Dionysus

Dionysus was born of Zeus and Semele, daughter of Cadmus, king of Thebes. Hera, jealous, took the shape of Beroe, the old nurse, and planted in Semele the doubt that her lover was truly a god. Semele then drew from Zeus an oath by the Styx, which no god may break, and asked to see him in his true form: the lightning consumed her. Zeus snatched the six-month foetus from her womb and sewed it into his own thigh until its term was complete, whence his epithets «the twice-born» and «the god of two mothers». Hermes gave the newborn to Ino and Athamas, who reared him dressed as a girl to hide him from Hera; when Hera drove the couple mad, the child passed to the nymphs of Nysa, who later rose into the sky as the Hyades.

Dionysus is the god of the vine, of wine, and of the rapture wine opens. His gift is not mere gladness: it dissolves fear and judgement alike, and whoever receives it ceases to answer for himself. He is attended by maenads in trance, by satyrs and silens, and his emblems are the thyrsus tipped with a pine cone, the ivy, the mask and the panther. Tradition always paints him arriving from outside (from Lydia, from Phrygia, from Thrace), a god who must be let in and who punishes the city that bars its door. And yet his name already appears on the Mycenaean tablets in Linear B, a thousand years before Euripides: he was no newcomer, but a most ancient god whom the Greeks went on telling of as a newcomer.

Nearly every myth of Dionysus tells the same story: someone denies him worship and pays for it. Lycurgus of Thrace, in the oldest episode we possess (Iliad VI), drives off his nurses with an ox-goad and Zeus strikes him blind. The Tyrrhenian pirates who seize him, taking him for a rich boy, watch a vine sprout from the mast and leap into the sea as dolphins. And at Thebes, Pentheus, his own cousin, forbids the bacchanals and is torn apart on Mount Cithaeron by the maenads led by Agave, his own mother, who comes down into the city with her son's head fixed on her thyrsus, believing it a lion cub. Not all is punishment: Ariadne, left asleep by Theseus on Naxos, he finds and weds, and her bridal crown was set in the sky as the Corona Borealis. He also went down to Hades to fetch his mother Semele, whom he made a goddess under the name Thyone.

Alongside that story runs another, minority and far darker. In the Orphic tradition the first Dionysus is born not of Semele but of Persephone, and as a child the Titans lure him with toys (a mirror, a spinning top, knucklebones, golden apples), tear him apart and devour him. Of what follows there is no single version: Hyginus says Zeus gave Semele the pounded heart to drink, whence the second birth; Diodorus, that Demeter reassembled the limbs; Clement, that Apollo buried the remains on Parnassus. It is worth saying how far the attestation actually reaches. The name Zagreus is very ancient, but in archaic sources it belongs to a distinct chthonic god, and the full narrative (Zagreus born of Persephone, dismembered by the Titans and reborn) is read whole only in Nonnus, already in the fifth century AD. The «Orphic myth of Zagreus» as it is usually summarised is largely a modern assembly of pieces the ancient sources never present together.

The Athenian cult of Dionysus gave the world the theatre. Out of the dithyramb, the choral song in his honour, came tragedy and comedy, performed in his sacred precinct during the City Dionysia in March, before the god's priest seated in the front row. At the Anthesteria, in February, the jars of new wine were unsealed and people drank in silence, each from his own pitcher, because these were days when the dead walked loose about the city. Outside Athens, the thyiads climbed Parnassus every other year to celebrate him in midwinter, in the months when Apollo left Delphi in his hands. The mask that today serves as the emblem of theatre is, in origin, the face of this god.