Bendis
Bendis is the Thracian goddess of the hunt .
Greece
The Thracian huntress is repeatedly referred to in inscriptions as Artemis with the epiclesis of Bendis or in the Latin form as Diana with the same surname.
Her picture first appeared in the archaic period in the Attic cultural area. At the time of Plato (approx. 430 BC) there was an official festival in Athens, the Bendideia , which - as reported by Strabo - took place once a year, in the month of Thargelion. In a night torch relay, sometimes on horseback, one approached the sanctuary of the goddess, the Bendideion in Piraeus (Plato, Republic 327a, 328a). This torch relay is depicted on a relief in the British Museum. Cecil Smith assumed that it led from Laurion, about 50 km away, to Piraeus. The temple in Piraeus is mentioned by Xenophon , among others (Xenophon, Hell. 2, 4, 11). According to Thucydides , the strange goddess Bendis from the barbarian north was granted hospitality for a short time in Athens as thanks for the alliance of the Thracians with the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War .
In Attica there was a temple of the Bendis in Salamis and their cult is also recorded in Laurion , where a Bendis statue was discovered. Their cult continued to reach many places in the Greek cultural area, such as the Cyclades , Asia Minor, Cyprus , Egypt and southern Italy. As part of Athens' expansion policy, she also reached northern Greece, her homeland, in the late classical period. Here, the references to the presence and cult of the Bendis concentrate on the cities along the coast that have been populated by Greeks since the Archaic era, where their cult was accepted by the Greek residents and partially integrated into everyday private life or, in individual cases, into the official cult the polis was added. The goddess atone at the end of the 4th century BC. Their enormous popularity and their cult came to a largely standstill.
Roman time
It was not until the beginning of the middle imperial period, that is, from the 2nd century AD, that pond reliefs were made again with the image of a huntress. From isolated votive inscriptions we know that Bendis is depicted here, who was equated with Artemis / Diana in Northern Greece. Here she no longer appears as the goddess of an ethnic minority, as in classical Athens, but was worshiped equally by all population groups in the now Roman province of Thracia and Macedonia .
literature
- Adolf Rapp : Bendis . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 1.1, Leipzig 1886, Col. 779-783 ( digitized version ).
- Georg Knaack : Bendis . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume III, 1, Stuttgart 1897, Col. 269-271.
- Christopher Planeaux: The Date of Bendis' Entry into Attica. In: Classical Journal. 96, 2000, pp. 165-192.
- Maria Deoudi: The Thracian huntress. Roman stone monuments from Macedonia and Thracia (= Peleus. Studies on the archeology and history of Greece and Cyprus. Volume 51), Rutzen, Mainz, Ruhpolding 2010, ISBN 978-3447062138 .
Individual evidence
- ^ O. Hansen: On the Date for an Athenian Festival . In: Mnemosyne Ser. 4, 38, 1985, p. 390.
- ↑ Cecil Harcourt Smith : The Torch Race of Bendis. In: The Classical Review 13, 1899, p. 230.
- ^ A b Cecil Harcourt Smith: The Torch Race of Bendis . In: The Classical Review 13, 1899, p. 232