Monsieur Ken Dowden

Myth : Brauron & beyondIn: Dialogues d'histoire ancienne. Vol. 16 N°2, 1990. pp. 29-43.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Dowden Ken. Myth : Brauron & beyond. In: Dialogues d'histoire ancienne. Vol. 16 N°2, 1990. pp. 29-43.

doi : 10.3406/dha.1990.1476

http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/dha_0755-7256_1990_num_16_2_1476

ОНА 16,2 1990 29-43

MYTH : BRAURON & BEYOND

Ken DOWDEN The University of Birmingham

1 - ON COINCIDENCE

It is a startling experience, worthy of Luis Borges, to discover that you have just written, as Pierre Brûlé remarks elsewhere in this Bulletin, the same book as someone else. I am quite sure that Zeitgeist determinists can rejoice in the comparison of Brulé's La Fille d'Athènes with my Death and the Maiden (hereafter : FdA, D&M) *. Our chapters on Brauron present a remarkably similar selection of topics considered important (lovingly numbered ch. 2.2.3.5 and so on) and are very close in methodology, progressing from myth to cult and reaching broadly similar myth-ritual conclusions. We differ perhaps in the scale on which we handle particular topics and Brûlé is to my mind more meticulous. But even beyond Brauron, our books appear to share a common agenda : virgin priestesses, population sizes (even if D&M 27 is calculated on the back of an envelope), age of menarche, myths from elsewhere in Greece.

All our work is naturally to an extent culturally determined : one may perhaps believe that our times were right for the

1. For documentation of points summarily mentioned in this contribution, please see the indices of these works.

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fulfilment of the work of Jeanmaire and Brelich - as is shown by the work of Burkert, Graf and Bremmer. We write the mythology of our age. But at the same time, may one dare to think that the extent of our common agenda and the almost identical conclusions reached on the items on that agenda display something more objectively mutually confirming and that agreement is possible because solid answers have been found for important questions ? In addition, a remarkable corollary is found for myth-ritual method : Brûlé starts from religion (subtitle: La religion des filles à Athènes à l'époque classique : Mythes, cultes, société) ; I start from mythology (subtitle: Girls' Initiation Rites in Greek Mythology) ; and yet the myth—ritual method ensures that the result must be nearly indistinguishable.

2 - ON THE TRACK OF MYTH : FOUNDATIONS & HYPOTHESES

My concern in D&M was an old one : to develop an informative method for reading myth relating to concrete, even pedestrian historical suppositions. K.O. Miiller's (1825) notion of a 'scientific' mythology, with its implications for the formation (Entstehung) of mythology as a whole, underlies this style of approach, as I shall from time to time underline during this contribution : had he lived in the late 1980's, perhaps he would have written a third identical volume. In my enquiry, Brauron is the keystone because it is at Brauron that we have some information on a ritual, the Bear- Ritual, which can be tied to a myth - the one exhibited in closely similar variants at Brauron and Mounichia. It is true that the evidence for ritual is very defective compared with what we might wish (FdA 225), but from the point of view of myth-interpretation it is sufficient to make the connection. If this basic link could be broken, then the whole structure of D&M would collapse. Mercifully, that seems unlikely.

It is at a very early stage, while still confirming this link, that the myth of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis can be drawn in as another variant of the Mounichia-Brauron myth. From the point of view of religion, this seems to demand another cult of Artemis and a Deer-ritual at Aulis and whilst a Deer-ritual cannot be demonstrated for Aulis, there is at least evidence of what appears

DIALOGUES D'HISTOIRE ANCIENNE 31

to be a Deer-ritual preliminary to marriage in Thessaly 2. From the point of view of mythology, this now becomes an exciting example of a cult-myth incorporated into Greek legend, our entry-point to the question of how Greek mythology has in fact been formed.

So the first principles of reading Greek myths in this way are derived from a match of a myth to a surviving ritual. (There may also be a corollary that ritual is best understood in the light of a matching myth, as Detienne's treatment of the Adonia suggests.) No match, however, could be made if the connection of myth with ritual was random and chaotic ; as a result the matches that are made teach us a language by which we can understand myths which were attached to similar rituals now lost. To this apparently simple process must of course be added our understanding, however limited, of the type of society involved and in particular the basic but fertile conceptual model of Van Gennep : the passage rite with its three stages - separation, liminal stage, incorporation.

