This article refers to the ancient festival. The cruise ship Sea Princess

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Adonia (Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

: ), or Adonic feasts, was an ancient festival mourning the death of Adonis

Adonis

Adonis , in Greek mythology, the god of beauty and desire, is a figure with Northwest Semitic antecedents, where he is a central figure in various mystery religions. The Greek , Adōnis is a variation of the Semitic word Adonai, "lord", which is also one of the names used to refer to God in the Old...

. The date is uncertain, but may have been early Spring, or summer. It was a private, rather than a state festival, and was celebrated by women exclusively..

The festival

According to one 1875 source, the festival lasted two days. On the first day, they brought into the streets statues of Adonis, which were laid out as corpses; and they observed all the rites customary at funerals, beating themselves and uttering lamentations, in imitation of the cries of Venus

Venus (mythology)

Venus is a Roman goddess principally associated with love, beauty, sex,sexual seduction and fertility, who played a key role in many Roman religious festivals and myths...

 for the death of her paramour. The second day was spent in merriment and feasting; because Adonis was allowed to return to life, and spend half of the year with Aphrodite. But Dillon states that the resurrection of Adonis was not celebrated, and that the only sources that mention this are all late.

According to Johannes Meursius

Johannes Meursius

Johannes Meursius , was a Dutch classical scholar and antiquary.-Biography:...

, these two rituals made two distinct feasts, which were held at different times of the year, the one six months after the other; Adonis being supposed to pass half the year with Proserpine, and half with Venus

Venus (mythology)

Venus is a Roman goddess principally associated with love, beauty, sex,sexual seduction and fertility, who played a key role in many Roman religious festivals and myths...

.

History

The origins of the festival are unknown, but Photius records that it came to Greece from Cyprus and Phoenicia. We do not know when the Adonia was first observed in Athens: a mid-fifth-century date has been suggested on the basis of vase-paintings. Casual remarks in Aristophanes

Aristophanes

Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete...

' Lysistrata

Lysistrata

Lysistrata is one of eleven surviving plays written by Aristophanes. Originally performed in classical Athens in 411 BC, it is a comic account of one woman's extraordinary mission to end The Peloponnesian War...

(lines 387-96) and elsewhere show the Adonia was a familiar, though disruptive, element of Athenian life in the 420s.

The date of the early summer festival of Adonia has been debated: it was tied to the cycle of the new moon on the ninth day of Hecatombion. This festival was the only celebration of Adonis at Athens: there was no temple to honour him, and he had no place in the official cults of the polis

Polis

Polis , plural poleis , literally means city in Greek. It could also mean citizenship and body of citizens. In modern historiography "polis" is normally used to indicate the ancient Greek city-states, like Classical Athens and its contemporaries, so polis is often translated as "city-state."The...

. In the masculine public culture of Athens, at least five comic poets wrote plays titled Adonis: Nikophon, Plato, Araros, Anthiphanes and Phaliskos. The official view of the Adonia is reflected in a fragment of Kratinos: "The man, who did not give a chorus to Sophocles

Sophocles

Sophocles is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than or contemporary with those of Euripides...

 when he asked, but to the son of Kleomachos, whom I would not think worthy to produce for me, not even for the Adonia".

During this festival, ad-hoc groups of women only — according to Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

, who disapproved of the essentially non-Greek and female cultus especially loose women, prostitutes and mistresses — gathered on the rooftops, wailing, drinking and singing. According to a fragment of the Athenian comic poet of the late fifth century, Pherecrates

Pherecrates

Pherecrates, was an Greek poet of Athenian Old Comedy, and a rough contemporary of Cratinus, Crates and Aristophanes. He was victorious at least once at the City Dionysia, first probably in the mid-440s Pherecrates, was an Greek poet of Athenian Old Comedy, and a rough contemporary of Cratinus,...

 found in the Suda, they said "We celebrate the Adonia and we bewail Adonis". An early testimony to the Adonia, in Lesbos is provided by fragmentary lines of Sappho

Sappho

Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...

