The Panathenaic Festival

Every summer, on a date reckoned near what corresponds to the goddess's mythical birthday, Athens closed its ordinary business and turned toward the Acropolis. The smaller, annual Panathenaea combined animal sacrifice at the great altar of Athena, a distribution of the meat among citizens, athletic and musical competitions open to entrants from beyond Athens itself, and an all-night vigil by young women called pannychis, with torch races that some ancient sources connect to Athena's role as a bringer of fire and craft to humanity. The festival's central act, though, was the procession, a formal march from the Kerameikos cemetery and civic center through the Agora and up to the Acropolis, in which magistrates, priests, resident foreigners, cavalry and ordinary citizens all took a designated place, culminating in the delivery of the year's woven peplos to the ancient statue of Athena Polias.

The Panathenaea is generally treated by historians as reorganized into something like its Classical form in 566 BCE, under circumstances tradition attributes to Peisistratus' circle, when the athletic and musical competitions were added or formalized alongside the older religious observance. Whatever the exact prehistory, from that point the festival becomes a fixture of the Athenian civic and religious calendar, and prize amphorae from the games, filled with sacred olive oil and stamped with an image of Athena, have survived in enough numbers across the Mediterranean world to trace how far Athenian visitors and honored competitors carried them home.

Every fourth year the ordinary Panathenaea gave way to the Great Panathenaea, an expanded version of the same festival with grander competitions, larger prizes and, most visibly, a much larger peplos, grown by the Classical period from a garment a person could carry to a rigged sail hauled through the city on the mast of a wheeled processional ship. The scale of the Great Panathenaea, and Athens' evident interest in publicizing it, is part of why many historians read the festival as functioning as civic ritual and diplomacy at once, an occasion to display Athenian wealth and religious devotion to visitors from the wider Greek world and, later, from cities within the Athenian empire that sent representatives and offerings as a mark of their standing relative to the city.

The frieze that once ran around the Parthenon's inner colonnade is widely, though not universally, read by archaeologists as depicting this procession, ending in a scene showing a folded cloth passed between human and divine hands, and if that reading is correct, then the temple raised for the newer, gold and ivory statue of Athena Parthenos also carried a permanent record of the older festival owed to her more ancient cult image. The Panathenaea continued, in some diminished form, well into the Roman period, one of the longest continuously attested civic festivals of the ancient Greek world.