This volume collects the papers from a conference, ‘What is a Festival?’, held at Bergen, Norway in 2006, as part of a cross-disciplinary project. An international group of scholars was asked to consider ancient festivals from a variety of angles, such as ‘origins, as well as their social function and meaning form a synchronic and diachronic point of view’ (p. v). Although the project was apparently aborted, the programmatic nature of this meeting still shines through in this volume, which shows a strong concern with matters of definition and methodology. These questions are further adumbrated in the introduction by the editors, and return in some of the chapters. I. grapples with definitions in his (rather) long piece ‘What is a Graeco-Roman festival? A polythetic approach’. The hybrid Graeco-Roman of his title might suggest that he is concerned with defining a particular category, for example Greek festivals under Roman rule, but in fact he is looking for a definition for all festivals in Greek and Roman antiquity. Not surprisingly, perhaps, a definitive definition eludes him. His suggestion to opt for a polythetic approach, i.e. a definition which seems to cover most of the cases, most of the time, may have been useful in the context of a grant application, but the result is so general that one wonders whether readers of this volume really need this kind of definition. Some concise definitions are offered by other authors in this volume that will satisfy most readers, most of the time. Consider the one offered by J. Scheid: ‘A ritual system capable of conveying complex messages’, or by S. des Bouvrie: an ‘orchestrated cultural performance’. Questions of methodology are raised (also at some length) in another programmatic chapter by B., which explains how to read changes in content and form of a festival of certain categories of archaeological data. B. offers some examples, such as a diachronic distribution of pottery types in different festivals, but he leaves it unclear what can be achieved with such diachronic comparisons. Finally in this category, S. des Bouvrie offers a theory- (and jargon-) laden approach to the understanding of ancient festivals, which are neither ‘irrational’ nor ‘incomprehensible’. She focuses on the ritual process in ancient Olympia, where she rightly points at the fact that separate events were organised for men and women – or rather girls – which must have played a part in the cultural construction of Greek gender identities, and on the Great Dionysia at Athens that played their part in the creation of a shared (polis) identity. But such conclusions are hardly surprising.
Several papers show what can be achieved by adopting a long-term perspective on one or more particular festivals. W. Burkert casts his net wide: in a brief and elegant article he collects some ancient views of festivals, which he claims do not solely belong to the Greek or Roman world – but are part of a Near Eastern Mediterranean koine. He does not discuss the nature of these connectivities in much detail, but adduces some literary sources that evoke aspects of the shared experiences of festival-goers all over the ancient world. G. Ekroth focuses on the site of Olympia and explores the changing place of the cult of Pelops in this sanctuary. The cult was an innovation of the sixth century when a theoxenia ritual was set up in the Pelopeion. In the course of time, as Pelops was promoted as the national hero of the Eleans, his cult gained in importance. In the second century a.d. the cult persisted, but appears to have been adapted to Roman tastes, which included a stronger emphasis on the funerary elements. Drawing a parallel between renaissance and early modern festivals and the Panathenaea, J. Neils argues that political developments had an influence on the organisation of this festival. Using visual evidence, she suggests that they support Robertson's argument that the offering of the robe by women of the Praxergidai clan was an invented tradition of the 460s. S. Scullion discusses Athenian views on the choregia to show that not all festival activities were regarded as purely ritual – or purely religious, and that drama was not ‘regarded as a form of religious ritual’. The modern distinction between secular and religious spheres may not hold in the classical world; this seems obvious, but Scullion's amply documented article may help us to evaluate claims (by e.g. Chaniotis) that political and social ingredients of festivals clearly increased in the Hellenistic period. K. Buraselis is the only author to touch on this later period. He highlights another way in which political circumstances can impact on the festival culture in a careful consideration of a number of cases where the cult of Hellenistic rulers was appended to local festivals, as the religious systems of the individual poleis got entangled with that of the wider world.
Changes in the ritual portfolio in Rome are discussed in a number of challenging articles by leading experts: J. Scheid discusses the complex of the festivals in and around the Roman Forum Boarium: he argues that – in the absence of sacred books – we need to study such ritual complexes, to get a grip on the deeper cultural meaning of Roman religion. He explores the dense network of cults in the Forum Boarium that evoked stories about the foundation of Rome, in an attempt to think through various tensions in Roman society. A similar concern is behind M. Beard's chapter (which is an expanded and improved version of a 1994 paper) on the cult of Magna Mater in Rome. This cult is generally considered to have been an unsettling experience to Roman observers, due to its foreign origins and exotic character, which could only be made acceptable after a process of domestication. Beard argues, however, that throughout its history the cult's cultural and religious function was to address fundamental tensions at the heart of Roman identity.
C. Smith discusses the Feriae Latinae that are among the longest lasting of Roman festivals. He shows how the core festival was connected to the increasingly complex set of rituals that surrounded Roman warfare in an expanding empire. Its original meaning was located in the context of Roman dealings with their Latin neighbours – in later periods the festival remained relevant as it authorised the consuls to lead not just Romans, but also allies into war. J. Rüpke addresses a similar issue. He shows how the growing complexity of festivals and public rituals in Republican Rome must be understood against the background of their importance for societal communication. As the Roman state grew in size and in complexity, modes of ritual communication had to be elaborated and new modes had to be devised in order to engage the growing number of citizens in public festivals which acquired an important political role. Rüpke concludes by drawing attention to the fact that such communicative and societal functions would become the hallmark of religious festivals in the imperial period, but a paper addressing these issues is unfortunately lacking.
Like most edited volumes this is rather a mixed bag: the articles that focus on matters of definition or questions of method do not offer much new, but the articles that take a close look at the long-term history of individual festivals and consider these in their specific contexts have plenty to offer to the general reader and the specialist alike.
