CHAPTER VIII.

DIONYSOS.

‘ὦ μάκαρ ὅστις εὐδαί-

μων τελετὰς θεῶν

εἰδὼς βιοτὰν ἁγιστεύει.’

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’ (ἀποτροπή) to ‘tendance’ (θεραπεία). 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.

DIONYSOS AN IMMIGRANT THRACIAN.

First it is certain beyond question that Dionysos was a late-comer 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[928], 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 succeeding 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.

[Illustration: FIG. 113.]

The earliest monument of art showing Dionysos as an actual denizen of

Olympus is the curious design from an amphora[929] 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.

[Illustration: FIG. 114.]

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[930] 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[931] 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 Lycoörgos, 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 Lycoörgos 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[932] 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 and the stranger-god captured

and brought into his presence, is parodied by Aristophanes in the

_Thesmophoriazusae_ and the scholiast[933] 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[934]. On the obverse is the mad Lycurgus with his children dead

and dying. He swings a double axe (βουπλήξ). 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

(p. 463). 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 seat 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[935] 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 Satrae who interpret the

oracle are called Bessi; it is a priestess who 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.

Herodotus speaks of the Bessi as though they were a kind of priestly

caste among the Satrae, but Strabo[936] 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[937] 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[938].’

Thucydides[939] 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[940] 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[941] 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[942]:

‘From Asia, from the day-spring that uprises,

From Tmolus ever glorying we come,’

and again[943]:

‘Hither, O fragrant of Tmolus the golden.’

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[944], ‘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[945] 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 hest

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[946]. 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[947]:

‘Acheloüs’ roaming daughter,

Holy Dirce, virgin water,

Bathed he not of old in thee

The Babe of God, the Mystery?’

and again[948]:

‘Why, O 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.

[Illustration: FIG. 115.]

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 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[949] 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 incline 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 be distinctly borne in mind that the figure

on the camel carries no Dionysiac attributes and cannot be certainly said

to be the god.

* * * * *

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[950] 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[951] 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[952].

[Illustration: FIG. 116.]

But mythology is too unconscious not to betray itself. Herodotus[953]

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’ (Ἥρας δεσμοί). 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[954] vowed he would bring

Hephaistos by force. Hephaistos drove him off with firebrands. 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 François[955]

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[956] 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 (p. 366), 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[957] 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:

‘O thou with golden mitre band,

Named for our land,

On thee in this our woe

I call, thou ruddy Bacchus all aglow

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[958] 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[959] knows that he is not only Teacher, Healer, Prophet,

but

‘of Ares’ realm a part hath he.

When mortal armies mailèd 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[960], 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[961]

Ares has found a place, but a significant one, at the very end, on a

seat by himself, as though naïvely 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.

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

Herodotus[962] 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 (p.

368), Nysa or as it is called Nyseïon, whether it be mountain or plain,

is clearly in Thrace, home of Lycurgus son of Dryas. But already in

Sophocles[963], in the beautiful fragment preserved by Strabo, wherever

it may be, it is a place touched by magic, a silent land which

‘The horned Iacchus loves for his dear nurse,

Where no shrill voice doth sound of any bird.’

Euripides[964] 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[965] 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[966] and never doubts but that

Orpheus was a Thracian, a matter to be discussed later. Most significant

of all, when he is speaking[967] 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.

[Illustration: FIG. 117.]

The Satyrs first—they are (what else should they, could they be?) the

_Satrae_[968]; 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[969], 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[970], 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[971] 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[972] knew quite well who the opponents of Peirithoös were, not

cloud-demons, not mountain torrents, but real wild _men_ (φῆρες), as real

as the foes they fought with. He tells of the heroes Dryas, father of

Lycurgus, and Peirithoös 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 Peirithoös, 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[973] we are told how Peirithoös

‘Took vengeance on the shaggy mountain-men,

Drave them from Pelion to the Aithikes far.’

