Genesia

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The Genesia ( Greek  Γενέσια ) were an annual funeral ceremony in ancient Greece , which was celebrated in honor of deceased relatives. In Athens , Genesia was also a public chthonic festival of the dead.

The private celebrations were celebrated exclusively in aristocratic families until Solon in Athens in the 6th century BC. In the course of his reforms, the Genesia made a public festival. Whether the celebrations originally took place on a day of remembrance of the deceased, such as the birthday , or on a date embedded in the festival calendar, cannot be determined with certainty, but after Solon's reform the public festival was celebrated on the 5th Boëdromion . In Hellenism , the inscriptions dry up on a number of Attic festivals, including Genesia. It is assumed that with the spread of oriental cults in Greece, these festivals were less and less celebrated and eventually stopped. All that is recorded about the course of the festival is that fruit offerings were made to the chthonic goddess Ge .

Because Herodotus mentions the festival and names several months of different Greek calendars after the festival - the Genesion of the Magnesian , the Genesios of the Arcadian and the Genetios of the Malian calendar - an all-Greek festival is assumed.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Parker : Athenian Religion. A history . Clarendon, Oxford 1996, ISBN 0-19-815240-X , p. 48.
  2. ^ Robert Parker: Athenian Religion. A history . Clarendon, Oxford 1996, ISBN 0-19-815240-X , p. 270.
  3. ↑ Herodotus, Histories 4, 26.
  4. ↑ See Ernst Bischoff : Genesion 2. In: Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswwissenschaft (RE). Volume VII, 1, Stuttgart 1910, Col. 1131 f. ( Digitized version ). and Catherine Trümpy : Investigations into the ancient Greek month names and month sequences . C. Winter, Heidelberg 1997, ISBN 3-8253-0516-3 , p. 111.