Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
Jane Ellen Harrison
1903

CHAPTER VIII.

DIONYSOS.

Dionysos An Immigrant Thracian

Dionysos and the Bessi | Dionysos in the Bacchae | Dionysos a Phrygio-Thracian | Dionysos and Nysa | The Satyrs | Satyrs and Centaurs | The Maenads | Dionysos Liknites | Dionysos Son Of Semele | Semele as Keraunia | Dionysos Son of Zeus | Bromios, Braites, Sabazios | Tragedy the Spelt-song | Cereal Intoxicants | The Coming of the Vine | Dionysos as Dendrites | Dionysos as Bull-god | Dithyrambos and the Dithyramb | The Thriae

So far the formula for Greek theology has been, 'Man makes the gods in his own image.' Mythological development has proceeded on lines perfectly normal, natural, intelligible. In so far as we understand humanity we can predicate divinity. The gods are found to be merely magnified men, on the whole perhaps better but with frequent lapses into worse, quot homines tot sententiae, quot sententiae tot dei.

"As man grew more civilized, his image, mirrored in the gods, grew more beautiful and pari passu the worship he offered to these gods advanced from 'aversion' to 'tendance'. But all along we have been conscious that something was lacking, that even these exquisite presentations of the Nymphs and the Graces, the Mother and the Daughter, are really rather human than divine, that their ritual, whether of ignorant and cruel 'aversion' or of genial 'tendance' was scarcely in our sense religious. These perfect Olympians and even these gracious Earth-goddesses are not really Lords over man's life who made them, they are not even ghosts to beckon and threaten, they are lovely dreams, they are playthings of his happy childhood, and when full-grown he comes to face realities, from kindly sentiment he lets them lie unburied in the lumber-room of his life.

Just when Apollo, Artemis, Athene, nay even Zeus himself, were losing touch with life and reality, fading and dying of their own luminous perfection, there came into Greece a new religious impulse, an impulse really religious, the mysticism that is embodied for us in the two names Dionysos and Orpheus. The object of the chapters that follow is to try and seize, with as much precision as may be, the gist of this mysticism.

Dionysos is a difficult god to understand. In the end it is only the mystic who penetrates the secrets of mysticism. It is therefore to poets and philosophers that we must finally look for help, and even with this help each man is in the matter of mysticism peculiarly the measure of his own understanding. But this ultimate inevitable vagueness makes it the more imperative that the few certain truths that can be made out about the religion of Dionysos should be firmly established and plainly set forth.

First it is certain beyond question that Dionysos was a latecomer into Greek religion, an immigrant god, and that he came from that home of spiritual impulse, the North. These three propositions are so intimately connected that they may conveniently be dealt with together.

In the face of a steady and almost uniform ancient tradition that Dionysos came from without, it might scarcely be necessary to emphasize this point but for a recent modern heresy. Anthropologists have lately recognized, and rightly, that Dionysos is in one of his aspects a nature-god, a god who comes and goes with the seasons, who has like Demeter and Kore, like Adonis and Osiris, his Epiphanies and his Recessions. They have rashly concluded that these undoubted appearances and disappearances adequately account for the tradition of his immigration, that he is merely a new-comer year by year, not a foreigner; that he is welcomed every spring, every harvest, every vintage, exorcised, expelled and slain in the death of each succeding winter. This error is beginning to filter into handbooks.

A moment's consideration shows that the actual legend points to the reverse conclusion. The god is first met with hostility, exorcised and expelled, then by the compulsion of his might and magic at last welcomed. Demeter and Kore are season-goddesses, yet we have no legend of their forcible entry. Comparative anthropology has done much for the understanding of Dionysos, but to tamper with the historical fact of his immigration is to darken counsel.

Ancient tradition must be examined, and first as to the lateness of his coming.

In Homer Dionysos is not yet an Olympian. On the Parthenon frieze he takes his place among the seated gods. Somewhere between the dates of Homer and Pheidias his entry was effected. The same is true of the indigenous Demeter, so that this argument alone is inadequate, but the fact must be noted.

The earliest monument of art showing Dionysos as an actual denizen of Olympus is the curious design from an amphora now in the Berlin Museum. The scene depicted is the birth of Athene and all the divinities present are carefully and sometimes curiously inscribed. Zeus with his thunderbolt is seated on a splendid throne in the centre. Athene springs from his head.

To the right are Demeter, Artemis, Aphrodite, and last of all Apollo. To the left Eileithyia, Hermes, Hephaestos, and last Dionysos holding his great wine cup.

From the style of the inscriptions the design can scarcely date later than the early part of the sixth century. The position and grouping of the different gods is noteworthy. Of course someone must stand on the outside, but Dionysos is markedly aloof from the main action. Hermes seems to come as messenger to the furthest verge of Olympus to tell him the news. At the right, the other Northerner, Apollo, occupies the last place.

Moreover on vase-paintings substantially earlier than the Parthenon marbles the scene of his entry into Olympus is not infrequent. As we have no literary tradition of this entry, the evidence of vase-paintings is here of some importance. The design selected (fig. 114) is from a cylix signed by the potter Euxitheos and can be securely dated as a work executed about the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. On the obverse is an assembly of the Olympians all inscribed; Zeus himself with his thunderbolt and Ganymede about to fill his wine cup, Athene holding helmet and lance, Hermes with a flower, Hebe, Hestia with flower and a branch, Aphrodite with dove and flower, Ares with helmet and lance.

We might not have named them right but for their inscriptions. Hera and Poseidon are absent, Demeter not yet come. At this time the vase-painter is still free to make a certain choice, the twelve Olympians are not yet canonical. On the obverse the gods are seated waiting, and on the reverse the new god is coming in all his splendour in his chariot with vine and wine-cup in his hand. With him, characteristically, for he is never unaccompanied, come the Satyr Terpes playing on the lyre and the Maenad Thero with thyrsos and fawn and snake, and behind the chariot another Maenad Kalis with thyrsos and lion and a Satyr Terpon playing on the flute. At the close of the sixth century when Pratinas and Choirilos and Phrynichus were writing tragedies in his honour, the gates of that exclusive epic Olympus could no longer be closed against the people's god, and the potter knew it. But there had been a time of doubt and debate. We do not have these entries of Athene or Poseidon or even Hermes.

Homer is of course our first literary source and his main notice of Dionysos is so characteristic it must be quoted in full. The fact that the passage stands alone elsewhere through all Homer Dionysos is of no real account has led critics to suspect that it is of later and local origin. Be that as it may, the story glistens like an alien jewel in a bedrock of monotonous fighting. Diomede meets Glaucus in battle, but so great is the hardihood of Glaucus that Diomede fears he is one of the immortals and makes pious, prudent pause:

'I, Diomedes, will not stand 'gainst heavenly Gods in war.
Not long in life was he of old who raised 'gainst gods his hand
Strong Lycoorgos, Dryas'son. Through Nysa's goodly land
He Dionysos'Nursing Nymphs did chase, till down in fear
They cast their wands upon the ground, so sore he smote them there,
That fell king with the ox-smiter. But Dionysos fled,
And plunged him'neath the salt sea wave. Him sore discomfited
Fair Thetis to her bosom took. Great fear the god did seize.
With Lycoorgos they were wroth, those gods that dwell at ease,
And Kronos'son did make him blind, and he was not for long,
The immortal gods they hated him because he did them wrong.'

Homer is somewhat mysterious as to the end of Lycurgus 'Not long in life was he.' Sophocles is more explicit, both as to his nationality and his doom. He is a Thracian king, son of Dryas, and he was 'rock-entombed' When Antigone is going to her death the chorus sing how in like fashion others had been forced to bend beneath the yoke of the gods, Danae, Lycurgus, the sons of Phineus, Oreithyia three of them Thracians; and of Lycurgus they tell:

'He was bound by Dionysos, rock-entombed,
Dryas son, Edonian king; swiftly bloomed
His dire wrath and drooped. So was he wrought
To know his blindness and what god he sought
With gibes mad-tongued. Yea and he set his hand
To stay the god-inspired band,
To quell his women and his joyous fire
And rouse the fluting Muses into ire.'

The loss of the Lycurgus trilogy of Aeschylus is hard to bear. One scene at least must have been something like a forecast of the Bacchae of Euripides. The dialogue between Lycurgus arid the stranger-god captured and brought into his presence, is parodied by Aristophanes in the Thesmophoriazusae and the scholiast tells us that the words:

'Whence does the womanish creature come ?'

occurred in the Edonians.

Neither Homer nor Sophocles knew anything of the murder of the children. Who first piled up this fresh horror we do not know. Vase-paintings of the rather late red-figured style (middle of the fifth century B.C.) are our first sources. The punishment of sin was to the primitive mind always incomplete unless the offender was cut off with his whole family root and branch, and the murder of the children may have been an echo of the story of the mad Heracles. It is finely conceived on a red-figured krater. On the obverse is the mad Lycurgus with his children dead and dying. He swings a double axe. The 'ox-feller' of Homer is probably a double axe, not a goad. It is the typical weapon of the Thracian, and with it the Thracian women regularly on vases slay Orpheus. Through the air down upon Lycurgus swoops a winged demon of madness, probably Lyssa herself, and smites at the king with her pointed goad. To the left, behind a hill, a Maenad smites her timbrel in token of the presence of the god. On the reverse of the vase we have the peace of Dionysos who made all this madness. The god has sent his angel against Lycurgus, but no turmoil troubles him or his. About him his thiasos of Maenads and Satyrs seem to watch the scene, alert and interested but in perfect quiet.

The exact details of the fate of Lycurgus, varying as they do from author to author, are not of real importance. The essential thing, the factor which recurs in story after story, is the rage against the dominance of a new god, the blind mad fury, the swift sudden helpless collapse at the touch of a real force. This is no symbol of the coming of the spring or the gathering of the vintage. It is the mirrored image of a human experience, of the passionate vain beating of man against what is not man and is more and less than man.

The nature and essence of the new influence will be in part determined later. For the present the question that presses for solution is 'whence did it come?' 'where was the primitive jseat of the worship of Dionysos?'

The testimony of historians, from Herodotus to Dion Cassius, is uniform, and confirms the witness of Homer and Sophocles. Herodotus tells how Xerxes, when he marched through Thrace, compelled the sea tribes to furnish him with ships and those that dwelt inland to follow by land. Only one tribe, the Satrae, would suffer no compulsion, and then come the significant words: 'The Satrae were subject to no man so far as we know, but down to our own day they alone of all the Thracians are free, for they dwell on high mountains covered with woods of all kinds and snow-clad, and they are keenly warlike. These are the people that possess an oracle shrine of Dionysos and this oracle is on the topmost range of their mountains. And those among the Sati who interpret the oracle are called Bessi; it is a priestess wh utters the oracles as it is at Delphi, and the oracles are nothing more extraordinary than that.' Herodotus is not concerned with the religion of Dionysos; he does not even say that the religion of Dionysos spread southward into Greece, but he states the all-important fact that the Satrae were never conquered. They received no religion from without. Here among those splendid unconquerable savages in their mountain fastnesses was the real home of the god.

Dionysos and the Bessi

Herodotus speaks of the Bessi as though they were a kind of priestly caste among the Satrae, but Strabo knows of them as the wildest and fiercest of the many brigand tribes that dwelt on and around Mt. Haemus. All the tribes about Mt. Haemus were, he says, 'much addicted to brigandage, but the Bessi who possessed the greater part of Mt. Haemus were called brigands by brigands. They are the sort of people who live in huts in very miserable fashion, and they extend as far as Rhodope and the Paeonians.' He mentions the Bessi again as a tribe living high up on the Hebrus at the furthest point where the river is navigable, and again emphasizes their tendency to brigandage.

The evil reputation of the Bessi lasted on till Christian days, till they bowed beneath the yoke of a greater than Dionysos. Towards the end of the fourth century A.D. the good Bishop of Dacia, Niketas, carried the gospel to these mountain wolves and, if we may trust the congratulatory ode written to him by his friend Paulinus, he carried it not in vain. Paulinus celebrates the conversion of the Bessi as follows:

'Hard were their lands and hard those Bessi bold,
Cold were their snows, their hearts than snow more cold,
Sheep in the fold from roaming now they cease,
Thy fold of peace.

Untamed of war, ever did they refuse
To bow their heads to servitude's hard use,
'Neath the true yoke their necks obedient
Are gladly bent.

They who were wont with sweat and manual toil
To delve their sordid ore from out the soil
Now for their wealth with inward joy untold
Garner heaven's gold.

There where of old they prowled like savage beasts,
Now is the joyous rite of angel feasts.
The brigands'cave is now a hiding place
For men of grace.'

Thucydides in his account of Thracian affairs is silent about the Bessi and his silence surprises us. It is probably accounted for by the fact that in his days the Odrysae had complete supremacy, a supremacy that seems to have lasted down to the days of Roman domination. The autochthonous tribes were necessarily obscured. He mentions however certain mountain peoples who had retained their autonomy against Sitalkes king of the Odrysae and calls them by the collective name Dioi. Among them were probably the Bessi, for we learn from Pliny that the Bessi were known by many names, among them that of Dio-Bessi. It seems possible that to these Dio-Bessi the god may have owed one of his many names.

In the face of all this historical evidence, it is at first a little surprising to find that, in the Bacchae of Euripides, Dionysos is no Thracian. He is Theban born, and comes back to Thebes, after long triumphant wanderings not in Thrace but in Asia, through Lydia, Phrygia to uttermost Media and Arabia. On this point Euripides is explicit. In the prologue Dionysos says:

'Far now behind me lies the golden land
Of Lydian and of Phrygian far away
The wide, hot plains where Persian sun-beams play,
The Bactrian war-holds and the storm-oppressed
Clime of the Mede and Araby the blest,
And Asia all, that by the salt sea lies
In proud embattled cities, motley-wise
Of Hellene and Barbarian interwrought,
And now I come to Hellas, having taught
All the world else my dances and my rite
Of mysteries, to show me in man's sight
Manifest God.'

Dionysos is made to come from without, not as an immigrant stranger but as an exile returned. Moreover, if historical tradition be true, he is made to come from the wrong place. He comes also attended by a train of barbarian women, Asiatic not Thracian. They chant their oriental origin:

'From Asia, from the day-spring that uprises,
From Tmolus ever glorying we come,'

and again:

'Hither, fragrant of Tmolus the golden.'

Dionysos in the Bacchae

Yet Euripides wrote the play in Macedonia and must have known perfectly well that these Macedonian rites that so impressed his imagination were from Thrace; that, as Plutarch tells us,'The women called Klodones and Mimallones performed rites which were the same as those done by the Edonian women and the Thracian women about the Haemus.' He knows it perfectly well and when he is off his guard betrays his knowledge. In the epode of the third choric song he makes Dionysos come to bless Pieria and in his coming cross the two Macedonian rivers, the Axios and Lydias:

'Blessed land of Pierie,
Dionysos loveth thee,
He will come to thee with dancing,
Come with joy and mystery,
With the Maenads at his best
Winding, winding to the west;
Cross the flood of swiftly glancing
Axios in majesty,
Cross the Lydias, the giver
Of good gifts and waving green,
Cross that Father Stream of story
Through a land of steeds and glory
Rolling, bravest, fairest River
E'er of mortals seen.'

Euripides as poet can afford to contradict himself. He accepts popular tradition, too careless of it to attempt an irrelevant consistency. It matters nothing to him whence the god came. The Theban birth-place, the home-coming were essential to the human pathos of his story. But for that we should have missed the appeal to Dirce:

'Achelous'roaming daughter, Holy Dirce, virgin water, Bathed he not of old in thee The Babe of God, the Mystery?'

and again:

'Why, Blessed among Rivers,

Wilt thou fly me and deny me?
By his own joy I vow,
By the grape upon the bough,
Thou shalt seek him in the midnight, thou shalt love him even now.'

He came unto his own and his own received him not.

When we examine the evidence of art, we find that the simple vase-painter accepts the fact that Dionysos has become a Greek, and does not raise the question whence he came. In black and early red figured designs Dionysos is almost uniformly dressed as a Greek and attended by Greek Maenads. Later the artist becomes more learned and dresses Dionysos as a Thracian or occasionally as an Oriental. The vase-painting in fig. 115, from a late aryballos in the British Museum, has been usually interpreted as representing the Oriental triumph of Dionysos. Rightly so, I inclii to think, because the figure on the camel is attended not only by Orientals but by Greek maidens playing on cymbals. Their free upward bearing contrasts strongly with the strange abject fantastic posturings of the Orientals. It must however distinctly borne in mind that the figure on the camel carries no Dionysiac attributes and cannot be certainly said to be the god.

