A cause, which contributed to make the religious festivals of the Greeks
appear as amusements and diversions, was that ridiculous buffoonery that
constituted so great a part of them: it would be tedious to enumerate
one half of these buffooneries; but let a few serve as a specimen. At a
festival held in honor of Bacchus, the women ran about for a long time
seeking the god, who, they pretended, had run away from them: this done,
they passed their time in proposing riddles and questions to each other,
and laughing at such as could not answer them; and at last often closed
the scene with such enormous excesses, that at one of these festivals,
the daughters of Minya, having, in their madness, killed Hippasus, had
him dressed and served up to table as a rarity. At another, kept in
honor of Venus and Adonis, they beat their breasts, tore their hair, and
mimicked all the signs of the most extravagant grief, with which they
supposed the goddess to have been affected on the death of her favorite
paramour. At another, in honor of the nymph Cotys, they addressed her as
the goddess of wantonness with many mysterious rites and ceremonies. At
Corinth, these rites and ceremonies, being perhaps thought inconsistent
with the character of modest women, this festival was only celebrated by
harlots. Athenaeus mentions a festival, at which the women laid hold on
all the old bachelors they could find, and dragged them round an altar;
beating them all the time with their fists, as punishment for their
neglect of the sex. We shall only mention two more; at one of which,
after the assembly had met in the temple of Ceres, the women shut out
all the men and dogs, themselves and the bitches remaining in the temple
all night; in the morning, the men were let in, and the time was spent
in laughing together at the frolic. At the other, in honor of Bacchus,
they counterfeited phrenzy and madness; and to make this madness appear
the more real, they used to eat the raw and bloody entrails of goats
newly slaughtered. And, indeed, the whole of the festivals of Bacchus, a
deity much worshipped in Greece, were celebrated with rites either
ridiculous, obscene, or madly extravagant. There were others, however,
in honor of the other gods and goddesses, which were more decent, and
had more the appearance of religious solemnity, though even in these,
the women dressed out in all their finery; and, adorned with flowers and
garlands, either formed splendid processions, or assisted in performing
ceremonies, the general tendency of which was to amuse rather than
instruct.