Editing Adonis (section)

=== Festival of Adonia ===
{{main|Adonia}}

[[File:Women Adonia Louvre CA1679.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|Fragment of an Attic red-figure wedding vase ({{circa}} 430–420 BC), showing women climbing ladders up to the roofs of their houses carrying "gardens of Adonis"]]

The worship of Adonis is associated with the festival of Adonia, which was celebrated by Greek women every year in midsummer.{{sfn|Cyrino|2010|page=97}}<ref>W. Atallah, ''Adonis dans la littérature et l'art grecs'', Paris, 1966.</ref> The festival, which was evidently already celebrated in Lesbos by Sappho's time in the seventh century BC, seems to have first become popular in Athens in the mid-fifth century BC.{{sfn|Cyrino|2010|page=97}}{{sfn|Burkert|1985|pages=176–177}} At the start of the festival, the women would plant a "garden of Adonis", a small garden planted inside a small basket or a shallow piece of broken pottery containing a variety of quick-growing plants, such as [[lettuce]] and [[fennel]], or even quick-sprouting grains, such as [[wheat]] and [[barley]].{{sfn|Cyrino|2010|page=97}}{{sfn|Detienne|1977}}{{sfn|Burkert|1985|page=177}} The women would then climb ladders to the roofs of their houses, where they would place the gardens out under the heat of the summer sun.{{sfn|Cyrino|2010|page=97}}{{sfn|Burkert|1985|page=177}} The plants would sprout in the sunlight, but wither quickly in the heat.{{sfn|Cyrino|2010|pages=97–98}} While they waited for the plants to first sprout and then wither, the women would burn incense to Adonis.{{sfn|Burkert|1985|page=177}} Once the plants had withered, the women would mourn and lament loudly over the death of Adonis, tearing their clothes and beating their breasts in a public display of grief.{{sfn|Cyrino|2010|page=98}}{{sfn|Burkert|1985|page=177}} The women would lay a statuette of Adonis out on a [[bier]] and then carry it to the sea along with all the withered plants as a [[funeral procession]].{{sfn|Burkert|1985|page=177}}{{sfn|Detienne|1977|p=xii}} The festival concluded with the women throwing the effigy of Adonis and the withered plants out to sea.{{sfn|Burkert|1985|page=177}}