Dionysos a Phrygio-Thracian

The question remains why did popular tradition, accepted by Euripides and embodied occasionally in vase-paintings, point to Asia rather than to the real home, Thrace? The answer in the main is given by Strabo in his important account of the provenance of the orgiastic worships of Greece. Strabo is noting that Pindar, like Euripides, regards the rites of Dionysos as substantially the same with those performed by the Phrygians in honour of the Great Mother.' Very similar to these are,'he adds, 'the rites called Kotytteia and Bendideia, celebrated among the Thracians. Nor is it at all unlikely that, as the Phrygians themselves are colonists from the Thracians, they brought their religious rites from thence.' In a fragment of the lost seventh book he is still more explicit. He is mentioning the mountain Bernicos as formerly in possession of the Briges, and the Briges, he says, were'a Thracian tribe of which some portion went across into Asia and were called by a modified name, Phrygians.'

The solution is simple and is indeed almost a geographical necessity. If the Thracians dwelling in the ranges of Rhodope and Haemus went south at all, they would inevitably split up into two branches. The one would move westward into Macedonia, across the Axios and Lydias into Thessaly and thence downwards to Delphi, Thebes and Attica; the other eastward across the Bosporus or the Hellespont into Asia Minor. Greek colonists in Asia Minor would recognize in the orgiastic cults they found there elements akin to their own worship of Dionysos. Wise men are not slow to follow the star that leads to the east, and it was pleasanter to admit a debt to Asia Minor than to own kinship with the barbarous north. Similarity of names, e.g. Lydias and Lydia, may have helped out the illusion and most of all the Theban legend of the Phoenician Kadmos.

But mythology is too unconscious not to betray itself. Herodotus says that the Thracians worship three gods only: Ares, Dionysos and Artemis. Between Ares and Dionysos there would seem to be but little in common, but in one current myth their kinship comes out all unconsciously. It is just these unconscious revelations that are in mythology of cardinal importance. The story is that known as the 'bonds of Hera'. Hephaistos, to revenge himself for his downfall from heaven, sent to his mother Hera a golden throne with invisible bonds. The Olympians took counsel how they might free their queen. None but Hephaistos knew the secret of loosing. Ares vowed he would bring Hephaistos by force. Hephaistos drove him off with fire-brands. Force failed, but Hephaistos yielded to the seduction of Dionysos and was brought in drunken triumph back to Olympus. It was a good subject for broad comedy, and Epicharmus used it in his'Revellers or Hephaistos.' It attained a rather singular popularity in art; the subject occurs on upwards of thirty vase-paintings black and red figured.

Earlier than any literary source for the myth is unquestionably the famous Fraois vase (early sixth century B.C.) in the Museo Civico at Florence, where the scene is depicted in broad epic fashion and with some conscious humour. All the figures are inscribed. Zeus is there and Hera, seated on the splendid, fatal throne. Dionysos leads the mule on which sits the drunken Hephaistos. Up they come into the very presence of Zeus with three attendant Silenoi carrying respectively a wine-skin, a flute, a woman. It is the regular revel rout. Behind the throne of Hera crouches Ares in deep dejection, on a sort of low stool of repentance, while Athene looks back at him with scorn. Why are Ares and Dionysos thus set in rivalry? Not merely because wine is mightier than war, but because the two, Ares and Dionysos, are Thracian rivals, with Hephaistos of Lemnos for a third. It is a bit of local mythology transplanted later to Olympus.

The diverse fates of these two Thracian gods are instructive. Ares was realized as a Thracian to the end. In Homer he is only half accepted in Olympus, he is known as a ruffian and a swashbuckler and like Aphrodite escapes to his home as soon as he is released:

'Straightway forth sprang the twain;
To savage Thrace went Ares, but Kypris with sweet smile
Hied her to her fair altar place, in pleasant Paphos'isle.'

The newly admitted gods, such as Ares and Aphrodite, are never really at home in Olympus. Dionysos, as has already been seen, has no place in the Homeric Olympus, but, once he does force an entry, his seat is far more stable. In the Oedipus Tyrannos Sophocles realizes that Dionysos and Ares are the great Theban divinities, but Ares is of slaughter and death, Dionysos of gladness and life. He makes his chorus summon Dionysos to banish Ares his fellow divinity:

'0 thou with golden mitre band,
Named for our land,
On thee in this our woe
I call, thou ruddy Bacchus all aglow
blockquote With wine and Bacchant song.
Draw nigh, thou and thy Maenad throng,
Drive from us with bright torch of blazing pine
The god unhonoured'mong the gods divine.'

Sophocles just hits the theological mark, Ares is a god but he is unhonoured of the orthodox gods, the Olympians.

Euripides too lets out the kinship with Ares. He knows of 'Harmonia, daughter of the Lord of War,'

Harmonia, bride of Kadmos, mother of Semele, and though his Dionysos is at the outset all gentleness and magic, his kingdom scarcely of this world, Teiresias knows that he is not only Teacher, Healer, Prophet, but

'of Ares'realm a part hath he.
When mortal armies mailed and arrayed
Have in strange fear, or ever blade met blade,
Fled, maddened,'tis this god hath palsied them,'

and though the panic he sends is from within not without, yet the mention is significant. Dionysos, for all his sweetness, is to the end militant, he came not to bring peace upon the earth but a sword, only in late authors his weapons are not those of Ares. On vase-paintings he is not unfrequently depicted doing on his actual armour, but Polyaenus, in the little treatise on mythological warriors with which he prefaces his Strategika, notes the secret armour of the god, the lance hidden in ivy, the fawn-skin and soft raiment for breastplate, the cymbals and drum for trumpet. To the end the god of the brigand Bessi was Lord of War.

Art tells the same tale, that the Thracian Dionysos succeeded where the equally Thracian Ares failed. Among the archaic seated gods on the frieze of the treasury of Cnidos recently discovered at Delphi Ares has found a place, but a significant one, at the very end, on a seat by himself, as though naively to mark the difference. Even on the east frieze of the Parthenon, where all is softened down to a decent theological harmony, there is just a lingering, semi-conscious touch of the same prejudice. Ares is admitted indeed, but he is not quite at home among these easy aristocratic Olympians. He is grouped with no one, he leans his arm on no one's shoulder; even his pose is a little too consciously assured to be quite confident.

Dionysos and Nysa

It is abundantly clear that the remote Asiatic origin of Dionysos is emphasized to hide a more immediate Thracian provenance. The Greeks knew the god was not home-grown, but he was so great, so good, so all-conquering, that they were forced to accept him. But they could not bear the truth, that he came from their rough north-country kinsmen the Thracians. They need not have been ashamed of these Northerners, who were as well born as and more bravely bred than themselves. Even Herodotos owns that'the nation of the Thracians is the greatest among men, except at least the Indians.'

Once fairly uprooted from his native Thracian soil, it was easy to plant Dionysos anywhere and everywhere wherever went his worshippers. His homeless splendour grows and grows till by the time of Diodorus his birthplace is completely apocryphal. In Homer, as has been seen, Nysa or as it is called Nyseion, whether it be mountain or plain, is clearly in Thrace, home of Lycurgus son of Dryas. But already in Sophocles, in the beautiful fragment preserved by Strabo, wherever it may be, it is a place touched by magic, a silent land which

'The horned lacchus loves for his dear nurse,
Where no shrill voice doth sound of any bird.'

Euripides never expressly states where he supposes Nysa to be, but the name comes to his lips coupled with the Korykian peaks on Parnassos and the leafy haunts of Olympus, so we may suppose he believed it to be northwards. As the horizon of the Greeks widened, Nysa is pushed further and further away to an ever more remote Nowhere. Diodorus with much circumstance settles it in Libya on an almost inaccessible island surrounded by the river Triton. It mattered little so long as it was a far-off happy land.

Convinced as he was of this remote African Nysa and of the great Asiatic campaign of Dionysos, it is curious to note that even Diodorus cannot rid his mind of Thrace. He knows of course the story of the Thracian Lycurgus and mentions incidentally that it was in a place called Nysion that Lycurgus set upon the Maenads and slew them, he knows too of the connection between Dionysos and Orpheus and never doubts but that Orpheus was a Thracian, a matter to be discussed later. Most significant of all, when he is speaking of the trieteric ceremonies instituted in memory of the Indian expedition, he automatically records that these were celebrated not only by Boeotians and the other Greeks but by the Thracians. Thrace is obscured by the glories of Phrygia, Lydia, Phoenicia, Arabia and Libya, but never wholly forgotten.

The Satyrs

Dionysos then, whatever his nature, is an immigrant god, a late comer, and he enters Greece from the north, from Thrace. He comes not unattended. With him are always his revel rout of Satyrs and of Maenads. This again marks him out from the rest of the Olympians; Poseidon, Athene, Apollo, Zeus himself has no such accompaniment. As man makes the gods in his own image, it may be well before we examine the nature and functions of Dionysos to observe the characteristics of his attendant worshippers, to determine who and what they are and whence they come.

The Satyrs first they are (what else should they, could they be?) the Satrae*; and these Satrae-Satyrs have many traits in common with the more mythological Centaurs. The evidence of the coins of Macedonia is instructive. On the coins of Orreskii, a centaur, a horse -man, bears off a woman in his arms. At Lete close at hand, with a coinage closely resembling in style, fabric, weight the money of the Orreskii and other Pangaean tribes, the type is the same in content, though with an instructive difference of form a naked Satyr or Seilenos with the hooves, ears and tail of a horse seizes a woman round the waist. These coins are of the sixth century B.C. Passing to Thasos, a colony of the Thracians and like it rich in the coinage that came of gold mines, we find the same type. On a series of coins that range from circ. 500 411 B.C. we have again the Satyr or Seilenos bearing off the woman. An instance, for clearness'sake one of comparatively late date, is given in fig. 117.

This interchange of types, Satyr and Centaur, is evidence about which there can be no mistake. Satyr and Centaur, slightly diverse forms of the horse-man, are in essence one and the same. Nonnus is right: 'the Centaurs are of the blood of the shaggy Satyrs.' It remains to ask who are the Centaurs?

There are few mythological figures about which more pleasant baseless fancies have been woven; woven irresponsibly, because mythologists are slow to face solid historical fact; woven because, intoxicated by comparative philology, they refuse to seek for the origin of a myth in its historical birthplace. The Centaurs, it used to be said, are Vedic Gandharvas, cloud-demons. Mythology now-a-days has fallen from the clouds, and with it the Centaurs. They next became mountain torrents, the offspring of the cloud that settles on the mountain top. The Centaurs have possession of a wine-cask, the imprisoned forces of the earth's fertility are left in charge of the genius of the mountain. The cask is opened, this is the unlocking of the imprisoned forces at the approach of Herakles, the sun in spring, and this unlocking is the signal for the mad onset of the Centaurs, the wild rush of the torrents. Of the making of such mythology truly there is no end.

Homer knew quite well who the opponents of Peirithoos were, not cloud-demons, not mountain torrents, but real wild men (cfrrjpes), as real as the foes they fought with. He tells of the heroes Dryas, father of Lycurgus, and Peirithoos and Kaineus:

'Mightiest were they, and with the mightiest fought,
With wild men mountain-haunting.'

No one has, so far as we know, reduced the mighty Peirithoos, Dryas and Lycurgus to mountain torrents or sun myths. Why are their mighty foes to be less human?

Again in the Catalogue of the Ships we are told how Peirithoos

Took vengeance on the shaggy mountain-men,
Drave them from Pelion to the Aithikes far.'

In the name of common sense, did Peirithoos expel a stormcloud or a mountain torrent and force it to leave Pelion and settle elsewhere? The vengeance of Peirithoos is simply the expulsion of one wild tribe by another.

In these passages from the Iliad the foes of Peirithoos are simply a tribe of wild men, Pheres. In the Odyssey, Homer calls these same foes by the name Kentauri, and implies that they are non-human. Speaking of the peril of 'honey-sweet wine' he says:

'Thence'gan the feud'twixt Centaurs and mankind.'

For the right understanding of this later non-humanity of the Centaurs the development of their art type is of paramount importance.

We are apt to think of the Centaurs exclusively somewhat as they appear on the metopes of the Parthenon, i.e. as splendid horses with the head and trunk of a man. By the middle of the fifth century B.C. in knightly horse-loving Athens the horse form had got the upper hand. In archaic representations the reverse is the case. The Centaurs are in art what they are in reality, men with men's legs and feet, but they are shaggy mountain men with some of the qualities and habits of beasts; so to indicate this in a horse-loving country they have the hind-quarters of a horse awkwardly tacked on to their human bodies.

A good example is the vase-painting in fig. 118 from an early black-figured lekythos in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Vases of this style cannot be dated later than the beginning of the sixth century B.C. and may be somewhat earlier. The scene represented is the fight of Herakles with the Centaurs. To the left is a Centaur holding in his right hand a branch, the primitive weapon of a primitive combatant. He is figured as a complete man with a horse-trunk appended. In the original drawing the horse-trunk is made more obviously an extra appendage from the fact that the human body is painted red and the horse-trunk black. Herakles too is a fighter with rude weapons; he carries his club, which in this case is plainly what its Greek name indicates, a rough hewn trunk or branch or possibly root of a tree. The remainder of the design is not so clear and does not affect the present argument. The man with the sword to the right is probably lolaos. The object surmounted by the eagles I am quite unable to explain.

Satyrs and Centaurs

The next stage in the development of the Centaur is seen in the archaic gem from the British Museum in fig. 120. Here the noticeable point is that the Centaur, though he has still the body of a man, is beginning to be more of a horse. He has hoofs for feet. He is behaving just like the Satyr on the coin in fig. 117, or the aggressor on the Fracois vase (fig. 116), he is carrying off a woman. It is the last step in the transition to the Centaur of the Parthenon, i.e. the horse with head and trunk of a man. Between Satyr and Centaur the sole difference is this: the Centaur, primarily a wild man, became more and more of a horse, the Satyr resisted the temptation and remained to the end what he was at the beginning, a wild man, with horse adjuncts of ears, tail and occasionally hoofs. Greek art, as has been already seen in discussing the Gorgon, was liberal in its experiments with monster forms, the horse Medusa failed, the horse Centaur prevailed.

The Parthenon type of the Centaur, the type in which the horse-form is predominant, obtains later in red-figured vase-paintings for all Centaurs save one, the virtuous Cheiron. Cheiron always keeps his human feet and legs and often wears a decent cloak to mark his gentle civilized citizenship. Pausanias when examining the chest of Kypselos at Olympia, a monument dedicated in the seventh century B.C., noted this peculiarity: 'And the Centaur has not all his feet like a horse, but the front feet are the feet of a man/ Pindar does definitely in the case of Cheiron identify jijp and Kevravpos, but art kept for Cheiron the more primitive and human type to emphasize his humanity, for he is the trainer of heroes, the utterer of wise saws, the teacher of all gentle arts of music and medicine, he has the kind heart of a man.

The charming little design in fig. 121 is from an oinochoe in the British Museum. Though the technique is black-figured the delicate soft style is archaistic rather than archaic and the vase is probably not older than the middle of the fifth century B.C. The good Cheiron is a quaint blend of horse and middle-aged citizen. The tree branch he still carries looks back to the primitive habits he has left far behind, and the little tree in front marks the woodland home. But there is nothing shaggy about his neat decorous figure. Even the dog who used to go hunting with him is now alert to give a courteous welcome to the guest. A father is bringing his child, a little miniature copy of himself, to be reared in the school of Cheiron. Father and son are probably Peleus and Achilles, but the child might be Jason or even Asklepios. It is the good Centaur only who concerns us. How has he of the mountains, fierce and untameable, come to keep a preparatory school for young heroes ? The answer to this question is interesting and instructive.

Prof. Ridgeway has shown that in the mythology of the Centaurs we have a reflection of the attitude of mind of the conquerors to the conquered. This attitude is, all the world over, a double one. The conquerors are apt to regard the conquered with mixed feelings, mainly, it is true, with hatred and aversion, but in part with reluctant awe.' The conquerors respect the conquered as wizards, familiar with the spirits of the land, and employ them for sorcery, even sometimes when relations are peaceable employ them as foster-fathers for their sons, yet they impute to them every evil and bestial characteristic and believe them to take the form of wild beasts. The conquered for their part take refuge in mountain fastnesses and make reprisals in the characteristic fashion of Satyrs and Centaurs by carrying off the women of their conquerors.'

