Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

After Erigone hanged herself above her father’s body, Dionysus (or the polluted land itself) sent a plague of hanging upon Attic maidens: girls killed themselves as she had done, until the city asked an oracle how to stop the deaths. The answer prescribed honors for Icarius and Erigone and the institution of the Aiora—the Swing Festival—in which maidens swing on ropes from trees or frames, a controlled, festive image of the deadly hanging, and songs (the alêsis or “wandering” songs) recall Erigone’s search. The rite remediates the myth: motion without death, memory without contagion, and a place for Dionysus’s gift of wine inside civic order after the shepherds’ crime. Some notices tie the swinging to the Anthesteria’s broader wine calendar; the aetiology remains Erigone’s. Catalogue the Aiora here as the cult end of the Icarius cycle—distinct from the murder story (05/065) and from Maera’s star (05/077).