developed in Greek art, we may reflect on what happens with us in the
use of certain names, as expressing summarily, this name for you and
that for me--Helen, Gretchen, Mary--a hundred associations, trains of
sound, forms, impressions, remembered in all sorts of degrees, which,
through a very wide and full experience, they have the power of
bringing with [37] them; in which respect, such names are but
revealing instances of the whole significance, power, and use of
language in general. Well,--the mythical conception, projected at
last, in drama or sculpture, is the name, the instrument of the
identification, of the given matter,--of its unity in variety, its
outline or definition in mystery; its spiritual form, to use again
the expression I have borrowed from William Blake--form, with hands,
and lips, and opened eyelids--spiritual, as conveying to us, in that,
the soul of rain, or of a Greek river, or of swiftness, or purity.
To illustrate this, think what the effect would be, if you could
associate, by some trick of memory, a certain group of natural
objects, in all their varied perspective, their changes of colour and
tone in varying light and shade, with the being and image of an
actual person. You travelled through a country of clear rivers and
wide meadows, or of high windy places, or of lowly grass and willows,
or of the Lady of the Lake; and all the complex impressions of these
objects wound themselves, as a second animated body, new and more
subtle, around the person of some one left there, so that they no
longer come to recollection apart from each other. Now try to
conceive the image of an actual person, in whom, somehow, all those
impressions of the vine and its fruit, as the highest type of the
life of the green sap, had become incorporate;--all the scents and
colours of its flower and fruit, and [38] something of its curling
foliage; the chances of its growth; the enthusiasm, the easy flow of
more choice expression, as its juices mount within one; for the image
is eloquent, too, in word, gesture, and glancing of the eyes, which
seem to be informed by some soul of the vine within it: as Wordsworth
says,
Beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face--
so conceive an image into which the beauty, "born" of the vine, has
passed; and you have the idea of Dionysus, as he appears, entirely
fashioned at last by central Greek poetry and art, and is consecrated
in the Oinophoria and the Anthestêria,+ the great festivals of the
Winepress and the Flowers.
The word wine, and with it the germ of the myth of Dionysus, is older
than the separation of the Indo-Germanic race. Yet, with the people
of Athens, Dionysus counted as the youngest of the gods; he was also
the son of a mortal, dead in childbirth, and seems always to have
exercised the charm of the latest born, in a sort of allowable
fondness. Through the fine-spun speculations of modern ethnologists
and grammarians, noting the changes in the letters of his name, and
catching at the slightest historical records of his worship, we may
trace his coming from Phrygia, the birthplace of the more mystical
elements of [39] Greek religion, over the mountains of Thrace. On
the heights of Pangaeus he leaves an oracle, with a perpetually
burning fire, famous down to the time of Augustus, who reverently
visited it. Southwards still, over the hills of Parnassus, which
remained for the inspired women of Boeotia the centre of his
presence, he comes to Thebes, and the family of Cadmus. From Boeotia
he passes to Attica; to the villages first; at last to Athens; at an
assignable date, under Peisistratus; out of the country, into the
town.
To this stage of his town-life, that Dionysus of "enthusiasm" already
belonged; it was to the Athenians of the town, to urbane young men,
sitting together at the banquet, that those expressions of a sudden
eloquence came, of the loosened utterance and finer speech, its
colour and imagery. Dionysus, then, has entered Athens, to become
urbane like them; to walk along the marble streets in frequent
procession, in the persons of noble youths, like those who at the
Oschophoria bore the branches of the vine from his temple, to the
temple of Athene of the Parasol, or of beautiful slaves; to
contribute through the arts to the adornment of life, yet perhaps
also in part to weaken it, relaxing ancient austerity. Gradually,
his rough country feasts will be outdone by the feasts of the town;
and as comedy arose out of those, so these will give rise to tragedy.