Nonnus is again right, it was jealousy that gave to the Satyrs their horns, their manes, tusks and tails, but not, as Nonnus supposed, the jealousy of Hera, but of primitive conquering man who gives to whatever is hurtful to himself the ugly form that utters and relieves his hate. It should not be hard for us to realize this impulse; our own devil, with horns and tail and hoofs, died hard and recently.

Most instructive of all as to the real nature of the Centaurs and their close analogy to the Satrai-Satyroi is the story of the opening of the wine cask. Pindar tells how

'Then when the wild men knew
The scent of honeyed wine that tames men's souls,
Straight from the board they thrust the white milk-bowls
With hurrying hands, and of their own will flew
To the horns of silver wrought,
And drank and were distraught.'

Storm-clouds and mountain torrents, nay even four-footed beasts do not get drunk, the perfume of wine is for the subduing of man alone. The wild things (ffipes) are all human,'they thrust with their hands.'

The scene is a favourite one on vases. One of the earliest representations is given in fig. 122 from a skyphos in the Louvre. It dates about the beginning of the sixth century B.C. The scene is the cave of the Centaur Pholos. The great pithos or wine jar is open. Pholos himself has a large wine-cup in his hand. Pholos is sober still, he is a sort of Cheiron, but not so the rest. They are mad with drink and are hustling and fighting in wild confusion. Herakles comes out and tries to restore order. Wine has come for the first time to a primitive population unused to so strong an intoxicant. The result is the same all over the world. A like notion comes out in the popular myth of the wedding feast of Peirithoos; the Centaurs taste wine and fall to fighting and in Satyr fashion seek to ravish the bride. These stories are of paramount importance because they point the analogy between two sets of primitive worshippers of Dionysos, the Centaurs and the Satrai-Satyroi.

To these Satrai-Satyroi we must now return. It is now sufficiently clear that, whatever they became to a later imagination, to Homer and Pindar and the vase-painters these horsemen, these attendants of Dionysos, were not fairies, not 'spirits of vegetation' though from such they may have borrowed many traits, but the representatives of an actual primitive population. They owe their monstrous form, their tails, their horses' ears and hoofs, not to any desire to express 'powers of fertilization' but to the malign imagination of their conquerors. They are not incarnations of a horse-god Dionysos such a being never existed they are simply Satrai. It is not of course denied that they ultimately became mythological, that is indeed indicated by the gradual change of form. As a rule the Greek imagination tends to anthropomorphism, but here we have a reverse case. By lapse of time and gradual oblivion of the historical facts of conquest, what was originally a primitive man developes in the case of the Centaurs into a mythological horse-demon.

The Satyrs undergo no such change, they remain substantially human. The element of horse varies but is never predominant.

The form in which there is most horse is well shown in fig. 123. This picture is from the reverse of the cylix in the Wlirzburg Museum, on which is depicted the feast of Phineus already discussed. The fact is worth noting that both representations come from a Thracian cycle of mythology. Phineus is a Thracian hero, Dionysos a Thracian god. Dionysos stands in a chariot to which are yoked a lion and a stag. By his side is a woman, probably a goddess, but whether Ariadne or Semele cannot certainly be determined, nor for the present argument does it matter. The god has stopped to water his steeds at a fountain. Satyrs attend him, one is drawing water from the well basin, another clambers on the lion's back. Some maidens have bathed at the fountain, and are resting under a palm tree, one is just struggling back into her clothes. Two prying Satyrs look on with evil in their hearts. They are wild men with shaggy bodies, rough hair, horses'ears and tails, and they have the somewhat exceptional addition of hoofs; the human part of them is closely analogous to the shaggy Centaurs of fig. 122.

The Satyrs are not pleasant to contemplate; they are ugly in form and degraded in habits, and but for a recent theory it might not be needful to emphasize so strongly their nature and functions. This theory, which has gained wide and speedy popularity, maintains that the familiar horse-men of black and red figured vases are not Satyrs at all. The Satyrs, we are told, are goat-men, the horse-men of the vases are Seilenoi. This theory, if true, would cut at the root of our whole argument. To deny the identity of the horse-men with the Satyrs is to deny their identity with the Satrai, i.e. with the primitive population who worshipped Dionysos.

Why then, with the evidence of countless vase-paintings to support us, may we not call the horse-men who accompany Dionysos Satyrs? Because, we are told, tragedy is the goat-song, the goat-song gave rise to the Satyric drama, hence the Satyrs must be goat-demous, hence they cannot be horse-demons, hence the horse-demons of vases cannot be Satyrs, hence another name must be found for them. On the Francois-vase (fig. 116) the horse-demons are inscribed Seilenoi, hence let the name Seilenoi be adopted for all horse-demons. Be it observed that the whole complex structure rests on the philological assumption that tragedy means the goat-song. What tragedy really does or at least may mean will be considered later; for the present the point is only raised because I hold to the view now discredited that the familiar throng of idle disreputable vicious horse-men who constantly on vases attended Dionysos, who drink and sport and play and harry women, are none other than Hesiod's 'race Of worthless idle Satyrs.'

That they are also called Seilenoi I do not for a moment deny. In different lands their names were diverse.

The Maenads

It is refreshing to turn from the dissolute crew of Satyrs to the women-attendants of Dionysos, the Maenads. These Maenads are as real, as actual as the Satyrs; in fact more so, for no poet or painter ever attempted to give them horses'ears and tails. And yet, so persistent is the dislike to commonplace fact, that we are repeatedly told that the Maenads are purely mythological creations and that the Maenad orgies never appear historically in Greece.

It would be a mistake to regard the Maenads as the mere female correlatives of the Satyrs. The Satyrs, it has been seen, are representations of a primitive subject people, but the Maenads do not represent merely the women of the same race. Their name is the corruption of no tribal name, it represents a state of mind and body, it is almost a cultus-epithet. Maenad means of course simply 'mad woman,' and the Maenads are the women-worshippers of Dionysos of whatever race, possessed, maddened or, as the ancients would say, inspired by his spirit.

Maenad is only one, though perhaps the most common, of the many names applied to these worshipping women. In Macedonia Plutarch tells us they were called Mimallones and Klodones, in Greece, Bacchae, Bassarides, Thyiades, Potniades and the like.

Some of the titles crystallized into something like proper names, others remained consciously adjectival. At bottom they all express the same idea, women possessed by the spirit of Dionysos. Plutarch in his charming discourse on Superstition tells how when the difchyrambic poet Timotheos was chanting a hymn to Artemis he addressed the daughter of Zeus thus:

'Maenad, Thyiad, Phoibad, Lyssad.'

The titles may be Englished as Mad One, Rushing One, Inspired One, Raging One. Cinesias the lyric poet, whose own songs were doubtless couched in language less orgiastic, got up and said: 'I wish you may have such a daughter of your own.' The story I is instructive on two counts. It shows first that Maenad and Thyiad were at the date of Timotheos so adjectival, so little crystallized into proper names, that they could be applied not merely to the worshippers of Dionysos, but to any orgiastic divinity, and second the passage is clear evidence that educated people, towards the close of the fifth century B.C., were beginning to be at issue with their own theological conceptions. Cultus practices however, and still more cultus epithets, lay far behind educated opinion. It is fortunately possible to prove that the epithet Thyiad certainly and the epithets Phoibad and Maenad probably, were applied to actually existing historical women. The epithet Lyssad, which means'raging mad,'was not likely to prevail out of poetry. The chorus in the Bacchae call themselves'swift hounds of raging Madness,'but the title was not one that would appeal to respectable matrons.

We begin with the Thyiades. It is at Delphi that we learn most of their nature and worship, Delphi where high on Parnassos Dionysos held his orgies. Thus much even Aeschylus, though he is'all for Apollo,'cannot deny. To this he makes the priestess in her ceremonial recitation of local powers bear almost reluctant witness:

'You too I salute,
Ye nymphs about, Kory Ida's caverned rock,
Kindly to birds, haunt of divinities.
And Bromios, I forget not, holds the place,
Since first to war he led his Bacchanals,
And scattered Pentheus, like a riven hare.'

Aeschylus, intent on monotheism, would fain know only the two divinities who were really one, i.e. Zeus and

'Loxias utterer of his father's will,'

the Father and the Son, these and the line of ancient Earth-divinities to whom they were heirs. But religious tradition knew of another immigrant, Dionysos, and Aeschylus cannot wholly ignore him. On the pediments of the great temple were sculptured at one end, Pausanias tells us, Apollo, Artemis, Leto and the Muses, and at the other'the setting of the sun and Dionysos with his Thyiad women.' The ritual year at Delphi was divided, as will later be seen, between Apollo and Dionysos.

The vase-painting in fig. 124 from a krater in the Hermitage Museum at St Petersburg is a brief epitome of the religious history of Delphi, marking its three strata. In the foreground is the omphalos of Gaia covered with fillets:

'First in my prayer before all other gods
. I call on Earth, primaeval prophetess,'

Gaia, of whom her successors Themis and Phoebe are but by-forms. Higher up in the picture are other divinities superimposed on this primitive Earth-worship. Apollo and Dionysos clasp hands while about them is a company of Maenads and Satyrs. It is perhaps not quite certain which is regarded as the first comer, but the balance is in favour of Dionysos as the sanctuary is already peopled with his worshippers. His dress has something of Oriental splendour about it as compared with the Hellenic simplicity of Apollo. Each carries his characteristic wand, Apollo a branch of bay, Dionysos a thyrsos.

In this vase-painting, which dates about the beginning of the fourth century B.C., all is peace and harmony and clasped hands. The Delphic priesthood were past masters in the art of glossing over awkward passages in the history of theology. Apollo had to fight with the ancient mantic serpent of Gaia and slay it before he could take possession, and we may be very sure that at one time or another there was a struggle between the followers of Apollo and the followers of Dionysos. Over this past which was not for edification a decent veil was drawn.

A religion which conquered Delphi practically conquered the whole Greek world. It was probably at Delphi, no less than at Athens, that the work of reforming, modifying, adapting the rude Thracian worship was effected, a process necessary to commend the new cult to the favour of civilized Greece. If then we can establish the historical actuality of the Thyiads at Delphi we need not hesitate to believe that they, or their counterparts, existed in the worship of Dionysos elsewhere.

Pausanias when he was at Panopeus was puzzled to know why Homer spoke of the'fair dancing grounds'of the place. The reason he says was explained to him by the women whom the Athenians call Thyiades. He adds, that there may be no mistake, 'these Thyiads are Attic women who go every other year with the Delphian women to Parnassos and there hold orgies in honour of Dionysos. On their way they stopped to dance at Panopeus, hence Homer's epithet.' Of course this college of sacred women, these Thyiades, were provided with an eponymous ancestress, Thyia. She is mythological. Pausanias says in discussing the origin of Delphi that 'some would have it that there was a man called Castalius, an aboriginal, who had a daughter Thyia, and that she was the first priestess of Dionysos and held orgies in honour of the god, and they say that afterwards all women who were mad in honour of Dionysos have been called Thyiades after her. If those who are mad in honour of Dionysos'are not substantially Maenads, it is hard to say what they are. It is fortunate that Pausanias saw and spoke to these women or else his statement that they raved upon the topmost peaks of Parnassos in honour of Dionysos and Apollo would have been explained away as mere mythology.

Plutarch was a priest in his own Chaeronea and intimately acquainted with the ritual of Delphi, and a great friend of his, Klea, was president of the Thyiades at Delphi. He mentions them more than once. In writing to Favorinus on 'the First Principle of Cold' he argues that cold has its own special and proper qualities, density, stability, rigidity, and gives as an instance the cold of a winter's night out on Parnassos. 'You have heard yourself at Delphi how the people who went up Parnassos to bring help to the Thyiades were overtaken by a violent gale with snow, and their coats were frozen as hard as wood, so that when they were stretched out they crumbled and fell to bits.' The crumbling coats sound apocryphal, but the Thyiades out in the cold are quite real. You do not face a mountain snow-storm to succour the mythological'spirits of the spring.'

It may have been from his friend Klea that Plutarch learnt the pleasant story of the Thyiades and the women of Phocis, which he records in his treatise on the 'Virtues of Women.' 'When the tyrants of Phocis had taken Delphi and undertook against them what was known as the Sacred War, the women who attended Dionysos whom they call Thyiades being distraught wandered out of their way and came without knowing it to Amphissa. And being very weary and not yet having come to their right mind they flung themselves down in the agora and fell asleep anyhow where they lay. And the women of Amphissa were afraid lest, as their city had made an alliance with the Phocians and the place was full of the soldiery of the tyrants, the Thyiades might suffer some harm. And they left their houses and ran to the agora and made a ring in silence round them and stood there without disturbing them as they slept, and when they woke up they severally tended them and brought them food and finally got leave from their husbands to set them on their way in safety as far as the mountains.' These Thyiades are the historical counterparts of the Maenads of countless vases and bas-reliefs, the same mad revelry, the same utter exhaustion and prostrate sleep. They are the same too as the Bacchant Women of Euripides on the slopes of Cithaeron:

'There, beneath the trees
Sleeping they lay, like wild things flung at ease
In the forest, one half sinking on a bed
Of deep pine greenery, one with careless head
Amid the fallen oak-leaves.'

In the reverence shown by the women of Amphissa we see that though the Thyiades were real women they were something more than real. This brings us to another of the cultus titles enumerated by Timotheos, 'Phoibad.' Phoibas is the female correlative of Phoebus, a title we are apt to associate exclusively with Apollo. Apollo, Liddell and Scott say, was called Phoebus because of the purity and radiant beauty of youth. The epithet has more to do with purity than with radiant beauty; if with beauty at all it is'the beauty of holiness.' Plutarch in discussing this title of Apollo makes the following interesting statement 2: 'The ancients, it seems to me, called everything that was pure and sanctified phoebic as the Thessalians still, I believe, say of their priests when they are living in seclusion apart on certain prescribed days that they are living phoebically.' The meaning of - this passage, which is practically untranslateable, is clear. The v root of the word Phoebus meant'in a condition of ceremonial purity, holy in a ritual sense,'and as such specially inspired by and under the protection of the god, under a taboo. Apollo probably took over his title of Phoebus from the old order of women divinities to whom he succeeded. Third in order of succession after Gaia and Themis:

'Another Titaness, daughter of Earth,
Phoebe, possessed it, and for birthday gift
To Phoebus gave it, and he took her name.'

Apollo, we may be sure, did not get his birthday gift without substantial concessions. He took the name of the ancient Phoebe, daughter of earth, nay more he was forced, woman-hater as he always was, to utter his oracles through the mouth of a raving worn an -priestess, a Phoibas. Herodotus in the passage already quoted justly observed that in the remote land of the Bessi as at Delphi oracular utterance was by the mouth of a priestess. Kassandra was another of these women-prophetesses of Gaia. She prophesied at the altar-omphalos of Thymbrae, a shrine Apollo took over as he took Delphi. Her frenzy against , Apollo is more than the bitterness of maiden betrayed; it is the wrath of the prophetess of the old order discredited, despoiled by the new; she breaks her wand and rends her fillets and cries:

'Lo now the seer the seeress hath undone.'

The priestess at Delphi, though in intent a Phoibas, was called the Pythia, but the official name of the priestess Kassandra was, we know, Phoibas:

'The Phoibas whom the Phrygians call Kassandra,'

and the title, 'she who is ceremonially pure' lends a bitter irony to Hecuba's words of shame.

The word Phoibades is never, so far as I know, actually applied to definite Bacchantes, though I believe its use at Delphi to be due to Dionysiac influence, but another epithet Potniades points the same way. In the Bacchae, when the messenger returns from Cithaeron, he says to Pentheus:

'I have seen the wild white women there, king,
Whose fleet limbs darted arrow-like but now
From Thebes away, and come to tell thee how
They work strange deeds.

I The'wild white women'are in a hieratic state of holy madness, hence their miraculous magnetic powers. Photius has a curious note on the verb with which'Potniades'is connected. He says its normal use was to express a state in which a woman 'suffered something and entreated a goddess'and'if any one used the word of a man he was inaccurate.' By 'suffering something' he can only mean that she was possessed by the goddess, and he may have the Maenads and kindred worshippers in his mind. Madness could be caused by the Mother of the gods or by Dionysos, in fact by any orgiastic divinity.

