The Renewal of Spartan Society

The festival of the Hyakinthia is recognised as having been a pronounced celebration of Spartan culture, wherein the heroes, customs, and societal values of the city- state were emphasised through rites and religious activities. In this article, we examine how these differing rites, as they are presented in our sources, would have impacted the cognitive and embodied experience of participants. As such, aspects of the Hyakinthia are revealed as producing the types of ritual interaction understood as engendering the adoption and transmission of shared ideas, narratives, and belief systems.