Attic Festival Calendar

Athens reckoned its year in twelve lunar months, Hekatombaion through Skirophorion, each one organised as much around the festivals it hosted as around the count of days. Hekatombaion, the first month, carried the Panathenaia, the city's central festival of Athena, held in an especially elaborate form every fourth year with athletic and musical competitions and a procession that carried a newly woven robe to the goddess's cult statue. Anthesteria, in late winter, marked the opening of the new wine and included rites addressed to the dead alongside its celebration, while Thesmophoria, kept by citizen women in honour of Demeter and excluding men from its central rites, structured the autumn.

The City Dionysia, in spring, was the occasion on which Athenian tragedy and comedy were performed, a fact that places the origin of Western theatre inside a civic religious festival rather than beside one. No other Greek polis shared this exact calendar. Sparta, Corinth, Delphi and every other Greek city-state kept its own months and its own festival cycle, so the Attic calendar is best understood as the most thoroughly documented example of a pattern repeated, with real variation, across the Greek world rather than as a panhellenic standard.

Twelve lunar months run to roughly 354 days, eleven days short of the solar year, so left uncorrected the festival calendar would cycle through the seasons over the span of a generation, putting a harvest festival in midwinter within thirty years. Athens corrected for this by inserting an intercalary month, but did so irregularly rather than by a fixed rule until the astronomer Meton proposed a nineteen year cycle of intercalation in 432 BCE, a scheme later associated with his name as the Metonic cycle and adopted only unevenly by the Athenian state rather than enforced as binding civic law. To complicate matters further, Athens ran a second, separate reckoning for its administrative business, the conciliar year tied to the terms of the Council rather than to the festival months, and the two systems frequently diverged, so that an Athenian document might carry a date that made sense administratively while conflicting with where the festival calendar actually stood that month.

No single complete official fasti comparable to Rome's pontifical calendar survives from Athens. What is known of the Attic calendar comes from inscribed public decrees that dated themselves by month and sometimes by festival, from later Hellenistic and Roman era grammarians who had to explain month names their own readers no longer used, and from literary references that mention, in passing, when a particular festival fell.