytany” decrees are an important source for the religious activities of this and following centuries, and for that reason, and because of its own importance, I offer a translation of Agora XV, #78:
For those still inclined to question the vivacity of Athenian state cult in the Hellenistic period, it is worth emphasizing how much importance is attributed to the religious duties and contributions of these fifty government officials in this, one of the first and best preserved of the prytany decrees. The language of the text was to become formulaic for centuries, but such is the nature of the Athenian official prose style for all subjects. The formulaic language should not, of itself, lead us to question the importance or significance of these activities now or later.In the archonship of Glaucippos (273/2), in the fourth prytany, that of the tribe Antiochis, for which Euthoinos son of [Euthycritos] of the deme Myrrhinous was secretary, on the twenty-ninth of Pyanopsion, [an Ekklesia]. Of the presiding officers Hegesilochos, son of Cephisodotos, of the deme Piraeus and his fellow officers brought the vote. The Demos decided. Euthymachos, son of Euthippos, of the deme Xypete made the proposal:
Concerning what the prytanists of Antiochis report about the sacrifices which they were making before meetings of the Ekklesia to Apollo Prostaterios and the other gods to whom it was traditional to sacrifice, and they sacrificed also the Stenia at their own expense to Demeter and Kore on behalf of the [Boule] and the Demos, with good fortune it has been decided by the Demos:
And since the prytanists [sacrificed] the appropriate sacrifices well and generously and took care of all the other things which the laws and decrees of the Demos assigned [them],To accept the [good things] which they say occurred in the sacrifices which they were sacrificing for the health and safety of the Boule and Demos of the Athenians and of all others who are well intentioned to the Demos.
To praise the prytanists of Antiochis and to crown them with a gold crown in accordance with the [law] because of their piety toward the gods and their generosity toward the Demos of the Athenians.
And so that they may sacrifice also the Chalkeia to Athena Archegetis of the city and so that the relations [to the gods] may be good and pious for the Boule and the Demos, the Demos is to vote how much money it is necessary to dispense to them for the [administration of the sacrifice]. What the Demos decides to vote for, [the treasurer of the stratiotic fund] and those in charge of the administration are to dispense. And the revenue is to be from the money ent for decrees] by the Boule. And [the secretary for the] prytany is to inscribe this [decree] on a stone stele and erect it [in the Prytaneion. And for the inscription] of the stele those in charge of the administration are to dispense [the expense that occurs].
The sacrifices to Apollo Prostaterios and the other gods before legislative meetings are clearly already routine, and we shall return to these. Two provisions appear specific to these prytanists: that they sacrificed the Stenia to Demeter and Kore at their own expense, and that they be allocated funds to sacrifice the Chalkeia to Athena Archegetis. What little is known of the Stenia indicates that it was a women’s festival, held at Eleusis on Pyanopsion 9 and featuring a night banquet characterized by the trading of insults.[25] It is known from the fifth century (Ar. Thesm. 834, of 411), appears in this text, and then first reappears in a probable restoration of a prytany decree of 140/39 (Agora XV, #240.9–10). There may have been local celebrations of the festival, as for the Thesmophoria, but the celebration at Eleusis—no doubt the major, state one—was quite probably impossible during the Macedonian occupation. Agora XV, #78, passed just twenty days after the festival, may suggest a time of revival for this festival at Eleusis, in part through the prytanists’ generosity, after the recovery of Eleusis ca. 285. Presumably the prytanists paid for the victim that would, duly sacrificed, serve as the entrée for the women’s banquet.[26]
Only one day after the decree was passed, on Pyanopsion 30, the Chalkeia was held. The timing indicates last minute and, since the budget for the festival was still undecided, somewhat chaotic preparation. The Chalkeia, too, was an established festival of the fifth century (Soph. frag. 760 Nauck) which, in 273/2, required some ad hoc financing. The role of the prytanists in this festival, here first securely attested,[27] may have continued. The festival has been restored in a prytany decree of 118/7 (Agora XV, #253.9–10; cf. IG II2 990).
That the Stenia and Chalkeia do not appear in prytany decrees from 273/2 until well into the second century B.C. probably results not from the temporary demise of these festivals but from their being subsumed under “the traditional sacrifices” that the prytanists of the month Pyanopsion made. In most years, unlike in 273/2, the prytanists’ activity in regard to these festivals would have been routine. Only financial needs and extraordinary measures to meet them dictated their mention then.