It may possibly be objected that Maenads are not the same as either Thyiades or Phoibades. My point is that they are. The substantial basis of the conception is the actual women-worshippers of the god; out of these were later created his mythical attendants. Such is the natural order of mythological genesis. Diodorus like most modern mythologists inverts this natural sequence, and his inversion is instructive. In describing the triumphal return of Dionysos from India he says: 'And the Boeotians and the other Greeks and the Thracians in memory of the Indian expedition instituted the biennial sacrifices to Dionysos and they hold that at these intervals the god makes his epiphanies to mortals. Hence in many towns of Greece every alternate year Bacchanalian assemblies of women come together and it is customary for maidens to carry the thyrsos and to revel together to the honour and glory of the god, and the married women worship the god in organized bands and they revel, and in every way celebrate the presence of Dionysos in imitation of the Maenads who from of old, it was said, constantly attended the god.' Diodorus is an excellent instance of mistaken mythologizing. Mythology invents a reason for a fact, does not base a fact on a fancy.

It is not denied for a moment that the Maenads became mythical. When Sophocles sings:

'Footless, sacred, shadowy thicket, where a myriad berries grow.
Where no heat of the sun may enter, neither wind of the winter blow,
Where the Reveller Dionysos with his nursing nymphs will go,'

we are not in this world, and his nursing nymphs are 'goddesses'; but they are goddesses fashioned here as always in the image of man who made them.

The difficulty and the discrepancy of opinion as to the reality of the Maenads are due mainly to a misunderstanding about words. Maenad is to us a proper name, a fixed and crystallized personality; so is Thyiad, but in the beginning it was not so. Maenad is the Mad One, Thyiad the Rushing Distraught One or something of that kind, anyhow an adjectival epithet. Mad One, Distraught One, Pure One are simply ways of describing a woman under the influence of a god, of Dionysos. Thyiad and Phoibad obtained as cultus names, Maenad tended to go over to mythology. Perhaps naturally so; when a people becomes highly civilized madness is apt not to seem, save to poets and philosophers, the divine thing it really is, so they tend to drop the mad epithet and the colourless Thyiad becomes more and more a proper name.

Still Maenad, as a name of actual priestly women, was not wholly lost. An inscription of the date of Hadrian, found in Magnesia and now in the Tschinli Kiosk at Constantinople, gives curious evidence. This inscription recounts a little miracle-story. A plane tree was shattered by a storm, inside it was found an image of Dionysos. Seers were promptly sent to Delphi to ask what was to be done. The answer was, as might be expected, the Magnesians had neglected to build'fair wrought temples'to Dionysos; they must repair their fault. To do this properly they must send to Thebes and thence obtain three Maenads of the family of Kadmean Ino. These would give to the Magnesians orgies and right customs. They went to Thebes and brought back three'Maenads'whose names are given, Kosko, Baubo and Thettale; and they came and founded three thiasoi or sacred guilds in three parts of the city. The inscription is of course late; Baubo and Kosko are probably Orphic, but the main issue is clear: in the time of Hadrian at least three actual women of a particular family were called 'Maenads.'

We are so possessed by a set of conceptions based on Periclean Athens, by ideas of law and order and reason and limit, that we are apt to dismiss as'mythological'whatever does not fit into our stereotyped picture. The husbands and brothers of the women of historical days would not, we are told, have allowed their women to rave upon the mountains; it is unthinkable taken in conjunction with the strict oriental seclusion of the Periclean woman. That any woman might at any moment assume the liberty of a Maenad is certainly unlikely, but much is borne even by husbands and brothers when sanctioned by religious tradition. The men even of Macedonia, where manners were doubtless ruder, did not like the practice of Bacchic orgies. Bacchus came emphatically not to bring peace. Plutarch conjectures that these Bacchic orgies had much to do with the strained relations between the father and mother of Alexander the Great. A snake had been seen lying by the side of Olympias and Philip feared she was practising enchantments, or worse, that the snake was the vehicle of a god. Another and probably the right explanation of the presence of the snake was, as Plutarch tells us, that'all the women of that country had been from ancient days under the dominion of Orphic rites and Dionysiac orgies, and that they were called Klodones and Mimallones because in many respects they imitated the Edonian and Thracian women round about Haemus, from whom the Greek word Bprfcriceveiv seems to come, a word which is applied to excessive and overdone ceremonials. Now Olympias was more zealous than all the rest and carried out these rites of possession and ecstasy in very barbarous fashion and introduced huge tame serpents into the Bacchic assemblies, and these kept creeping out of the ivy and the mystic likna and twining themselves round the thyrsoi of the women and their garlands, and frightening the men out of their senses'

However much the Macedonian men disliked these orgies, they were clearly too frightened to put a stop to them.

The women were possessed, magical, and dangerous to handle. Scenes such as those described by Plutarch as actually taking place in Macedonia are abundantly figured on vases.

The beautiful raging Maenad in fig. 125 from the centre of a cylix with white ground at Munich is a fine example. She wears the typical Maenad garb, the fawn-skin over her regular drapery; she carries the thyrsos, she carries in fact the whole gear of Dionysos.

When Pentheus would counterfeit a Bacchant he is attired just so; he wears the long trailing chiton and over it the dappled fawn-skin, his hair flows loose, in his hand is the thyrsos. For snood in her hair the Maenad has twined a great snake. Another Maenad is shown in fig. 126. She is characterized only by the two snakes she holds in her hand. But for her long full drapery she might be an Erinys.

The snakes emerging from the sacred cistae are illustrated by the class of coins known as cistophoroi, a specimen of which is reproduced in fig. 127. These coins, of which the type is uniform, originated, according to Dr Imhoof, in Ephesus a little before B.C. 200, and spread through air the dominions of Attalos the First. They illustrate a phase of Dionysos worship in Asia Minor closely akin to that of Macedonia.

Macedonia is not Athens, but the reforms of Epimenides allow us to divine that Athenian brothers and husbands also had their difficulties. Plutarch again is our informant. Athens was beset by superstitious fears and strange appearances. They sent to Crete for Epimenides, a man beloved of the gods and skilled in the technicalities of religion, especially as regards enthusiastic and mystic rites. He and Solon made friends and the gist of his religious reforms was this:'he simplified their religious rites, and made the ceremonies of mourning milder, introducing certain forms of sacrifice into their funeral solemnities and abolishing the cruel and barbarous elements to which the women were addicted. But most important of all, by lustrations and expiations and the foundings of worships he hallowed and consecrated the city and made it subserve justice and be more inclined to unity. The passage is certainly not as explicit as could be wished, but the words used Karopyidaas and Kado(7iwaa; and the fact that Epimenides was an expert in ecstatic rites, that they gave him the name of the new Koures, the special attention paid to the rites of women, though they are mentioned in relation to funerals, make it fairly clear that some of the barbarous excesses were connected with Bacchic orgies. This becomes more probable when we remember that many of Solon's own enactments were directed against the excesses of women.' He regulated Plutarch tells us,'the outgoings of women, their funeral lamentations and their festivals, forbidding by law all disorder and excess/ Among these dreary regulations comes the characteristically modern touch that they are not to go out at night'except in a carriage and with a light before them. It was the going out at night that Pentheus could not bear. When he would know what were the rites of Dionysos he asks the god:

P. How is this worship held, by night or day?
D. Most oft by night,'tis a majestic thing
The Darkness.
P. Ha, with women worshipping?
Tis craft and rottenness.

Dionysos Liknites

The Maenads then are the frenzied sanctified women who are devoted to the worship of Dionysos. But they are something more; they tend the god as well as suffer his inspiration. When first we catch sight of them in Homer they are his 'nurses'. One of the lost plays of Aeschylus bore the title 'Rearer of Dionysos,' and Sophocles, here as so often inspired by Homer, makes his chorus sing:

There the reveller Dionysos with his nursing nymphs doth go.'

In Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles, though Dionysos has his goddess nurses, he is himself no nursling. A child no longer, he revels with them as coevals. Mythology has half forgotten the ritual from which it sprang. Fortunately Plutarch has left us an account, inadequate but still significant, of the actual ritual of the Thyiades, and from it we learn that they worshipped and tended no full-grown god, but a baby in his cradle.

Plutarch is speaking of the identity of Osiris and Dionysos, both being embodiments according to him of the'moist principle.' You, Klea,'he says,'if any one, should know that Osiris is the same as Dionysos, you who are leader of the Thyiades at Delphi and were initiated by your father and mother into the rites of Osiris.' After pointing out various analogies, he adds:'For the Egyptians, as has been said, point out tombs of Osiris in many places, and the Delphians hold that they possess the relics of Dionysos buried by the side of their oracular shrine; the Hosioi make a secret sacrifice in the sacred precinct of Apollo when the Thyiades raise up Liknites.' It will later be seen that Dionysos was represented in ritual as slain and dismembered; from this passage it is clear that there was some sort of resurrection of the god, a new birth as a little child. Liknites can be none other than the babe in the cradle. Hesychius in commenting on the word Liknites says: 'a title of Dionysos from the cradle in which they put children to sleep.' In primitive agricultural days, the liknon, a shovel-shaped basket, served three purposes: it was a 'fan' with which to winnow grain, it was a basket to hold grain or fruit or sacred objects, it was a cradle for a baby. The various forms of likna and the beautiful mysticism that gathered round the cradle and the winnowing fan, will be considered when Orphic ceremonial is discussed. For the present it is enough to note that the ceremony of raising or waking Liknites marks clearly the worship of a child-god.

The worship by women of Liknites, of the child in the cradle, reflects a primitive stage of society, a time when the main realized function of woman was motherhood and the more civilized, less elemental, function of wedded wife was scarcely adventured. It is at once a cardinal point and a primary note in the mythology of Dionysos that he is the son of his mother. The religion of the Mother and the Daughter is already familiar; it reflected, as has been seen, primarily not so much the relations of mother and daughter as the two stages of woman's life, woman as maid, and woman as mother. If we are to have the relation of parent and child mirrored in mythology, assuredly the closest relation is not that even of mother and daughter but of mother and son. Father and son, Zeus and Apollo, reflect a still further advance in civilization.

Before leaving the Thyiades, it is important to note that they had a cult not only of Liknites, the child in the cradle, but of the mother who bore him, Semele, and this too at Delphi. Plutarch is again our authority. In his Greek Questions, he treats of the three great enneateric festivals of Delphi, the Stepterion, Herois and Charila. Of the Herois he says:'Its inner meaning is for the most part mystical as is known to the Thyiades, but from the rites that are openly performed one may conjecture that it is a Return of Semele.' Plutarch's conjecture was undoubtedly right. The Herois was a resurrection festival, with rites of Return and Uprising, such as have been already fully discussed in relation to Demeter and Kore.

The relation of Dionysos to his father Zeus was slight and artificial. He is, as aforesaid, essentially the son of his mother, 'child of Semele.' The meaning of the fatherhood of Zeus and the strange hieratic legend of the double birth will be discussed later: the question must first be asked'Who is Semele?'

Dionysos Son Of Semele

Dionysos, we have seen, was a Thracian; if his mother can be shown to be Thracian too, each will confirm the other. The certain remains of the Phrygio-Thracian tongue are but scanty, happily however they suffice for the certain interpretation of the name Semele.

Prof. Ramsay in his Phrygian explorations has brought to light a number of inscriptions from tombs which run after this fashion:

'Cursed be he that does any damage to this tomb.'

These various permutations and combinations are followed by a curse formulary. The inscriptions which all date after the Christian era belong to a time when the well-to-do classes spoke and wrote Greek, but, in the case of a curse, it was well to couch your inscription in a tongue understanded of the people.

Semele, mother of Dionysos, is the Earth. This the vase-painter knew well. In dealing with the Earth-Mother a number of vase-paintings have been considered, in which Kore, the earth in her young form as maiden, has been seen represented as rising out of the actual earth she really is. To these as counter-part must now be added the curious vase-painting in fig. 128, now in the Hope collection at Deep-dene. Out of the earth-mound rises a youthful figure, a male Kore; he holds a sceptre as king and is welcomed, or rather heralded, by a little winged Nike. His worshippers await him: a Maenad with thyrsos and tray of offerings to the right, a Satyr also with thyrsos to the left. The rising figure can be none other than the child of Semele, the earth-Dionysos himself. It is rash, I think, to give the rising god any special name, to call him lacchos or Brimos; all we can be sure that the vase-painter meant was that the god is earth-born.

The same notion comes clearly out in the second design in fig. 129 from a kalpis in the British Museum. Here the familiar type of. the birth of Erichthonios from the earth is taken over and adapted to the birth of Dionysos. The vase-painter thus in instructive fashion assimilates the immigrant stranger to his own heroic mythology. Ge is rising from the earth; she presents, not Erichthonios, but another sacred child to a foster-mother, Athene. It is practically certain that the child is Dionysos, not Erichthonios, for the maiden who in such familiar fashion leans on the shoulder of Zeus in inscribed 'Wine-bloom' Oinanthe. Zeus himself with his thunderbolt is a reminiscence of the thunder-smitten birth. On authentic representations of the birth of Erichthonios, Hephaistos, his putative father, is present, not Zeus. As in fig. 128 the new-born hero is welcomed by a winged Victory, who brings a taenia to crown him. It is clear that the vase-painter wants to make the new-born child as Athenian as possible, almost to substitute him for the autochthonous Erichthonios; he is welcomed and received not by Satyrs and Maenads, his own worshippers and kinsfolk, but by his new relations, Athene and Athenian Victory.

The third vase-painting in fig. 130 from a cylix in the Museum at Naples is a much earlier piece of work. It dates about the middle of the sixth century, and is free from any specifically Athenian influence. Out of the ground rise two great busts inscribed severally Dionysos and Semele. Even without the inscriptions there could be no doubt as to Dionysos. The vase-painter in his primitive eager fashion makes assurance doubly sure. The god holds aloft with pardonable pride his characteristic high-handled wine-cup, the kantharos; behind him and Semele a great vine is growing, up one side of which a Satyr is clambering. Dionysos is not Liknites here; he is in the full bloom of his youth, not elderly though bearded, coeval with fair Semele.

At Thebes the legend of the birth of Dionysos took on a special form. He is not only son of Semele, of Earth, but son of Semele as Keraunia, Earth the thunder-smitten.

This aspect of Semele as Keraunia is familiar in classical literature. Sophocles has 'thou and thy mother, she of the thunder.' To Euripides in the Hippolytus Semele thunder-smitten is the stuff of which is made perhaps the most splendid poetry he ever wrote:

'O mouth of Dirce, god-built wall
That Dirce's wells run under;
Ye know the Cyprian's fleet foot-fall,
Ye saw the heavens round her flare
When she lulled to her sleep that Mother fair
Of Twy-born Bacchus and crowned her there
The Bride of the bladed thunder:
For her breath is on all that hath life, and she floats in the air
Bee-like, death-like, a wonder.'

And this splendid poetry is based, it seems, not merely on mythology but on a local cult, a cult of thunder and a place thunder-smitten. The prologue of the Bacchae, spoken by Dionysos, opens thus, with a description of the sanctuary of Semele:

'Behold god's son is come unto this land
Of Thebes, even I, Dionysos, whom the brand
Of heaven's hot splendour lit to life, when she
Who bore me, Cadmus'daughter Semele,
Died here. So, changed in shape from god to man,
I walk again by Dirce's stream, and scan
Ismenus'shore. There by the castle side
I see her place, the Tomb of the Lightning's Bride,
The wreck of smouldering chambers and the great
Faint wreaths of fire undying, as the hate
Dies not that Hera held for Semele.
Ay Cadmus hath done well: in purity
He keeps this place apart, inviolate
His daughter's sanctuary, and I have set
My green and clustered vines to robe it round.'

Nor again is this merely the effective scenic setting of a play.

Semele as Keraunia

Any place that was struck by lightning was regarded as specially sacred. If the place was the tomb of a local heroine there was a double sanctity. Such a tomb there unquestionably was at Thebes. Pausanias asserts the fact though he does not state that he actually saw the tomb: 'There are also the ruins of the house of Lycus and Semele's monument.' Primarily of course the sanctity of a thunder-smitten place was more of the nature of a taboo than of consecration in our sense of the word. It would lend itself easily to a legend of judgment on a heroine or of a divine Epiphany. The figure of the great Earth-goddess Semele faded before the splendour of Zeus.

Possibly the cult of these thunder-smitten places may serve to answer a question asked by Plutarch 'Who among the Boeotians are the Psoloeis (Smoky Ones) and who the Aioleiai?' Plutarch tells a confused story of the daughters of Minyas who went mad with desire for human flesh and slew the child of one of them. The dreadful deed was commemorated by a 'flight ceremony' that formed part of the Agrionia, in which the priest of Dionysos pursued with a sword the women of the clan in which the men were called Psoloeis and the women Aioleiai, and if he caught one, had leave to slay her. Zoilos, a priest in the time of Plutarch, actually availed himself of the permission. Bad luck followed. Zoilos sickened and died, and the priesthood ceased to be hereditary and became elective. The story is very obscure, but Lydus in discussing thunderbolts says there are two kinds, the one is swift and rarefied and fiery and is called apytfs, the other is slow and smoky and is called oxoets. The family of the Smoky Ones may have been worshippers of the smoky kind of thunderbolt.

