Athéna Apatouria et la ceinture : les aspects féminins des Apatouries à Athènes

In ancient Greece, the Athenian festival of the Apaturia in honor of Zeus and Athena consecrated the insertion of young adult men and young unmarried women into the civic community. The etiological myth associated with this festival provides the young men with an example of wily behaviour. This myth may thus be compared with another from Troezen recounting the ruse employed by Athena Apaturia to make the girl Aethra become the wife of Poseidon and the mother of Theseus. Trickery is thus at the heart of the pre-eminent female rite de passage, marriage, as is corroborated by other mythical tales which stress the use of cunning (metis) at such a moment. Yet the young woman is never the agent of the ruse. In the Apaturia, Athena plays a double role : on the one hand, she possesses the metis required to effect the passage and on the other she figures as the guarantor of the change in the girls' social status upon marriage, as can be seen from the study of the ritual offering of the girdle at Troezen. If, the transition from parthenos to married woman seems to be critical point in the system of representations of the ancient Greeks, that is perhaps because it concerns the basis of the political system of the classical Greek city-state : the procreation of legitimate sons.Schmitt-Pantel Pauline. Athéna Apatouria et la ceinture : les aspects féminins des Apatouries à Athènes. In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 32ᵉ année, N. 6, 1977. pp. 1059-1073