In Agora XV, #78.6 of 273/2, Apollo Prostaterios first emerges as the deity who receives the prytanists’ sacrifice before meetings of the Ekklesia. To him are added “the other gods to whom it was traditional to sacrifice.” By 254/3 his sister Artemis, as Boulaia, has joined him in this role (Agora XV, #89.8), and henceforth they are regularly paired in the pyrtany decrees.[28] Apollo Prostaterios first appears in the Athenian tradition in a collection of oracles inserted into the text of the speech that Demosthenes prepared against Meidias in 348 (21.52–53). There are at least four oracles, coming from both Delphi and Dodona.[29] The second, seemingly from Delphi, orders the Athenians “for health to sacrifice and pray to Zeus Hypatos, Heracles, and Apollo Prostaterios; for good fortune to Apollo Agyieus, Leto, and Artemis.” [30] Heracles was, of course, worshipped throughout Attica, and Zeus Hypatos received an annual sacrifice from the Marathonian Tetrapolis in the fourth century (IG II2 1358, col. 2.13). The oracle from Demosthenes, if genuine here, makes a fourth century B.C. cult of Apollo Prostaterios likely. Given the context and the source, it is probable that this Apollo Prostaterios was none other than Apollo Pythios, the Apollo of Delphi.
It is certainly possible that the prytanists had always, or at least since the fourth century, made such sacrifices to Apollo Prostaterios but that Apollo becomes known only when the prytanists first begin to record their sacrifices in the prytany decrees. Apollo may, however, have been given prominence first now, after the Athenians in 279 reconciled with the Aetolians and reestablished, after decades, ties to Delphi.[31] One may also assume that Zeus Boulaios/Athena Boulaia, Zeus Soter/Athena Soteira, and Apollo Prostaterios/Artemis Boulaia all maintained their own, somewhat distinctive roles in the cults of the Boule and Ekklesia throughout this period; another possibility, as I suggest, is that after a period of uncertainty and rivalry between the pairs, Apollo Prostaterios/Artemis Boulaia emerge as the chief deities and the others fall into the category of “the other gods” who also receive sacrifices. If my suggestion is correct, this development would be a further indication of Athena’s diminished importance in state cult. Athena has lost her role in the protection of the state as a whole to Zeus Soter and as Archegetis was tending primarily to industry and the handicrafts. In the cults of the Boule and Ekklesia her role of Boulaia/Soteria was lost to Artemis Boulaia, the junior partner of Apollo Prostaterios. If this development, admittedly hypothetical, is correctly proposed, it can be the result largely of the maltreatment of her cult by Demetrios Poliorcetes and his Athenian supporters and by the thug Lachares.
After 287/6 the Athenians also quickly removed Demetrian elements from the City Dionysia. Demetrieia, incorporated into the City Dionysia in 295/4 (chapter 3, pp. 92–94), disappears from the festival’s name as early as 285/4 (IG II2 653.36–38, 654.41–43).[32] The City Dionysia is then attested or expected for 284/3 (IG II2 654.41–43), 283/2 (IG II2 657.61–63; SEG 25.89.12–13), 282/1 (IG II2 3079 + 668), 279/8 (IG II2 2853), 271/0 (IG II2 3083), 270/69 (SEG 28.60.92–94; IG II2 3081), and was doubtless held also in the intervening years.
But here too there may have been a change in the festival. Since the end of the fourth century it had been the practice to announce “in the competition of the tragedies” the honor of a crown given to an individual for some service or other. In the Callias decree of 270/69 (SEG 28.60.92–94) is the earliest appearance of the wording, “in the new competition of tragedies of the Great Dionysia.” [33] In 385 the production of an old tragedy had been introduced into the City Dionysia, and the practice apparently became regular after 341.[34] The phrase “in the new competition of tragedies” has been taken to mean “in the competition of new tragedies,” to distinguish it from the competition of old tragedies.[35] That may be correct, but it requires an awkward reading of the Greek. It may rather be that since 283/2, when honors were, as usual, to be announced “in the competition of the tragedies of the Great Dionysia” (IG II2 657.61–63),[36] a change had occurred. The Athenians either redesigned the competitions of the post-Demetrian Dionysia or, at the least, now first began in these texts to distinguish between the competitions of old and new tragedies. Henceforth that distinction is usually maintained.[37] In any case, “the new competition” suggests that changes, actual or conceptual, were made in the City Dionysia between 283/2 and 270/69, and this may have been the result of restructuring the festival after the removal of the “new” Dionysos, Demetrios Poliorcetes.