For his entrance upon this new stage of his career, his coming into
the town, is from the [40] first tinged with melancholy, as if in
entering the town he had put off his country peace. The other
Olympians are above sorrow. Dionysus, like a strenuous mortal hero,
like Hercules or Perseus, has his alternations of joy and sorrow, of
struggle and hard-won triumph. It is out of the sorrows of Dionysus,
then,--of Dionysus in winter--that all Greek tragedy grows; out of
the song of the sorrows of Dionysus, sung at his winter feast by the
chorus of satyrs, singers clad in goat-skins, in memory of his rural
life, one and another of whom, from time to time, steps out of the
company to emphasise and develope this or that circumstance of the
story; and so the song becomes dramatic. He will soon forget that
early country life, or remember it but as the dreamy background of
his later existence. He will become, as always in later art and
poetry, of dazzling whiteness; no longer dark with the air and sun,
but like one eskiatrofêkôs+--brought up under the shade of Eastern
porticoes or pavilions, or in the light that has only reached him
softened through the texture of green leaves; honey-pale, like the
delicate people of the city, like the flesh of women, as those old
vase-painters conceive of it, who leave their hands and faces
untouched with the pencil on the white clay. The ruddy god of the
vineyard, stained with wine-lees, or coarser colour, will hardly
recognise his double, in the white, graceful, mournful figure,
weeping, chastened, lifting up his arms in yearning+ [41] affection
towards his late-found mother, as we see him on a famous Etruscan
mirror. Only, in thinking of this early tragedy, of these town-
feasts, and of the entrance of Dionysus into Athens, you must
suppose, not the later Athens which is oftenest in our thoughts, the
Athens of Pericles and Pheidias; but that little earlier Athens of
Peisistratus, which the Persians destroyed, which some of us perhaps
would rather have seen, in its early simplicity, than the greater
one; when the old image of the god, carved probably out of the stock
of an enormous vine, had just come from the village of Eleutherae to
his first temple in the Lenaeum--the quarter of the winepresses, near
the Limnae--the marshy place, which in Athens represents the cave of
Nysa; its little buildings on the hill-top, still with steep rocky
ways, crowding round the ancient temple of Erechtheus and the grave
of Cecrops, with the old miraculous olive-tree still growing there,
and the old snake of Athene Polias still alive somewhere in the
temple court.
The artists of the Italian Renaissance have treated Dionysus many
times, and with great effect, but always in his joy, as an embodiment
of that glory of nature to which the Renaissance was a return. But
in an early engraving of Mocetto there is for once a Dionysus treated
differently. The cold light of the background displays a barren
hill, the bridge and towers of [42] an Italian town, and quiet water.
In the foreground, at the root of a vine, Dionysus is sitting, in a
posture of statuesque weariness; the leaves of the vine are grandly
drawn, and wreathing heavily round the head of the god, suggest the
notion of his incorporation into it. The right hand, holding a great
vessel languidly and indifferently, lets the stream of wine flow
along the earth; while the left supports the forehead, shadowing
heavily a face, comely, but full of an expression of painful
brooding. One knows not how far one may really be from the mind of
the old Italian engraver, in gathering from his design this
impression of a melancholy and sorrowing Dionysus. But modern
motives are clearer; and in a Bacchus by a young Hebrew painter, in
the exhibition of the Royal Academy of 1868, there was a complete and
very fascinating realisation of such a motive; the god of the
bitterness of wine, "of things too sweet"; the sea-water of the
Lesbian grape become somewhat brackish in the cup. Touched by the
sentiment of this subtler, melancholy Dionysus, we may ask whether
anything similar in feeling is to be actually found in the range of
Greek ideas;--had some antitype of this fascinating figure any place
in Greek religion? Yes; in a certain darker side of the double god
of nature, obscured behind the brighter episodes of Thebes and Naxos,
but never quite forgotten, something corresponding to this deeper,
more refined idea, [43] really existed--the conception of Dionysus
Zagreus; an image, which has left, indeed, but little effect in Greek
art and poetry, which criticism has to put patiently together, out of
late, scattered hints in various writers; but which is yet
discernible, clearly enough to show that it really visited certain
Greek minds here and there; and discernible, not as a late after-
thought, but as a tradition really primitive, and harmonious with the
original motive of the idea of Dionysus. In its potential, though
unrealised scope, it is perhaps the subtlest dream in Greek religious
poetry, and is, at least, part of the complete physiognomy of
Dionysus, as it actually reveals itself to the modern student, after
a complete survey.
