Ceremony
The procession to the Parthenon was more important than the games themselves. During the Great Panathenaia, a special robe (the peplos) was made by the women of Athens for the statue of Athena, which was carried to the Parthenon as part of the procession. There was also a large sacrifice made to Athena, the hekatombe ("sacrifice of a hundred oxen") and the meat from the sacrificed animals was used in an enormous banquet on the final night of the festival, the pannychis ("all-nighter"). Many scholars believe that this procession is the theme of the Parthenon Frieze.
Award ceremonies included the giving of Panathenaic amphorae which were the large ceramic vessels that contained the oil given as prizes. The winner of the chariot race received as a prize one-hundred and forty "Panathenaic Amphorae" full of olive oil.
Read more about this topic: Panathenaic Games
Famous quotes containing the word ceremony:
““Dirty fellow!” exclaimed the Captain, seizing both her wrists, “hark you, Mrs. Frog, you’d best hold your tongue; for I must make bold to tell you, if you don’t, that I shall make no ceremony of tripping you out of the window, and there you may lie in the mud till some of your Monseers come to help you out of it.””
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)
“But ceremony never did conceal,
Save to the silly eye, which all allows,
How much we are the woods we wander in.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)