A further, major change occurred for the personnel of the City Dionysia by 278/7 when, for the first time, we learn of the existence of an Athenian guild or corporation of technītai (“artists” or “craftsmen”) of Dionysos.[38] In IG II2 1132.1–39 the Amphictionic Council of Delphi guarantees to these technītai safe passage and freedom from taxes and military service as they travel the Greek world to participate in festivals.
At Athens in the early period of the City Dionysia the actors and choruses of tragedy and comedy, the choruses of the dithyramb, and virtually all the chorēgoi had been Athenian citizens. The poets too, except for the writers of dithyrambs, were Athenians. Apart from the musicians all the participants were Athenians, writing and performing for their fellow Athenians, celebrating the local festival of an Athenian Dionysos. And the plays themselves, at least in performance, were indissolubly bound to the city’s Dionysiac festivals. Foreigners could and did attend the City Dionysia, however, and quite early the fame of Athenian drama and dramatic poets drew international attention. The texts of some plays no doubt soon circulated far beyond Athens. Already ca. 476 Aeschylus visited the court of Hieron in Sicily, and in 456 he returned to Gela where he died. At the end of his career Euripides was enticed to the court of King Archelaos of Macedon where, in 406, he too died. We may also recall that the comic poet Philippides of Kephale was a guest and influential friend of King Lysimachos and in 283/2 was rewarded by the Athenians for his efforts on their behalf (chapter 3, pp. 99–101). During their various visits Aeschylus certainly and Euripides and Philippides probably wrote plays and assisted in staging productions. But none of this need have had much effect, except for the loss of talent, on the religious nature of the City Dionysia in Athens.
We may suspect, however, a change of atmosphere when the actors became to a degree divorced from the audience and the community, when they became thoroughly professional and, individually or in groups, traveled an international circuit, performing in festivals of other countries or even in purely secular productions. Henceforth for them the Athenian City Dionysia was just one, however important, stop on the circuit.[39] The increasing professionalism and cosmopolitanism of the poets and actors must have made the competitions of the City Dionysia, even more than they had been in the fifth century, a source of entertainment rather than of religious feeling for the assembled citizenry. Ordinary fellow citizens, neighbors, would no longer be performing and addressing the particular concerns of their state. Other changes may also have contributed to distancing the Athenian audience from the dramatic presentations. From the times of the reforms under Demetrios of Phaleron (317–307), only one Athenian each year, the agōnothetēs, took responsibility for the dramatic competitions; no longer were twenty-eight wealthy Athenians involved, financially and emotionally, in each year’s productions. We might imagine the audience now less as participants (actual or psychological) than as spectators at an event presented by the agōnothetēs and the government. We also see that by the last quarter of the fourth century several of the prominent comic poets—for example, Alexis of Thurii and Philemon of Syracuse—were no longer born Athenians.[40]
At the end of the classical and throughout the Hellenistic period we can see tragedy and comedy progressing, if that is the word, from genres intimately tied to Athenian Dionysiac festivals to a form of entertainment suited to many occasions. At Athens it never reached the point at which it is found in Rome—where, for example, in the 160s Terence’s Hecyra could be produced at the Ludi Megalenses, the funeral games of L. Aemilius Paullus, and the Ludi Romani, during which audiences were lost to a ropewalker and bear acts (prologue to Ter. Hec.). But, as such developments were occurring outside of Athens and Athenian actors were contributing to them, the effect was no doubt felt in Athens.
