But a moment’s reflection shows that the identification, though tempting, will not do. Thucydides himself (p. 66) seems to warn us; he seems to say, ‘not that precinct which you all know so well and think so much of, not that theatre where year by year you all go, but an earlier and more venerable place, and, that there be no mistake, the place where you go on the 12th day of Anthesterion, and where your ancestors went before they migrated to colonize Asia Minor.’ It is most fortunate that Thucydides has been thus precise, because about this festival on the 12th day of Anthesterion we know from other sources[193] certain important details which may help to the identification of the sanctuary. * * * * * The festival celebrated on the 12th of Anthesterion was the Festival of the Choes or Pitchers[194]. On this day, we learn from Athenaeus[195] and others, the people drank new wine, each one by himself, offered some to the god, and brought to the priestess in the sanctuary in the Marshes the wreaths they had worn. On this day took place also a ceremony of great sanctity, the marriage of the god to the wife of the chief archon—the ‘king’ as he was called. The actual marriage took place in a building called the Boukoleion, the exact site of which is not known; but certain preliminary ceremonies were gone through by the Bride in the sanctuary in-the-Marshes. The author of the Oration ‘_against Neaera_[196]’ tells us that there was a law by which the Bride had to be a full citizen and a virgin when she married the king, she was bound over to perform the ceremonies required of her ‘according to ancestral custom,’ to leave nothing undone, and to introduce no innovations. This law, the orator tells us, was engraved on a stele and set up alongside of the altar in the sanctuary of Dionysos in-the-Marshes, and remained to his day, though the letters were somewhat dim. But this, though much, is not all. The orator goes on to tell us why the law was written up in this particular sanctuary. ‘And the reason why they set it up in the most ancient sanctuary of Dionysos and the most holy, in the Marshes, is that not many people may read what is written. For it is opened once only in each year, on the 12th of the month Anthesterion[197].’ Finally, having sufficiently raised our curiosity, he bids the clerk read the actual oath administered by this pure Bride to her attendants, administered before they touch the sacred things, and taken _on_ the baskets at the altar. The clerk is to read it that all present may realize how venerable and holy and ancient the accustomed rite was. The oath of the attendants was as follows: ‘_I fast and am clean and abstinent from all things that make unclean and from intercourse with man, and I will celebrate the Theoinia and the Iobakcheia to Dionysos in accordance with ancestral usage and at the appointed times._’