What do we learn about this language at Brauron/ Mounichia ?

1. Locale : myths happen at Brauron (the deme Philaidai), or Mounichia ; the rituals are to be sited at Brauron, Mounichia. This apparently vacuous point is in fact fundamental for the analysis of myths of uncertain function and origins - an observation that goes all the way back to K.O. Miiller3. Myths are normally sited at a locale, because they matter there. Other cases (e.g. Crete or Egypt used as a 'Beyond') are special or exceptional.

2. Wrath of the goddess (exhibited in plague/famine, revealed in oracle) in myth corresponds to the necessity of the practice of a ritual for that goddess. The origin of the wrath, loss of a wild animal which had become tame, is vital to the rhythm of the ritual : the myth creates a debit balance, which is paid off in ritual by a tame girl becoming wild animal.

3. The mythic language of tame and wild reflects the rituals of social inclusion and social exclusion (segregation).

4. (The title track :) Death of the maiden in myth denotes termination of maidenhood, the segregatory function of the

P. CLEMENT, New Evidence for the Origin of the Iphigeneia Legend, AC 3 (1934) 393-409 ; FdA 191, D&M 41 f. MÚLLER 108-9 ; cf. the organisational merit, on a myth-ritual view, of the geographical arrangement of cults favoured by GRUPPE : 1906 : 16-379 ; 1921 : 325-422.

32 Ken DOW DEN

passage rite. Sacrifice to Artemis denotes that the termination occurs within the cult and precinct of Artemis and somehow in her honour. Sacrifice by father denotes the imminent loss of parental control over daughter because of marriage for which the rite prepares the daughter. The substitution of an animal for the maiden at the point of sacrifice shows that the maiden in sacrificing a goat in the ritual sacrifices herself or, rather, her maidenhood. Question : after the rite the daughter is left nubile but unwed ; had marriage (group-marriage, of course, if group-participants in ritual) been the original termination of the rite ?

5. The liminal stage of the ritual, the Bear-ritual, is pointed to by the dead bear of (2) above, but not directly represented. Otherwise, as often, little beyond the catastrophe of segregation is represented.

Through this language of myth we can interpret the myth- ritual complex at the Attic sites of Brauron and Mounichia and the associated myth of Iphigeneia at Aulis. Further away, we can make sense of the comparison, made by scholars since Muller, between the Arkteia and Kallisto, a maiden with a grave in southern Arcadia who had been turned into a bear 4. In addition we can draw into our fold : (1) a nameless Messenian girl slaughtered by her father Aristodemos (soon to be king) 5; and (2) the grave of Iphinoë, a dead maiden at Sikyon where those about to marry (predictably) bring offerings. Iphinoë of Sikyon is replicated at Megara, and alleged elsewhere to be the name of one of the Proitids of Tiryns - girls, eligible for marriage, who thought they had become cows at the point when they were segregated from the city. Meanwhile, down the road at the 'Argive' Heraion, Io, nubile enough for Zeus, is changing into another cow and being segregated from her own home. The animal and dead maiden patterns form a family of interconnecting mythemes which seem to be to be readily accounted for by the supposition of rites 'preliminary to marriage' whose particular concern with the termination of maidenhood survives in these myths, whilst the rites themselves - or at least our information about them - have perished.

4. MÚLLER73-5. 5. Aristodemos and his daughter: Paus. 4.9.4-10, D&M 24, 68

(glimpsed FdA 203).

DIALOGUES D'HISTOIRE ANCIENNE 33

3 - VERIFICATION BY SURPRISE

So far, hypotheses, a decipherment on the basis of one Rosetta Stone and a few fragments, the discovery of what one already suspects will be found. But, as they say, 'un train peut en cacher un autre'. And in this case there is a whole string of consequence, corollaries and further conclusions.

