Adonia

Adonia (Greek: Ἀδώνια) or Feast of Adonis was an ancient festival mourning the death of Adonis. 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.

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 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 eight months of the year with Aphrodite (the other four with Persephone Queen of the Underworld). 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, 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.

Reitzammer has produced a recent reinterpretation of much of the accepted interpretation of the festival. She examines the meaning of the festival in its cultural context.

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

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