Introduction
Colour is rarely the first thing that comes to mind when considering ancient Greek religion or religious practice.
Yet for the site of Brauron, one of Artemis’s most important Attic sanctuaries, located on the coast 27 km south-east of Athens, the significance of vibrant yellow textiles cannot be emphasised enough. It is here that the penteteric2 festival of the Arkteia was held, a rite of passage intended to mark the maturation of young Athenian girls from childhood to adulthood. The central ritual of the Arkteia involved young Athenian girls playing the bear (arktos)3 and wearing a special garment dyed with saffron known as the krokotos.4 The saffron-coloured garment was essential to the successful completion of the festival which was considered to be the means by which the girls might safely secure their sexual maturity and, hence, ensure fertility for the Athenian pop-ulace as a whole.
It is at Brauron too that Iphigeneia is thought to have a heröon, a shrine or monument dedicated to a Greek or Roman hero, and to receive cult worship. Literary sources describe women’s dedication of textiles in her honour,
presumably in thanks for healthy childbirth.5 Iphigeneia herself is also described by Aeschylus as shedding the krokotos prior to her sacrificial death at the hands of her father, Agamemnon, in what might potentially be interpreted as a purposeful echoing of the ritual language associated with the Arkteia.6 In any event, it is apparent that the bright yellow of saffron-dyed cloth permeated the experience of the ritual at the site, making the sanctuary of Brauron particularly suited to a study of the visual, archaeological, literary and epigraphic evidence for the relationship between colour and cult, in this case specifi-cally the association between Artemis Brauronia and the krokotos (Fig. 6.1).7
This paper will focus on the visual links between Artemis Brauronia, Athenian girls, femininity and saffron textiles.8 In so doing, krokotos, both as a colour and as a garment, is shown to be symbolically and aesthetically appropriate for invoking Artemis Brauronia in ritual performance. The paper begins by reviewing evidence from literary texts for the ritual use of the krokotos at Brauron and elsewhere and its relationship to divinity.9 Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which colour, and specifically the saffron yellow textile known as the krokotos, was integral to the cult of Artemis Brauronia, both at her sanctuary site in Brauron and on the Athenian Acropolis. It highlights the links between Artemis Brauronia, Athenian girls, femininity and saffron textiles. It does so through a close examination of the Brauron Clothing Catalogues (355–336 BCE); visual evidence of textile dedication on a white-ground drinking cup (kylix) from Brauron (Brauron inv. no. 689); and Vinzenz Brinkmann’s colour reconstruction of the Peplos Kore (Acropolis Museum, 679).1 By revealing the intimate associations between Artemis Brauronia and the rich saffron textiles donned, dedicated, displayed and depicted at her sanctuary sites, it seeks to provide broader insights into the significance and symbolism of colour in the dynamic religious landscape of ancient Greece.
Daphne D. Martin 80
It then focuses on epigraphic evidence for the dedication of saffron-coloured garments from the Brauron Clothing Catalogues found on the Athenian Acropolis, listing numerous dedications of textiles to Artemis at her sanctu-ary in Brauron for the years 349–335 BCE.10 It next exam-ines the visual evidence for textile dedication to Artemis Brauronia found on a fragmentary white-ground kylix (cup) from Brauron which appears to depict a young female offering a vibrant yellow cloth at an altar. It concludes by utilising Vinzenz Brinkmann’s colour reconstruction of the Peplos Kore, and in particular the yellow mantle that appears on that statue, to suggest that the figure may have served as a representation of Artemis Brauronia on the Athenian Acropolis.
Literary evidence for the krokotos
Literary texts, ranging from Homeric epic to comedies of the Classical period, provide evidence that saffron was indicative of divinity and support its specific ritual function at Brauron. Aristophanes defines saffron’s significance in relation to Artemis at Brauron, describing how:
ἑπτὰ μὲν ἔτη γεγῶσ᾿ εὐθὺς ἠρρηφόρουν·
εἶτ᾿ ἀλετρὶς ἦ δεκέτις οὖσα τἀρχηγέτι,
καὶ χέουσα τὸν κροκωτὸν ἄρκτος ἦ Βραυρωνίοις·
As soon as I turned seven I was an Arrephoros;
Then when I was ten I was a grinder for the Foundress;
And shedding my saffron robe I was a Bear at the Brauronia;11
Aristophanes provides invaluable evidence for the use of the krokotos in the Arkteia, the coming-of-age festival held at Brauron for Athenian girls aged 5–10 years.12 The festival, characterised by the shedding of the krokotos by the young girls playing the bear, seems to have included a pannychis, a ritual celebration that lasted through the night, as well as a procession from the Brauroneion on the Αthenian acropolis to Brauron.13 That the krokotos comes up without further elaboration in the play suggests the intimate familiarity of the Athenian audience with the Arkteia and identifies the shedding of the saffron robe as the ritual activity at the festival’s core.