The whole compass of the idea of Dionysus, a dual god of both summer
and winter, became ultimately, as we saw, almost identical with that
of Demeter. The Phrygians believed that the god slept in winter and
awoke in summer, and celebrated his waking and sleeping; or that he
was bound and imprisoned in winter, and unbound in spring. We saw
how, in Elis and at Argos, the women called him out of the sea, with
the singing of hymns, in early spring; and a beautiful ceremony in
the temple at Delphi, which, as we know, he shares with Apollo,
described by Plutarch, represents his mystical resurrection. Yearly,
about the time of the shortest day, just as the light begins to
increase, [44] and while hope is still tremulously strung, the
priestesses of Dionysus were wont to assemble with many lights at his
shrine, and there, with songs and dances, awoke the new-born child
after his wintry sleep, waving in a sacred cradle, like the great
basket used for winnowing corn, a symbolical image, or perhaps a real
infant. He is twofold then--a Döppelganger; like Persephone, he
belongs to two worlds, and has much in common with her, and a full
share of those dark possibilities which, even apart from the story of
the rape, belong to her. He is a Chthonian god, and, like all the
children of the earth, has an element of sadness; like Hades himself,
he is hollow and devouring, an eater of man's flesh--sarcophagus--the
grave which consumed unaware the ivory-white shoulder of Pelops.
And you have no sooner caught a glimpse of this image, than a certain
perceptible shadow comes creeping over the whole story; for, in
effect, we have seen glimpses of the sorrowing Dionysus, all along.
Part of the interest of the Theban legend of his birth is that he
comes of the marriage of a god with a mortal woman; and from the
first, like merely mortal heroes, he falls within the sphere of human
chances. At first, indeed, the melancholy settles round the person
of his mother, dead in childbirth, and ignorant of the glory of her
son; in shame, according to Euripides; punished, as her own sisters
allege, for impiety. The death of Semele [45] is a sort of ideal or
type of this peculiar claim on human pity, as the descent of
Persephone into Hades, of all human pity over the early death of
women. Accordingly, his triumph being now consummated, he descends
into Hades, through the unfathomable Alcyonian lake, according to the
most central version of the legend, to bring her up from thence; and
that Hermes, the shadowy conductor of souls, is constantly associated
with Dionysus, in the story of his early life, is not without
significance in this connexion. As in Delphi the winter months were
sacred to him, so in Athens his feasts all fall within the four
months on this and the other side of the shortest day; as Persephone
spends those four months--a third part of the year--in Hades. Son or
brother of Persephone he actually becomes at last, in confused, half-
developed tradition; and even has his place, with his dark sister, in
the Eleusinian mysteries, as Iacchus; where, on the sixth day of the
feast, in the great procession from Athens to Eleusis, we may still
realise his image, moving up and down above the heads of the vast
multitude, as he goes, beside "the two," to the temple of Demeter,
amid the light of torches at noonday.
But it was among the mountains of Thrace that this gloomier element
in the being of Dionysus had taken the strongest hold. As in the
sunny villages of Attica the cheerful elements of his religion had
been developed, so, in those [46] wilder northern regions, people
continued to brood over its darker side, and hence a current of
gloomy legend descended into Greece. The subject of the Bacchanals
of Euripides is the infatuated opposition of Pentheus, king of
Thebes, to Dionysus and his religion; his cruelty to the god, whom he
shuts up in prison, and who appears on the stage with his delicate
limbs cruelly bound, but who is finally triumphant; Pentheus, the man
of grief, being torn to pieces by his own mother, in the judicial
madness sent upon her by the god. In this play, Euripides has only
taken one of many versions of the same story, in all of which
Dionysus is victorious, his enemy being torn to pieces by the sacred
women, or by wild horses, or dogs, or the fangs of cold; or the
maenad Ambrosia, whom he is supposed to pursue for purposes of lust,
suddenly becomes a vine, and binds him down to the earth
inextricably, in her serpentine coils.
In all these instances, then, Dionysus punishes his enemies by
repaying them in kind. But a deeper vein of poetry pauses at the
sorrow, and in the conflict does not too soon anticipate the final
triumph. It is Dionysus himself who exhausts these sufferings.
