PANATHENAeA, the most splendid and brilliant of all the Athenian festivals, with perhaps the exception of the Great Dionysia. The mythic foundation is ascribed to Erechtheus; and Pausanias declares that the Olympia, the Lycaea, and the Panathenaea were the three oldest feasts in Greece. It was originally a religious celebration in honour of the patron goddess of the city, celebrated by her own worshippers. It is said that when Theseus united the whole land under one government he made this festival of the city-goddess common to the entire country, and the older name Athenaea was then changed to Panathenaea. In addition to the religious rites there is said to have been a chariot race from the earliest time; Erechtheus himself won the prize in the race. The Panathenaea were modified and rendered far more magnificent by Pisistratus and his sons. It is probable that the distinction of Greater and Lesser Panathenaea dates from this period. Every fourth year the festival was celebrated with peculiar magnificence; gymnastic sports were added to the horse races; and there is little doubt that Pisistratus aimed at making the penteteric Panathenaea the great Ionian festival in rivalry to the Dorian Olympia. The penteteric festival was celebrated in the third year of each Olympiad. The annual festival consisted solely of the sacrifices and rites proper to this season in the cultus of the goddess. One of these rites originally consisted in carrying a new peplus to the temple to serve as the clothing of the image, a ceremonial known in other cities and represented by the writer of the Iliad (vi.) as being in use at Troy; but it is probable that this rite was afterwards restricted to the great penteteric festival. Even the religious rites were celebrated with much greater splendour ...at the Greater Panathenaea. The whole empire shared in the great sacrifice; every colony and every subject state sent a deputation and sacrificial animals. On the great day of the feast there was a procession of the priests, the sacrificial assistants of every kind, the representatives of every part of the empire with their victims, the cavalry, in short of the population of Attica and great part of its dependencies. The peplus was borne in the procession and presented to the goddess, and the hecatomb was sacrificed. At least as early as the 3d century before Christ the custom was introduced of spreading the peplus like a sail on the mast of a ship, which was rolled on a machine in the procession. The subject of the frieze of the Parthenon is an idealized treatment of this great procession.
The festival which had been beautified by Pisistratus was made still more imposing under the rule of Pericles. He introduced a regular musical contest in place of the old recitations of the rhapsodes, which were an old standing accompaniment of the festival. The order of the agones from this time onwards was—first the musical, then the gymnastic, then the equestrian contest. Many kinds of contest, such as the chariot race of the apobatai, which were not in use at Olympia, were practised in Athens. The season of the festival was the last days of Hecatombaeon, and the great day was the 28th, third from the end of the month (τρίτη φθlvovτo<s, called by Euripides φθωάς aμεpa). The prize in the games was an amphora full of olive oil produced from the holy olives, the property and gift of the goddess herself. Only one Panathenaic amphora has been found in Attica itself; and, though many have been discovered outside of Attica, especially in Cyrene, it has been maintained that the latter are not really prizes in the games, but imitations made in the export trade as a sort of mark that the oil sold in them was of the very finest quality.
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