The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (24 page)

1
. Euripides:
Bacchae
99–102; Onomacritus, quoted by Pausanias: viii. 37. 3; Diodorus Siculus: iii. 62;
Orphic Hymn
xlv. 6; Clement of Alexandria:
Address to the Greeks
ii. 16.

2
. Apollodorus: iii. 4. 3; Hyginus:
Fabula
182; Theon on Aratus’s
Phenomena
177; Diodorus Siculus: iii. 68–69; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1131; Servius on Virgil’s
Eclogues
vi. 15.

3
. Apollodorus: iii. 5. 1; Aeschylus:
The Edonians, a Fragment
; Diodorus Siculus: iii. 70–71.

4
. Euripides:
Bacchae
13; Theophilus, quoted by Plutarch:
On Rivers
24; Pausanias: x. 29. 2; Diodorus Siculus: ii. 38; Strabo: xi. 5. 5; Philostratus:
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
ii. 8–9; Arrian:
Indica
5.

5
. Pausanias: vii. 2. 4–5; Plutarch:
Greek Questions
56.

6
. Apollodorus: iii. 5. 1; Homer:
Iliad
vi. 130–40.

7
. Theocritus:
Idylls
xxvi.; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
iii. 714 ff.; Euripides:
Bacchae, passim.

8
. Ovid:
Metamorphosis
iv. 1–40; 390–415; Antoninus Liberalis: 10; Aelian:
Varia Historia
iii. 42; Plutarch:
Greek Questions
38.

9
. Plutarch:
loc. cit
.

10
.
Homeric Hymn to Dionysus
6 ff.; Apollodorus: iii. 5. 3; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
iii. 577–699.

11
. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 996; Hesiod:
Theogony
947; Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 5.

12
. Apollodorus: iii. 5. 3; Pausanias: ii. 31. 2.

1
. The main clue to Dionysus’s mystic history is the spread of the vine cult over Europe, Asia and North Africa. Wine was not invented by the Greeks: it seems to have been first imported in jars from Crete. Grapes grew wild on the southern coast of the Black Sea, whence their cultivation spread to Mount Nysa in Libya, by way of Palestine, and so to Crete; to India, by way of Persia; and to Bronze Age Britain, by way of the Amber Route. The wine orgies of Asia Minor and Palestine – the Canaanite Feast of Tabernacles was, originally, a Bacchanal orgy – were marked by much the same ecstasies as the beer orgies of Thrace and Phrygia. Dionysus’s triumph was that wine everywhere superseded other intoxicants (see
38.
3
). According to Pherecydes (178)
Nysa
means ‘tree’.

2
. He had once been subservient to the Moon-goddess Semele (see
14.
5
) – also called Thyone, or Cotytto (see
3.
1
) – and the destined victim of her orgies. His being reared as a girl, as Achilles also was (see 160.
5
), recalls the Cretan custom of keeping boys ‘in darkness’ (
scotioi
), that is to say, in the women’s quarters, until puberty. One of his titles was
Dendrites
, ‘tree-youth’, and the Spring Festival, when the trees suddenly burst into leaf and the whole world is intoxicated with desire, celebrated his emancipation. He is described as a horned child in order not to particularize the horns, which were goat’s, stag’s, bull’s, or ram’s according to the place of his worship. When Apollodorus says that he was disguised as a kid to save him from the wrath of Hera – ‘Eriphus’ (‘kid’) was one of his titles
(Hesychius
sub
Eriphos) – this refers to the Cretan cult of Dionysus-Zagreus, the wild goat with the enormous horns. Virgil (
Georgics
ii. 380–84) wrongly explains that the goat was the animal most commonly sacrificed to Dionysus ‘because goats injure the vine by gnawing it.’ Dionysus as a stag is Learchus, whom Athamas killed when driven mad by Hera. In Thrace he was a white bull. But in Arcadia Hermes disguised him as a ram, because the Arcadians were shepherds, and the Sun was entering the Ram at their Spring Festival. The Hyades (‘rain-makers’) into whose charge he gave Dionysus, were renamed ‘the tall’, ‘the lame’, ‘the passionate’, ‘the roaring’, and ‘the raging’ Ones, to describe his ceremonies. Hesiod (quoted by Theon:
On Aratus
171) records the Hyades’ earlier names as Phaesyle (? ‘filtered light’), Coronis (‘crow’), Cleia (‘famous’), Phaeo (‘dim’), and Eudore (‘generous’); and Hyginus’s list (
Poetis Astronomy
ii. 21) is somewhat similar.
Nysus
means ‘lame’, and in these beer orgies on the mountain the sacred king seems to have hobbled like a partridge – as in the Canaanite Spring Festival called the
Pesach
(‘hobbling’ – see
23.
1
). But that Macris fed Dionysus on honey, and that the Maenads used ivy-twined fir-branches as thyrsi, records an earlier form of intoxicant: spruce-beer, laced with ivy, and sweetened with mead. Mead was ‘nectar’, brewed from fermented honey, which the gods continued to drink in the Homeric Olympus.

