the
people, fashioned before Athena became a warrior maiden. This image was
rudely hewn in wood, it was dressed and decked doll-fashion like a May
Queen, and to her the great _peplos_ was dedicated. The _peplos_ was
hoisted as a sail on the Panathenaic ship, and this ship Athena had
borrowed from Dionysos himself, who went every spring in procession in a
ship-car on wheels to open the season for sailing. To a seafaring people
like the Athenians the opening of the sailing season was all-important,
and naturally began not at midsummer but in spring.

[Illustration: Fig. 5.]

The sacred _peplos_, or robe, takes us back to the old days when the
spirit of the year and the "luck" of the people was bound up with a rude
image. The life of the year died out each year and had to be renewed. To
make a new image was expensive and inconvenient, so, with primitive
economy it was decided that the life and luck of the image should be
renewed by re-dressing it, by offering to it each year a new robe. We
remember (p. 60) how in Thuringia the new puppet wore the shirt of the
old and thereby new life was passed from one to the other. But behind
the old image we can get to a stage still earlier, when there was at the
Panathenaia no image at all, only a yearly maypole; a bough hung with
ribbons and cakes and fruits and the like. A bough was cut from the
sacred olive tree of Athens, called the _Moria_ or Fate Tree. It was
bound about with fillets and hung with fruit and nuts and, in the
festival of the Panathenaia, they carried it up to the Acropolis to give
to Athena _Polias_, "Her-of-the-City," and as they went they sang the
old Eiresione song (p. 114). _Polias_ is but the city, the _Polis_
incarnate.

This _Moria_, or Fate Tree, was the very life of Athens; the life of the
olive which fed her and lighted her was the very life of the city. When
the Persian host sacked the Acropolis they burnt the holy olive, and it
seemed that all was over. But next day it put forth a new shoot and the
people knew that the city's life still lived. Sophocles[44] sang of the
glory of the wondrous life tree of Athens:

"The untended, the self-planted, self-defended from the foe,
Sea-gray, children-nurturing olive tree that here delights to grow,
None may take nor touch nor harm it, headstrong youth nor age grown bold.
For the round of Morian Zeus has been its watcher from of old;
He beholds it, and, Athene, thy own sea-gray eyes behold