Iphigeneia, also honoured at the site of Brauron, is described as shedding a saffron garment in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon.14
κρόκου βαφὰς δ᾽ ἐς πέσον χέουσα she shed to earth her saffron robe15
Sourvinou-Inwood interprets this shedding by Iphigeneia as echoing the girls’ shedding of the krokotos at the Arkteia, an integral part of the ritual completion of one phase of life and movement on to the next.16 Ekroth argues for the possibility that the krokotos in Aeschylus could also be interpreted as a bridal veil, marking Iphigeneia as the future bride-to-be for Achilles.17 The presence of the krokotos and the ritual language of the Arkteia in plays that would have been performed in front of audiences who themselves participated in and viewed Attic cult highlights the nexus of associations that identify the krokotos and its yellow colouring as significant in the worship of Artemis Brauronia.
One should not, however, assume that saffron and the krokotos did not also have other meanings in the context of Athenian religion and religious practice. In Euripides’
Hecuba, for example, Athena’s peplos18 on the Acropolis is described as saffron, yoked with horses, and embroidered in colourful, flower-dyed threads.19 Saffron, then, also has associations with Athena through the ritual weaving and dedication of a peplos to the goddess as part of the Panathenaia, the important ancient Greek festival held in honour of the goddess Athena at Athens every four years.20 In addition to being characteristic of the Arkteia and of Athena’s peplos on the Acropolis, saffron robes are also mentioned in early Greek lyric and epic works as worn by Eos (Il. 8.1), Hera (Il. 14.348), Enyo (Hes. Theog. 273), the nymphs (Hes. Theog. 358) and the Muses (Alk. 85 A), among others.21
Fig. 6.1. Plan of the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron. 1. Temple of Artemis; 2. Spring; 3. Western terrace; 4. Rock-cut terrace;
5. Chapel of Ag. Georgios; 6. ‘Small Temple’; 7. Buildings within the cave area; 8. ‘Sacred House’; 9. Eastern building; 10. Polygonal terrace; 11. Great stoa; 12. Northern section of the stoa; 13. Bridge.
After Ekroth (2003, 68). © By kind permission of the author.
6. The colour of cult: Artemis Brauronia and the krokotos 81 The krokotos and the Brauron Clothing
Catalogues
The association between saffron textiles and Brauron can be explored further by focusing on a distinct body of evidence, the Treasury Records of Artemis Brauronia (IG II2 1514–1530).22 The inscriptions listed in these records provide additional evidence of a different type that reveals the importance of saffron-coloured garments for ritual practice at Brauron. The extant records provide perhaps ‘the single most significant body of epigraphic evidence for Greek clothing in the late Classical period’.23 The importance of colour for these garments, and the particular significance of the krokotos, cannot be ignored.
Cleland, using Barthes’ semiotic theory as laid out in his seminal work The Fashion System, sees the way that colour terms are used in the textile catalogue as indicative of emphatically marked variants of colour.24 The very act of description is a choice which ‘marks’ certain features deemed significant in a particular context. All garments have colour, but there are only certain instances in the case of the dedicated garments where this colour is marked and therefore made significant.25 Within the 33 items where complete descriptions are preserved, seven items are described as krokotos, among which ‘three use [the term] substantively, and three use it in conjunction with terms describing, not garment type, but only decoration or decorative form’.26 According to Cleland, 49 of the fragmentary descriptions include colour/decoration. For base colour, there are four fragmentary instances of white (leukos), eight of saffron (krokotos), 12 of purple (halourgos), two of blue-grey (glaukos) and one of green (batracheion).27
The substantive use of the word krokotos is distinctive in the context of the Brauron textile catalogue, indicating the relative importance of the colour as an explicitly marked aspect of a textile offering.28 Here, the descriptor, the colour term krokotos, may be seen as all-subsuming, insofar as the garment is described purely in terms of its colour, implying that this was the most significant feature both in identifying the garment and carrying its connotations.29 The term as used in the Brauron Clothing Catalogues may even go so far as to indicate a specific role for the garments, given saffron’s strong associations with ritual use in situ, as well as broader connotations of femininity and womanhood.30 The frequent use of the term krokotos as both a substantive and a single descriptive term in the Brauron Clothing Catalogues empha-sises the conceptual and symbolic importance of the colour for textile dedications at this particular sanctuary.
