CLODONES

There were revels in Parnassus, in Phocis, Messenia, Arcadia, even Sparta. The festivals were held on mountains, with blazing torches, in dark winter nights. The votaries were in large part women, and were known by many names,--Maenads, Thyiads, Clodones, Mimallones, Bassarides, etc. They were clothed in fawn skins, carried thyrsi and in their ecstasies used to hunt wild animals, tear them in pieces, and sometimes eat them raw. In very early times, human sacrifice seems to have been offered to Dionysus Zagreus and Themistocles before the battle of Salamis sacrificed three young Persian prisoners to Dionysus Omestes.

The splendours of trieteric Bacchic revelry in excelsis are brilliantly depicted in the choruses and messengers' speeches of the Bacchae.(Fasti by Ovid i)

Once, moreover, a serpent was found lying by Olympias as she slept, which more than anything else, it is said, abated Philip's passion for her; and whether he feared her as an enchantress, or thought she had commerce with some god, and so looked on himself as excluded, he was ever after less fond of her conversation.

Others say, that the women of this country having always been extremely addicted to the enthusiastic Orphic rites, and the wild worship of Bacchus (upon which account they were called Clodones, and Mimallones), imitated in many things the practices of the Edonian and Thracian women about Mount Haemus, from whom the word threskeuein seems to have been derived, as a special term for superfluous and over-curious forms of adoration; and that Olympias, zealously, affecting these fanatical and enthusiastic inspirations, to perform them with more barbaric dread, was wont in the dances proper to these ceremonies to have great tame serpents about her, which sometimes creeping out of the ivy in the mystic fans, sometimes winding themselves about the sacred spears, and the women's chaplets, made a spectacle which men could not look upon without terror. ( Alexander By Plutarch)