In Athens, the Adonia took place annually. It is unclear when the festival was first instituted in Athens; the earliest certain references to it are in plays by
Aristophanes and
Cratinus in the 420s BCE, and it may be depicted in a fragment of a red-figure vase from the mid-fifth century. It was organised and celebrated by women. It was one of a number of Athenian festivals which were celebrated solely by women and addressed sexual or reproductive subjects – others included the
Thesmophoria,
Haloa, and
Skira. Unlike these other festivals, however, the Adonia was not state-organised, or part of the official state calendar of religious celebration. In fact, it was not found to be celebrated by any official cults, like the cult of Bendis, or foreign cults, whose participants were mostly non-natives, like Isis. Prostitutes, respectable women, non-citizens and citizens alike celebrated the Adonia. Also unlike the Thesmophoria, the Adonia was never celebrated in a designated area. Over the course of the festival, Athenian women took to the rooftops of their houses. They danced, sang, and ritually mourned the death of
Adonis. They planted "Gardens of Adonis" – lettuce and fennel seeds, planted in potsherds – which sprouted before withering and dying. After the rooftop celebrations, the women descended to the streets with these Gardens of Adonis, and small images of him; they then conducted a mock funeral procession, before ritually burying the images and the remains of the gardens at sea or in springs. The rites observed during the festival are not otherwise paralleled in ancient Greek religion; like Adonis himself they probably originated in the Near East.
Date The date of the Adonia at Athens is uncertain, with ancient sources contradicting one another.
Aristophanes, in his
Lysistrata, has the festival take place in the early spring of 415 BCE, when the
Sicilian Expedition was proposed; Plutarch puts the festival on the eve of the expedition's setting sail, in
midsummer that year. Theophrastus'
Enquiry into Plants (Περι φυτων ιστορια) and Plato's
Phaedrus are both often taken as evidence for the Adonia having been celebrated in the summer. In Egypt and Syria in the Roman period, the Adonia coincided with the rising of the star
Sirius in late July. As the Sicilian Expedition sailed in June 415, this contradicts both Aristophanes' and Plutarch's dating of the Adonia; the Athenian Adonia must have been celebrated at a different time. Modern scholars disagree on which of these sources is correct. Many agree with Plutarch, and put the festival around midsummer, though Dillon argues that Aristophanes' placement of the festival near the beginning of spring is "without question" correct. Some scholars, such as James Fredal, suggest that there was in fact no fixed date for the Adonia to be celebrated.
Gardens of Adonis depicts the casting of the gardens of Adonis into the sea at the end of the Adonia. The main feature of the festival at Athens were the "Gardens of Adonis", broken pieces of terracotta which had lettuce and fennel seeds sown in them. These seeds sprouted, but soon withered and died. Though most scholars say that these gardens withered due to being exposed to the heat of the summer, Dillon, who believes that the Adonia was held in the spring, says that the plants instead failed because they could not take root in the shallow soil held by the terracotta shards. In support of this, he cites
Diogenianus, who says that in the Gardens of Adonis, seedlings "wither quickly because they have not taken root". In ancient Greece, the phrase "Gardens of Adonis" was used proverbially to refer to something "trivial and wasteful". The symbolism of the Gardens of Adonis is also widely debated: according to James George Frazer, the Gardens of Adonis were supposed to be a sort of ritual performed in order to promote a good harvest, that the actual crops were to grow fast like the little gardens. To
John J. Winkler the gardens were meant to represent how men had very little power when it came to regeneration in either plants or humans.
Purposes of the Gardens There have also been debates on what the woman did with the gardens. Most assume they put the gardens out on their rooftops to wither and die, in order to symbolize how Adonis "sprouted and died quickly". Simms believes that the gardens were made to be used as funerary biers for the little effigies of Adonis to be placed in. These little effigies were made so that the women could have something to focus their mourning towards, because this entire festival is supposed to mourn the loss of Adonis himself. ==Outside Athens==