3.1. CHRONOLOGY. Myths are not constantly invented anew : they are traditional stories which have been found satisfactory in a context and continue as long as they satisfy a need. Thus myth in Greek tragedy or on Greek temples or vases has its uses and functions which ensure its survival in these media. Today too Greek myth survives as something not just entertaining, but exotic, intercultural, enigmatic, tantalisingly not quite religious. But Greek myth has not been invented in our day to attain these goals, nor in the days of the Greek tragedians in order to serve theirs. If we wish to reach the point of origin (Entstehung) of particular myths, we must think back before the Classical and Archaic periods of Greece - almost, as Miiller saw it, to the very times of myth 6. Nilsson, in his Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology showed the prominence in Greek myth of Mycenaean centres like Tiryns and Mycenae and a possible conclusion is clear : in some sense, yet to be defined, the Mycenaean age was formative for Greek myths. So it becomes necessary to take a view of the tribal complexion of Mycenaean Greece and of its social structure, to which at least some myth (on our ritual theory) was attached. If we discover that a myth at Tiryns, the myth of the Proitids, implies a ritual, then that ritual is only implied for the era of creation of the myth. Since, say, 1200 ВС or 850 ВС the myth may have survived as a colourful, somewhat moral entertainment in the hands of poets, whether local or panhellenic.

3.2. MYTH AS MOVABLE PROPERTY. Do Mycenaeans create myth de novo ? We might be less prepared to believe so if myths could be transferred with moving populations, as used to be commonly envisaged 7. On the smallest scale, the myths of Mounichia und Brauron are not spontaneously generated at such a slight distance apart and 'borrowing' is, at least in my view, a more difficult notion than a moving and dividing population. The

6. MULLER 164-9 in its way foreshadows NILSSON : note especially 164 : 'the majority of myths must have been rooted in the mythic period itself.

7. MULLER 160-1.

34 Ken DOWDEN

replication of Iphinoë at Megara and Sikyon cannot be coincidence. The myth of the Proitids is associated with Lousoi in northern Arcadia as well as with Tiryns - and this seems to match the archaeological supposition of population movements from Tiryns around 1200 8. As a test case I tried the association of Achilles with 'Aeolic' populations, and found an intelligible pattern of distribution in the light of the advance of colonists from Thessaly to Skyros to Lesbos and the Troad - and a good deal further south than the traditional Aeolid in Asia Minor. One would have to suppose that Ionia had pushed back the borders of the Aeolid - and that too has some confirmation in the historical record (most notably in Herodotos on Smyrna) and in local toponyms. Thus the predictions of our theory, which so closely associates myths with the culture of particular sites, finds some verification. Even the 'Minyans1, a favourite of 19th and early 20th century writers on myth, find their place in this tribal, religious, mythic and dialectal geography 9- something which leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that these earlier writers (such as E. Bethe and C. Robert) knew something which we have supposed we can avoid learning. Did anyone ever refute the geographic approach to myth ?

In the case of Brauron, its mythic-cultural affiliations are twofold : it has an animal-rite stratum which links it to Aulis and Thessaly in the north (contrasting for instance with the Agrionia pattern of Boiotia) and maybe to Kallisto in the south. I am less convinced of the immediacy of the connection with the cows of the Argolid. And secondly it has a specific Iphigeneia stratum of which Aulis is the most distant known outpost to the north, but which reaches down through Megara to the north-eastern Péloponnèse. These look to me like culture distributions which do not match the later historical tribal distributions but which are by no means impossible to envisage for the Bronze Age.

3.3. MYCENAEAN AULIS, MYCENAEAN BRAURON. Both Aulis and Brauron have their Mycenaean settlements. At Aulis, on the promontory between the two bays, remains have been found indicating the position at least of the Mycenaean acropois - and Mycenaean graves have been discovered nearby 10. At Brauron, soundings at the top of the acropolis indicate that 'the town of Brauron flourished from Neolithic times to the

8. D&M 94. 9. MULLER 160-1.

10. THREPSIADIS95, 101.

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late Mycenaean period1 according to Papadimitriou n. And the temple is in fact at the foot of this acropolis. Papadimitriou charts prosperity between 2000 and 1600, but decline after 1300- to the point at which he speaks of 'abandonment' of the site, the usual archaeological argument ex silentio of which I have complained elsewhere : 12 negative conclusions are after all no less risky than positive. There is clearly a particular problem with continuity of cult and settlement on the one hand and the archaeological record of this period on the other, but I feel that we must avoid the Greeks and their religion popping in and out of existence like the physical objects of Bishop Berkeley.