Macedon’s influence was important, perhaps decisive also in this area of Athenian and Greek religion. Macedonian kings and nobility from early days clearly had a taste for Athenian drama and sought out poets, actors, and other performers. Euripides had left Athens for the court of Archelaos, and Philippides stayed with Lysimachos. By the middle of the fourth century the Athenian actors Neoptolemos, originally of Scyros (PA 10647), and Aristodemos, originally of Metapontum, were making extended stays at Philip’s court and assisting Athens in her negotiations with him.[41] As actors they apparently had the right of safe passage (Dem. 5.6). After Philip took Olynthus in 348 he held an “Olympian” festival and provided technītai for the sacrifice and the night festival, himself crowning the victors. Demosthenes (19.192–95) reports that at a symposium on this occasion, the comic actor Satyros personally and successfully intervened with Philip on behalf of some girls captured at Olynthos.[42] Demosthenes treats the performance of actors in a non-Dionysiac, non-Athenian, ad hoc occasion at the request of the king of Macedon as routine. Later, in 336, the same Neoptolemos recited lines from tragedy at the festival Philip held in Aegae to celebrate the marriage of his daughter Cleopatra.[43] After his capture of Thebes in 335 Alexander held at Dion a nine-day festival, originally instituted by Archelaos, with dramatic competitions for Zeus and the Muses,[44] and did the same after taking Tyre in 332. In the Tyrian festival the actors Thettalos and Athenodoros participated.[45] To be there the Athenian Athenodoros had skipped his own City Dionysia. Thettalos, much to Alexander’s dismay, was defeated by Athenodoros, but Alexander nonetheless paid the fine the Athenians levied on their fellow citizen for missing their festival (Plut. Alex. 29, Mor. 334D–E). Thettalos and Athenodoros as well as Aristocritos and the comic actors Lycon, Phormion, and Ariston also participated in the festival accompanying Alexander’s wedding in Susa.[46]
These are but a few examples of a new type of “religious” festival, instituted by the Macedonians, which celebrated a military victory, a marriage, or another noteworthy occasion and contained, among other elements, musical and dramatic performances. Athenian actors, apparently still as freelancing individuals, participated widely, and Athens’ measures to secure their services even for the City Dionysia were not always successful. Unlike the circulation of the plays and even of the poets, the international movement and experience of the actors would very likely have affected the atmosphere of the City Dionysia itself, changing it from the purely civic event it had once been.
By 278/7 actors and poets centered in Athens had organized themselves into a corporation. The Amphictiones of Delphi grant the Athenian technītai of Dionysos safe passage and safety for their property in times of war and peace, exemption from taxes and military service, for all time and among all Greeks, “so that the honors and sacrifices to which the technītai are assigned may be performed at the appropriate times” (IG II2 1132.15–17). The representatives of the guild to the Amphictiones were the Athenian tragic poet Astydamas and the tragic actor Neoptolemos. The text of the decree was to be set up at both Athens and Delphi, and copies of both happen to survive.[47] It is worth stressing that the avowed purpose of the decree is religious, to have technītai available for religious festivals and, more generally, “for the sake of piety toward the gods” (lines 32–33).
A Euboean decree of ca. 294–288 contains detailed provisions for a festival but makes no allusion to a guild of technītai.[48] The Athenian guild was thus probably formed in the years between the Euboean decree and 278/7. It then soon faced competition from a similar guild, the Isthmian-Nemean. The Amphictionic Council may have chosen this time to recognize the Athenian guild in order to secure its participation in the Soteria, a new Delphic festival commemorating victory over the Gauls. A guild of technītai, probably the Isthmian-Nemean, under the leadership of their priest Aristarchos of Hermione, “donated the whole competition to the god (Apollo) and the Amphictiones for the Soteria.” This festival typically required sixty technītai of various specialties, including three teams each for tragedy and comedy. The inscriptions of the Amphictionic Soteria list 251 different artists, 29 of them from Athens.[49] It appears that the guild took full responsibility for the musical competitions, providing this component of the festival essentially prepackaged for their clients. The sacrifices would be the responsibility of the client. Presumably the occasion or even the deity would make little difference to the technītai. Given the availability of the competitions as a package, it is not surprising to find several new festivals appearing in the Greek world under the patronage of rich kings in the later third century. It is noteworthy, however, that there is no evidence of such guild activity or of the sudden appearance of such new festivals in Athens. The guild of Dionysiac technītai was an Athenian export. For the City Dionysia, the ultimate origin of such guilds, Athenians evidently secured the artists’ participation on an individual basis. In this, as in other areas, Athenian state cult was conservative, lagging behind religious developments occurring elsewhere in the Greek world.[50]
Moreover, in approximately these years (278/7) the Athenians inscribed on a building in the theater records of victorious poets and actors in the Lenaia and City Dionysia from as far back as 485/4 (IG II2 2325).[51] Dina Peppas-Delmousou (1984) has associated these “historical” lists of victors, the “new competition of tragedies,” and the appearance of the technītai of Dionysos in arguing, persuasively, that after the ouster of Demetrios Poliorcetes the Athenians gave to their theater a new élan with an antiquarian flavor. As they perhaps formalized a new structure to their festival, as they celebrated, with an inscriptional record, their glorious dramatic past, the Athenians were also sending their actors in an organized troupe and individually to perform tragedies and comedies at a wide variety of public and private occasions throughout the Greek world. If Athens was, in international terms, weak politically and economically, she could still reassert, for herself and other Greeks, her literary and cultural predominance.