Hence, in many forms--reflexes of all the various phases of his
wintry existence--the image of Dionysus Zagreus, the Hunter--of
Dionysus in winter--storming wildly on the dark Thracian hills, from
which, like Ares and Boreas, he originally descends into [47] Greece;
the thought of the hunter concentrating into itself all men's
forebodings over the departure of the year at its richest, and the
death of all sweet things in the long-continued cold, when the sick
and the old and little children, gazing out morning after morning on
the dun sky, can hardly believe in the return any more of a bright
day. Or he is connected with the fears, the dangers and hardships of
the hunter himself, lost or slain sometimes, far from home, in the
dense woods of the mountains, as he seeks his meat so ardently;
becoming, in his chase, almost akin to the wild beasts--to the wolf,
who comes before us in the name of Lycurgus, one of his bitterest
enemies--and a phase, therefore, of his own personality, in the true
intention of the myth. This transformation, this image of the
beautiful soft creature become an enemy of human kind, putting off
himself in his madness, wronged by his own fierce hunger and thirst,
and haunting, with terrible sounds, the high Thracian farms, is the
most tragic note of the whole picture, and links him on to one of the
gloomiest creations of later romance, the werewolf, the belief in
which still lingers in Greece, as in France, where it seems to become
incorporate in the darkest of all romantic histories, that of Gilles
de Retz.
And now we see why the tradition of human sacrifice lingered on in
Greece, in connexion with Dionysus, as a thing of actual detail, and
[48] not remote, so that Dionysius of Halicarnassus counts it among
the horrors of Greek religion. That the sacred women of Dionysus
ate, in mystical ceremony, raw flesh, and drank blood, is a fact
often mentioned, and commemorates, as it seems, the actual sacrifice
of a fair boy deliberately torn to pieces, fading at last into a
symbolical offering. At Delphi, the wolf was preserved for him, on
the principle by which Venus loves the dove, and Hera peacocks; and
there were places in which, after the sacrifice of a kid to him, a
curious mimic pursuit of the priest who had offered it represented
the still surviving horror of one who had thrown a child to the
wolves. The three daughters of Minyas devote themselves to his
worship; they cast lots, and one of them offers her own tender infant
to be torn by the three, like a roe; then the other women pursue
them, and they are turned into bats, or moths, or other creatures of
the night. And fable is endorsed by history; Plutarch telling us
how, before the battle of Salamis, with the assent of Themistocles,
three Persian captive youths were offered to Dionysus the Devourer.
As, then, some embodied their fears of winter in Persephone, others
embodied them in Dionysus, a devouring god, whose sinister side (as
the best wine itself has its treacheries) is illustrated in the dark
and shameful secret society described by Livy, in which his worship
ended at Rome, afterwards abolished by solemn act of the senate. [49]
He becomes a new Aidoneus, a hunter of men's souls; like him, to be
appeased only by costly sacrifices.
And then, Dionysus recovering from his mid-winter madness, how
intensely these people conceive the spring! It is that triumphant
Dionysus, cured of his great malady, and sane in the clear light of
the longer days, whom Euripides in the Bacchanals sets before us, as
still, essentially, the Hunter, Zagreus; though he keeps the red
streams and torn flesh away from the delicate body of the god, in his
long vesture of white and gold, and fragrant with Eastern odours. Of
this I hope to speak in another paper; let me conclude this by one
phase more of religious custom.
