Panathenaea

For more information on Panathenaea, visit Britannica.com.

Panathēnaea, ancient Athenian festival supposedly founded in the time of Theseus in honour of the birth of Athena, the patron goddess of the city, and held every year at the end of July. For three out of four years it was held on 28 and 29 Hekatombaion (July) and called the Lesser Panathenaea, but starting from the archonship of Hippocleidēs in 566/5 BC it was celebrated with particular splendour every fourth year, when it lasted from 21 to 28 Hekatombaion and was called the Great Panathenaea. The augmented festival included games, horse-races, and musical contests, to which the Peisistratids added poetical recitations by rhapsodes. The equestrian events were held on that part of the Panathenaic Way (from the Dipylon Gate to the Acropolis) which crossed the agora. Pericles extended the musical contests and built a special theatre, the Odeum, for them. The prizes at the athletic contests were beautiful vases (some of which still survive, the earliest dated 570–560 BC) filled with olive oil; as many as 140 of them were given as the principal prize. The festival culminated on the last day in a magnificent procession along the Panathenaic Way and up to the Parthenon, in which Athena's new robe, a peplos, was carried to her statue (see ERECHTHEUM). This peplos was a costly garment, woven by Athenian girls of good family; it was a signal honour for a girl to be thought ‘worthy of the peplos’. It was carried on a great ship on wheels, followed by girls known as arrēphoroi bearing baskets with the implements of sacrifice, by groups of boys bearing pitchers and old men with olive branches, by chariots, and finally by a cavalcade of young men on horseback (as depicted on the frieze of the Parthenon). The feast was completed with a hecatomb of oxen, the flesh distributed among the people. In the fifth century BC the Panathenaea had not only a civic but a political character, being held in honour of the patroness not of the city alone but of the Delian League also; the part taken by the allies in the sacrifices was regulated by decrees.