3.4. MYCENAEAN CLIENTELE & THEIR MARGINS. If there were adequate Mycenaean settlements, we may ask how the Arkteia related to the settlements of these times. Do socially elevated members of the community at Mycenaean Athens come like the later Lysistrata to this marginal location for the rites ? Is Brauron even part of Athenian geography at this time ? Is it essentially and unavoidably a 'margin' ; and if so can it only be a 'margin' in relation to Athens ?

Some sites are undeniably marginal : the cult of Artemis of Akroi in the Argolid was not designed for the inhabitants of barren mountain-tops 13. And it really is desperately hard to believe that the 'Argive' Heraion's site was determined by an immediate community : it is the margin for Mycenae, reached by Bronze Age road across a marginalising stream 14 . But Brauron ? The Artemis site, as both Brûlé and I have observed15, is one of a number sited by the sea. In historical times it is also marginal because of its relationship to Athens, a pattern repeated and therefore confirmed in the relationship of Tanagra to Aulis and of Kleitor to Lousoi. There is clearly a role for a sacred, seclusive site at the fringes of your territory. But perhaps this is a trend in Greek religion as it develops alongside the polis. Eleusis, with its Mysteries, stands in something of this relationship to Athens, yet few, I think, would suppose it had been originally designed as an outpost of Athens.

11. 12. 13. 14.

PAPADIMITRIOU 111. D&M D&M D&M

45, 128 f. 90. 128.

15. FdA 191-3, 199 (map) ; D&M 39 ; cf. de POLIGNAC 45.

36 Ken DOWDEN

So shall we conversely hold that these sites were in Mycenaean times more local margins, more local places of exclusion ? It is perhaps worth stressing at this point that, contrary to the impression given by Brûlé and myself, these temples are not exactly on the sea-shore. They however have a certain geography in common which seems revealing. The Brauron temple is a the foot of the acropolis, by the river Erasinos and next to a spring and pool (a particular focus of devotion)16. A stream flows down from the spring and attention is drawn to it by a curiously elaborate bridge over it - 30 feet long and 30 feet wide 17. The temple at Aulis is sited next to a spring, which at least in later times was elaborated with a square surround and steps down into the water. At the end of antiquity, to the detriment of the Artemis temple, this was the site for Roman baths. The pattern of fresh water at a small (but sufficient?) distance from the acropolis is one which is repeated at Patrai with the temple of Artemis Triklaria not only next to the sea but also next to the River Meilichios (and its initiatory rituals) 18; and Lousoi, with pools next to the mountains from which the Proitids descend, is not wholly different.

So here the historical implications of our hypothesis brusquely curtail a conventional view of marginality, centring on the polis of historical times - and consequently alter the clientele which we should envisage.

3.5. UNIVERSAL OR SELECTIVE ? Clientele perhaps leads to one of the more unexpected conclusions of our study. The ideological framework of our study, let us confess, comes from the study of initiation customs in non-European cultures. This should arouse more distrust and wariness than it usually does. Do we not remember how difficult it is to assimilate Greek ideas of mythology to world mythology, how Lévi-Strauss gave virtuoso performances on south American myth without being able to make real headway into Greek ? Why then should we expect Greek ritual to be so obliging ? What we look for is the initiation of age-groups - these whole classes that are to become warriors or matrons. Yet, with the exception of the 50 Danaids (to whom I will return), mythology repeatedly tells us of individuals or trios (just enough to be 'plural' in Indo-European) : Iphigeneia, Iphinoë, Io, Kallisto, Proitids,

16. PAPADIMITR1OU 113-5. 17. PAPADIMITRIOU 120. 18. D&M ch. 8.2, FdA 347 f.

DIALOGUES D'HISTOIRE ANCIENNE 37

daughters of Kadmos. Perhaps this is simply a matter of myth clarifying, simplifying, focussing in televisual close-up - though it talks easily enough of the 'Women of Argos' - but it is sobering to realise that the information supplied by cult is not so different. With the possible exceptions of Sparta and Crete, there is no identified survival of initiation-practice which is not selective : maiden priestess or boy priest ; a few Arrhephoroi ; matching pairs of 7 boys and 7 girls at the R. Sythas near Sikyon or appeasing the children of Medea or the woes of the Bacchiads. And at Brauron : select maidens, like Lysistrata. To assert now that this is the result of the historical degeneration of the custom begins to look like special pleading.

