Dionysus and the Bacchae: God of Wine, Maenads and Theatre

Dionysus was the Greek god of wine, ecstasy, masks and the theatre, a god who arrived in myth as a stranger and yet was worshipped in Greece since the Bronze Age. His worshippers, the maenads or Bacchae, were remembered for their wild mountain dances, and his festivals, from the Anthesteria with its new wine and returning dead to the City Dionysia with its tragedies, shaped Athenian life. Euripides' Bacchae, staged around 405 BCE, remains the classic portrait of the god's double nature: gentle joy for those who accept him, terrible madness for those who refuse.

Who Was Dionysus? Names, Origins and Epithets§

For a long time scholars accepted the ancient view that Dionysus was a late foreign import, a god of Thracian or Phrygian origin whose cult spread through Greece in the archaic age. The decipherment of Linear B overturned that picture: the name di-wo-nu-so appears on tablets from Pylos and, later, from Chania in Crete, so a deity of that name was known to Mycenaean scribes several centuries before Homer. The myth of his foreign arrival is therefore best read as a statement about his character rather than his history. Dionysus is the god who comes from outside, who disrupts the ordinary order of household and city, and who must be received.

He bore many cult titles. Bakchos and Bromios ("the roaring one") described his ecstatic power; Lyaios or Lysios ("the loosener") his release from care; Eleuthereus recalled the village of Eleutherai, from which his image came to Athens; Dendrites honoured him as god of trees and growing sap. Wine was his best-known gift, but his province was wider: all moist, vital, overflowing life, and the dissolving of boundaries between human and animal, male and female, sanity and madness. In art he appears first as a bearded, robed man holding a drinking cup, and from the later fifth century more often as a soft, youthful figure crowned with ivy.

The Myths of the Twice-Born God§

Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, a Theban princess. Persuaded by the jealous Hera to ask her lover to appear in his true form, Semele was burned to ash by his lightning. Zeus snatched the unborn child and sewed him into his thigh, from which he was born a second time; hence the title "twice-born". Hermes carried the infant to the nymphs of Nysa, a mountain that ancient writers placed in many different lands.

Most stories about the grown god follow one pattern: he arrives, he is rejected, and his opponents are punished. In the Iliad the Thracian king Lycurgus drives the god's nurses away and is blinded by Zeus; in the seventh Homeric Hymn pirates who seize the young god leap into the sea and become dolphins. Against these tales stand tales of welcome: the Athenian Icarius receives the gift of wine, and the abandoned Ariadne on Naxos becomes the god's bride. Dionysus also descended to the underworld to bring back his mother Semele, and Orphic poems told a darker story in which the child Dionysus was torn apart by the Titans, a myth discussed in Orphism and the Orphic Gold Tablets.

Maenads and Bacchic Ritual§

The maenads ("raving women") or Bacchae of myth leave their looms, dress in fawnskins, wreathe themselves with ivy and snakes, carry the thyrsos, a fennel stalk tipped with ivy or a pine cone, and dance on the mountainside. In their frenzy they suckle wild animals, strike milk and wine from the earth, and in the most violent stories tear living creatures apart (sparagmos) and eat the flesh raw (omophagia).

Historical maenadism was real but more ordered. Inscriptions and later writers describe official women's associations (thiasoi) that went out to the mountains every second winter in rites called oreibasia, "mountain-walking". At Delphi the Thyiades held such rites on Mount Parnassus. An inscription from Miletus of 276/5 BCE regulates who may "throw in the raw piece" for the city's Bacchic women, which suggests that the old raw-meat rite survived in a symbolic, controlled form. Albert Henrichs and other scholars have emphasised the gap between this regulated practice and the bloody images of drama and vase painting.

Private Bacchic groups also offered initiation and hopes for the afterlife, which links Dionysus with the mysteries described in Greek Religion and the Mysteries. In Italy such groups alarmed the Roman Senate, which in 186 BCE suppressed the Bacchanalia; Livy's dramatic account and a bronze copy of the Senate's decree, found at Tiriolo in Calabria in 1640, both survive. The Roman background is covered in Roman Religion. Ancient sources tie Bacchic ecstasy to wine, music and dance; theories that other intoxicants were involved remain speculative (see Entheogens and Sacred Plants).

Euripides' Bacchae§

Euripides wrote the Bacchae in his last years, probably in Macedonia, and it was produced in Athens after his death in 406 BCE, winning first prize. In the play Dionysus returns in human disguise to Thebes, his mother's city, where his aunts have denied his divinity and his cousin, the young king Pentheus, has banned his rites. The god has driven the Theban women to the mountains as maenads. Pentheus imprisons the stranger, who escapes as the palace shakes, and gradually draws the king under his spell, dresses him as a woman and leads him to spy on the maenads. There his own mother Agave, in Bacchic madness, takes him for a lion and leads the women in tearing him apart. She returns carrying his head in triumph, and Cadmus slowly brings her back to her senses.