Be this as it may, the cult and mythology of Dionysos are haunted by reminiscences of lightning and sudden fiery apparitions that are probably not merely poetical but primitive. In the Bacchae not only is Dionysos fire-born and attended by the light of torches, but his Epiphany is marked by a manifest thunderstorm, a storm that takes the shape of a resurgence of the flame on Semele's tomb. A voice is heard:

'Unveil the Lightning's Eye, arouse
The fire that sleeps, against this house.'

And the chorus make answer:

'Ah saw ye, marked ye there the flame
From Semele's enhallowed sod
Awaken'd ? Yea the Death that came
Ablaze from heaven of old the same
Hot splendour of the shaft of God.'

And again on Cithaeron there is not only the mysterious voice and the awful silence, but the manifestation of the pillar of fire:

'So spake he and there came
'Twixt earth and sky a pillar of high flame:
And silence took the air, and no leaf stirred
In all the forest dell. Thou hadst not heard
In that vast silence any wild thing's cry.'

The Epiphany by fire is of course common to many theologies; we have the Burning Bush and the Pentecostal tongues, but it is interesting to find that, in far-away Thrace, the favour of Dionysos was made manifest by a great light. The evidence comes from Aristotle . He says:'There is in the same place (i.e. in Krastonia near the district of the Bisaltae) a large and beautiful sanctuary of Dionysos, in which it is reported that at the time of the festival and the sacrifice, if the god intends to send a good season, a great blaze of fire appears, and this is seen by all those whose business is in the temenos; but if the god intends a barren season, the light does not make its appearance, but there is darkness on the place as on other nights.' It would be vain to ask what natural fact, whether of summer lightning or burning bush, caused the belief; the essential point is the primitive Epiphany by fire, an Epiphany not vengeful but beneficent.

Dionysos is then the son of an ancient Thracian Earth-goddess, Semele, and she is Keraunia, thunder-smitten, in some sense the bride, it would seem, of our old sky and thunder-god, a sort of Ouranos later effaced by the splendour of the Hellenic Zeus. If some such old nature-god existed as is probable in the far background of primitive mythology, the affiliation of Zeus and Dionysos would be an easy matter.

In this connection it is interesting to note that not only Zeus himself was associated with the thunder and the lightning, but also the ancient'Mother of the Gods.' Pindar, who all through the third Pythian has in his mind the sore sickness of Hieron, not only bethinks him of Cheiron the primitive Healer but also sings:

'I would pray to the Mother to loose her ban,
The holy goddess, to whom and to Pan
Before my gate, all night long,
The maids do worship with dance and song.'

The scholiast tells us how it came that Pindar prayed to the Mother for healing. One day while Pindar was teaching a pupil on a mountain, possibly Cithaeron itself,'there was heard a great noise, and a flame of lightning was seen descending, and Pindar saw that a stone image of the Mother had come down at their feet, and the oracle ordained that he should set up a shrine to the Mother.' The story is transparent a thunderstorm, lightning and a fallen aerolite, the symbol of the Mother, surely of Keraunia. And the Mother, the scholiast further tells us,'had power to purify from madness.' She had power to loose as well as to bind. In this she was like her son Dionysos. The magical power for purification of aerolites and indeed of almost any strange black stone is attested by many instances. Orestes was purified at Trozen from his madness, mother-sent, by a sacred stone. Most curious of all, Porphyry tells us that Pythagoras when he was in Crete met one of the Idaean Dactyls, worshippers of the Mother, and was by him purified with a thunderbolt.

With a mother thunder-smitten, it was not hard for Dionysos to become adopted child of the Hellenic Zeus, God of the Thunderbolt. Theologians were ready with the myth of the double birth. Semele fell into partial discredit, obscured by the splendour of the Father. Matriarchy pales before the new order of patriarchy, and from henceforth the name Dionysos, 'son of Zeus' is supreme.

Dionysos Son of Zeus

The fatherhood of Zeus is charmingly set forth by the lovely little vase-fragment in fig. 131 from a red-figured cylix, found in the excavations on the Acropolis and now in the National Museum at Athens. Zeus with his sceptre holds the infant Dithyramb and displays him proudly to the other Olympians. Semele is ignored, perhaps half forgotten. Dionysos in the new order is 'all for the father.'

The all-important question is forced upon us why did Zeus adopt him? Dionysos is the child of the Earth-goddess, but why was this particular earth-child adopted? Why did his worship spread everywhere with irresistible might, overshadowing at the end even the cult of his adopted father? Kore too is daughter of Earth, she too in awkward fashion was half affiliated to Zeus, yet he never takes her in his arms and her cult though wide-spread has no militant missionary aspect.

Zeus holds the infant Dionysos in his arms, and Dionysos holds in his the secret of his strength, the vine with its great bunch of grapes. But for that bunch of grapes Zeus would never have troubled to adopt him. To the popular mind Dionysos was always Lord of the Vine, as Athene was Lady of the Olive. It is by the guerdon of the grape that his Bacchants appeal to Dirce 1:

'By his own joy I vow,
By the grape upon the bough.'

It is by his great gift of Wine to sorrowful man that his kingdom is established upon earth:

'A god of Heaven is He,
And born in majesty,
Yet hath he mirth in the joy of the Earth
And he loveth constantly
Her who brings increase,
The Feeder of children, Peace.

No grudge hath He of the great,
No scorn of the mean estate,
But to all that liveth, his Wine he giveth,
Griefless, immaculate.
Only on them that spurn
Joy may his anger burn.'

It is the usual mythological inversion, he of the earth is translated to heaven that thence he may descend.

Dionysos as god of the grape is so familiar that the idea needs no emphasis. It is more important to note that the vine as the origin of his worship presents certain difficulties.

It has clearly been seen that Dionysos was a Northerner, a Thracian. Wine is not the characteristic drink of the North. Is it likely that wine, a drink characteristic to this day of the South, is the primitive essence of the worship of a god coming into Greece from the North?

The answer to this difficulty is an interesting one. The main distinguishing factor of the religion of Dionysos is always the cult of an intoxicant, but wine is not the only intoxicant, nor in the North the most primitive. Evidence is not wanting that the cult of the vine-god was superimposed on, affiliated to, in part developed out of, a cult that had for its essence the worship of an early and northern intoxicant, cereal not vinous.

To this conclusion I have been led by the consideration of the cultus titles of the god.

Bromios, Braites, Sabazios

Dionysos is a god of many names; he is Bacchos, Baccheus, lacchos, Bassareus, Bromios, Euios, Sabazios, Zagreus, Thyoneus, Lenaios, Eleuthereus, and the list by no means exhausts his titles. A large number of these names are like Lenaios, 'He of the Wine-Press' only descriptive titles; they never emerge to the dignity of proper names. Some, like lacchos and probably Bacchos itself, though they ultimately became proper names, were originally only cries. lacchos was a song even down to the time of Aristophanes, and was probably, to begin with, a ritual shout or cry kept up long after its meaning was forgotten. Such cries from their vagueness, their aptness for repetition, are peculiarly exciting to the religious emotions. How many people attach any precise significance to the thrice repeated, stately and moving words that form the prooemium to our own Easter Hymn?

'Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.'

They are a homage beyond articulate speech. Then, as now, these excited cries became sacred titles of the worshippers who used them: 'Evian women' were the ancient and more reverent counterpart of our 'Hallelujah lasses.'

The various titles of the god are of course of considerable use in determining his nature, for they all express some phase of emotion in the worshipper, and it is of these phases that a god is compounded. Certain names seem to cling to certain places. Sabazios is Thracian, Zagreus Cretan, Bromios largely Theban, lacchos Athenian. Some of the epithets have unquestionably shifted their meaning in the course of time. The Greeks were adepts at false etymology, and an excellent instance of this is a title of the first importance for our argument, Bromios.

The title Bromios has to our modern ears a poetical, somewhat mystical ring. It never occurs in Homer, nor in Sophocles. Pindar and Aeschylus both use it, Euripides often. The poets, by their usage, clearly show that they connect the title which means 'to make a confused sound.' Pindar in a dithyrambic fragment says:

'We hymn thee Bromios and Him of the loud cry.'

The address it may be noted is to the Cadmean Dionysos.

Sometimes the association is definitely with thunder. Thus in the second Olympian we have:

'High in Olympus lives for evermore
She of the delicate hair,
Semele fair,
Who died by the thunder's roar.'

Here the title Bromios can scarcely have been remote from Pindar's mind, though he does not care to press the allusion. In the Bacchae there seems no consciousness of etymology. The titles Dionysos and Bromios come haphazard, but throughout the play Dionysos is in some degree a god of thunder as well as thunder-born, a god of mysterious voices, of strange, confused, orgiastic music, music which we know he brought with him from the North.

Strabo has preserved for us two fragments from the lost Edonians of Aeschylus which deal with this music of orgy and madness. Aeschylus, he says, speaks in the Edonians of the goddess Kotys and the instruments of her worship, and immediately introduces the worshippers of Dionysos, thus:

'One on the fair-turned pipe fulfils
His song, with the warble of fingered trills
The soul to frenzy awakening.
From another the brazen cymbals ring.
The shawm blares out, but beneath is the moan
Of the bull-voiced mimes, unseen, unknown,
And in deep diapason the shuddering sound
Of drums, like thunder, beneath the ground.'

Of the'bull-voiced mimes'we should have been glad to know more details, but the fragment, obscure as it is, leaves at least the impression of weird exciting ceremonial, and most of all of mysterious music.

All this must have helped to make of Bromios the god of sounds and voices; yet it is probable, indeed almost certain, that the title had another origin, simpler, less poetical. We owe the clue to this primitive meaning to the Emperor Julian.

Julian in his northern campaign saw and no doubt tasted with compunction a wine, made not from the grape but from barley. After the fashion of his age he wrote an epigram to this new, or rather very old, Dionysos. From the number of instructive puns it contains this epigram is almost untranslateable, but as its evidence is for our purpose of paramount importance it may be roughly Englished as follows:

'To wine made of barley'.
Who and whence art thou, Dionyse? Now, by the Bacchus true
Whom well I know, the son of Zeus, say'Who and what are you?'
He smells of nectar like a god, you smack of goats and spelt,
For lack of grapes from ears of grain your countryman the Celt
Made you. Your name's Demetrios, but never Dionyse,
Bromos, Oat-born, not Bromios, Fire-born from out the skies.'

The gist of the third pun will be considered more fully at a later stage of the argument. For the present it is sufficient to note that all three have the same substantial content, there is a Dionysos who is not of heaven but of earth. Julian propounds as an elegant jest the simple but illuminating mythological truth that the title Bromios points to a god born not of the lightning and thunder but of an intoxicant made from the cereal Bromios is Demetrios, son of Demeter the Corn-Mother, before he becomes god of the grape and son by adoption of Olympian Zeus.

Julian is not precise in his discrimination between the various edible grasses. His epigram is headed, 'To wine made of barley tepidly; the god, he says, smacks of spelt, he is wheat-born and he is of oats. It matters to Julian nothing, nor is it to our argument of first importance, of what particular cereal this new-old Dionysos is made. The point is that it is of some cereal, not of the grape. The god is thus seen to be son of Semele, Earth-goddess in her agricultural aspect as Demeter, Corn-Mother. We shall later see that he was worshipped with service of the winnowing-fan, and we shall further see that, when he-of-the-cereal-intoxicant became he-of-the-wine-of-grapes, the instrument that had been a winnowing-fan' became a grape-basket.

The possibility of this simple origin of Bromios grows when we consider another epithet of the god. In the Paean to Dionysos recently discovered at Delphi there occurs the title hitherto unexplained Braites. The hymn opens thus with a string of cultus epithets:

'Come, Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come,
Euios, Thyrsos-Lord, Braites, come,
Bromios, come, and coming with thee bring
Holy hours of thine own holy spring.'

Nowhere else does the title Braites occur; but the hymn, as an actual ritual composition, inscribed and set up at Delphi, is an important source. Braites has been Explained as the Breaker or Striker, but this is scarcely a happy epithet for the Spring-god. In the light of Bromios it may be suggested that the epithet is connected with the late Latin word braisum, which means'grain prepared for the making of the beer braisum.' Braites would then like Bromios be an epithet derived from a cereal intoxicant.

An examination of the title Sabazios leads to results more certain and satisfactory. The name Sabazios has a more foreign sound than Dionysos, even than Bromios. Sabazios was never admitted even to the outskirts of Olympus. In the time of Demosthenes his rites were regarded by the orthodox as foreign, outrageous, disreputable. One of the counts in the unmannerly attack of Demosthenes on Aeschines is that Aeschines had been instructed by his mother in mysteries and rites that were certainly those of Sabazios, that having performed various degrading ceremonials he'led those admirable thiasoi about the streets, they being crowned with fennel and poplar, and gesticulated with great red snakes, waving them over his head and shouting Euoi Saboi.' The Saboi were the worshippers of Sabazios as the Bacchae of Bacchos. Of course Demosthenes is grossly unjust. The ceremonies of Sabazios could be closely paralleled by the perfectly orthodox ritual of Dionysos, but they passed under another name, were not completely canonical, and above all things were still realized as foreign. That pious men of good repute might quietly worship Sabazios is clear from the account of the 'Superstitious Man' in Theophrastos. Against his moral character nothing can be urged, but that he was a little over-zealous, and 'whenever he chanced to see a red snake he would invoke Sabazios.'

Down to Christian days the snake was an important feature in the cult of Sabazios. Clement and Arnobius both state that one of the'tokens'of the mysteries of Sabazios was'the god (gliding) through the bosom.' The snake was of course associated also with Dionysos he may have inherited it from the earlier god but his more characteristic vehicle was the bull. Sabazios seems always to have been regarded as more primitive and savage than Dionysos. Diodorus, puzzled by the many forms of Dionysos, says: 'Some people fable that there was another Dionysos very much earlier in date than this one, for they allege that there was a Dionysos born af Zeus and Persephone, the one called by some Sabazios, whose birth and sacrifices and rites they instance as celebrated by night and in secret on account of shameless ceremonies attending them.' These last words probably refer to the mystic marriage of the god with the initiated .

The symbolism of the snake has already been discussed. A god whose vehicle was the snake would find easy affiliation in Greece, where every dead hero was a snake.

Sabazios is left unsung by tragic poets, but the realism of comedy reflects the popular craze for semi-barbarian worship. The temper of Demosthenes was not, if Strabo be right, characteristically Athenian.' As in other matters,' Strabo says, 'the Athenians were always hospitable to foreign customs, so with the gods. They adopted many sacred customs from abroad and were ridiculed in comedies for doing so, and this especially as regards Phrygian and Thracian rites. Plato mentions the Bendidean, and Demosthenes the Phrygian, rites in his accusation against Aeschines and his mother on the count that Aeschines joined his mother in her rites and went about in a thiasos and cried aloud Euoi Saboi and Hyes Attes, for these cries are of Sabazios and the Mother.'

It is then to comedy, to Aristophanes, that we owe most of our references to Sabazios, hints of his real character and his inner kinship with Dionysos. In an untranslateable pun in the Birds he tells us that Sabazios is a Phrygian, and from the Lysistrata' we learn that his worship was orgiastic and much affected by women. The 'deputation man' exclaims:

'Has the wantonness of women then blazed up,
Their tabourings, Sabazios all about,
Their clamour for Adonis on the roofs?

But most instructive of all is the mention of Sabazios in the opening of the Wasps. The two slaves Sosias and Xanthias are watching over their master Bdelycleon. They know he is a dangerous monster and they ought to keep awake.

'Xan. I know, but I do want a little peace.
Sos. Well, chance it then. Some sweet and drowsy thing
Is falling drop by drop upon my eyes.
Xan. What? Are you clean mad or a Korybant?
Sos. No, a sleep holds me from Sabazios.
Xan. And I too herd the same Sabazios.
Just now a very Mede of a nodding sleep
Came down and made an onset on my eyes.'

Sabazios is here clearly not so much the god of ecstasy and orgy as of compelling irresistible sleep. And why? A late historian gives the simple answer.

Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that, when the Emperor Valens was besieging Chalcedon, the besieged by way of insult shouted to him'Sabaiarius.' He adds in explanation'sabaia is a drink of the poor in Illyria made of barley or corn turned into a liquor. 'Sabaiarius' is then 'Beer-man, 'beer-drinker or brewer. S. Jerome, himself a Dalmatian, says in his commentary on Isaiah that 'there is a sort of drink made from grain and water, and in the provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia it is called, in the local barbarian speech, sabaium.' To the wine-drinker the beer-drinker seemed a low fellow. Wine was in itself a rarer, finer beverage, probably at first more expensive. Even to-day in some parts of beer-drinking Germany to drink beer at the solemn midday dinner is almost a vulgarity. Sabazios, god of the cheap cereal drink, brings rather sleep than inspiration.

The testimony of Sabazios is now added to that of Bromios and Braites. Separately the conjectured etymology of each epithet might fall far short of conviction, but the cumulative force of the three together offers evidence that seems conclusive.

Tragedy the Spelt-song

A fourth link in the chain still remains. The emperor Julian's third pun, goat, and rpdyos, spelt, has yet to be considered:

'He smells of nectar like a god, you smack of goats and spelt.'

The word rpdyos is usually rendered'goat/ and the meaning 'spelt'ignored. There is of course a reference to the time-honoured jest about the animal, but that the primary reference is to grain, not the goat, is clear from the words that immediately follow:

'For lack of grapes from ears of grain your countryman the Celt Made you.'

In translating I have therefore used both the meanings; the formal pun is untranslateable.

It is an odd fact that the ancients seem to have called certain wild forms of fruits and cereals by names connecting them with the goat. The reason is not clear, but the fact is well-established. The Latins called the wild fig caprificus; Pausanias expressly tells us that the Messenians gave to the wild fig-tree the name rpdryos, goat. Vines, when they ran wild to foliage rather than fruit, were said rpayav. I would conjecture that the inferior sort of spelt called rpdyos, goat, owes its name to this unexplained linguistic habit. It is even possible that the beard with which spelt is furnished may have helped out the confusion. Tragedy I believe to be not the 'goat-song,' but the 'harvest-song' of the cereal rpdyos, the form of spelt known as 'the goat.' When the god of the cereal, Bromios-Braites-Sabazios, became the god of the vine, the fusion and confusion of rpaywbia, the spelt-song, with rpvyaysta, the song of the winelees, was easy and indeed inevitable. The Tpaywsoi, the 'beanfeast-singers,'became Tpvytpsoi or 'must-singers.'

The difficulties in the way of the canonical etymology of tragedy are acknowledged to be great. In discussing the Satyrs it has already been shown that the primitive followers of Dionysos are mythologically conceived of not as goat-men, but as horse-men. The primitive 'goat-song' we are asked to believe, was sung by a chorus of horse-men. The case in fact stands thus. We are confronted on the one hand by the undoubted fact that on countless vase-paintings of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. the attendants of Dionysos are horse-men, while goat-men attend the Earth-goddess; on the other hand we have the supposed fact that tragedy is the goat-song. But this supposed fact is merely an etymological assumption. If another etymology be found for tragedy, the whole discrepancy disappears. Such an etymology is, I think, offered by rpdyos'spelt,'with the further advantage that it contains in itself a hint of how the goat misunderstanding arose.

A fragment of Aeschylus cited, but I think erroneously, as evidence of a goat chorus remains to be examined. In a lost tragedy a Satyr on the stage sees for the first time fire just given to mortals, and he runs to kiss her as though she were a beautiful maiden. Prometheus warns him: if you do this

'You'll be a goat mourning his beard.'

The passage is used as evidence for the goat form and dress of the Satyric chorus. Surely such an inference is needless; the point of the jest is the morals and manners of the Satyr. To reconstruct a goat-chorus out of a casual joke is labour in vain.

We have then found four several titles, Bromios, Braites, Sabazios and tragedy, for which the supposition of a cereal drink affords a simple, satisfactory explanation. It remains to show that, though the words bromos, braisum, sabaia and tragos have become to us dim and almost forgotten in the lapse of time, a cereal drink such as they imply was widely in use in ancient days, and that among Northern nations.

Cereal Intoxicants

The history of fermented drink in Europe seems to have been briefly this. Never, so far back as we can look into mythology, was miserable man without some rudimentary means of intoxication. Before he had advanced to agriculture he had a drink made of naturally fermented honey, the drink we now know as mead, which the Greeks called pedv or jbeor. The epithet 'sweet' which they constantly apply to wine surprises us, but as a characteristic of 'mead' it is natural enough. This mead made of honey appears in ancient legends. When Zeus would intoxicate Kronos he gave him not wine, Porphyry says, for wine was not, but a honey-drink to darken his senses. Night says to Zeus:

'When prostrate'neath the lofty oaks you see him
Lie drunken with the work of murmuring bees,
Then bind him,'

and again Plato tells how when Poros falls asleep in the garden of Zeus he is drunk not with wine but with nectar, for wine was not yet. Nectar, the ancient drink of the gods, is mead made of honey; and men know this, for they offer to the primitive earth-god libations of honey. The gods like their worshippers knew the joys of intoxication before the coming of the grape-Dionysos. Plutarch says mead was used as a libation before the appearance of the vine, and 'even now those of the barbarians who do not drink wine drink honey-drink'. The nephalia are but intoxicants more primitive than wine.

Next in order came the drinks made of cereals fermented, the various forms of beer and crude malt spirit. These gave to the Thracian Dionysos his names Bromios, Braites, Sabazios, but they never seem to have found a real home in Greece. Mention of them occurs in classical writers, but they are always named as barbarian curiosities, as drinks in use in Thrace, Armenia, Egypt, but never like mead even in primitive times the national drink of Hellas. Isis in Egypt is addressed as not only Our Lady of Bread but also Our Lady of Beer, but Bromios when he comes to Greece forgets the oats from which he sprang.

The first beer was probably a very rude product, like the drink mentioned by Xenophon as still in use among the Armenians of his day; the grain was pounded and allowed to ferment with the grains still floating about in the drinking-cups. The Lithuanians in the Middle Ages are said to have made their beer over-night and drunk it next morning. Beer of this primitive kind was best sucked up through a pipe. Archilochus alludes to the practice:

'As through a reed Phrygian and Thracian men
Suck up their brew.'

The name given to the drink means simply something brewed or fermented. Aeschylus in his Lykurgos makes some one, probably Lykurgos the Thracian, drink:

'Thereat he drank the bruton and waxed strong
And boasted thus within the hero's halls.

Athenaeus, in the passage in which he quotes Archilochus, cites quite a number of authorities about the making of these rude cereal drinks. According to Hellanicus in his Origins, bruton could be made also of roots. 'Some people' he says, 'drink bruton made of roots as the Thracian drink is made of barley. Hecataeus in his Journey round Europe notes that the Paeonians drank bruton made from barley and an admixture of millet and endive.

Another name for this drink made from grain was zythos. Diodorus draws a lamentable picture of the straits to which the peoples of Gaul were put because 'from the excessive cold and intemperate character of the climate, the land could not bring forth either wine or oil. Bereft of these products the Gauls make of barley the drink that is called zythos; they likewise wash out their honeycombs with water and use the rinsings. They had only imported wine, but to this they were excessively addicted, they drank it intemperately and either fell asleep dead drunk or became stark mad.' Here we have the living historical prototype of the Centaurs, the uncivilized men who cannot support the taste of wine, the lamentable story of imported intoxicants told in all ages all the world over.

The Coming of the Vine

The number of primitive beers cervisia, korma, sabaia, zythos is countless and it would be unprofitable to discuss them in detail. / All have this in common, and it is sufficient for our purpose, that they are spirituous drinks made of fermented grain, they appear with the introduction of agriculture, they tend to supersede mead, and are in turn superseded by wine. To put it mythologically the worship of Bromios, Braites and Sabazios pales before the Epiphany of Dionysos. Sabazios is almost wholly left behind, a foreigner never naturalized. Bromios is transformed beyond recognition; to the old name is given a new meaning, a new etymology.

It is important to note that had there been only Sabazios, had Bromios never emerged from himself, both would probably have remained in Thracian obscurity. The Thracians never conquered Greece; there was, therefore, no historical reason why their god should impose himself. His dominance is unquestionably due to the introduction and rapid spread of the vine. Popular tradition enshrined as it usually does a real truth the characteristic gift of Dionysos by which he won all hearts was wine, wine made not of barley but of the juice of the grape. A new, incoming plant attaches itself to the local divinity, whoever and whatever he be. The olive attached itself to Athene who was there before its coming, and by the olive the prestige of Athene was sensibly increased; but the olive, great glory though it was and though a Sophocles sang its praises, had never the divine omnipotence of the vine. Olive oil over all the countries of Southern Europe supplanted the other primitive grease, butter. Butter is hard to keep fresh in hot countries, as every traveller finds to his cost in Italy and Greece to-day. But the supersession of butter by oil was a quiet, unnoticed advance, not a triumphant progress like the Coming of the Vine.

We are now at last in a position to say what was the characteristic essence of the worship of Dionysos. The fact however repugnant must be fairly faced. This essence was intoxication. But by the very nature of primitive thought this essence was almost instantly transformed into something more, something deeper and higher than mere physical intoxication. It was intoxication thought of as possession. The savage tastes of some intoxicant for the first time, a great delight takes him, he feels literally a new strange life within him. How has it come about? The answer to him is simple. He is possessed by a god, not figuratively but literally and actually; there is a divine thing within him that is more than himself, he is mad, but with a divine madness. All intense sorrow or joy is to him obsession, possession. When in the Hippolytus the chorus see Phaedra distraught with passion, instinctively they ask:

'Is this some spirit, child of man,
Doth Hecate hold thee perchance or Pan,
Doth She of the Mountains work her ban
Or the dread Corybantes bind thee.

They utter not poetical imagery but a real belief.

To what beautiful imaginations, to what high spiritual vision this Bacchic cult of intoxication led will best be considered when we come to speak of Orpheus. For the present some other primitive elements in Dionysiac worship remain to be considered, elements essential to the understanding of his cult.

Dionysos as Dendrites

Intoxication is of the essence of the god Dionysos, it is the element that marks him out from other gods, it is the secret of his missionary impulse; but to suppose that it exhausts his content would be a grave misunderstanding. There go to his making not only this distinctive element of intoxication but certain other primitive factors common to the gods of other peoples.

Thinking people even in antiquity, when the study of comparative mythology scarcely existed, were struck by analogies between Dionysos and other divinities. Plutarch, who thought much, if somewhat vaguely, on religious matte'rs, was very sensible of this. In the enlightened and instructive parallel that he draws between Osiris and Dionysos, he sees that Dionysos like the gods of many other peoples is a god who in some sense embodies the life of nature that comes and goes with the seasons, dies and rises again with the fruits of the earth. In a passage full of insight he draws attention to the analogies of the diverse cults he had observed.' The Phrygians think that the god is asleep in the winter, and is awake in summer, and at the one season they celebrate with Bacchic rites his goings to bed and at the other his risings up. And the Paphlagonians allege that in the winter he is bound down and imprisoned and in the spring he is stirred up and let loose.' The passage and others that will later be quoted are as it were a forecast of the whole comparative method.

The truth that Dionysos, like many another god, was a god of the impulse of life in nature was not only apprehended by the philosopher, it was also evidenced in cultus. This is seen very clearly in two popular phases of the worship of Dionysos, his worship as a tree-god and his worship as a bull.

The vine is a tree; but Dionysos is Dendrites, Tree-god, and a plant-god iu a far wider sense. He is god of the fig-tree, Sykites; he is Kissos, god of the ivy; he is Anthios, god of all blossoming things; he is Phytalmios, god of growth. In this respect he differs scarcely at all from certain aspects of Poseidon, or from the young male god of Attica and the Peloponnese, Hermes. Probably this aspect of the god, at once milder and wider, was always acceptable in Southern Greece and made his affiliation with the indigenous Hermes an easy matter. This affiliation is clearly shown by the fact that in art Hermes and Dionysos appear, as they were worshipped in cultus, as herms; the symbol of both as gods of fertility is naturally the phallos. The young Dionysos, a maturer Likriites, is not distinguishable from Hermes.

On the beautiful cylix by Hieron reproduced in fig. 132, perhaps the most exquisite thing that ancient ceramography has left us, this affiliation is clearly shown. In the centre design Dionysos is all vine-god. He holds a great vine-branch in his left hand, in his right his own sceptre the thyrsos; his worshipper is a horse-Satyr piping on the double flutes. But on the exterior of the cup, a scene of cultus rather than mythology, he is of wider import, he is Dendrites. The god round whom the lovely Maenads dance in circle is a rude pillar or plank draped with a splendid ritual garment.

It is a primitive herm decorated with great bunches of grapes, but also with ivy sprigs and honeycombs and a necklace of dried figs, such as the Greek peasant now-a-days takes with him for food on a journey. He is god of all growing things, of every tree and plant and natural product, and only later exclusively of the vine. He takes to himself ivy and pine and honeycomb.

The honey-drink he supersedes, yet honey is sacred to him. Only the olive he never takes, for Athene had it already. Ivy especially was sacred to him; his Maenads chewed ivy leaves for inspiration, as the Delphic prophetess chewed the bay. Pliny says: 'Even to this day ivy is used to decorate the thyrsos of the god and the helmets and shields used by the peoples of Thrace in their rites, and this ritual ivy is remembered by Dionysos when he comes to Thebes:

'I cry to Thebes to waken, set her hands
To clasp my wand, mine ivied javelin,
And round her shoulders hang my wild fawn-skin.'

Very primitive in form but wholly of the vine-god is the xoanon on a krater in the Campana collection of the Louvre (fig. 133). The image of the god is a column treated as a herm, and reminds us that Dionysos was called by the name Perikonios, He-about-the-pillar. The two representations in figs. 133 and 132 are characteristically different. The rude Satyrs have but one way of worshipping their god, they fall upon the wine-cup; the Maenads, worshipping the god of life, bend in ritual ecstasy to touch the earth, mother of life; the wine-jar in Hieron's vase is present as a symbol, but the Maenads revel aloof

The worship of the tree-god was probably indigenous in Thrace long before the coming of the vine. We have evidence that it lingered on there down to Roman times. An inscription on a cippus recently discovered in a mosque at Eski Djoumi and now in the museum at Saloniki affords curious evidence. The cippus marked the grave of a priestess of Dionysos. Her name is lost, but the word priestess is followed by two characteristically Bacchic epithets, Ovoa and evela. She is priestess of the thiasos of the 'Carriers of the Evergreen Oak', and she leaves to her guild certain property in vineyards. If they do not fulfil the conditions of the bequest, including the offering of a wreath of roses, the property is to go to another thiasos, that of the 'Carriers of the Oak', and on the same conditions.

The tree-god was too simple for the philosopher. He wanted to abstract Dionysos, rid him of not only his anthropomorphic but his zoomorphic and phytomorphic shapes. Still he used the tree-god as a stepping-stone to his'principle of moisture.' Plutarch says the Greeks regard Dionysos as not merely lord and originator of wine, but of the whole principle of moisture. Of this, he adds, Pindar is in himself sufficient witness when he says:

'Of all the trees that are
He hath his flock, and feedeth root by root,
The Joy-god Dionysos, the pure star
That shines amid the gathering of the fruit.'

Plutarch is fond of this beautiful little bit of Pindar. He quotes it again in his Symposiacs. A friend who is a farmer objects that Plutarch has shut out his calling from the worship of the Muses, whereas he had hoped that at least Thalia, goddess of increase, might be his to worship. Plutarch says the charge is not a just one, for farmers have Dendrites, He-of-the-Trees, and Anesidora, She-who-sends-up-gifts; and then he quotes his favourite passage. Pindar is of course no evidence for a Principle of Moisture. Neither poets nor primitive people use any such philosophical jargon; but all the world over primitive man did and still does welcome the coming and lament the going of the something or someone who makes the trees and plants to grow and beasts and man to bring forth. Later, though they are little the wiser as to what that something is, they will call it the 'Principle of Moisture,' or if they are poets Love or Life.

The 'Principle of Moisture' was in fashion among theologists long before Plutarch. In the Bacchae of Euripides the new wine of the religion of Dionysos has to be poured into some very old bottles. Teiresias in a typically orthodox fashion, characteristic of the timid and kindly priest all the world over, tries to water it down with weak rationalism. Dionysos, he urges, is not new at all, he is very old, as old and respectable as Demeter herself; she is the Principle of Dryness, he of Moisture, nothing could be more safe and satisfactory. He thus instructs honest Pentheus:

'Two spirits there be,
Young prince, that in man's world are first of worth.
Demeter one is named. She is the Earth
Call her what name thou wilt! who feeds man's frame
With sustenance of things dry. And that which came
Her work to perfect, second, is the Power
From Seniele born. He found the liquid shower
Hid in the grape

This is the rationalism not of the poet Euripides, but of the priest Teiresias. This is clear, for the poet in the next line breaks clean away from the tiresome Dryness and Moisture and is gone to the magic of sleep and the blood of the God out-poured.