But how were saffron garments actually treated in a ritual context at Brauron? One line from the Brauron Clothing Catalogues provides rare evidence for the use of a krokotos to adorn a statue of divinity, possibly a cult statue, likely housed within the sanctuary:
κροκωτὸν διπλοῦν ποικίλην τὴν πεζίδα ἔχει τὸ ἄγαλμα τὸ ὀρθὸν ἔχει (IG II2 1522.28/9)31
saffron, double-layered, garment, with ribbons, the upright statue has it (trans. Cleland)
Thus, in addition to literary evidence for saffron textiles being worn by the young girls taking part in the Arkteia and more generally being offered as dedications, the krokotos was used to decorate a cult statue in the sanctuary at Brauron, as indicated by the epigraphic evidence.32 The other textile dedications made to cult statues at Brauron as recorded in the clothing catalogues include: a garment of diaphanous material known as a tarantinon,33 an ampechonon (a female outer garment used for wrapping around the body);34 an embroidered mantle with two fluttering corners known as a katastikton dipterygon;35 a chiton amorginon (an inner garment made of fine linen from the Cycladic island of Amorgos);36a white encircling wrap (enkyklon);37 a child’s chitoniskos (a short chiton worn primarily by women and children);38 a peripoikilos (richly patterned) chitoniskos;39 two kandyes (Persian garments with sleeves);40 and two white himatia.41 The krokotos was therefore not exclusively dedicated to statues of Artemis at Brauron. Yet it is one of few distinguished for its colour. Along with the kandyes, it is also the only garment for which the active verb ekho (‘to have’), indicating possession (‘the statue has …’), is used with respect to the cult statue at Brauron.
Saffron textiles thus emerge in the epigraphic evidence as having a unique association with Artemis at Brauron.
This is further supported by comparison with other temple inventories from the Heraion at Samos, Artemis Kithone at Miletos and various sanctuaries at Delos, Tanagra and Thebes, where krokotos rarely comes up as an adjective or substantive descriptor of textile dedications and, fur-thermore, does not appear to be worn or possessed by the statues themselves.42 In the account of the treasurers of the Heraion on Samos (IG XII 6.1.261), the verb ekho is applied to a cult statue wearing a white himation;43 this is never, across the extant corpus, the case for the krokotos – except at Brauron. Furthermore, the krokotos appears as a dedication only once outside Brauron, in a temple inventory from Tanagra.44 This cumulative evidence emphasises the specific ritual associations of textiles, and particularly that of the krokotos, with Artemis at Brauron.
Visual evidence for textile dedication
An image on a fragmentary white-ground kylix (Fig. 6.2) from the Sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron provides addi-tional visual evidence for the dedication of coloured textiles, allowing a further exploration of how colour may have functioned in ritual contexts to indicate a particular deity.
The fragments, dating to 470–450 BCE, depict a young girl in profile, her black hair looped into a bun, wearing a stephane, a diadem-like women’s headdress, and large earrings. She is dressed in a patterned chiton and has a
Daphne D. Martin 82
sheer, flowing himation draped over her left shoulder. In her right hand, she pinches a leafy sprig delicately between her fingers. In front of her, slightly above knee level, a yellow folded cloth hangs before the base of an altar.45 The textile consists of six vertical folds, articulated in fine brown and yellow lines, with the folds closest to the female figure being shortest, while the rightmost folds, near the altar, extend down the furthest. The cloth’s colour is rendered in a thick, orange-yellow paint, concentrated within the textile’s outline and clearly differentiated from the white background.46 The altar, visible at far right, is the focus of the female’s offer-ings, and her prayers. But what of the colour of the cloth?
Can it be interpreted as a textile dedication of a krokotos, perhaps to Artemis or Iphigeneia?
The cup, with its unique scene of ritual textile dedication where the colouring of the cloth being dedicated is still visible, was likely to have functioned as a votive dedication at Brauron, where saffron garments are known to have been worn by young girls, to have adorned cult statues and to have been dedicated to divinity.47 Of the other white-ground kylikes which bear yellow colouring, it is difficult to defini-tively identify the colouring as saffron or the krokotos, also
due to the rarity of having a specific provenance. Perhaps most notable is a white-ground kylix depicting Hera, c.
470–460 BCE, from the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich (inv. no. 8958002676), where the mantle of the goddess has a deep golden-yellow tone, in comparison to the white background and reddish border of the garment.