3
. J. E. Harrison, who first pointed out (
Prolegomena
ch. viii) that Dionysus the Wine-god is a late superimposition on Dionysus the Beer-god also called Sabazius, suggests that
tragedy
may be derived not from
tragos
, ‘a goat’, as Virgil suggests (
loc. cit
.), but from
tragos,
‘spelt’ – a grain used in Athens for beer-brewing. She adds that, in early vase-paintings, horse-men, not goat-men, are pictured as Dionysus’s companions; and that his grape-basket is, at first, a winnowing fan. In fact, the Libyan or Cretan goat was associated with wine; the Helladic horse with beer and nectar. Thus Lycurgus, who opposes the later Dionysus, is torn to pieces by wild horses – priestesses of the Mare-headed goddess which was the fate of the earlier Dionysus. Lycurgus’s story has been confused by the irrelevant account of the curse that overtook his land after the murder of Dryas (‘oak’); Dryas was the oak-king, annually killed. The trimming of his extremities served to keep his ghost at bay (see 153.
b
and 171.
i
), and the wanton felling of a sacred oak carried the death penalty. Cotytto was the name of the goddess in whose honour the Edonian Rites were performed (Strabo: x. 3. 16).

4
. Dionysus had epiphanies as Lion, Bull, and Serpent, because these were Calendar emblems of the tripartite year (see
31.
7
;
75.
2
, and 123.
1
). He was born in winter as a serpent (hence his serpent crown); became a lion in the spring; and was killed and devoured as a bull, goat, or stag at midsummer. These were his transformations when the Titans set on him
(see
30.
a
). Among the Orchomenans a panther seems to have taken the serpent’s place. His Mysteries resembled Osiris’s; hence his visit to Egypt.

5
. Hera’s hatred of Dionysus and his wine-cup, like the hostility shown by Pentheus and Perseus, reflects conservative opposition to the ritual use of wine and to the extravagant Maenad fashion, which had spread from Thrace to Athens, Corinth, Sicyon, Delphi, and other civilized cities. Eventually, in the late seventh and early sixth centuries
B
.
C
., Periander, tyrant of Corinth, Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, and Peisistratus, tyrant of Athens, deciding to approve the cult, founded official Dionysiac feasts. Thereupon Dionysus and his vine were held to have been accepted in Heaven – he ousted Hestia from her position as one of the Twelve Olympians at the close of the fifth century
B
.
C
. – though some gods continued to exact ‘sober sacrifices’. But, although one of the recently deciphered tablets from Nestor’s palace at Pylus shows that he had divine status even in the thirteenth century
B
.
C
., Dionysus never really ceased to be a demi-god, and the tomb of his annual resurrection continued to be shown at Delphi (Plutarch:
On Isis and Osiris
35), where the priests regarded Apollo as his immortal part (see
28.
3
). The story of his rebirth from Zeus’s thigh, as the Hittite god of the Winds had been born from Kumabi’s (see
6.
6
), repudiates his original matriarchal setting. Ritual rebirth from a man was a well-known Jewish adoption ceremony (
Ruth
iii. 9), a Hittite borrowing.

6
. Dionysus voyaged in a new-moon boat, and the story of his conflict with the pirates seems to have been based on the same icon which gave rise to the legend of Noah and the beasts in the Ark: the lion, serpent, and other creatures are his seasonal epiphanies. Dionysus is, in fact, Deucalion (see
38.
3
). The Laconians of Brasiae preserved an uncanonical account of his birth: how Cadmus shut Semele and her child in an ark, which drifted to Brasiae, where Semele died and was buried, and how Ino reared Dionysus (Pausanias: iii. 24. 3).

7
. Pharos, a small island off the Nile Delta, on the shore of which Proteus went through the same transformations as Dionysus (see 169.
a
), had the greatest harbour of Bronze Age Europe (see
39.
2
and 169.
6
). It was the depôt for traders from Crete, Asia Minor, the Aegean Islands, Greece, and Palestine. From here the vine cult will have spread in every direction. The account of Dionysus’s campaign in Libya may record military aid sent to the Garamantians by their Greek allies (see
3.
3
); that of his Indian campaign has been taken for a fanciful history of Alexander’s drunken progress to the Indus, but is earlier in date and records the eastward spread of the vine. Dionysus’s visit to Phrygia, where Rhea initiated him, suggests that the Greek rites of Dionysus as Sabazius, or Bromius, were of Phrygian origin.

8
. The Corona Borealis, Ariadne’s bridal chaplet, was also called ‘the
Cretan Crown’. She was the Cretan Moon-goddess, and her vinous children by Dionysus – Oenopion, Thoas, Staphylus, Tauropolus, Latromis, and Euanthes – were the eponymous ancestors of Helladic tribes living in Chios, Lemnos, the Thracian Chersonese, and beyond (see
98.
o
). Because the vine cult reached Greece and the Aegean by way of Crete –
oinos
, ‘wine’, is a Cretan word – Dionysus has been confused with Cretan Zagreus, who was similarly torn to pieces at birth (see
30.
a
).

9
. Agave, mother of Pentheus, is the Moon-goddess who ruled the beer revels. The tearing to pieces of Hippasus by the three sisters, who are the Triple-goddess as Nymph, is paralleled in the Welsh tale of Pwyll Prince of Dyffed where, on May Eve, Rhiannon, a corruption of Rigantona (‘great queen’), devours a foal who is really her son Pryderi (‘anxiety’). Poseidon was also eaten in the form of a foal by his father Cronus; but probably in an earlier version by his mother Rhea (see
7.
g
). The meaning of the myth is that the ancient rite in which mare-headed Maenads tore the annual boy victim – Sabazius, Bromius, or whatever he was called – to pieces and ate him raw, was superseded by the more orderly Dionysian revels; the change being signalized by the killing of a foal instead of the usual boy.