Two solutions to this problem have been offered. Burkert, in the context of the Arrhephoroi, suggested a model of two versions of the rites : a major version in which the select participate ; and a minor version in which the whole age-class participates 19. But in what sense are there minor rites at all ? In historical times, you were lucky to be selected as a kanephoros, for instance, and wholesale procession of an age-class looks unlikely. Maybe we should think of some quiet, private rite (I suggested at D&M 27-8 that the krateriskoi might result from a general practice, though I do fear that the remains are too few for that - no matter how shoddy they are to our cultivated eyes). Maybe, it is only a question of attending, bystanding, watching - scarcely a rite, though characteristic enough of the Roman brand of Indo-European religion. Bremmer focusses on the boy priest and girl priestess : is this perhaps the leader of a dance-group which has disappeared ? 20 At firt sight trios might seem to pose a difficulty for this view, yet at Thebes the trio of Kadmus' daughters are the leaders of three dance-groups, which seems to solve the problem. So Bremmer's theory is a theory of degeneration of ritual, of a more widespread (if minor) participation that vanishes. It is not impossible : the dance- group has emerged as important from Calame's study and must have been widespread - not just in the poetry of Sappho or Alcman, but led maybe by Telesilla at Argos, and in myth by Auge at Tegea and implied by Melampous' band of youths at Sikyon or the 50 Danaids.

Dancing requires preparation. The preparation is not, however, equivalent to full seclusion, for which, perhaps, an

19. BURKERT (1966) 19 f., D&M 28. 20. BREMMER 15.

38 Ken DOWDEN

appointment to a 'priesthood' or a named role such as 'arrhephoros' is required. Thus we see that status, or more precisely, a class structure is built into Greek myth and ritual. Greek society was less egalitarian than the traditional societies from whom we derive our model of initiation of the whole age-class - with the exception of the Spartan Homoioi, where indeed the whole age-class seems to have gone through an elaborate initiation structure for precisely this reason. Initiation is an aristocratic privilege : it creates the warriors of tomorrow, fighting as promachoi, bronze-armed individuals who step out from the Bronze Age riff-raff and slaughter like a man ; and it creates matrons who will be comparable with those who begin the genealogy of the nation (lo, Kallisto). No ordinary person has a genealogy.

3.6. INCORPORATION & THE LARGER SOCIETY. Dancing also requires a setting : when is the performance ? It

is reasonable to speculate that this is the end of the period of seclusion, what it has all along been leading to - and that in turn, following Van Genncp's model, must mean the festival of integration. Here we are even more poorly informed than usual : our rituals have largely vanished ; our myths prefer the crisis of segregation. Integration reassigns our initiands (and their dance- group) a place in the community. One might therefore expect that- ex-maidens would be incorporated in the group of women. This would make one look to an integrated woman's festival, perhaps of Thesmophoria type or of Agrionia type depending on local culture.

But here is another model too, where the focus is not the integration of maidens into the community of women, but the union the sexes through the medium of marriage. All our girls are at the age for marriage, the Arkteia rite is supposed to be a necessary preliminary to marriage and boys do occasionally put in an appearance in cult or myth. Achilles and Iphigeneia, the Danaids and their Egyptians (or the contestants in the footrace that finally marry them), Melampous and his band of youths followed by marriage of the select Melampous and Bias to select surviving Proitids. At Larisa, the future husband of one who has gone through the Deer rite (if that is what Nebeia means) is said to 'ransom' her from Artemis. If it is true that boys' rites were celebrated at Halai and girls' at Brauron, were the two never united except in a secular wedding ceremony ? The whole logic of these rites preliminary to

DIALOGUES D'HISTOIRE ANCIENNE 39

marriage is that they should conclude in marriage - as happened in the group marriages at the R. Scamander in the Troad.

