In discussing Dionysos, we are dealing with a religious importation, a god originally foreign to Greece. He is still quite obscure in Homer, who however has heard something of his wild rites and of his conflict with Lykourgos of Thrace. That he is himself a Thracian deity we are abundantly assured; but we know that the Thracians and Phrygians were closely allied races, and by good luck we know the Phrygian form of the god’s name, Diounsis. Concerning the meaning of the name, since Thrako-Phrygian was linguistically fairly near akin to Greek, we can say with reasonable confidence that the first member contains the name of the sky-god, who was called in Phrygian Dios. As to the rest, it is not so certain. A connexion with the legendary Nysa has been suggested; another and very ingenious theory is that there existed a word nyso, cognate with Latin nurus, Greek nyos, and that it meant ‘child’ or ‘son.’ But this raises a difficulty of accounting for the Phrygian form, which seems to give rise to the Homeric Dionysos. In any case, there is no doubt that his mother’s name is good Phrygian, for Semele is nothing but a Greek modification of Zemelo, the Phrygian earth goddess.
However, in Greek mythology Semele is one of the mortal daughters of a mortal father, Kadmos son of Agenor. Zeus loved her, and thereby excited the jealousy of Hera, who plotted her rival’s destruction. Appearing to her in the form of an old woman, she congratulated her on the exalted rank of her lover, but advised her to put his love to a test; let him appear to her in all the splendour of his divinity, as if she were his lawful divine consort. Semele persuaded Zeus to promise her any favour she liked, and asked for this one, which the god reluctantly granted. But her human frailty could not endure the terror of his Olympian glory, nor the blaze of his thunderbolts, and she was consumed by the lightning, to be rescued afterwards from the under-world by her son and made a goddess. Her unborn child, deified already in some accounts by contact with the divine fire, was caught up from the ashes of his mother’s body by Zeus, who thrust him into his own thigh, whence at the fulfilment of the time of gestation he was born.
A title of Dionysos, and the name of a hymn commonly sung in his honour was Dithyrambos. This by dint of bad etymology was pressed into alluding to the story just told; it was explained as meaning ‘he of the double door,’ a reference supposedly to the child’s two entrances into life. This is of course absurd, but most of the modern etymologies are not much better. The likeliest seems to be that from dithrera, a Phrygian name for a tomb, for we know that in Phrygia Diounsis was one of the deities who guard tombs against violators.
Being thus born, Dionysos had to be provided with a nurse to attend him in in lieu of his conflagrated mother Semele. According to one of the best-known stories, there was only a single nurse, Semele’s sister Ino. But Ino’s career came to a no less disasterous—if quite different—dénouement than Semele’s, and so the baby Dionysos, having been rescued from all the complex of madness and murder connected with the human nurse Ino, was handed over to divine nurses, the nymphs of Mt. Nysa. Of this mountain the ancient Greek lexicographer Hesychios says: Nysa, the Nyseian Mount. Not confined to any one place; we find it in Arabia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Babylon, Erythra (? the Red Sea, erythra thalatta), Thrace, Thessaly, Kilikia, India, Libya, Lydia, Macedonia, Naxos, the neighbourhood of Mt. Pangaion, and as a place in Syria.
Wherever or whoever they were, they nursed him faithfully, and became his companions and followers after he no longer needed their nursing. According to Ovid, he repaid their kindness by renewing their youth when they grew old (regarding the various kinds of nymphs and the question of their lifespans, read the file about the Nymphai, i.e., the "Nymphs").
Once he came to maturity, Dionysos’ adventures fall into two great categories, namely his persecutions by unbelievers in his divinity, and his conquests, peaceful and warlike. Lykourgos has already been mentioned; he attacked Dionysos and his nurses ‘on holy Nyseion,’ and smote the nurses with an ox-goad; Dionysos jumped into the sea, and there was kindly received by Thetis. But Zeus smote Lykourgos with blindness, ‘and he lived not long thereafter, for he was become hateful to all the deathless gods.’
