Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/240

 method of observance. The pagan orgies which marked these festal days were strongly denounced by the Fathers of the Church from the very earliest times. In the first century of our era, Timothy, bishop of Ephesus, met with his martyrdom in an attempt to suppress such a festival. At the end of the fourth century S. John Chrysostom and, after him, Asterios, bishop of Amasea, loudly inveighed against the celebration of the Kalandae. At the end of the seventh century the sixth Oecumenical Council of the Church promulgated a canon forbidding all these pagan winter-festivals. But still in the twelfth century, as Balsamon testifies, the old abuses continued unabated; and there are local survivals of such festivals at the present day.

The most prominent feature of these celebrations was that men dressed themselves up in various characters, to represent women, soldiers, or animals, and thus disguised gave themselves up to the wildest orgies. At Ephesus it is clear that these orgies included human sacrifice, and that Bishop Timothy was on one occasion the victim; for we are told by Photius that he met with his death in trying to suppress 'the polluted and blood-stained rites of the Greeks '; and the same writer speaks of [Greek: to katagôgion]—so this particular ceremony was called—as a 'devilish and abominable festival ' in which men 'took delight in unholy things as if they were pious deeds .' And again another account of the same celebration tells how men with masks on their faces and with clubs in their hands went about 'assaulting without restraint free men and respectable women, perpetrating murders of no common sort and shedding endless blood in the best parts of the city, as if they were performing a religious duty ([Greek: hôsanei anankaion ti kai psychôpheles prattontes]) .'

At Amasea, according to Asterios, at the beginning of the fifth century, things were not much better. The peasants, he says, who come into the town during the festival 'are beaten and outraged by drunken revellers, they are robbed of anything they are carrying, they have war waged upon them in a time of peace,.].].]