If the Brauron image does indeed depict a textile dedi-cation, then the dedication of a white-ground cup with the representation of such a scene can perhaps be seen as a substitution for, or supplement to, the dedication of actual woven cloth.48 Cups were among the most common dedica-tions at sanctuary sites, making up from one-third to one-half of all pottery dedications on the Athenian Acropolis. These objects may either have been used to pour libation, making them part of the functioning of the sanctuary, or might have been conceived of as possessions of the goddesses, as dedicatory inscriptions of ta iera (the sacred items) seem to suggest. The significance of the krokotos at Brauron and its links to the worship of Artemis Brauronia enhance the particular association of the image represented on the cup with the site. The white-ground technique chosen allows for colours (yellows, oranges, purples, reds) to be depicted in
Fig. 6.2. White-ground kylix, 470–450 BCE, depicting a scene of textile dedication at an altar. Archaeological Museum of Brauron, no.
689. © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/ Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica.
6. The colour of cult: Artemis Brauronia and the krokotos 83 a manner that black and red-figure pottery does not allow.
This raises the possibility that white-ground is particularly appropriate for depicting scenes where colour matters, such as those of textile dedication.49
The archaeological provenance of the object from the Sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia supports its identification as a possible votive dedication.50 Ioannis Papadimitriou, the archaeologist responsible for the major excavations of the site in the 1950–1960s, describes the many white-ground kylix fragments excavated by his team, including those inscribed ‘ieron’ or ‘iera Artemidos’, phrases frequently found in votive inscriptions meaning ‘sacred [object]’ or
‘sacred [object] of Artemis’, respectively.51 These frag-ments were found at the small sanctuary at the entrance of the prehistoric acropolis at Brauron and the excavator compared their quality to that of similar finds from the Acropolis and Eleusis.52 Based on the excavation reports, it seems that the largest numbers of high-quality pottery sherds from the 6th century were found between the small temple and the larger temple of Artemis to the west,53 along with some of the Brauron Clothing Catalogues.54 A fragment of a white-ground kylix, attributed to the Sotades Painter and displayed in close proximity to the fragment discussed here in the Brauron Archaeological Museum, is specifically identified by Papadimitriou as having been found between the small sanctuary and temple to Artemis outlined above, near the cave where worship of Iphigeneia took place.55 This votive deposit may be where the fragment in question also comes from.
Both the dedication of textiles represented in the tondo of Brauron no. 59 and the white-ground vessel itself were likely to be sacred offerings intended for Artemis Brauronia or Iphigeneia. The relative importance of krokotos at Brauron outlined above in terms of literary and epigraphic evidence allows the yellow colouring of the garment to be viewed in a new light, serving as an iconographic marker which has the potential to identify the dedicatee of object and image alike. Without the colouring of the cloth, it would be dif-ficult, or even nearly impossible, to make an assumption about the dedicatee of either the representation or the cup based on iconography alone, given the evidence for donation of textiles for Athena, Artemis, Leto, Demeter and Kore, Hera, Eileithyia, Dionysos, Hermes and Asklepios.56 In this case, the ‘markedness’ of the textile in reference to a particular colour, yellow, allows the viewer to distinguish between divinities and identifies the cup as associated spe-cifically with the sanctuary site of Brauron. The scene of ritual textile dedication, with the remaining thick traces of yellowish-orange slip, corroborates the epigraphic evidence from the clothing catalogues, dating to 150 years later, for the dedication of textiles at Brauron. Other white-ground kylix fragments from the site seem also to display tantalis-ing clues about practices of ritual dedication, presumably taking place in situ.57 However, more work is needed to examine the corpus of white-ground kylikes in relation to
the iconography of textiles and, particularly, to the use of colour. Nonetheless, the fragments examined here serve to highlight the significance of krokotos and its essential role in the worship of Artemis at Brauron.
The Peplos Kore
In 1886, the Greek Archaeological Society discovered 14 Archaic korai – statues of maidens – on the Athenian Acropolis. These fourteen korai are especially notable for the traces of blue, green, red and brown pigments on their surfaces, bearing witness to their original dazzling polychro-my.58 This is presumably due to the particular conditions (or date) of the deposit in which they were found.59 Among the finds was a kore, found near the northernmost wall of the Acropolis, who seemed already then to be stylistically different from the other female statues and who eventually became known as the Peplos Kore (Fig. 6.3) because of her unique attire.60 The korai are usually interpreted by
In 1886, the Greek Archaeological Society discovered 14 Archaic korai – statues of maidens – on the Athenian Acropolis. These fourteen korai are especially notable for the traces of blue, green, red and brown pigments on their surfaces, bearing witness to their original dazzling polychro-my.58 This is presumably due to the particular conditions (or date) of the deposit in which they were found.59 Among the finds was a kore, found near the northernmost wall of the Acropolis, who seemed already then to be stylistically different from the other female statues and who eventually became known as the Peplos Kore (Fig. 6.3) because of her unique attire.60 The korai are usually interpreted by