Jeremy McInerney (University of Pennsylvania, USA)

This paper is concerned with the cult of cult of Artemis Tauropolos on the outskirts of Athens. Here, at Halai Araphenides, was a temple where boys were initiated. Upon completion of the initiation the young men performed the pyrriche at the Tauropolia. (AE 1932, Chron. 30-32) They are now fully adult and fully Greek. I argue that the foreignness of the cult, which was associated with the Tauric Chersonese (Ukraine) was integral to its function as a site of adolescent initiation. Herodotos 4.103 associates the cult in Tauris with piracy, abuse of xenia and human sacrifice. The Tauric cult thus exemplifies barbarian ethnicity as the inversion of normative Greek practice. Euripides’ IT 1457 and Strabo 12.2.3 assign the cult’s introduction to Athens to Orestes, thereby linking the cult to the story of Iphigenia’s time spent in Tauris. Euripides also refers to drawing a blade across a man’s throat “in memory of these rites.” The liminal stage of initiation was thus marked by a re-enactment of barbarian savagery.

The cult activity at Halai Araphenides is connected to the better known cult of Artemis at Brauron, where girls play the bear for Artemis in the Arkteia ritual. It was here that, in at least one version of the myth, Iphigenia went to live as priestess of Artemis, who was worshipped as Tauria (Pausanias 1.23.7). But the statue from Tauris finally made its way to Sparta where, as Orthia, it continued to thirst for blood. Only the scourging of boys could slake it. If the scourgers slackened because of a boy’s beauty, the image grew too heavy for the priestess to carry. (Pausanias 3.16.7 and Philostratos, Vit. Apollon.Tyan. 6.20).

The association of Artemis Tauropolos with the blood shed by boys entering manhood is a distinctive feature of the cult. The beating of the Spartan youths and the dedication of chlamydes ephebikai at the cult of Artemis in Miletos recall the ritual of female initiation for young girls at Brauron and the dedication there of garments by women at Brauron. In her cults, garments are left as a reminder of the goddess’ kindness in allowing the young person to advance to another stage of life, and for both boys and girls that meant a symbolic shedding of blood that marked the female as a woman and the male as a Greek. The encounter with Artemis Tauropolos is a structured around a familiar set of polarities used to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood: animal versus human; centrality versus the limits of territory. Yet woven into the performance of her cult is another polarity: Greek and barbarian. In the transition from the Tauric Chersonesos to Halai Araphenides, the goddess’ power is both Hellenized and harnessed to make Greeks.