At Amasea, according to Asterios, at the beginning of the fifth century, things were not much better. The peasants, he says, who come into the town during the festival ‘are beaten and outraged by drunken revellers, they are robbed of anything they are carrying, they have war waged upon them in a time of peace, they are mocked and insulted in word and in deed[597].’ Here too the custom of dressing up was in vogue among those who took part in the festival--women’s dress being especially affected.
Again in the seventh century the points specially emphasized by the canon of the Church are that ‘no man is to put on feminine dress, nor any woman the dress proper to men, nor yet are masks, whether comic, satyric, or tragic, to be worn’; and the penalty for disregard of this ordinance was to be excommunication. Yet for all these fulminations the old custom continued. The author of ‘the Martyrdom of S. Dasius[598],’ writing perhaps as late as the tenth century, speaks of the festival of the Kronia as still observed in the old way: ‘on the Kalends of January foolish men, following the custom of the (pagan) Greeks, though they call themselves Christians, hold a great procession, changing their own appearance and character, and assuming the guise of the devil; clothed in goat-skins and with their faces disguised,’ they reject their baptismal vows and again serve in the devil’s ranks. And still in the twelfth century these practices obtained not only among the laity but even among the clergy, some of whom, in the words of Balsamon[599], ‘assume various masks and dresses, and appear in the open nave of the church, sometimes with swords girt on and in military uniform, other times as monks or even as quadrupeds.’
Several instances of the continuance of this custom in modern times have been collected by Polites[600] and others; the savage orgies of old time have indeed dwindled into harmless mummery; but their most constant feature, the wearing of strange disguises, remains unchanged; and the occasion too is still a winter-festival, either some part of the Twelve Days or the carnival preceding Lent. From certain facts concerning these modern festivals it will be manifest that some relation exists between the mummers who celebrate them and the Callicantzari.