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.”

The holy tree carried in procession is, like the image of Athena, made of olive-wood, just the incarnate life of Athens ever renewed.

The Panathenaia was not, like the Dithyramb, a spring festival.  It took place in July at the height of the summer heat, when need for rain was the greatest.  But the month Hecatombaion, in which it was celebrated, was the first month of the Athenian year and the day of the festival was the birthday of the goddess.  When the goddess became a war-goddess, it was fabled that she was born in Olympus, and that she sprang full grown from her father’s head in glittering armour.  But she was really born on earth, and the day of her birth was the birthday of every earthborn goddess, the day of the beginning of the new year, with its returning life.  When men observe only the actual growth of new green life from the ground, this birthday will be in spring; when they begin to know that the seasons depend on the sun, or when the heat of the sun causes great need of rain, it will be at midsummer, at the solstice, or in northern regions where men fear to lose the sun in midwinter, as with us.  The frieze of the Parthenon is, then, but a primitive festival translated into stone, a rite frozen to a monument.