In the name of common sense, did Peirithoös expel a storm-cloud or a

mountain torrent and force it to leave Pelion and settle elsewhere? The

vengeance of Peirithoös is simply the expulsion of one wild tribe by

another.

In these passages from the _Iliad_ the foes of Peirithoös are simply

a tribe of wild men, Pheres. In the _Odyssey_, Homer[974] 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[975]. 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 Iolaos. The object surmounted by the eagles I am

quite unable to explain.

[Illustration: FIG. 118.]

[Illustration: FIG. 119.]

[Illustration: FIG. 120.]

The next stage in the development of the Centaur is seen in the archaic

gem from the British Museum[976] 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 François 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

(p. 179), the horse Centaur prevailed[977].

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[978] 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[979] does definitely in the

case of Cheiron identify φήρ and Κένταυρος, 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.

[Illustration: FIG. 121.]

The charming little design in fig. 121 is from an oinochoë in the

British Museum[980]. 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[981] 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[982]. 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[983] 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 (φῆρες) are all human, ‘they thrust with their hands.’

[Illustration: FIG. 122.]

The scene is a favourite one on vases. One of the earliest

representations is given in fig. 122 from a skyphos in the Louvre[984].

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 Peirithoös; 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 horse-men, 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[985]—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 Würzburg Museum[986], on which is depicted the feast

of Phineus already discussed (p. 225). 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.

[Illustration: FIG. 123.]

The Satyrs are not pleasant to contemplate; they are ugly in form and

degraded in habits, and but for a recent theory[987] 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_-demons, 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 François-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 (p. 421); for the present the point is only raised

because I hold to the view now discredited[988] 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[989]

‘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[990] 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[991] tells how

when the dithyrambic 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 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_[992] 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[993] in her ceremonial recitation of

local powers bear almost reluctant witness:

‘You too I salute,

Ye nymphs about Korykia’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[994], 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[995] 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.

[Illustration: FIG. 124.]

The vase-painting in fig. 124 from a krater in the Hermitage Museum at St

Petersburg[996] 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[997],’

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[998].

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[999] 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[1000] 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’ (ὅσαι

τῷ Διονύσῳ μαίνονται Θυιάδας καλεῖσθαί φασιν ὑπὸ ἀνθρώπων). 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[1001] 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

(ἀρχηγός) of the Thyiades at Delphi[1002]. He mentions them more than

once. In writing to Favorinus[1003] 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[1004].’ ‘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[1005] 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[1006]: ‘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 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[1007]:

‘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 woman-priestess, a Phoibas.

Herodotus in the passage already quoted (p. 370) 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[1008]. 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[1009]:

‘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[1010]:

‘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_[1011], when the messenger returns from Cithaeron,

he says to Pentheus:

‘I have seen the wild white women there, O king,

Whose fleet limbs darted arrow-like but now

From Thebes away, and come to tell thee how

They work strange deeds.’

The ‘wild white women’ are in a hieratic state of holy madness, hence

their miraculous magnetic powers. Photius[1012] 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 (ἔνθεος or κάτοχος), 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[1013] 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[1014]:

‘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[1015] 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[1016]. 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[1017]. 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[1018] 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 θρησκεύειν

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_.’

[Illustration: FIG. 125.]

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[1019] 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 (σκεύη) 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 (μίτρα) in her hair the Maenad has

twined a great snake. Another Maenad[1020] 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.

[Illustration: FIG. 126.]

[Illustration: FIG. 127.]

The snakes emerging from the sacred cistae are illustrated by the class

of coins[1021] 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 all 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[1022] 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—κατοργιάσας and καθοσιώσας—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[1023]

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[1024]. 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 (p. 368) they are his ‘nurses’ (τιθῆναι). One of the lost plays of

Aeschylus bore the title ‘Rearer of Dionysos’ and Sophocles[1025], 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[1026] has left us an account, inadequate but still

significant, of the actual ritual of the Thyiades[1027], 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 (p. 483) 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 (p. 518). 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

(p. 271); 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_[1028], he treats of the three great enneateric

festivals of Delphi, the Stepterion, Heroïs and Charila. Of the Heroïs 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 Heroïs was a resurrection festival, with rites of Return and

Uprising, such as have been already (p. 276) 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[1029].’ 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[1030] has brought to light a

number of inscriptions from tombs which run after this fashion:

δη διως ζεμελω.