Readers have taken the play in opposite directions: as a defence of traditional piety, as an attack on cruel gods, as a study of repression and release, or as a reflection on the theatre itself, since Dionysus stages a disguise and a performance within the drama. E. R. Dodds's commentary of 1944 set the modern agenda by comparing Bacchic ecstasy with documented religious possession. The wider tragic tradition is discussed in Greek Tragedy and Myth.

The Anthesteria and the Festivals of Dionysus at Athens§

Athens kept at least four festivals of Dionysus: the Rural Dionysia in the villages in winter, with phallic processions; the Lenaia, with dramatic contests from about the 440s BCE; and the City Dionysia in early spring, when the old image of Dionysus Eleuthereus was escorted into the city and tragedies, satyr plays and comedies were performed.

The Anthesteria, the "flower festival", fell in the month Anthesterion (around February) and lasted three days. On the first, Pithoigia, the jars of new wine were opened and offered to the god. On the second, Choes ("jugs"), every participant drank from his own jug in a silent drinking contest, a custom explained by the myth that the polluted Orestes had once been received at Athens and served apart. Children of about three were given small jugs of their own, many of which have been found, painted with scenes of play, in children's graves. Probably on the same day the wife of the official called the archon basileus was given in a secret sacred marriage to Dionysus in the Boukoleion. The third day, Chytroi ("pots"), belonged to the dead: pots of mixed grains were offered to Hermes of the underworld, and at the close a formula sent the spirits away, saying in effect that the Anthesteria was over. The festival's combination of new wine, children, marriage and the returning dead shows how wide the god's domain was. Sacrifice and the civic calendar in general are explained in Greek Sacrifice, Festivals and Temples.

Dionysus and the Origins of Theatre§

Theatre at Athens was an act of worship. Plays were performed only at festivals of Dionysus, in the theatre of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis, next to his temple, with his priest seated in the front row. Actors and chorus wore masks, the god's own emblem. Aristotle believed that tragedy grew out of the improvisations of the leaders of the dithyramb, a choral song for Dionysus, and comedy from the leaders of phallic songs. Tradition named Thespis as the first actor, competing around 534 BCE.

How tragedy developed from such roots is debated, and an ancient proverb already complained that tragedy had "nothing to do with Dionysus", since most plays told stories of other gods and heroes. Yet the satyr play, which followed each set of three tragedies, kept the god's half-animal companions on stage, and the experience of becoming someone else through a mask was itself Dionysian.

Dionysus after Antiquity§

The Romans identified Dionysus with their own god Liber, and Dionysiac scenes covered Roman sarcophagi, where they probably expressed hopes of a joyful afterlife. Renaissance painters turned to the same stories: Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–23) and Caravaggio's young Bacchus are among the best known, as discussed in Greek Myth in Art and the Modern Imagination. In 1872 Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy opposed the "Dionysian", the force of ecstatic dissolution, to the "Apollonian", the principle of form and measure, and this pairing has shaped modern thinking about art, religion and psychology ever since.

Frequently asked questions§

Is Dionysus the same as Bacchus?§

Bacchus (Greek Bakchos) was one of Dionysus's own Greek names, and the Romans used it as the god's usual name. They also identified him with Liber, an old Italian god of wine and fertility, so Bacchus, Liber and Dionysus refer to essentially the same figure in Roman times.

Who were the maenads?§

Maenads were female worshippers of Dionysus. In myth they were frenzied women who roamed the mountains and tore animals apart; in history they were members of organised groups that performed ecstatic rites, usually every second winter, under the supervision of their cities.

Why is Dionysus the god of theatre?§

Athenian drama was performed only at his festivals and in his sanctuary, and masks, disguise and the release of emotion were part of his worship. Aristotle traced tragedy to choral songs for Dionysus, although modern scholars debate how direct the link was.

What happens in Euripides' Bacchae?§

Dionysus comes to Thebes in disguise to punish the family that denied his divinity. King Pentheus opposes his rites, is lured to spy on the maenads dressed as a woman, and is torn apart by them, led by his own mother Agave.

Sources and further reading§

• The Bacchae — Euripides, c. 405 BCE
• Euripides: Bacchae — E. R. Dodds, 1944
• Dionysus: Myth and Cult — Walter F. Otto, 1965
• Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life — Carl Kerényi, 1976
• Homo Necans — Walter Burkert, 1983
• Masks of Dionysus — Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher A. Faraone, 1993
• Dionysos — Richard Seaford, 2006
• The Birth of Tragedy — Friedrich Nietzsche, 1872