Kanephoros

Her task was to carry a basket or kanoun (κανοῦν), which contained the offering of barley or first fruits, the sacrificial knife and fillets to decorate the bull,[2] in procession through the city up to the altar on the acropolis.

From Aristophanes’s Lysistrata we have evidence that the office of kanephoros was the last in a sequence of religious duties that an unmarried Athenian girl might undertake; first as an arrhephoros, later an aletris, then as an arktos (ἄρκτος).

In 514 BCE the sister of Harmodios, whose name is unknown, was rebuffed as kanephoros in the Greater Panathenaia; this insult is cited as the cause of her brother’s later assassination of the tyrant Hipparchos which hastened the fall from power of the Peisistratid family.

However, Linda Jones Roccos suggests that the maidens wearing both peplos and mantle implies they are kanephoroi, which would be consistent with the evidence of contemporary vase painting and wedding iconography.

She may be found at a number of festivals across the Greek world, including: the Country Dionysia of Attica; Mother of the Gods in Athens, and Apollo Pythais, Artemis Brauronia, Asklepios; Demeter and Isis at Eleusis; Zeus Disoterien in Piraeus; Zeus Basileus in Lebadeia; Argive Hera; Xphrodite; Hermes at Salamis; Hekate on Delos; Sarapis and Isis; Herakles; Heros Iatros; Neoptolemos.