με ζεμελω κε δεος.

δεος κε ζεμ(ελω).

με ζεμελω.

These various permutations and combinations are followed by a curse

formulary as follows: ιος σεμουν κνουμανει κακουν αδδακει ετιττετικμενος

ειτου, which is Phrygian for ὃς τούτῳ (τῷ) μνήματι κακὸν ἐπέθηκε

ὑποκατάρατος ἔστω, ‘Cursed be he that does any damage to this tomb.’ 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. με and δη would appear to be affirmative curse particles;

με has for cognates μά, μήν and possibly μέν, as well as the Latin _me_

in _me Hercle, me Dius Fidius_. δη is cognate not only to the ordinary

affirmative Greek δή but also to the _de_ of the Latin oath _e-de-pol_.

The divinities sworn by remain to be considered. δη διως can scarcely be

other than νὴ Δία, ‘by Zeus.’ ζεμελω at once brings Semele to mind. But

who and what is Semele? Phrygian and Thracian are now admitted to belong

to the Indo-European family of languages, and a conjoint consonantal

characteristic of the two is that they replace the palatals _g_ and

_gh_ (Greek γ and χ) by a spirant; this spirant the Greeks rendered

indifferently by their nearest equivalents ζ and σ. The Phrygian ζεμελω

is the Greek γῆ (earth) appearing in nasalized form as χαμαί, χθαμαλός,

χθών, in Latin as _humus_, _humilis_, _homo_, in Sclavonic, to quote only

a familiar and convincing instance, in Nova _Zembla_, ‘new earth.’ The

Greek form γῆ looks remote but we have also its nasalized form Χαμύνη

(Lit. _Zemyna_). At Elis Pausanias[1031] saw, opposite the place where

the umpires stood, an altar of white marble. On that altar sat the

priestess of Demeter Chamyne, to behold the Olympic games. ‘She of the

Ground’ was probably at Olympia long before the coming of Zeus.

* * * * *

Semele, mother of Dionysos, is the Earth. This the vase-painter

knew well. In dealing with the Earth-Mother (p. 276) 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 counterpart must now be added

the curious vase-painting in fig. 128, now in the Hope collection at

Deep-dene[1032]. 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 Iacchos or Brimos; all we can be sure that the

vase-painter meant was that the god is earth-born.

[Illustration: FIG. 128.]

[Illustration: FIG. 129.]

The same notion comes clearly out in the second design in fig. 129 from

a kalpis in the British Museum[1033]. Here the familiar type[1034] 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.

[Illustration: FIG. 130.]

The third vase-painting in fig. 130 from a cylix in the Museum at

Naples[1035] 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

Διόνυσος (Dionysos) and Σεμέλη (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[1036], but son of Semele as Keraunia,

Earth the thunder-smitten.

This aspect of Semele as Keraunia is familiar in classical literature.

Sophocles[1037] has ‘thou and thy mother, she of the thunder.’ To

Euripides[1038] 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, O 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[1039] 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.

Any place that was struck by lightning was regarded as specially

sacred[1040]. If the place was the tomb of a local heroine there was

a double sanctity. Such a tomb there unquestionably was at Thebes.

Pausanias[1041] 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[1042]—‘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[1043] in discussing thunderbolts says

there are two kinds, the one is swift and rarefied (μανός) and fiery and

is called ἀργής, the other is slow and smoky and is called ψολόεις. 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[1044]:

‘Unveil the Lightning’s Eye, arouse

The fire that sleeps, against this house.’

And the chorus make answer: