Mary Caroline Danisi (Cornell University)
This paper examines literary and epigraphic evidence for fillets in ancient Greek sanctuaries. Fillets, fabric bands crafted through varied textile techniques, featured prominently in ritual practices, including votive dedication and crowning ceremonies (Papadopoulou 2017; Brøns 2016; Rask 2016; Lichtenberger et al. 2012; Smith 1988). Since fillets have been studied primarily as a form of costume (Krug 1968), their adornment of cult topographies has lacked sustained treatment. I address here how these bands interacted with the built environments of sanctuaries in complex, and oftentimes, ambivalent fashions. Just as the material qualities of cult statues have been recognized as integral to epiphanic experiences of the divine (Platt 2011), fillets lent their textilic aesthetics to their environs, transforming the sanctuary into an adaptable place of contact capable of sacred exchanges.
Thucydides, for instance, attests to the abundance of fillets within the interiors of cult buildings when he recounts that an Argive temple to Hera was destroyed when Chrysis, the priestess, accidentally sets fire to the fillets hanging inside it (Thuc. 4.133.2-3). Pausanias, meanwhile, writes that fillets bound agalmata of Demeter and Kore in temples at Stiria and Arcadia (Paus. 10.35.10 and 8.31.8). Suspended from temple walls and draped on statues, fillets constructed cult through the adornment of sacred spaces. Although bands in these contexts are typically interpreted as means to contain divine power (Seiterle 1999), I emphasize, instead, fillets’ freely fluttering fabrics. Their flexibility offered a counterpoint to the rigid contours of classical monuments. Building upon developments in textile literature (Lather 2021: 18-63; Stieber 2011: 275-336), I claim that, through their porous, multi-layered, and shimmering woven surfaces, fillets made permeable the boundaries customarily separating mortals and immortals.
Other testimonia discuss fillets operative within ritual performances. Plutarch records how bands were regularly paraded in procession, and that the richness of their dyes could be a measure of the celebration’s reception by the gods (Plut. Phocion.28.2-3). The Sacred Law of Andania (92/91 BCE), likewise, decrees that the managers of the Mysteries for the Great Goddess must wear purple fillets around their heads (LSCG 65; SEG XI 978; Gawlinski 2012: 94-95). I contend that, following their highly regularized use in such procedures, fillets were dedicated as fixtures upon the walls, columns, and other furnishings of the sanctuary to commemoratively display the normative activities of its cults. While their temporary public exhibition codified proper ritual behaviors, the gradual deterioration of fillets asserted the need for the continuous renewal of rites, culminating in the bands’ subsequent replacement. These cyclical re-hangings rendered the fabric-lined wall an installation site for multiple acts of reciprocity.
Fillets—suspended, draped, bound—actively participated in the tectonics of cult through which human beings communicated with the gods. Yet they offered an alternative aesthetics to the image of permanent communication implied by the more lasting structures of sacred venues, including temples and sculpture composed of durable materials. I contend that fillets’ pliable structures and flexible matrices demonstrated how mortal-divine relations were always in a constant state of renegotiation and flux.