: "delicate Adonis is dying, Kytherea

Aphrodite

Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation.Her Roman equivalent is the goddess .Historically, her cult in Greece was imported from, or influenced by, the cult of Astarte in Phoenicia....

; what should we do? Beat your breasts, maidens, and rend your garments."

Literary evidence for any Adonis cult outside Athens has been thin, although in the 2nd century A.D. Lucian refers to a celebration in Syria and the 15th Idyll of Theocritus

Theocritus

Theocritus , the creator of ancient Greek bucolic poetry, flourished in the 3rd century BC.-Life:Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from his writings. We must, however, handle these with some caution, since some of the poems commonly attributed to him have little claim to...

, ca. 270 BC, describes a public, state-supported Adonia at Alexandria

Alexandria

Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...

, celebrated in the royal palace.

"The rooftop location of the Adonia was not a place for religious activity in Greece, but it was used for such purposes in the Near East, and this feature of the festival was retained in Athens" Ronda R. Simms has observed in her analysis of the Adonia.

Sir James Frazer believed that Gardens of Adonis provided sympathetic magic

Sympathetic magic

Sympathetic magic, also known as imitative magic, is a type of magic based on imitation or correspondence.-Similarity and contagion:The theory of sympathetic magic was first developed by Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough...

 that encouraged fertility, growth and the vegetational death of Adonis, as a life-death-rebirth deity

Life-death-rebirth deity

A dying god, also known as a dying-and-rising or resurrection deity, is a god who dies and is resurrected or reborn, in either a literal or symbolic sense. Male examples include the ancient Near Eastern and Greek deities Baal, Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun, Attis Tammuz, Asclepius, Orpheus, as well as...

, as he was honoured in the Levant

Levant

The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...

: see Adonis

Adonis

Adonis , in Greek mythology, the god of beauty and desire, is a figure with Northwest Semitic antecedents, where he is a central figure in various mystery religions. The Greek , Adōnis is a variation of the Semitic word Adonai, "lord", which is also one of the names used to refer to God in the Old...

. But, Marcel Detienne

Marcel Detienne

Marcel Detienne is a Belgian historian and specialist in the study of ancient Greece. He is Professor Emeritus at The Johns Hopkins University, where he held the Basil L...

, the author of Gardens of Adonis, a structuralist analysis of the practice, has a different view. By Detienne's reinterpretation, Frazer's was "destroyed beyond any hope of resuscitation", according to Ronda R. Simms 1997. Detienne pointed out that the plants in a Garden of Adonis quickly wither under the heat of the sun. The Greeks have a proverb— "more sterile than the gardens of Adonis"— and also use the phrase to indicate something superficial, immature or lightweight. Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

 in Phaedrus contrasts the sensible male farmer, who would sow his seeds when it is suitable and be content to wait eight months for them to mature, and would not sow plants during eight days of summer in a Garden of Adonis. One is a serious act, the other playful; one will come to maturity, the other, according to Plato, is strictly for "the sake of sport and festival". According to a scholion on the passage, in Greek the phrase "garden of Adonis" came to mean anything out of season or short-lived. By this, Adonis, the unfruitful seducer of goddesses was the antithesis of useful agriculture and the union of marriage. The Gardens of Adonis were considered a suitable theme for a wedding vessel, nevertheless (illustration).

John Winkler found it impossible to conceive that the women of Athens, citizens and non-citizens, would celebrate their own marginality in this fashion, and found the Adonia a wry representation of the ephemeral sexual nature of Adonis— and men in general.

The Gardens of Adonis

One of the features of the holiday was the creation of "Gardens of Adonis". This involved sowing seeds of quickly-germinating plants— wheat, barley, lettuce, fennel— in shallow baskets, bowls or even in shards of clay. Tended by the women, who watered them daily, the plants grew rapidly but had shallow root systems. Images on Greek vases show the women carrying these little gardens up ladders to the rooftops, the unique site for the Adonia. At the end of eight days the pots of greenery were thrown into the ocean or a stream.

External links

• J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: Frazer's view of the gardens and the agricultural mythology of Adonis
• Make your own Garden plus more history at School of the Seasons. This is an excellent, short discussion of the Gardens and their history.