Agra and Agrai

ARAI (or Agra) was a verdant suburb of Athens on the Ilissos River, the environs of which are charmingly portrayed by Plato in the Phaedrus.1 It possessed a wealth of local cults-we hear of Artemis Agrotera,2 the Great Mother (IG I^sup 3^ 369.91), Zeus Meilichios,3 Eileithyia,4 Pan,5 and Poseidon Helikonios6-but was especially renowned as the site of the Lesser Mysteries of Demeter and Kore, rites which in classical times were prefixed to the Mysteries at Eleusis as a required

As `early as the fourth century B.C. the alternate forms Agrai/Agra had attracted scholarly attention. Despite ancient and modern attempts to attach one of the two forms to a distinct part of the area,9 the totality of our evidence makes clear that, in practice, the two terms were alternatives for naming the entire district.10

Despite, however, this ancient equivocation of Agra and Agrai as simple variants of a place-name, one peculiarity in the use of the singular can suggest a different interpretation: certain of the local cults-the Mysteries, and the cults of Meter and Zeus Meilichios-are identified in inscriptions and other sources case, as it incorporates the Indo-European locative.16 The genitive, on the other hand, subsumes the I-E ablative, which itself is separative, privative, filiative, etc., in nature, not locative.17

Further, if Agraia = Agra, we have an explanation for the "confusion" between the two names in the Phaedrus MSS. quoted above. Ancient scholiasts and lexicographers (see n.21) adopted the reading Agraia, by which they understood Artemis: the MSS. themselves, however, may reflect an earlier reality in which the two figures were separate and distinct.

As for Agra's divine role, a suggestion can be found in the cults of Artemis, Demeter, Meter, and Eileithyia which clustered within and about her sanctuary (the sources for Eileithyia [supra

It is possible, then, that Agra's role was akin to that of the other divinities, and that her principal rite...