The would-be initiate applied to someone belonging to either of the sacred Eleusinian families to act as mystagogue and lead him through the preliminary purification, which seems to have been essentially identical with that employed to purify any unclean person; this done, the mystagogue duly presented the novice to the officials and recommended him as a proper person to be initiated. There were two degrees of the secret rites: in the first the novices were initiated and became mystae; in the second they advanced to be epoptae, those to whom were made special revelations not vouchsafed to the mystae. Each year there were two celebrations of the mysteries, one at Agrae, a suburb of Athens, in the month Anthesterion, which corresponds roughly to our February-March, and the greater celebration at Eleusis in Boëdromion, our September. The initiate was ordinarily obliged to take part in the lesser celebration before he could be admitted at Eleusis. The great festival lasted eight or nine days, from the fifteenth to the twenty-second or twenty-third of the month Boëdromion. On the first day the participants assembled before the Painted Porch in Athens to listen to the formal proclamation, in which the officials ordered all unclean persons and all foreigners to withdraw, and enjoined secrecy on all who were to share in the festival. The sixteenth was a day of purification when the participants washed in the sea; the seventeenth and eighteenth were spent as holidays at Athens, during which various sacrifices were made; so that it was not until the nineteenth that the festal procession started for Eleusis, carrying the image of Iacchos, a form of the infant Dionysus. Although the Sacred Way is less than fourteen miles in length, so many stops were made at shrines that Eleusis was not reached until evening. The ceremonies there continued three days and nights. There were sacrifices and offerings to many divinities. In memory of Demeter’s hunt for her daughter the devotees roamed the shore by night carrying lighted torches; and finally like the goddess, they broke their fast by drinking a holy potion of meal and water. The consummation of the festival was the celebration in the Great Hall, where some three thousand might find place on the seats which rose in banks on all four sides. There were two sorts of representations—one for the mystae, who were witnessing the festival for the first time, and the other for those who were more expert, the epoptae. What went on in the Hall we do not know; we can, however, conjecture in general the nature of the celebrations. They consisted of “things done,” δρώμενα, and “things said,” λεγόμενα. The former may well refer to some kind of mystery play, or of tableaux, in which incidents from the myth were represented, such for example as the rape and the recovery of Kore, the mourning of Demeter, the birth of the child Iacchos, and so forth. In fact Clement of Alexandria tells us: “Deo and Kore