A final model, as unexpected as exciting, may bring all together. The Agrionia of Boiotia focusses particularly on women. Indeed, it is the principal source of the illusion amongst some students of Greek religion that the ecstatic worship of Dionysos was widespread in Greece. But myths of the Agrionia and of related rites in Asia Minor dramatise the separation of the sexes through hostility, chase and murder. Graf above all has shown that these are rites of periodic renewal, typically taking place at night (thus not only Agrionia but also Nyktelia). Thus a jigsaw reconstruction might produce this picture : a select girl acquires her nebris at the Nebeia of e.g. Aulis. She is integrated into a community of women, distinct and separated from men - because it is the Agrionia this year at e.g. Tanagra : the women are wild, unmatronly and wearing their own nebrides. Finally, in a festival of reunion of the sexes, return to normality and renewal of the flame of society (complete with New Fire), marriages are celebrated and society can continue.

This sort of picture emerges equally from Burkert's study of New Fire at Lemnos and Graf's study of the cults of North Ionia 21. It is not just romantic guesswork. Nor is it exclusively a Boiotian matter - a feature of Tanagra, and maybe Aulis, but not of Brauron, Brauron and Aulis belong to the same family. Deer at Aulis, Bears at Brauron. Nebris at Aulis, Krokotos at Brauron. Renewal is by nocturnal festival at Tanagra ; women and maidens dance through the night at the Tauropolia of, it seems, Halai - even if Halai is supposed to be boys-only 22! At Orchomenos the male 'Sooties' persecute the 'Aioleiai' ; at Brauron 'Pelasgians' (mythic for 'preliminary people') seize Athenian women, ritually segregated for Artemis - and the sequel tells inter alia of a ban on marriage 23. There are, I think, enough hints that there was, or rather had been, some larger festival tending towards what we know as the Boiotian Agrionia - and this was where the Arkteia fitted. But of course we have little idea of the content of the Brauronia even of classical times.

21 . GRAF e.g. 77-80, 234-6, 241 . 22. Tauropolia : Mcnandcr, Epitr. 451-3, D&M 33. 23. Brauron : Herodotos 6.138. For the mythic idea of 'Pelasgians1,

featureless, unformed people, see D&M e.g. 148. At FdA 291, 293, Brûlé gives the Brauronian Pelasgians their set of mythic intertexts as seizers of girls doing rites.

40 Ken DOWDEN

4 - GENESIS

Where ultimately did these myths and rites come from ? In D&M I concentrated on a particular model, the portable model : tribes carry myths and rites with them wherever they go. This is a model confirmed for instance by the movement of cults later in antiquity, where the natural assumption is that nations will wish to continue with their ancestral cults, even when their members move or are scattered : thus Judaism survived, and thus the cult of the so- called 'Egyptian' gods spread, carried by itinerant nationals. This is perhaps even more likely to be the case when a whole nation is on the move. My test-case here was the cult of Achilles, which seemed explicable in terms of a specific connection with something we might term 'Aeolic' Greeks.

Naturally, this portable model lends itself to a genetic approach and ultimately the explanation of everything will be Indo-European. This cannot be wholly true, any more than it is wholly true of the features of individual Indo-European languages, yet it can be true for the most part, as again with the languages. Thus in the last chapter of D&M I moved towards a position which attributed the structure of the mythology (and therefore of the rites) to the Indo-European inheritance, but the particular goddess- cults in which it was realised to the substratum.

There must however be some way of verifying or falsifying this model. For the Dumczilian, clearly a desideratum will be the demonstration of the position of these cults/myths relative to the trifunctional scheme. In fact that scheme, if valid (and I think it must be valid, at least in some basic class-descriptive way for Indo- European social structure), is easily satisfied and even explains a puzzling feature of Greek initiations as we hypothesise them : their selectivity. Repeatedly we find our select members of society in a regal and priestly ambience : princess Io the priestess, King Agamemnon playing priest Embaros, Melampous the guru with kingly pretensions. To merge scholarly ideologies, the rites which we seem to be picking up on our long-distance receivers are often the admission rites to full membership of the first (priestly-kingly) function. Achilles, however, and perhaps Spartan initiations might need further examination in the light of the second (warrior) function.

