Three Days Without Men

Thesmophoria was kept by married citizen women of Athens and, in local variations, across much of the wider Greek world, over three days of the autumn month Pyanepsion, during the sowing season, and its defining feature was the total exclusion of men from every stage of the observance. Women left their ordinary households, established a temporary camp on a hill sacred to the purpose, and passed the three days together under rules including a middle day kept as a fast, a schedule that gave the festival an unusually communal, almost campaign like structure compared to most Greek religious observances, which were typically shorter or conducted within ordinary household and civic space. Its scale and the fact that it was managed throughout by women holding recognized ritual office within the festival itself make Thesmophoria the largest and best documented women's religious event in the whole of Greek religion.

The festival was celebrated widely enough, under local variation, that versions of it are attested from Sicily to Asia Minor, making it one of the clearest examples of a shared Panhellenic ritual structure adapted to local civic calendars rather than a purely Athenian institution that happened to be unusually well recorded.