Plutarch quotes Pindar as authority for the Principle of Moisture, and undoubtedly the sap of trees and plants sacred to Dionysos may have helped out the abstraction. But, had Plutarch known it, the notion is associated not so much with Dendrites, the Tree-God, as with a figure perhaps still more primitive, Dionysos the Bull.

Dionysos as Bull-god

Dionysos Dendrites is easy to realize; he is but a step back from the familiar, canonical Vine-god. The Bull-god Dionysos is harder to accept because we have lost the primitive habit of thinking from which he sprang. The Greeks themselves suffered the like inconvenience. They rapidly advanced to so complete an anthropomorphism that in Periclean Athens the dogma of the Bull-incarnation was, we cannot doubt, a stumbling-block, a faith as far as possible put out of sight.

The particular animal in which a god is incarnate depends of course on the circumstances of the worshippers. If he is in a land lion-haunted his god will be apt to take shape as a lion; later the lion will be his attendant, his servitor. Lions attend the Mountain-Mother of Asia Minor, guard her as has been seen in heraldic fashion, draw her chariot, watch her throne. In like manner Dionysos, son of Semele, who is but one form of the same Earth-Mother, has a chariot drawn by lions (fig. 123), and sometimes, though not so frequently as his Mother, an attendant lion.

In the vase-painting in fig. 134 from an amphora in the British Museum Dionysos, with kantharos and great spreading vine, stands between two great prophylactic eyes. A little lion looks up at him, dog-like, adoring his master. On the reverse Hephaistos with his mallet carries the vine in token of the power of the god. The lion in this picture is losing his reality, because the lion has ceased to be a dominant terror in Greece. The god of a civilized, agricultural people must reincarnate himself in other animal shapes, in the Snake, in the Kid, most of all in the Bull. The Bull-god may have been too savage for Periclean Athens, but Euripides must have found him in full force in Macedonia. To a people of goat-herds like the Arcadians the goat is the impersonation of life and generation; to a people of cow-herds the bull is the more potent and splendid vehicle. In the Bacchae there are Snake-Epiphanies, Lion-Epiphanies, but first and foremost Bull-Epiphanies. At the mystery of the Birth

'A Horned' God was found
And a God with serpents crowned.'

In the supreme Orphic mystery, to be discussed later, the worshipper before he became'Bacchos'ate the raw flesh of a bull, and, probably in connection with this sacrament, the Bull form of the god crystallized into a mystery dogma. When Pentheus has imprisoned the'Bacchos'he finds in the manger not the beautiful stranger but a raging bull; the hallucination was doubtless bred of ancient faith and ritual. Again when in the Bacchae Dionysos leads him forth enchanted to his doom on Cithaeron, Pentheus in his madness sees before him strange sights:

'Yea and mine eye
Is bright ! Yon sun shines twofold in the sky,
Thebes twofold and the Wall of Seven Gates,
And is it a Wild Bull this, that walks and waits
Before me ? There are horns upon thy brow!
What art thou, man or beast? For surely now
The Bull is on thee!'

and last when at the moment of their uttermost peril the Bacchants invoke their Lord to vengeance, the ancient incarnations loom in upon their maddened minds:

'Appear, appear, whatso thy shape or name,
Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads,

Lion of the Burning Flame!
God, Beast, Mystery, come!'

All this madness is based not only on a definite faith, but that faith is the utterance of a definite ritual. In discussing the name Bromios we have seen that in the ritual of Dionysos in Thrace there were'bull-voiced mimes'who bellowed to the god. The scholiast on Lycophron's Alexandra says that the 'women who worshipped Dionysos Laphystios wore horns themselves, in imitation of the god, for he is imagined to be bull-headed and is so represented in art. Plutarch gives more particulars. 'Many of the Greeks represent Dionysos in their images in the form of a bull, and the women of Elis in their prayers invoke the god to come to them with his bull-foot, and among the Argives there is a Dionysos with the title Bull-born. And they summon him by their trumpets out of the water, casting into the depths lambs to the Door-keeper; they hide their trumpets in their thyrsoi, as Socrates has told in his treatise on the Hosioi.' A bull-god is summoned and he emerges from water.

It will later be seen to what strange theological uses the Orphics put their bull and lion and snake-shaped Epiphanies; for the present it must be noted how near akin these were to the shapes that the Southern Greeks gave to their own indigenous gods. Zeus and Athene and even Poseidon had, by the fifth century B.C., become pure human shapes, but the ministrants of Poseidon at Cyzicus were down to the time of Athenaeus known as Bulls, and lower divinities like rivers still kept their bull shape, witness the pathetic story of Deianeira and Achelolis:

'A river was my lover, him I mean
Great Acheloiis, and in threefold form
Wooed me, and wooed again; a visible bull
Sometimes, and sometimes a coiled gleaming snake,
And sometimes partly man, a monstrous shape
Bull-fronted, and adown his shaggy beard
Fountains of clear spring water glistening flowed.'

In those old divine days a wooer might woo in a hundred shapes, and a maiden in like fashion might fly his wooing. It is again Sophocles who tells us of the marriage of Pentheus:

'The wedlock of his wedding was untold,
His wrestling with the maiden manifold.'

The red-figured vase-painting in fig. 135 looks almost like an illustration of the Trachiniae*. Here is the monster; but he is man-fronted, his body that of a bull, and from his mouth flows the water of his own stream Acheloiis. Herakles is about to break off his mighty horn, the seat of his strength; Deianeira stands by unmoved. With odd insistence on his meaning the vase-painter draws in a horn parallel with the stream to show that the stream is itself a cornucopia of growth and riches. The vase-painting is many years earlier than the play of Sophocles.

I know of no instance where an actual bull-Dionysos is represented on a vase-painting, but in the design in fig. 136 from an amphora in the Wiirzburg Museum his close connection is indicated by the fact that he rides on a bull. From the kantharos in his hand he pours his gift of wine.

This representation is of special interest because on the reverse of the same vase Poseidon holding his trident is represented riding on a white bull.

This looks as though the vase-painter had in his mind some analogy between the two divinities of moisture and growth.

With the bull-Poseidon and the bull river-god at hand, the assimilation of the bull-shaped Dionysos would be an easy task, the more as he was god of sap and generation and life, as well as of wine. Water and wine were blended in theology as in daily life, and the Greeks of the South lent the element of water.

Dionysos then by his tree-shape and his bull-shape is clearly shown to be not merely a spirit of intoxication, but rather a primitive nature god laid hold of, informed by a spirit of intoxication. Demeter and Kore are nature-goddesses, they have their uprisings and down-goings, but to the end they remain sedate and orderly. Dionysos is as it were the male correlative of Kore, but informed, transfigured by this new element of intoxication and orgy.

This double nature of the god finds expression in one of his titles, the cultus epithet of Dithyrambos, and it is only by keeping his double aspect clearly in mind that this difficult epithet can at all be understood.

Dithyrambos and the Dithyramb

The title Dithyrambos given to Dionysos and the Dithyramb, the song sung in his honour, must be considered together, in fact this title like'lacchos'seems to have arisen out of the song.

The epithet Dithyrambos was always regarded by the Greeks themselves as indicating and describing the manner of the birth of the god. Disregarding the quantity of the vowel i in Di they believed it to be derived from A and 6vpa, double door, and took it to mean 'he who entered life by a double door' the womb of his mother and the thigh of his father. This was to them the cardinal 'mystery' of the birth. So much is clear from the birth-song of the chorus in the Bacchae:

'Acheloiis'roaming daughter,
Holy Dirce, virgin water,
Bathed he not of old in thee
The Babe of God, the Mystery?
When from out the fire immortal
To himself his God did take him,
To his own flesh, and bespake him:
"Enter now life's second portal,
Motherless mystery; lo I break
Mine own body for thy sake,
Thou of the Two-fold Door, and seal thee
Mine, Bromios" thus he spake
"And to this thy land reveal thee.' "

Dithyrambos was 'he of the miraculous birth' Liknites conceived mystically. The mistaken etymology need not make us distrust the substantial truth of the tradition.

As Dithyrambos is the Babe mystically born, so the Dithyramb was uniformly regarded as the Song of the Birth. Plato states this, though somewhat tentatively, in the Laws. When discussing various kinds of music he says: 'Another form of song, the Birth of Dionysos called, I think, the dithyramb.'

It has already been seen that Dionysos as the principle of life and generation was figured as a bull, it is therefore no surprise to learn from Pindar that the Dithyramb 'drives' the bull:

'Whence did appear the Charites who sing
To Dionyse their king
The dithyramb, the chant of Bull-driving?'

The Charites here halt half-way between ritual and poetry. They are half abstract rhythmical graces, half the Charites of an actual cult. The song of invocation to the Bull sung by the women of Elis has been already noted. It is the earliest Dithyramb preserved, and happily in his Greek Questions Plutarch has left us a somewhat detailed account. He asks,'Why do the women of Elis summon Dionysos in their hymns to be present with them with his bull-foot? 'He goes on to give the exact words of the little ritual hymn:

Hero, Dionysos, come
To thy temple-home
Here at Elis, worshipful
We implore thee
With thy Charites adore Thee,
Eushing with thy bull-foot, come
Noble Bull, noble Bull.'

The fact that'Hero'precedes'Dionysos'in the invocation makes it tempting to conjecture that we have here a superposition of cults, that the women of Elis long before the coming of Dionysos worshipped a local hero in the form of a bull and that Dionysos affiliated his cult; but another possibility is perhaps more probable, that Hero is in the hymn purely adjectival. It has already been shown that the word meant to begin with only 'strong' and then'strong one.

The mention of the Charites is important. They are the givers of increase, who naturally attend the coming of the life-god; they seem here analogous to the nurses of Dionysos, the sober form of his Maenads. They attend alike his coming and his birth.

In the Delphic Paean, where the birth of Dionysos in the spring is celebrated, the title Dithyrambos is first and foremost, before Bacchos, Euios, Braites and Bromios:

Come, Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come,
Euios, Thy sos-Lord, Braites, come,
Bromios, come, and coming with thee bring
Holy hours of thine own holy spring.
Evoe, Bacchos, hail, Paean, hail,
Whom in sacred Thebes the mother fair,
She, Thyone, once to Zeus did bear.
All the stars danced for joy. Mirth
Of mortals hailed thee, Bacchos, at thy birth.'

The new-born god is Dithyrambos, and he is born at the resurrection of earth in the spring-time.

The epithet Paean, belonging to Apollo, is here given to Dionysos. At the great festival of the finishing of the temple all is to be harmony and peace; theology attempts an edifying but impossible syncretism. Nothing in mythology is more certain than that the Paean and the Dithyramb were to begin with poles asunder, and it is by the contrast between them that we best understand not only the gist of the Dithyramb itself but the significance of the whole religion of Dionysos.

The contrast between Apollo and Dionysos, Paean and Dithyramb, has been sharply and instructively drawn by Plutarch, himself a priest at Delphi. The comparison instituted by Plutarch between the rites of Osiris and those of Dionysos has been already noted. In the discourse about Isis and Osiris, it will be remembered, Plutarch says 'the affair about the Titans and the Night of Accomplishment accords with what are called in the rites of Osiris " Tearings to pieces," Resurrections, Regenerations. The same,' he adds, 'is true about rites of burying. The Egyptians show in many places burial chests of Osiris, and the Delphians also hold that the remains of Dionysos are deposited with them near to the place of the oracle, and the Consecrated Ones perform a secret sacrifice in the sanctuary of Apollo what time the Thyiades awaken Liknites.' In a word, at Delphi there were rites closely analogous to those of Osiris and concerned with the tearing to pieces, the death and burial of the god Dionysos, and his resurrection and re-birth as a child.

In another discourse (On the Ei at Delphi} Plutarch tells us that these ceremonials were concerned with the god as Dithyrambos, that the characteristic of the Dithyramb was that it sang of these mutations, these re-births, and that it was thereby marked off sharply from the Paean of Apollo. The passage is so instructive both as to the real nature of Dionysos and as reflecting the attitude of an educated Greek towards his religion that it must be quoted in full. Plutarch has been discussing and contrasting Dionysos and Apollo apropos of the worship of Dionysos at Delphi, a worship every detail of which he must certainly have known. Dionysos, he says, has just as much to do with Delphi as Apollo himself, a statement rather startling to modern ears. Then he begins to work out the contrast between the two gods after the philosophic fashion of his day. Apollo is the principle of simplicity, unity and purity, Dionysos of manifold change and metamorphosis. This is the esoteric doctrine known to experts, cloaked from the vulgar. Among these experts were probably, as will be seen later, Orphic theologians. He goes on to tell how these esoteric doctrines were expressed in popular ritual. He of course inverts the natural order of development. He believes that the doctrine known only to the few gave rise to a ritual intended to express it in popular terms for the vulgar; whereas of course in reality the ritual existed first and was then by the experts made to bear a mystical meaning. Bearing this proviso in mind Plutarch's account is full of interest.' These manifold changes that Dionysos suffers into winds and water and earth and stars and the births of plants and animals they enigmatically term "rending asunder" and "tearing limb from limb"; and they call the god Dionysos and Zagreus and Nyktelios and Isodaites, and tell of certain Destructions and Disappearances and Resurrections and New-Births which are fables and riddles, appertaining to the aforesaid metamorphoses. And to him (i.e. Dionysos) they sing dithyrambic measures full of sufferings and metamorphosis, which metamorphosis has in it an element of wandering and distraction. For "it is fitting," as Aeschylus says, that "the dithyramb of diverse utterance should accompany Dionysos as his counterpart, but the ordered Paean and the sober Muse should attend Apollo." And artists in sculpture represent Apollo as ever young and ageless, but Dionysos they represent as having many forms and shapes. In a word, they attribute to the one uniformity and order and an earnest simplicity, but to the other a certain incongruousness owing to a blend made up of sportiveness and excess and earnestness and madness. They invoke him thus:

"Euios, thou Dionysos, who by the flame of thy rite
Dost women to madness incite."'

Plutarch goes on to tell of the division of the ritual year at Delphi between Apollo and Dionysos. Apollo as incoming conqueror has taken the larger and the fairer portion.

'And since the time of the revolutions in these changes is not equal, but the one which they call Satiety is longer, and the other which they call Craving is shorter, they observe in this matter a due proportion. For the remainder of the year they use the Paean in their sacrificial ceremonies, but at the approach of winter they wake up the Dithyramb and make the Paean cease. For three months they invoke the one god (Dionysos) in place of the other (Apollo), as they hold that in respect to its duration the setting in order of the world is to its conflagration as three to one.'

Plutarch's use of technical terms, e.g. conflagration, betrays that he is importing into his religious discussion philosophic speculations, and especially those of Heraclitus. Into these it is unnecessary to follow him; the important points that emerge for the present argument are that the Dithyramb was a ritual song sung in the winter season, probably at festivals connected with the winter solstice, of an orgiastic character and dealing with the god as an impersonation of natural forces, dealing with his sufferings, his death and resurrection, and as such contrasted with the sober simple Paean. In a word the Dithyramb, and with it the title Dithyrambos, resume the two factors that we have detected in the religion of Dionysos, the old spirit of life and generation, and the new spirit of intoxication.

It remains to enquire if any light can be thrown on the difficult etymology of the word.

The popular etymology, that saw in Dithyrambos the god-of-the-double-door, is of course impossible. Dithyrambos, all philologists agree, cannot etymologically be separated from its cognate thriambos, which gave to the Latins their word triumphus. The word thriambos looks as if it were formed on the analogy of iambos. It may be that Suidas among his many confused conjectures as to the meaning of the word throws out accidentally the right clue. He says 'they call the madness of poets thriasis.' May not thriambos mean the mad inspired orgiastic measure? The first syllable with its long i may possibly be referred to the root At already discussed under Diasia. At a time when in etymology the length of syllables was wholly disregarded the At in Ato? might help out the confusion, and last some brilliant theologian intent on edification thought of the double doors. Mythology has left us dim hints as to the functions of certain ancient maiden prophetesses at Delphi called Thriae. May they not have been the Mad Maidens who sang the mad song, the thriambos?

Of the Thriae we are told by Philochoros that they were nymphs of Parnassos, nurses of Apollo. Save for this mention we never hear that Apollo had any nurses, he was wholly the son of his father. Is it not more probable that they were nurses of Dionysos?

