The Secret Festival Greek Women Kept From Men: What We Actually Know | Ancient Greece Documentary

▶ Every source in this film, on the atlas: https://eostrata.com/occasion/thesmop... ▶ The Kalends: one ancient date each morning, free: https://eostrata.com/today Every autumn, in the month when the fields were sown, the wives of Athens kept a festival of Demeter and her daughter that no man was permitted to watch. What survives of it was written by people outside the fence: a village's supply list cut in marble, a comedy, two speeches from the law courts, a priest's aside, a harbour town's rules for its sanctuary, a historian who said he would keep silent, and a page written centuries later to explain a joke. This is a slow film. It leaves room for the pictures and the music, and it stops where the evidence stops. CHAPTERS 0:00 A dream at the gate 1:53 The list 4:41 The city stops 7:28 Three days 11:25 The sacred boundaries 13:33 What they would not say 16:50 What we do not know 18:15 The return of the year THE SOURCES (check the words yourself) · Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.14.3 (the dream at the Eleusinion), c. AD 160 · Herodotus, Histories 2.171 (he will keep silence; the Danaids), c. 430 BC; 6.16 (Ephesus, 494 BC); 6.134 (Miltiades at Paros, 489 BC) · IG II² 1184, decree of the deme of Cholargos, 334/3 BC, Louvre Ma 4205: the supplies and the two women officials (Attic Inscriptions Online) · IG II² 1177, decree of the deme Piraeus, mid-4th c. BC: the sanctuary rules, the altars and the megaron (Attic Inscriptions Online) · Isaeus 8.19 (the wives chose two to preside) and 3.80 (the husband's feast), c. 370–365 BC · Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae 78–80 (courts and Council closed), 295–300 (the prayer), 372–379 (the women's assembly), 655–658 (the Pnyx and the tents), 1148–1151 (men forbidden), 411 BC · Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 69 (the fast, seated on the ground, in the sowing month), c. AD 100; Demosthenes 30 (the death dated to the fast) · Scholion on Thesmophoriazusae 80 (the names of the three days) and on 834 (the Stenia) · Hesychius s.v. Stenia · Xenophon, Hellenica 5.2.29 (Thebes, 382 BC) · Scholion on Lucian, Dialogues of the Courtesans 2.1 (the pits and the piglets; date uncertain; it never names Athens) Greek texts shown on screen are from the Perseus Digital Library (Scaife). WHAT WE DON'T KNOW, AND SAY SO Where in Athens the festival met (the Pnyx or the Eleusinion); whether unmarried women attended; what was said on the day of the fast; which day the fast was (Plutarch gives a different day from the scholiast); whether the pits in the Piraeus inscription are the pits of the late commentary. The 2026 date (about 23 October) is reconstructed from the new moon of 10 October and is approximate by a day. PICTURES Francis Davis Millet, Thesmophoria (1894–97), Brigham Young University Museum of Art, public domain: a 19th-century imagining, not ancient evidence. Persephone krater, Apulian, c. 340 BC, Antikensammlung Berlin, public domain. The Pnyx, Athens (George E. Koronaios, CC0). Jean-François Millet, The Sower (1850), MFA Boston, public domain. Luis Meléndez, Still Life with Figs and Bread (c. 1770), National Gallery of Art, public domain. Clara Peeters, Still Life with Cheeses (c. 1615), Mauritshuis, public domain. Vincent van Gogh, Red Cabbages and Garlic (1887), Van Gogh Museum, public domain. Footage from Pexels (Pexels licence); the inscribed stone shown for the Cholargos decree is a stand-in, labelled on screen; the words from the Piraeus decree are set in type, not photographed. The Aegean map is schematic. MUSIC AND SOUND Erik Satie, Gymnopédie No. 1, performed by Gregory Tait (CC BY 4.0), slowed and processed; in the chapter abroad, J. S. Bach, Goldberg Variations, Aria, performed by Kimiko Ishizaka (Open Goldberg, CC0), slowed. Wind, fire, grain, sea and night sounds are synthesised sound design, not field recordings. The narration is a synthetic voice. THE KALENDS One encounter with historical wonder each morning, and the evidence behind it. There's more to today than your to-do list. Free: https://eostrata.com/today