Stars and Festivals

Aug 31, 2006 Alun The Past 1 Comment Ancient History, Archaeoastronomy, Demeter, Greece, The Attic Festivals

Not quite an ancient Greek at Eleusis.

I’ve sug­ges­ted else­where that there’s a link between some stel­lar events and the schedul­ing of fest­ivals in archaic Greece. What I haven’t had is a nice bit of text say­ing this. At least not till now. While wait­ing for a cata­logue to come avail­able recently I star­ted brows­ing The Attic Fest­ivals of Demeter and Their Rela­tion to the Agri­cul­tural Year by Allaire Chandor Brumfield.

One of the fest­ivals she talks about is Pro­er­o­sia. This seems to be a sac­red plough­ing fest­ival held on Pyanep­sion 5 at Eleusis before the mys­ter­ies and this is firmly dated by his­tor­ical inscrip­tion. There is another clue as to when it’s held as she’s found a quote from Hesychius.

καὶ ὸ δε̂μος δὲ αύτὰ προαρκτούρια καλεῖ

The key bit is προαρκτούρια, proark­touria, before Arcturus. The date she uses for the heli­acal rising of Arcturus, the first appear­ance of Arcturus in the morn­ing sky, is Septem­ber 18. She cites a book I haven’t read for this, so I’ll have to look into it, but it seems approx­im­ately right. This is a bit of a prob­lem because the quote doesn’t match the inscrip­tion.

The earli­est match between Pyanep­sion 5 in the ancient Athenian cal­en­dar to the mod­ern cal­en­dar I can make is Septem­ber 19. To get this I’ve assumed that the sum­mer sol­stice was observed on June 18 as the same day as a new moon. This would sur­prise any­one famil­iar with mod­ern astro­nomy, because the sol­stice is around June 21. How­ever, this was not known in archaic Greece and for the days around the sol­stice the Sun appears to be rising over the same part of the hori­zon, so it is pos­sible that it was cel­eb­rated earlier or later by a few days from year to year. If, like most years the first New Moon was con­sid­er­ably after June 21, then Pyanep­sion 5 could be around what we would call Octo­ber 21. It doesn’t seem to pos­sible to have Arcturus rise before the Pro­er­o­sia if it is held in Pyanepsion.

Another answer she con­siders is one put for­ward by Mommsen that προαρκτούρια refers to the heli­acal set­ting of Arcturus which was, accord­ing to Columella, Octo­ber 29. This would fit the data and ensure that the Pro­er­o­sia was always before the Arcturus event, but as she notes it’s unusual for the set­ting of Arcturus to be men­tioned without spe­cify­ing the set­ting. Usu­ally if a star is men­tioned without fur­ther details if refers to its rising.

Com­par­ing it to other texts that men­tion Arcturus a set­ting inter­pret­a­tion remains dif­fi­cult. Hesiod in line 609 of Works and Days says “...when Orion and Sirius are come into mid-heaven, and rosy-fingered Dawn sees Arcturus, then cut off all the grape-clusters, Perses, and bring them home.” You can make a case for before the set­ting of Arcturus, make sure you’re ploughing’s done before he leaves because he’s the plough­man, but it smacks of excuse-making.

Boötes from the cleaned Urano­graph­i­carum.

Adding to the con­fu­sion is some quer­ies over another inscrip­tion from Thorikos. We would expect it to be held in Pyanep­sion, because this was the sac­red plough­ing month. How­ever a stone from Thorikos put it in Boedromion, the month before Pyanep­sion. And also pos­sibly even in Metageit­nion, the month before that. As you ima­gine clas­si­cists would love to get their hands on the stone but they can’t. It’s been lost. And it was only tran­scribed by a farmer and appears to have a lot of errors in it anyway.

On the plus side I can at least now point to another fest­ival and say that there’s evid­ence that stel­lar cal­ib­ra­tion was used else­where. Yet it opens up far more ques­tions that will need look­ing into.