The Thriae

The account of these mysterious Thriae given in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes is strange and suggestive. Hermes is made to tell how his first gift of prophecy came not from Zeus, but from three maiden prophetesses:

'For there are sisters born, called Thriae, maiden things,
Three are they and they joy them in glory of swift wings.
Upon their heads is sprinkled fine flour of barley white,
They dwell aloof in dwellings beneath Parnassos'height.
They taught me love of soothsaying, while I my herds did feed,
Being yet a boy. Of me and mine my father took no heed.
And thence they flitted, now this way, now that, upon the wing,
And of all things that were to be they uttered soothsaying.
What time they fed on honey fresh, food of the gods divine,
Then holy madness made their hearts to speak the truth incline,
But if from food of honeycomb they needs must keep aloof
Confused they buzz among themselves and speak no word of sooth.'

The Thriae are nurses like the Maenads, they rave in holy madness like the Thyiades, but their inspiration is not from Bacchos, the wine-god, not even from Bromios or Sabazios or Braites, the beer-gods; it is from a source, from an intoxicant yet more primitive, from honey. They are in a word 'Melissae,' honey-priestesses, inspired by a honey intoxicant; they are bees, their heads white with pollen; they hum and buzz, swarming confusedly. The honey service of ancient ritual has already been noted, and the fact that not only the priestesses of Artemis at Ephesus were 'Bees,' but also those of Demeter, and, still more significant, the Delphic priestess herself was a Bee. The oracle of the Bessi was delivered by a priestess, and the analogy with Delphi is noted by Herodotus; may not the priestess of the Bessi have also been a Bee? The Delphic priestess in historical times chewed a laurel leaf, but when she was a Bee surely she must have sought her inspiration in the honeycomb.

With all these divine associations about the bee, a creature wondrous enough in nature, it is not surprising that she was figured by art as a goddess and half human. In fig. 137 we have such a representation, a woman with high curled wings and a bee body from the waist downwards. The design is from a gold embossed plaque found at Camiros.

When Euripides would tell of the dread power of Aphrodite haunting with her doom all living things, Aphrodite who was heir to all the sacred traditions of the Earth-Mother, the image of the holy bee FIG. 137. comes to his mind charged with mysterious associations half lost to us. He makes the chorus of maidens in the Hippolytus sing:

O mouth of Dirce, god-built wall
That Dirce's wells run under;
Ye know the Cyprian's fleet foot-fall,
Ye saw the heavens round her flare
When she lulled to her sleep that Mother fair
Of Twy-born Bacchus and crowned her there
The Bride of the bladed thunder,
For her breath is on all that hath life, and she floats in the air
Bee-like, death-like, a wonder.'

The thriambos was then, if this conjecture be correct, the song of the Thriae or honey-priestesses, a song from the beginning like the analogous Dithyramb confused, inspired, impassioned. The title Dithyrambos through its etymology and by its traditional use belonged to Dionysos, conceived of in his twofold aspect as the nature-god born anew each year, the god of plants and animals as well as of human life, and also as the spirit of intoxication. It remains to ask what was the significance of such a god to the Greeks who received him as an immigrant from the North. How far did they adopt and how far modify both elements in this strange and complex new worship?

The Return to Nature

First, what significance had Dionysos to the Greeks as a nature-god, in his animal and vegetable forms as bull and tree?

Long before the coming of Dionysos the Greeks had nature-gods: they had Demeter goddess of the corn, they had Poseidon Phytalmios god of the growth of plants, they had the Charites givers of all increase. But it should be distinctly noted that all these and many another nature-god had passed into a state of complete anthropomorphism. They represent human rather than merely physical relations, they have cut themselves as far as possible loose from plant and animal nature. Demeter is far more mother than corn. Hermes is the young man in his human splendour, and spite of his Herm-form and phallic worship has well nigh forgotten that he was once a spirit of generation in flocks and plants. Athene, like her mother the earth, had once for her vehicle a snake, but she has waxed in glory till she comes to be a motherless splendour born of the brain of Zeus, an incarnate city of Athens. These magnificent Olympians have shed for ever the slough of animal shapes. Dionysos came to Greece at an earlier stage of his development when he was still half bull half tree, and this earlier stage was tolerated, even welcomed, by a people who had themselves outgrown it.

It is not hard to see how this came to be. Man when he worships a bull or a tree has not, even to himself, consciously emerged as human. He is still to his own thinking brother of plants and animals. As he advances he gains but also loses, and must sometimes retrace his steps. The Greeks of the sixth century B.C. may well have been a little weary of their anthropomorphic Olympians, tired of their own magnified reflection in the mirror of mythology, whether this image were distorted or halo-crowned. They had taken for their motto 'Know Thyself,' but at the fountain of self-knowledge no human soul has ever yet quenched its thirst. With Dionysos, god of trees and plants as well as human life, there came a 'return to nature, 'a breaking of bonds and limitations and crystallizations, a desire for the life rather of the emotions than of the reason, a recrudescence it may be of animal passions. Nowhere is this return to nature more clearly seen than in the Bacchae of Euripides. The Bacchants leave their human homes, their human work and ordered life, their looms and distaffs, and are back with the wild things upon the mountains. In token of this their hair flows loose, they clothe themselves with the skin of beasts, they are girt with snakes, and crowned with ivy and wild briony, and leaving their human babes they suckle the young of wolves and deer:

'And one a young fawn held, and one a wild
Wolf-cub, and fed them with white milk and smiled
In love, young mothers with a mother's breast,
And babes at home forgotten.'

Euripides, it may be, utters his own longing to be free from the tangle and stress of things human, but it is into the mouths of the chorus of Maenads that he puts the lovely song:

'Will they ever come to me, ever again,
The long, long dances,
On through the dark till the dim stars wane?
Shall I feel the dew on my throat and the stream
Of wind in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam
In the dim expanses?
feet of a Fawn to the greenwood fled,
Alone in the grass, and the loveliness;
Leap of the Hunted, no more in dread,
Beyond the snares and the deadly press.
Yet a voice still in the distance sounds,
A voice and a fear and a haste of hounds,
wildly labouring, fiercely fleet,
Onward yet by river and glen
Is it joy or terror ye storm-swift feet?
To the dear lone lands untroubled of men,
Where no voice sounds, and amid the shadowy green
The little things of the woodland live unseen.'

Nor is it only that the Maenads escape from their humanity to worship on the mountain, they find there others, a strange congregation, that worship with them:

'There Through the appointed hour, they made their prayer
And worship of the Wand, with one accord
Of heart, and cry " lacchos, Bromios Lord,
God of God born! "And all the mountain felt
And worshipped with them; and the wild things knelt,
And ramped and gloried, and the wilderness
Was filled with moving voices and dim stress.'

This notion of a return to nature is an element in the worship of Dionysos so simple, so moving and in a sense so modern that we realize it without effort. It is harder to attain to anything like historical sympathy with the second element that of intoxication.

It is not easy to deal with the worship of Dionysos without rousing in our own minds an instinctive protest. Intoxication to us now-a-days means not inspiration but excess and consequent degradation; its associations are with crime, with the slums, with hereditary disease, with every form of abuse that abases man, not to the level of the beasts but far beneath them.

In trying to understand how the Greeks felt towards Dionysos we must bear in mind one undoubted fact. The Greeks were not as a nation drunkards. Serious excess in drink is rare among southern nations, and the Greeks were no exception to the general rule. When they came in contact with northern nations like the Thracians, who drank deep and seriously, they were surprised and disgusted.

Of this we have ample evidence, much of it drawn from the discussion in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus on Wine and Wine-cups. The general tone of the discourse, while it is strongly in favour of drinking, is averse to drunkenness.' The men of old time were not wont to get drunk.' The reason given is characteristically Greek; they disliked the unbridled license that ensued. It was well said by the inventors of proverbs, 'Wine has no rudder.' Plato in the sixth book of the Laws said it was unfitting for a man to drink to the point of drunkenness, except on the occasions of festivals of that god who was the giver of wine. An occasional and strictly defined license under the sanction of religion is widely different from a general habit of intemperance. In the first book of the Laws, in speaking of various foreign nations Northern and Oriental, e.g. Celts, Iberians, Thracians, Lydians and Persians, he says 'nations of that sort make a practice of drunkenness.'

The Greek habit of drinking was marked off from that of the Thracians by two customs, they drank their wine in small cups and they mixed it freely with water. One of the guests in Athenaeus remarks that it is worth while enquiring whether the men of old times drank out of large cups.' For' he adds, 'Dicaearchus the Messenian, the disciple of Aristotle, in his discourse on Alcaeus says they used small cups and drank their wine mixed with much water.' He goes on to cite a treatise 'On Drunkenness' by Chamaeleon of Heracleia, in which Chamaeleon stated not only that the custom of using large cups was a recent one but that it was imported from the barbarians. Imported indeed but never really naturalized, for he goes on to say, 'They being devoid of culture rush eagerly to excess in wine and provide for themselves all manner of superfluous delicacies.' It is clear that in respect of wine and food as of everything else the Greek was in the main true to his motto'Nothing too much.' Drunkenness was an offence in his eyes against taste as well as morals.

Large drinking cups were a northern barbarian characteristic; they were made originally of the huge horns of the large breed of cattle common in the North, they were set in silver and gold, and later sometimes actually made of precious metals and called rhyta. Chamaeleon goes on to say,'in the various regions of Greece neither in works of art nor in poems shall we find any trace of a large cup being made save in such as deal with heroes.' That to the dead hero was allowed even by the Orphics the guerdon of 'eternal drunkenness' will be seen later, but the living hero only drank of large cups of unmixed wine out of ceremonial courtesy to the Northerner. Xenophon in the seventh book of the Anabasis describes in detail the drinking festival given by the Thracian Seuthes. When the Greek general and his men came to Seuthes they embraced first and then according to the Thracian custom horns of wine were presented to them. In like manner the Macedonian Philip pledged his friends in a horn of wine. It was from silver horns that the Centaurs drank. A flatterer and a demagogue might drink deep for his own base purposes. Of the arch-demagogue Alcibiades Plutarch says:'At Athens he scoffed and kept horses, at Sparta he went close-shaved and wore a short cloak and washed in cold water, in Thrace he fought and drank.' War and drink, Ares and Dionysos, have been in all ages the chosen divinities of the Northerner. Diodorus in speaking of ceremonial wine-drinking makes a characteristically Greek statement: 'They say that those who drink at banquets when unmixed wine is provided invoke the Good Genius, but when after the meal wine is given mixed with water they call on the name of Zeus the Saviour; for they hold that wine drunk unmixed produces forms of madness, but that when it is mixed with the rain of Zeus the joy of it and the delight remain, and the injurious element that causes madness and license is corrected.' The Good, or perhaps we ought to call him'Wealthy,'Spirit is the very essence of the old wine-god of Thrace and Boeotia; the blending with the rain of Zeus is the taking of it over to the mildness and temperance of the Greek character.

Excess was rare among the southern Greeks, and, even when they exceeded, because they were a people of artists they euphemized. No one but a Greek could have conceived the lovely little vase-painting from an oinochoe in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in fig. 138. A beautiful maiden is the centre of the scene. She is a worshipper of Dionysos. In her left hand is a tall thyrsos and she holds the cup of Dionysos, the kantharos, in her right. It is empty, and she seems to ask the Satyr who stands before her to refill it from his oinochoe. But he will not, she has had too much already. Over her beautiful head, slightly inclined as if in weariness, is inscribed and who but a Greek would have dared to write it? her name 'Kraipale.' Behind her comes a kindly sober friend bearing in her hand a hot drink, smoking still, to cure her sickness.

Perhaps because the extreme of drunkenness, its after degradation and squalid ugliness, was rare among the Greeks, they were better able to realize that in its milder forms it lent lovely motives for art. Wine by the release it brings from self-consciousness unslacks the limbs and gives to pose and gesture the new beauty of abandonment. Degas has dared to seize and fix for ever the beauty he saw in that tragedy . of degradation a woman of the people besotted by absinthe. The peeping moralist that lurks in most of us intrudes to utter truth beside the mark and say that she is wicked. To the Greek artist there was no such extreme issue between art and morality. To him, whether poet or vase-painter, to drink and fall asleep was if not a common at least a beautiful experience, one he painted on many a vase and sang in many a song. A festival without the grace and glory of wine would to him have been shorn of well nigh all its goodliness. On this it is needless to insist. To him peace and wine and sleep are playfellows loving and lovely:

'Eyelids closed and lulled heart deep
In gentle, unforbidden sleep,
Street by street the city brims
With lovers'feasts and burns with lovers'hymns.'

Another point remains to be noted. Not only did the Greeks mix their Thracian wine with water, tempering the madness of the god, but they saw in Dionysos the god of spiritual as well as physical intoxication. It cannot be forgotten that the drama sprang from the religion of Dionysos; his nurses are not only Maenads, they are Muses; from him and him only comes the beauty and magic of their song:

'Hail Child of Semele, only by thee
Can any singing sweet and gracious be.'

The contrast between sheer Thracian madness and the Atheni notion of inspiration is very clearly seen in the two figures of Dionysos as represented on the two vase-paintings in fig. 139 and fig. 140, vase-paintings roughly contemporaneous, the first in the style of Hieron, the second in that of Brygos. In fig. 139 from a red figured stamnos in the British Museum we have the Thracian Dionysos drunk with wine, a brutal though still splendid savage; he dances in ecstasy brandishing the fawn he has rent asunder in his madness. In the second picture (fig. 140), a masterpiece of decorative composition, we have Dionysos as the Athenian cared to know him.

The strange mad Satyrs are twisted and contorted to make exquisite patterns, they clash their frenzied crotala and wave great vine branches. But in the midst of the revel the god himself is thrown back in ecstasy; he is drunken, but with music, not with wine.

Again, with the Maenad worshippers there is the same transformation.

The delicate red-figured kotylos in fig. 141 from the National Museum in Athens is like a little twofold text on the double aspect of the worship of Dionysos. On the obverse is a Maenad about to execute her old savage ritual of tearing a kid asunder. In a moment she will raise her bent head and chant:

'0 glad, glad on the Mountains
To swoon in the race outworn,
When the holy fawn-skin clings
And all else sweeps away,
To the joy of the quick red fountains,
The blood of the hill-goat torn,
The glory of wild-beast ravenings
Where the hilltop catches the day,
To the Phrygian, Lydian mountains
'Tis Bromios leads the way.'

On the reverse for counterpart is a sister Maenad. She dances in gentle ecstasy, playing on her great timbrel. She is all for the service of the Muses, and she might sing:

'But a better land is there
Where Olympus cleaves the air,
The high still dell, where the Muses dwell,
Fairest of all things fair.
there is Grace, and there is the Heart's Desire,
And peace to adore thee, thou Spirit of guiding Fire.'

There are some to whom by natural temperament the religion of Bromios, son of Semele, is and must always be a dead letter, if not a stumbling-block.

Food is to such a troublesome necessity, wine a danger or a disgust. They dread all stimulus that comes from without, they would fain break the ties that link them with animals and plants. They do not feel in themselves and are at a loss to imagine for others the sacramental mystery of life and nutrition that is accomplished in us day by day, how in the faintness of fasting the whole nature of man, spirit as well as body, dies down, he cannot think, he cannot work, he cannot love; how in the breaking of bread, and still more in the drinking of wine, life spiritual as well as physical is renewed, thought is re-born, his equanimity, his magnanimity are restored, reason and morality rule again. But to this sacramentalism of life most of us bear constant, if partly unconscious, witness. We will not eat with the man we hate, it is felt a sacrilege leaving a sickness in body and soul. The first breaking of bread and drinking of wine together is the seal of a new friendship; the last eaten in silence at parting is more than many words. The sacramental feast of bread and wine is spread for the newly married, for the newly dead.

Those to whom wine brings no inspiration, no moments of sudden illumination, of wider and deeper insight, of larger human charity and understanding, find it hard to realize what to others of other temperament is so natural, so elemental, so beautiful the constant shift from physical to spiritual that is of the essence of the religion of Dionysos. But there are those also, and they are saintly souls, who know it all to the full, know the exhilaration of wine, know what it is to be drunken with the physical beauty of a flower or a sunset, with the sensuous imagery of words, with the strong wine of a new idea, with the magic of another's personality, yet having known, turn away with steadfast eyes, disallowing the madness not only of Bromios but of the Muses and of Aphrodite. Such have their inward ecstasy of the ascetic, but they revel with another Lord, and he is Orpheus.