A more violent struggle was that with Pentheus, which is unforgetably handled in Euripides’ Bacchae. Pentheus, son of Kadmos’ other daughter Agaue and successor of Kadmos himself on the throne of Thebes, declared tlat Dionysos was an impostor and his votaries deceivers or deceived. Hence, when most of the women in the city flocked out to Mt. Kithairon to take part in the revels of the god, Pentheus did his best to stop them. As their frenzy, and the power of the god which wrought miracles through them, made them formidable even to a strong armed force, Pentheus was ready, if prompted, to use gentler means, and these were soon suggested. A mysterious stranger, probably a priest of Dionysos, was made prisoner and brought before him. Pentheus thrust him into the dungeons of his palace, only to find him miraculously delivered. Impressed, yet still hostile, he listened to the stranger’s advice that he should disguise himself as a woman and go to see for himself what Dionysos’ votaries were doing. Spying on them from a tree, he was seen, flung from his post, and torn to pieces, his own mother taking a leading part in his death. Not till later, when her frenzy subsided, did she realize what she had done. Thus Agaue too experienced horror as great as did her sisters Semele and Ino, however different in detail.
Even more terrible was the manifestation of Dionysos’ power in Argos. There, because they would not recognize his deity, madness fell upon the daughters of Proitos, or on the Argive women generally, and they rushed forth into the wilds, where they wandered about ‘with all manner of unseemliness’, says Apollodoros, and in particular, they destroyed their own children. At last the seer Melampous, after long haggling over terms, healed them, either by certain magical dances, for he was an expert on the Dionysiac mysteries, or by herbs. (Another version, however, attributes their madness to an insult to their native goddess Hera, and states that they fancied themselves cows, Hera’s beast.)
Still there were unbelievers in Boiotia; the daughters of Minyas, Alkithoe, Leukippe and Arsippe (or Aristippe, or Arsinoe) held out against the new cult, and when all their city, Orchomenos, had gone forth to worship, they sat at home and wove, although, by one account, Dionysos himself came to them in the form of a girl and advised them to take part. As his advice was spurned, he showed his power; phantoms of wild beasts filled the room, the web began to turn into vines, and invisible devotees of the god made wild music and raised their revel-shout. The daughters of Minyas were maddened, and in their madness cast lots to see who should offer sacrifice to the god. The lot fell upon Leilkippe, whose son, Hippasos, they accordingly tore in pieces. Then they ran out, to revel or to hide (the authorities differ), and were turned into bats or other nocturnal flying things.
Another opponent of Dionysos was Akrisios, king of Argos and father of Danae. His enmity to the god is but an obscure episode in his career.
Yet a further form of the story of Dionysos’ struggle for recognition concerns his earliest childhood. Kadmos—so the legend ran in Prasiai or Brasiai, a little town on the coast of Lakonia—when he heard of Semele’s frailty, put her and her newborn child into a chest and cast it into the sea. It floated ashore at Prasiai, and when it was opened, Semele was found dead, but Dionysos alive. Ino, conveniently coming upon the scene at that moment, was entrusted with the care of her nephew; Semele received a splendid funeral. A curious parallel to this is another tale, likewise preserved in Pausanias; at Patrai a chest came into the possession of Eurypylos, one of the warriors who fought against Troy; it had formerly belonged to Aineias or Kassandra. On being opened, it proved to contain an image of Dionysos the work of Hephaistos, at sight of which Eurypylos went mad.
So far we have had, pretty consistently, tales of the advent of Dionysos in which some one goes mad and some one else is torn in pieces. The god himself is always represented as followed by a revel- rout of beings, some divine and some human, Satyrs, Seilenoi, Nymphs, and finally Mainades or Lenai (literally, ‘madwomen’), human votaries, also known as Bassarides (probably ‘wearers of fox-skins’ from one form of their ritual costume; another was the skin of a fawn). They regularly perform curious miracles, making fountains of milk or wine spring up from the ground; they are madl strong, able to tear goats, bulls, and human beings in pieces nth their bare hands; fire will not burn them, nor weapons harm them; and despite their violence to various animals, they have a deep sympathy with them, often suckling kids, fawns, and so forth. All this, wild as it sounds, is but an idealization of the enthusiastic ritual of the god. His worshippers sought, by ecstatic dancing and perhaps also by the use of wine, to become possessed by their god; they were then called after one of his numerous names, Bakchoi, from Bakchos. The tearing in pieces and devouring of an animal or even human victim is also fact; these wild sacrifices were due to a desire to assimilate the god himself, who was conceived sometimes as human in form, sometimes as bestial, his most common avatars being the bull and the goat, although he often appears as a serpent. He was in fact a god of the fertility of nature; if in Greece he tends to become a wine-god merely (and even in Greece he is never wholly restricted to that one sphere) it is because there were already deities whose activities were directed to fertility—Demeter for example—and Dionysos occupied that part of the field in which there were fewest old-established incumbents. That the stories of quarrels and forceful propagation of his rites are wholly due to the details of his cult is not, however, by any means certain; it is likely enough that real opposition to the new god was shown at least here and there.
