Culture · Essay
Anthesteria: three days of wine, and on the third you tell the dead to leave
Athens opened the new wine, held a drinking contest in silence, and on the third day fed the dead a pot of grain nobody was allowed to eat. Then the householder swore at them until they went. On the oldest Dionysian festival.Written to last.
By Confinity Editorial · 2026-04-23 · 6-minute readQuiet tools, kept out of the way.
The Athenians held a festival at the end of winter that was, in order: a wine-tasting, a drinking competition conducted in total silence, and a meal cooked for the dead that nobody was permitted to touch. It ended with the head of each household telling the dead to get out.
It was among the oldest festivals in the Greek calendar, older than the dramatic festivals, and the Athenians said so themselves.
Pithoi are the great storage jars, and pithoigia is their opening.
The wine made from the previous autumn's grapes had finished fermenting, and on the first day the jars were opened and the new wine tasted. Some was poured out to Dionysos before anyone drank. Slaves drank alongside the household, which was unusual and is noted as such in the sources.
It is a straightforward seasonal marker: the wine is ready, winter is ending, Greece is about to turn.
The second day is where it gets strange.
Choes means jugs, and every participant received their own jug of wine, of a fixed measure. Then a contest: at the trumpet, everyone drank their jug, and the first to finish won.
And it was done in silence. Nobody spoke, nobody shared a cup, each person drank from their own vessel at their own table.
The explanation the Athenians gave was a story about Orestes, who arrived in Athens polluted by his mother's blood, and whom the city could neither turn away nor share a table with. So everyone was given a separate cup, nobody spoke to him, and no shame attached.
The more likely explanation is that the day was polluted anyway, because the dead were in the city. Temples were closed and roped off. Houses were smeared with pitch, and buckthorn was chewed, both against spirits.
So the second day is a public drinking festival held under conditions of ritual contamination, with everyone drinking alone in a crowd. It is one of the odder things any society has arranged.
There was a lighter element too. Children of about three were given their first small jug at Choes, and it functioned as a coming-into-the-world rite. Small choes jugs painted with children at play survive in numbers, and a good many were found in the graves of children who did not live much past the festival.
Chytroi means pots, and on the third day a pot of grain and seeds was boiled, a panspermia or all-seeds, and offered to Hermes Chthonios, Hermes of the underworld, on behalf of the dead.
No living person ate any of it. That prohibition is stated flatly in the sources and is the clearest signal of who the meal was for.
Then, at the end of the day, the householder went through the house and said, in effect: out, keres, the Anthesteria is over.
The keres were the spirits abroad during the festival, and the formula is a dismissal. Athens had opened its doors to the dead for three days and now closed them.
Set Anthesteria beside the rest of this library and there is nothing unusual about its architecture at all.
A fixed window opens. The dead come to the houses. They are fed. Precautions are taken because their presence is dangerous. Then, explicitly and on a stated day, they are told to go.
That is Obon with its welcome and sending fires. It is the Zoroastrian Muktad with its ten days and its formal farewell. It is Dziady, it is Pchum Ben, it is the Chinese ghost month.
Athens in the sixth century BC and rural Belarus in the nineteenth arrived at the same three-part structure independently, which suggests it is being produced by something about the problem rather than by cultural transmission.
Rome had its own version in the Parentalia, and the Roman one is the useful contrast: Parentalia was warm, familial and about your own named dead. Anthesteria is about the dead in general, and it is frightened of them.
Something is conspicuously missing from Anthesteria, and its absence explains why the festival did not survive.
There is no list. No names are read. The rite addresses the dead collectively, as a category to be fed and then dismissed, and it never requires anyone to know who they were.
Roman Parentalia had the family tomb and the ancestral masks. Athens had the pot nobody eats.
So when the festival stopped, at some point in the Christian centuries, nothing went with it, because nothing had been entrusted to it. Compare what was lost when Chinese lineage halls burned, or when a griot's line ends.
For all that, Anthesteria got one thing right that modern practice does not.
It ended. There was a day on which the doors were shut and ordinary life resumed, and the closing was as formal as the opening. Grief was given three days, a structure and a boundary, and then the household said out loud that it was over.
Day one: Pithoigia
Day two: Choes, and the silence