In any case verification requires the observation of suitable comparative materials in other Indo-European cultures ; it would

DIALOGUES D'HISTOIRE ANCIENNE 41

also be desirable to show that these features are not obvious enough accompaniments of a society, Indo-European or non-Indo-European, at that stage of development. The most salient example appears to be the Vestal Virgins at Rome, who have been drawn into the Greek initiatory picture by Burkert, Brûlé and myself 24. Common features here (weaving of robe, 'daughterhood' to Pontifex Maximus, maybe period of service in earlier times, and the accompanying myth - of Ilia/Silvia) cannot all be put down to learned Greek remodelling. But beyond this example, one quickly runs into the limitations of one's own expertise. Perhaps, however, a certain amount can be learnt from Stith Thompson's Motif Index of Folk-Literature, which has the advantage as a control of including a significant amount of non-Indo-European material, though the disadvantage of resting on secondary collections.

Motifs relevant to our myths are not very frequent. Perhaps we should count a father dying on the day daughter marries, 25 though such a message is rather obvious without supposing genetic connection with Greek concerns with father and daughters. Transmutation into animals is of course common, but in Thompson's index, bears are almost exclusively male and animal-maidens altogether rarer than one might suppose. I note daughters of a (Lithuanian) witch who are cattle (HI 199.12.2), which might just reach out to the Proitids. But I think the best example in this field comes from the early Irish tradition 26 : Oisin is the son of a fawn, an os (shades of Aulis, shades too of Arkas son of the arktos). She arrives as a fawn who escapes the Féinne (the Fenians, a sort of freelance warrior-band, at least in ancient mythology) who are hunting her (shades of Danaids and Egyptians ?) ; subsequently she marries and her child Oisin has a tuft of black hair where she licked him (shades of Romulus. Remus and the Capitoline wolf ?). It is perhaps slightly impressive also that I have not deliberately excluded non-Indo-European material - such material is simply less comparable.

This should only be the tip of an iceberg. Could not the Sanskrit tradition deliver something usable ? After all, it can give us an Achilles in Arjuna of the Mahâbhârata, and a burning initiation-hut where five substitutes for the Pandavas must die 27.

24. BURKERT (1970) 12 i.,Fd A 116 f., D&M ch. 9.3. 25. E765.4.1 . (Irish and /or Welsh), cf. E765.4.3. 26. A511.1.8.1., B641.2 ; CHRISTIANSEN 13. 27. D&M 67. 102.

42 Ken DOW DEN

It remains to be seen whether there is something more which might help us with girl's initiation-patterns.

5 - CONCLUSION

So Brauron, innocent site of doubtless pretty rituals for little girls, is a window onto ritual, myth and a history reaching back before Greeks were Greeks. It is an important key to our understanding of the culture and traditions of other areas of Greece. And a few Mycenaean stones - and a holy spring - point back to that earlier age in which the settled traditions of Greece were defined by a previous stratum of Greeks. Herodotos would doubtless have called them 'Pelasgians'. I hope their ideas are now rather better defined than that.

Ken DOWDEN

DIALOGUES D'HISTOIRE ANCIENNE 43

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.N. BREMMER, Heroes, rituals and the Trojan War, SSR 2 (1978) 5-38.

P. BRÛLÉ, La Fille d'Athènes, Paris 1987. W. BURKERT, Kekropidensage und Arrhephoria : vom

Initiationsritus zum Panathenaenfest, Hermes 94 (1966) 1-25. W. BURKERT, Jason, Hypsipyle and New Fire at Lemnos, CQ

20 (1970) 1-16. R. Th. CHRISTIANSEN, The Vikings and the Viking Wars in

Irish and Gaelic Tradition, Oslo 1931. K. DOWDEN, Death and the Maiden, London 1989. F. GRAF, Nordionische Kulte : Religions geschichtliche und

epigraphische Untersuchungen zu den Kulten von Chios, Erythrai, Klazomenai und Phokaia, Roma 1985.

O. GRUPPE, Griechische Mythologie und Religions- geschichte, Vol. I, Munchen 1906.

0. GRUPPE, Bericht iiber die Literatur zur antiken Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte 1906-17, Leipzig 1921.

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1. PAPADIMITRIOU, The Sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron, Scientific American 208/6 (1963) p. 110-20.

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