A central thesis of this study is that the Adonia as performed in Classical Athens offered “a textured commentary (often counter-ideological)” on “mainstream practices.” Reitzammer argues for a much broader and more powerful impact of the Adonia on Classical Athenian society than has hitherto been recognized, due to the scholarly characterization of the festival as “private.” Reitzammer adopts the method of considering our limited data about the Athenian Adonia in its broader cultural contexts, namely, the Athenian wedding and funeral, the role of the Adonia in Lysistrata as a whole, and in Plato’s Phaedrus as a whole.
Reitzammer’s avowed goal is not to reconstruct what happened at the festival, but instead to “get at the meaning” of the festival for Athenians. Still, she spends much of chapter 1 discussing the specifics of the ritual, and I am not sure that interpretation, even of the festival’s reception, can be separated from some degree of historical reconstruction. The thesis of this first chapter is that the Adonia functioned as a means of self-expression for women, and in particular, “collective female resistance” as a political activity, because it was carried out in public and drew on women’s traditions of lament. This is a valuable line of argument which could have been strengthened by reference to theoretical and comparative work on ritual as a form of resistance, from Turner and Bakhtin onward.
Chapter 2 takes account of visual representations of the Adonia, examining a fifth-century Athenian lekythos showing the festival alongside materials with similar motifs in order to make a case that “women at the Adonia may have been commenting on wedding practices” in their performance of the festival. Reitzammer uses myths of powerful goddesses’ sexual contact with mortal men to argue that Adonis was represented not only in nuptial terms, but with a full gender reversal, as a bride. The difficulty here is in distinguishing between nuptial imagery and that which merely points to the erotic and the sphere of Aphrodite. In support of this chapter, a useful collection of twenty-three vase paintings and other objects related to the study of the Adonia is included.
In chapter 3, Reitzammer provides a new reading of Lysistrata in which the women of Athens, rebelling against the Peloponnesian War, make the acropolis their “rooftop” and celebrate an Adonia. As she points out, the case for this reading demands our attention because Adoniazousai, “Women at the Adonia,” is attested as a possible alternative title for the comedy. She then suggests that the women in Lysistrata use the Adonia as a vehicle to “critique aspects of the tradition of the epitaphios logos” or civic funeral oration. In turn, the conclusion that Aristophanes depicted the Adonia as a female mode of resistance is used as evidence for the festival’s real-life function; but this does not necessarily follow, given the playwright’s penchant for satirizing women’s festivals (as in the Thesmophoriazusae).
The fourth chapter examines the passage in the Phaedrus in which Socrates asks whether a serious farmer would plant gardens of Adonis, destined to die in a few days, for the purpose of harvesting crops, or if he would instead do so for amusement (paidia) and festivity (heorte). Contrary to a common interpretation, that Socrates is dismissing the Adonia, Reitzammer argues that he is instead aligning it with the practice of philosophy, which like the Adonia was derided as a trivial and useless pastime, but which might bear paradoxical fruit. This is a sensitive exploration of the web of concepts in Phaedrus addressing the usefulness of philosophy and its impact on young minds, especially with regard to Plato’s decision to represent Socrates’s dialogues in writing.
Reitzammer’s method is to examine broader contexts, and these allow her to discover larger numbers of possible connections between a part of a given text that mentions the Adonia and the rest (or between different visual media). But these links are often hit-and-miss, and the argument proceeds by a piling up of every possible connection. An example of a weak connection is the idea that when Lysistrata and her friends take hold of the “boar” (wine jug) to swear their oath, this alludes to Adonis’s death by boar. But boars were preferentially used in oath ceremonies (as in Hom. Il. 19.252-8 and at the Olympics [Paus. 5.24.9-11]), so there is an independent reason for mentioning the boar which has nothing to do with Adonis. Reitzammer proposes many interesting readings, but too many connections are strained. Of her method with regard to use of sources, she says only that she will take “neither a severe positivist position—that until a detail is attested it does not exist within the culture—nor an extreme structuralist position, marshaling evidence from radically different time periods with abandon.” In practice, however, Reitzammer brings in non-Athenian, non-Classical evidence whenever it helps make her point. For example, Theocritus Idyll 15 is used to support her claim that the Athenian Adonia was concerned with nuptial themes, without discussion of how the differences between Classical Athens and Hellenistic Alexandria (such as the impact of the Osiris-Isis myth) might have affected the festival and its reception by the poet.
In spite of these flaws, Reitzammer’s approach generates enough fresh and original insights to deserve attention, and her contextual method is a useful reminder that every Greek festival needs to be interpreted in relation to its cultural nexus.
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[Review length: 890 words • Review posted on January 11, 2017]