Serving Athena: The Festival of the Panathenaia and the Construction of Athenian Identities

"His book asks how individuals took part in the Panathenaia, the most important festival in ancient Athens, and how doing so created identities for them. Everyone did not take part in the same way and the opportunities also changed over time. This differential participation articulated individuals' relationships both to the goddess and to the community so that the festival played an important role in negotiating what it meant to be Athenian (and non-Athenian). Athenians' involvement also marked out their membership in the group of 'all the Athenians', while for others, both individuals and collectives, participating placed them in relationship to this community of 'all the Athenians'. Thus the festival served to create identities both at the level of individuals and at the level of the worshipping community of 'all the Athenians'. Neither the celebration nor Athenian identities were static so that changes in one sphere affected the other. The Panathenaia also provides a lens for thinking about Sourvinou-Inwood's polis religion, its relationship to identities and the connections between ritual and religion, on the one hand, and politics, in the hard sense, on the other"--
ISBN : 9781108485272