The Kanephoros was an honorific office given to unmarried young women in ancient Greece

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

, which involved the privilege of leading the procession to sacrifice at festivals; the highest honour was to lead the pompe (πομπή) at the Panathenaic Festival. The role was given to a virgin selected from amongst the aristocratic or Eupatrid families of Athens whose purity and youth was thought essential to ensure a successful sacrifice. Her task was to carry a basket or kanoun (κανοῦν), which contained the offering of barley or first fruits, the sacrificial knife and fillets to decorate the bull, in procession through the city up to the altar on the acropolis.

From 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...

’s 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...

we have evidence that the office of kanephoros was the last in a sequence of religious duties that an unmarried Athenian girl might undertake; first as an arrhephoros

Arrephoros

An Arrephoros was a girl acolyte in the cult of Athena Polias on the Athenian Acropolis. They were seven to eleven years old. According to Pausanias, two Arrephoroi lived for a year on the Acropolis and concluded their term with a mystery rite called the Arrhephoria: they carried unknown objects...

, later an aletris, then as an arktos (ἄρκτος). The passage continues, “[f]inally, when I had grown to be a beautiful girl, I was a kanephoros and wore a necklace of dried figs.” Though the precise age of the kanephoros is not known this suggests the girl was probably between 11 and 15. In such a conspicuous and ritually important office the chosen girl was expected to have a blameless reputation: in 514 BCE the unnamed sister of Harmodios

Harmodius and Aristogeiton

Harmodius and Aristogeiton were two men from ancient Athens...

 was rebuffed as kanephoros in the Greater Panathenaia; this insult is cited as the cause of her brother’s later assassination of the tyrant Hipparchos which hastened the fall from power of the Peisistratid

Peisistratos (Athens)

Peisistratos was a tyrant of Athens from 546 to 527/8 BC. His legacy lies primarily in his institution of the Panathenaic Festival and the consequent first attempt at producing a definitive version for Homeric epics. Peisistratos' championing of the lower class of Athens, the Hyperakrioi, can be...

 family. The cult practice of bearing the basket in a sacrificial procession may date back to the Minoan

Minoan civilization

The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age civilization that arose on the island of Crete and flourished from approximately the 27th century BC to the 15th century BC. It was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century through the work of the British archaeologist Arthur Evans...

 period; however, the Athenian usage seems to belong to the beginnings of the Panathenaia. The role is also referred to in myth with the abduction of Oreithyia by Boreas. A girl who acted as kanephoros would have advertised the central place of her family in Athenian society, and her own availability for a dynastic marriage.

The depiction of the kanephoros in art presents an interesting problem. Unlike the ephebos

Ephebos

Ephebos , also anglicised as ephebe or archaically ephebus , is a Greek word for an adolescent age group or a social status reserved for that age in Antiquity....

 there are few representations of such girls, possibly because of the restriction on mentioning the name of honourable women in ancient Greek society. Excluding the Parthenon

Parthenon

The Parthenon is a temple on the Athenian Acropolis, Greece, dedicated to the Greek goddess Athena, whom the people of Athens considered their virgin patron. Its construction began in 447 BC when the Athenian Empire was at the height of its power. It was completed in 438 BC, although...

 there are only some 44 images of girls and karoun in the period 550 to 330 BCE. Otherwise she must be identified by her dress since while serving her office the kanephoros wore a distinctive full-length mantle, for example in the kylix

Kylix (drinking cup)

A kylix is a type of wine-drinking glass with a broad relatively shallow body raised on a stem from a foot and usually with two horizontal handles disposed symmetrically...

 by Makron

Makron (vase painter)

Makron was an ancient Greek vase painter active in Athens ca. 490-480 BC. Though only one signed example of his work is known to have survived, some 350 vases have been attributed to him by Sir John Beazley, making him one of the best surviving painters of the red-figure period.Makron is strongly...

, Toledo, Ohio 1972.55. On the Parthenon Frieze

Parthenon Frieze

The Parthenon frieze is the low relief, pentelic marble sculpture created to adorn the upper part of the Parthenon’s naos. It was sculpted between ca. 443 and 438 BC, most likely under the direction of Pheidias. Of the of the original frieze, survives—some 80 percent...

 none of the maidens (who may be identified by their long hair) are depicted carrying the kanoun and all of them wear the festival mantle, however Linda Jones Roccos suggests that the maidens wearing both peplos and mantle implies they are kanephoroi, which would be consistent with the evidence of contemporary vase painting and wedding iconography. This would solve the problem of the curious absence of the basket bearers from the processional frieze.

The kanephoros was not exclusive to the Panathenaia or to Athens, she may be found at a number of festival across the Greek world, including: the Country Dionysia of Attica; Mother of the Gods in Athens, and Apollo Pythais, Artemis Brauronia, Asklepios; Demeter and Isis at Eleusis; Zeus Disoterien in Piraeus; Zeus Basileus in Lebadeia; Argive Hera; Xphrodite; Hermes at Salamis; Hekate on Delos; Sarapis and Isis; Herakles; Heros Iatros; Neoptolemos. Arsinoe II is mentioned as kanephoros on the Rosetta stone

Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is an ancient Egyptian granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion Demotic script, and the lowest Ancient Greek...

.

Sources

• Brulé, Pierre (translated by Antonia Nevill). Women of Ancient Greece. Edinburgh University Press, 2003, ISBN 07486164382003.
• Dillon, Matthew. Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion. Routledge, 2003, ISBN 0415319161.
• Goff, Barbara E. Citizen Bacchae: Women’s Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece. University of California Press, 2004, ISBN 0520239989.
• Roccos, Linda Jones. "The Kanephoros and her Festival Mantle in Greek Art", American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 99, No. 4, October 1995, pp. 641-666.