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But now do enjoy Ryan's History of Ancient Greece. The So, The Hello and welcome back to the history of ancient Greece.

Episode 62, Agricultural Festivals help to fill the great vacancies of life for the ancient Greeks.

As the philosopher Democratis put it,

quote, a life without celebrations

is like a road that has no ends, end quote.

And festivals help to regulate the flow of life.

Without them, the passage of life

was in a constant danger of becoming monotonous

and undifferentiated, especially for a time that didn't have the type of entertainment options that we have today.

Because of this, festivals generally play only a minor part in the life of a community today,

notwithstanding the importance of certain holidays.

This state of affairs is characteristic of societies that regard their holidays as peripheral,

and whose members do not closely identify with one another through the collective memory of shared experience.

The Greeks, though, would not have understood how a society could function without a sense of shared experience that is reinforced at regular intervals

throughout the year, and our lack of celebrations would have struck them as very strange.

Moreover, because they did not divide the year into periods of seven days, with an appointed

period of rest at the end of each week, our weekends, festivals constituted the primary pretext

for the recreation of the ancient Greeks.

...