The festivals were often connected with the activities of country folk, with planting and reaping, the vintage and the winepress, and yet at the same time played an important part in a highly cultivated city life. Some of them were confined to women, like the Thesmophoria, celebrated by matrons in honour of Demeter, the patroness of fruitful marriages, and used by Aristophanes as occasion and stage-setting for an attack on the misogyny of Euripides; or like the Tauropolia, in honour of Artemis, which suggested to Menander a lover’s opportunity. Others, such as the Hermæa, at which Socrates first met the young Lysis and discoursed on friendship, were celebrated by young men at the palæstras, or by school-boys. The “Mean Man” of Theophrastus was “apt not to send his children to school when there was a festival of the Muses, but to say that they were sick, in order that they might not contribute.” Still others, like the Panathenæa, which occurred in July, the first month of the calendar year, united all classes and ages in a magnificent display of civic loyalty. Public taste at its highest made the presentation of plays the chief element in the Greater Dionysia in March, but the drama had originated in the December festival of the country Dionysia, which continued to be celebrated with a jollity and abandon that probably lost nothing in the descriptions of Aristophanes. The same poet also found plenty of material to his liking in the Anthesteria, another Dionysiac celebration, in which Pots and Pitchers figured in drinking competitions and in offerings to the dead. The statue of Dionysus in the Marshes was escorted to the outer Cerameicus, and by the time it was brought back again, a day later, the crowd was doubtless in the state described by the chorus of Frogs in the underworld:— “The song we used to love in the Marshland up above In praise of Dionysus to produce, Of Nysæan Dionysus, son of Zeus, When the revel tipsy throng, all crapulous and gay, To our precinct reeled along on the holy Pitcher day. Brekekekex, ko-ax ko-ax.”[17] Footnote 17: Translated by Rogers. The license of some of the Dionysiac holidays was in reality a break in the even tenor of Athenian temperance. At other times there seems to have been little more drunkenness among them than among the Spartans, whose uninterrupted self-restraint aroused the admiration of Plato. From the crapulous and often naked verses of Aristophanes to the austerely beautiful marbles of Phidias is a gamut that includes all the characteristics of ancient festivals, in their appeal to both the natural and the spiritual man. Religious sincerity, civic pride, and buffoonery, jostled one another. Music, literature, and athletics added discipline and beauty.