Of stories in which Dionysos appears peacefully spreading his cult, the most famous is the Attic legend of Ikarios. He lived in Attica in the days of King Pandion, and received Dionysos with joy. The god gave him his gift of wine, from which Ikarios gave the country people to drink. They, feeling the effects, imagined that they were poisoned, and killed him. His daughter Erigone, whom a to one obscure story Dionysos loved, sought him everywhere, accompanied by her faithful dog Maira. Finding him at last, she hanged herself for grief. Then ensued a plague of some kind, either an epidemic of suicide among the young women, or dog-star heat and ruinous drought. Somebody, in one version Aristaios, asked Apollo’s advice, and was told to honour Ikarios and Erigone. A festival was instituted, at which among other rustic rites little images were swung from trees, in commemoration of Erigone’s death. Also, Aristaios prayed to Zeus, who sent forty days of cooling wind just in the heat of summer.
One of the most charming of Dionysos’ adventures is that related in the ‘Homeric’ hymn which bears his name. ‘I will make mention,’ says the poet, ‘how he appeared by the shore of the unharvested sea, on a jutting headland, in the likeness of a young man, one in his first manhood; beautiful were the locks that waved about him, all black, and the cloak he wore about his sturdy shoulders was purple.’ Certain Tyrrhenian pirates, seeirg him, promptly seized and bound him, as an obviously desirable slave, ‘for they said he was a son of Zeus-nurtured princes;’ but the bonds fell off him, and the pilot warned them that this was a god they had on board. As they paid no attention, but continued their voyage, the ship began to run wine, a vine grew about the mast, and the god himself turned into a lion, in terror of which they all jumped overboard and were turned into dolphins, save the pilot, whom Dionysos spared. This is why dolphins are friendly to man.
The god’s triumphs were not limited to a handful of pirates. According to a fairly early saga (Euripides knows of it) he penetrated as a conqueror far into the interior of Asia; after Alexander’s real conquests, Dionysos’ fabled ones were extended and he was represented as having reached India. Here, however, the mythologist need not follow him; for in reading Nonnos’ narrative in the Dionysiaca, for example, or Diodorus Siculus’ account of Dionysos, we leave the realm of genuine myth for a strange world in which pseudo-history and politics are blended together. On the one hand, it was obviously desirable, from the point of view of Alexander and his successors, that they should be thought to have tread in the footsteps of a god, especially one readily identified with all manner of Oriental deities, since he was at least partly Oriental himself. On the other, Dionysos was equated with Osiris, and Osiris in turn was Euhemerized into an early king of Egypt who went about spreading culture, by force if necessary. So this Indian Dionysos, as we find him in the poem of Nonnos, for example, is no Greek god, but a hodge-podge of the mythology of several nations, stirred together by Hellenistic princes and Hellenistic theories. The result does not lack interest, but it is a subject distinct from the traditional mythology of the Greeks.
The Satyrs of Dionysos’ train are spirits of the wild life of woods and hills, and particularly of their unrestrained and unguided fertility. In shape they are regularly represented as quasi-human, but more or less grotesque in build and features, always male, always sexually excited, and with some part of them definitely bestial; usually, as in the earlier Attic art, they have horses’ tails, a feature reminiscent of the Centaurs Others have something of the goat about them, being shown with little horns, prick-ears, often goats’ legs. This, the type familiar from the famous Satyr of Praxiteles and other well-known monuments of art, clearly resembles Pan. Of tales concerning Satyrs there are plenty, but all of much the sane kind; they are intensely lustful, fond of dancing and revelry, usually cowardly, save in so far as the Dionysiac frenzy makes them formidable. They are rather part of the entourage of Dionysos, or—since they are an independent creation of Greek tradition and not merely an offshoot of his cult—a sort of mythological feature of the uncultivated lands, as the Tritons are of the sea. In Italy, they are identified with the native wood-spirits, the Fauni; we still often speak of Praxiteles’ statue as ‘the dancing Faun.’
