Panathenaea Sentence Examples

The most celebrated festival of the citygoddess was the Panathenaea at Athens and other places.

It is said that when Theseus united the whole land under one government he made the festival of the city-goddess common to the entire country, and changed the older name Athenaea to Panathenaea (Plutarch, Theseus, 24).

The union (Synoecism) itself was celebrated by a distinct festival, called Synoecia or Synoecesia, which had no connexion with the Panathenaea.

It is probable that the distinction of Greater and Lesser Panathenaea dates from this period, the latter being .a shorter and simpler festival held every year.

Every fourth year the festival was celebrated with peculiar magnificence; gymnastic sports were added to the horse races; and there is little doubt that Peisistratus aimed at making the penteteric Panathenaea the great Ionian festival in rivalry to the Dorian Olympia.

Even the religious rites were celebrated with much greater splendour at the Greater Panathenaea.

The proceedings were under the superintendence of ten athlothetae, one from each tribe, the lesser Panathenaea being managed by hieropoei.

At Athens there was a law that the Homeric poems should be recited (1 5446a-eat) on every occasion of the Panathenaea.

Again, the Platonic dialogue Hip parchus (which though not genuine is probably earlier than the Alexandrian times) asserts that Hipparchus, son of Peisistratus, first brought the poems to Athens, and obliged the rhapsodists at the Panathenaea to follow the order of the text, " as they still do," instead of reciting portions chosen at will.

Here he established the worst, of Athena, instituted the Panathenaea, and built an Erechtheum.

Wachsmuth ingeniously supposes that the latter festival commemorated the local union in a single city of the separate settlements on the Acropolis and its immediate neighbourhood, while the Panathenaea commemorated the political union of the whole of Attica (C. Wachsmuth, Die Stadt Athen im Alterthum, 18 74, p. 453 sq.).

The result of the notices now collected is to show that the early history of epic recitation consists of (r) passages in the Homeric hymns showing that poets contended for the prize at the great festivals, (2) the passing mention in Herodotus of rhapsodists at Sicyon, and (3) a law at Athens, of unknown date, regulating the recitation at the Panathenaea.

The orators Lycurgus and Isocrates make a great deal of the recitation of Homer at the Panathenaea, but know nothing of the poems having been collected and arranged at Athens, a fact which would have redounded still more to the honour of the city.