Panathenaea

It built the Parthenon on the Acropolis as her great temple and centered a huge amount of civic religious life around her.

And when we talk about that civic religious life, most notably, we're talking about the Panathenaia Festival, a major reoccurring civic celebration involving processions, athletic and artistic competitions and the ceremonial presentation of a newly woven robe.

This robe would be called a peplos and it was always given to her cult statue.

We will cover the Panathenaia properly when we get to that festival calendar later in the podcast.

But I want to flag how fitting it is that the central ritual act of her own great civic festival is an act of skilled textile craft.

And it's brought to her in procession by the city that she watches over.

The date is apparently the same, and the influences at work are the same.

It seems to have been under Pisistratus that the Homeric poems, in some form or other, came from Ionia to be recited in a fixed order at the Panathenaic Festival and to find a canonical form and a central home in Athens till the end of the Classical period.

Athens is the center from which Homeric influence radiates over the mainland of Greece.

Its effect upon literature was, of course, enormous.

It, it's, it's very hard, it's very hard to, to say the Timaeus is supposed to be a sequel to the proto-Republic when again, the, the proto-Republic, there's no evidence that it had Timaeus, Critias, Hermocrates, and some other person as Socrates's inter- interlocutors.

The proto-Republic, uh, also I should say, the Timaeus is set on the Panathenaea, which is a, a festival of Athena, celebration of Athena, but there's no evidence that the proto-Republic is set then, right? It would need to be if it's gonna happen one day after the, the other.

In fact, the full Republic, the text we have of The Republic now is set on a festival of Bendis, and Ben- the festival of Bendis is set, it, it happened way, m- you know, mo- months earlier in the calendar year, not, not one day before the Timaeus.

But, but of course someone who hold the, who held the idea that the Timaeus is a sequel to the proto-Republic would just say, "Yeah, but the proto-Republic wasn't a, uh, wasn't set on the festival of Bendis." And I would say, "Yeah, that's possible." It is possible that the part of Republic didn't have a particular dramatic date like that.

The result of this was that Harmodius and Aristogeiton, in a frenzy of wrath, did their celebrated deed in conjunction with a number of confederates.

But, while they were watching Hippias in the Acropolis during the Panathenaia, Hippias at this moment was awaiting the arrival of the procession, while Hipparchus was organizing its dispatch, they saw one of the persons privy to the plot talking familiarly with him.

Thinking that he was betraying them, and desiring to do something before they were arrested, they rushed down and made their attempt without waiting for the rest of their confederates, and killed Hipparchus near the Leocorium while he was engaged in arranging the procession.

This, however, ruined the design as a whole, and, of the two leaders, Harmodius was killed on the spot by the guards, while Aristogeiton was arrested later and perished after suffering long tortures.