Not dissimilar, but rather more substantial, are the Seilenoi, or Seilenos (once again, we find a minor deity now one, now many). Speaking generally, Seilenoi are older Satyrs—we sometines hear of Papposeilenoi, i.e., ‘daddy-Seilenoi’—and, whereas the Satyrs are often merry with wine, the Seilenoi are apt to be heavily drunk; a not uncommon subject in art is a Satyr supporting a Seilenos whose potations have been too deep. On the other hand, such wisdom and sobriety as is to be found among these wild creatures dwells with the Seilenoi. They are often the attendants and tutors of Dionysos in his youth; they are skilled musicians; and sometimes at least they are full of homely wisdom. Thus, a fragment of Pindar represent one of them as preaching to Olympos—the tutelary spirit, it would seem, of one of the mountains so called, but in this context a mortal—on the vanity of worldly wealth; and a famous story, probably a folktale, informs us that King Midas caught one at a spring variously located, but, it would seem, originally in or near Macedonia. This was done by mixing wine in the waters of the spring, and thus making the Seilenos drunk; on being brought in bonds before Midas, he reluctantly spoke, and told the king that the best fate for man was not to be born at all, the next best, to die as speedily as possible after birth. One Seilenos actually emerges into independent cult; Pausanias found a temple in Elis whch was dedicated to him, and him alone. Less impressive was his memorial in Athens; on the Akropolis was ‘a stone of no great size, big enough for a small man to sit on,’ which had served Seilenos for a seat when he came to Attica in the train of Dionysos.
I will tell of Dionysos, the son of glorious Semele, how he appeared on a jutting headland by the shore of the fruitless sea, seeming like a stripling in the first flush of manhood: his rich, dark hair was waving about him, and on his strong shoulders he wore a purple robe. Presently there came swiftly over the sparkling sea Tyrsenian pirates on a well-decked ship—a miserable doom led them on. When they saw him they made signs to one another and sprang out quickly, and seizing him straightway, put him on board their ship exultingly; for they thought him the son of heaven-nurtured kings. They sought to bind him with rude bonds, but the bonds would not hold him, and the withes fell far away from his hands and feet: and he sat with a smile in his dark eyes. Then the helmsman understood all and cried out at once to his fellows and said:
“Madmen! What god is this whom you have taken and bind, strong that he is? Not even the well-built ship can carry him. Surely this is either Zeus or Apollo who has the silver bow, or Poseidon, for he looks not like mortal men but like the gods who dwell on Olympos. Come, then, let us at once set him free on the dark shore; do not lay hands on him, lest he grow angry and stir up dangerous winds and heavy squalls.”
So said he, but the master chid him with taunting words: “Madman, mark the wind and help hoist sail on the ship; catch all the sheets. As for this fellow, we men will see to him. I reckon he is bound for Egypt or for Cyprus or to the Hyperboreans or further still. But in the end he will speak out and tell us his friends and all his wealth and his brothers, now that providence has thrown him in our way.”
When he had said this, he had mast and sail hoisted on the ship, and the wind filled the sail and the crew hauled the sheets taut on either side. But soon strange things were seen among them. First of all sweet, fragrant wine ran streaming throughout all the black ship and a heavenly smell arose, so that all the seamen were seized with amazement when they saw it. And all at once a vine spread out both ways along the top of the sail with many clusters hanging down from it, and a dark ivy-plant twined about the mast, blossoming with flowers, and with rich berries growing on it; and all the thole-pins were covered with garlands.
When the pirates saw all this, then at last they bade the helmsman to put the ship to land. But the god changed into a dreadful lion there on the ship, in the bows, and roared loudly; amidships also he showed his wonders and created a shaggy bear which stood up ravening, while the lion was glaring fiercely with scowling brows on the forepeak. And so the sailors fled into the stern and crowded bewildered about the right-minded helmsman, until suddenly the lion sprang upon the master and seized him; and when the sailors saw that, they leapt out overboard one and all into the bright sea, escaping from a miserable fate, and were changed into dolphins. But Dionysos had mercy on the helmsman and held him back and made him altogether happy, saying to him:
“Take courage, good ...[lacuna]...; you have found favour with myheart. I am loud-crying Dionysus whom Kadmos’ daughter Semele bare of union with Zeus.”
Hail, child of fair-faced Semele! He who forgets you can in no wise order sweet song.