If Dionysus, like Persephone, has his gloomy side, like her he has
also a peculiar message for a certain number of refined minds,
seeking, in the later days of Greek religion, such modifications of
the old legend as may minister to ethical culture, to the perfecting
of the moral nature. A type of second birth, from first to last, he
opens, in his series of annual changes, for minds on the look-out for
it, the hope of a possible analogy, between the resurrection of
nature, and something else, as yet unrealised, reserved for human
souls; and the beautiful, weeping creature, vexed by the wind,
suffering, torn to pieces, and rejuvenescent again at last, like a
tender shoot of living green out of the hardness and stony darkness+
[50] of the earth, becomes an emblem or ideal of chastening and
purification, and of final victory through suffering. It is the
finer, mystical sentiment of the few, detached from the coarser and
more material religion of the many, and accompanying it, through the
course of its history, as its ethereal, less palpable, life-giving
soul, and, as always happens, seeking the quiet, and not too anxious
to make itself felt by others. With some unfixed, though real, place
in the general scheme of Greek religion, this phase of the worship of
Dionysus had its special development in the Orphic literature and
mysteries. Obscure as are those followers of the mystical Orpheus,
we yet certainly see them, moving, and playing their part, in the
later ages of Greek religion. Old friends with new faces, though
they had, as Plato witnesses, their less worthy aspect, in certain
appeals to vulgar, superstitious fears, they seem to have been not
without the charm of a real and inward religious beauty, with their
neologies, their new readings of old legends, their sense of mystical
second meanings, as they refined upon themes grown too familiar, and
linked, in a sophisticated age, the new to the old. In this respect,
we may perhaps liken them to the mendicant orders in the Middle Ages,
with their florid, romantic theology, beyond the bounds of orthodox
tradition, giving so much new matter to art and poetry. They are a
picturesque addition, also, to the exterior of Greek life, with [51]
their white dresses, their dirges, their fastings and ecstasies,
their outward asceticism and material purifications. And the central
object of their worship comes before us as a tortured, persecuted,
slain god--the suffering Dionysus--of whose legend they have their
own special and esoteric version. That version, embodied in a
supposed Orphic poem, The Occultation of Dionysus, is represented
only by the details that have passed from it into the almost endless
Dionysiaca of Nonnus, a writer of the fourth century; and the imagery
has to be put back into the shrine, bit by bit, and finally
incomplete. Its central point is the picture of the rending to
pieces of a divine child, of whom a tradition, scanty indeed, but
harmonious in its variations, had long maintained itself. It was in
memory of it, that those who were initiated into the Orphic mysteries
tasted of the raw flesh of the sacrifice, and thereafter ate flesh no
more; and it connected itself with that strange object in the Delphic
shrine, the grave of Dionysus.
Son, first, of Zeus, and of Persephone whom Zeus woos, in the form of
a serpent--the white, golden-haired child, the best-beloved of his
father, and destined by him to be the ruler of the world, grows up in
secret. But one day, Zeus, departing on a journey in his great
fondness for the child, delivered to him his crown and staff, and so
left him--shut in a strong tower. Then it came to pass that the
jealous Here sent [52] out the Titans against him. They approached
the crowned child, and with many sorts of playthings enticed him
away, to have him in their power, and then miserably slew him--
hacking his body to pieces, as the wind tears the vine, with the axe
Pelekus, which, like the swords of Roland and Arthur, has its proper
name. The fragments of the body they boiled in a great cauldron, and
made an impious banquet upon them, afterwards carrying the bones to
Apollo, whose rival the young child should have been, thinking to do
him service. But Apollo, in great pity for this his youngest
brother, laid the bones in a grave, within his own holy place.
Meanwhile, Here, full of her vengeance, brings to Zeus the heart of
the child, which she had snatched, still beating, from the hands of
the Titans. But Zeus delivered the heart to Semele; and the soul of
the child remaining awhile in Hades, where Demeter made for it new
flesh, was thereafter born of Semele--a second Zagreus--the younger,
or Theban Dionysus.
NOTES
12. +"Hymn to Aphrodite," lines 264-72 (Greek text). The Homeric
Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-
White. Homeric Hymns. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press;
London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914.
16. +"Hymn to Pan," lines 16ff. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with
an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Homeric Hymns.
Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann
Ltd. 1914.
22. +Transliteration: deisidaimones. Liddell and Scott definition:
"fearing the gods," in both a good and bad sense--i.e. either pious
or superstitious.
22. *There were some who suspected Dionysus of a secret democratic
interest; though indeed he was liberator only of men's hearts, and
eleuthereus only because he never forgot Eleutherae, the little
place which, in Attica, first received him.
26. +E-text editor's transliteration: pyrigenês. Liddell and Scott
definition: "born of fire."
38. +Transliteration: Oinophoria . . . Anthestêria. Liddell and
Scott definition of Anthestêria: "The Feast of Flowers, the three
days' festival of Bacchus at Athens, in the month Anthesterion."
40. +Transliteration: eskiatrofêkôs. Liddell and Scott definition:
participle of skiatropheo, "to rear in the shade."
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES