In ancient Greek religion and myth, Dionysus (; ) is the god of wine-making, orchards, fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre.Hedreen, Guy Michael. Silens in Attic Black-figure Vase-painting: Myth and Performance. University of Michigan Press. 1992. . p. 1James, Edwin Oliver. The Tree of Life: An Archaeological Study. Brill Publications. 1966. p. 234. He was also known as Bacchus ( or ; ) by the Greeks (a name later adopted by the Romans) for a frenzy he is said to induce called baccheia.In Greek "both votary and god are called Bacchus". Burkert, p. 162. For the initiate as Bacchus, see Euripides, Bacchae 491. For the god, who alone is Dionysus, see Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 211 and Euripides, Hippolytus 560. His wine, music, and ecstatic dance were considered to free his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful. His thyrsus, a fennel-stem sceptre, sometimes wound with ivy and dripping with honey, is both a beneficent wand and a weapon used to destroy those who oppose his cult and the freedoms he represents.Olszewski, E. (2019). Dionysus’s enigmatic thyrsus. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 163(2), 153–173. Those who partook of his mysteries were believed to become possessed and empowered by the god himself.Sutton, p. 2, mentions Dionysus as The Liberator in relation to the city Dionysia festivals. In Euripides, Bacchae 379–385: "He holds this office, to join in dances, to laugh with the flute, and to bring an end to cares, whenever the delight of the grape comes at the feasts of the gods, and in ivy-bearing banquets the goblet sheds sleep over men."
His origins are uncertain, and his cults took many forms. Traditionally the cult of Dionysus has been said to have originated from Asia Minor and introduced to the Greeks via Thrace.Reginald Pepys Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles: an interpretation, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. 109 Google Books previewZofia H. Archibald, in Gocha R. Tsetskhladze (Ed.) Ancient Greeks west and east, Brill, 1999, pp. 429 ff.Google Books preview But, his name is mentioned in Linear B tablets from Pylos; so, he might be of Mycenaean origin.Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought, Allsworth press, 2002, pp. 118–121. Google Books preview In Orphism, he was variously a son of Zeus and Persephone; a chthonic or underworld aspect of Zeus; or the twice-born son of Zeus and the mortal Semele. The Eleusinian Mysteries identify him with Iacchus, the son or husband of Demeter. Most accounts say he was born in Thrace, traveled abroad, and arrived in Greece as a foreigner. His attribute of "foreignness" as an arriving outsider-god may be inherent and essential to his cults, as he is a god of epiphany, sometimes called "the god who comes".Rosemarie Taylor-Perry, 2003. The God Who Comes: Dionysian Mysteries Revisited. Algora Press.
Wine was a religious focus in the cult of Dionysus and was his earthly incarnation. Wine could ease suffering, bring joy, and inspire divine madness. Festivals of Dionysus included the performance of sacred dramas enacting his myths, the initial driving force behind the development of theatre in Western culture. The cult of Dionysus is also a "cult of the souls"; his maenads feed the dead through blood-offerings, and he acts as a divine communicant between the living and the dead. He is sometimes categorised as a dying-and-rising god.Corrente, Paola. 2012. Dioniso y los Dying gods: paralelos metodológicos. Tesis doctoral, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Scholars note parallels between Dionysus and Jesus as dying-and-rising gods, though key differences and contexts complicate direct comparisons.
Romans identified Bacchus with their own Liber Pater, "the free Father" of the Liberalia festival, patron of viniculture, wine and male fertility, and guardian of the traditions, rituals and freedoms attached to coming of age and citizenship. However, the Roman state treated independent, popular festivals of Bacchus (Bacchanalia) as subversive, partly because their free mixing of classes and genders transgressed traditional social and moral constraints. Celebration of the Bacchanalia was made a capital offence, except in the toned-down forms and greatly diminished congregations approved and supervised by the State. Festivals of Bacchus were merged with those of Liber and Dionysus.
Name Etymology
The dio- prefix in Ancient Greek (; ) has been associated since antiquity with Zeus (genitive Dios), and the variants of the name seem to point to an original *Dios-nysos. The earliest attestation is the Mycenaean Greek dative form (di-wo-nu-so),Palaima, Thomas G. University of Texas at Austin, 1998 featured on two tablets that had been found at Mycenaean Pylos and dated to the twelfth or thirteenth century BC. At that time, there could be no certainty on whether this was indeed a theonym,John Chadwick, The Mycenaean World, Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 99ff: "But Dionysos surprisingly appears twice at Pylos, in the form Diwonusos, both times irritatingly enough on fragments, so that we have no means of verifying his divinity." but the 1989–90 Greek-Swedish Excavations at Kastelli Hill, Chania, unearthed, inter alia, four artefacts bearing Linear B inscriptions; among them, the inscription on item KH Gq 5 is thought to confirm Dionysus's early worship. In Mycenaean Greek the form of Zeus is di-wo. The second element is of unknown origin. It is perhaps associated with Mount Nysa, the birthplace of the god in Greek mythology, where he was nursed by nymphs (the Nysiads),Fox, p. 217, "The word Dionysos is divisible into two parts, the first originally Διος (cf. Ζευς), while the second is of an unknown signification, although perhaps connected with the name of the Mount Nysa which figures in the story of Lykourgos: ... when Dionysos had been reborn from the thigh of Zeus, Hermes entrusted him to the nymphs of Mount Nysa, who fed him on the food of the gods, and made him immortal." although Pherecydes of Syros had postulated as an archaic word for "tree" by the sixth century BC.Testimonia of Pherecydes in an early fifth-century BC fragment, FGrH 3, 178, in the context of a discussion on the name of Dionysus: "Nũsas (acc. pl.), he [Pherecydes] said, was what they called the trees." On a vase of Sophilos the Nysiads are named ().Martin Nilsson (1967). Vol. I, p. 567. Kretschmer asserted that () is a Thracian word that has the same meaning as (), a word similar to () (daughter-in-law or bride; compare PIE *snusós and Sanskrit ).. He suggested that the male form is () and this would make Dionysus the "son of Zeus". Jane Ellen Harrison believed that the name Dionysus means "young Zeus".Myths of Greece and Rome, by Jane Harrison (1928). Robert S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin of the name, since all attempts to find an Indo-European etymology are doubtful.
Meaning and variants
Later variants include and in Boeotia; in Thessaly; and in Ionia; and in Aeolia, besides other variants. A prefix is found in other names, such as that of the Dioscures, and may derive from Dios, the genitive of the name of Zeus.This is the view of Garcia Ramon (1987) and Peters (1989), summarised and endorsed in Janda (2010:20).
Nonnus, in his Dionysiaca, writes that the name Dionysus means "Zeus-limp" and that Hermes named the new born Dionysus this, "because Zeus while he carried his burden lifted one foot with a limp from the weight of his thigh, and nysos in Syracusan language means limping".Nonnus, Dionysiaca 9.20–24. In his note to these lines, W. H. D. Rouse writes "It need hardly be said that these etymologies are wrong". The Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia based on classical sources, states that Dionysus was so named "from accomplishing [διανύειν] for each of those who live the wild life. Or from providing [διανοεῖν] everything for those who live the wild life."Suda s.v. Διόνυσος .
Origins
Academics in the nineteenth century, using study of philology and comparative mythology, often regarded Dionysus as a foreign deity who was only reluctantly accepted into the standard Greek pantheon at a relatively late date, based on his myths which often involve this theme—a god who spends much of his time on earth abroad, and struggles for acceptance when he returns to Greece. However, more recent evidence has shown that Dionysus was in fact one of the earliest gods attested in mainland Greek culture. The earliest written records of Dionysus worship come from Mycenaean Greece, specifically in and around the Palace of Nestor in Pylos, dated to around 1300 BC.Kerényi, Karl. 1976. Dionysus. Trans. Ralph Manheim, Princeton University Press. The details of any religion surrounding Dionysus in this period are scant, and most evidence comes in the form only of his name, written as di-wo-nu-su-jo ("Dionysoio" = 'of Dionysus') in Linear B, preserved on fragments of clay tablets that indicate a connection to offerings or payments of wine, which was described as being "of Dionysus". References have also been uncovered to "women of Oinoa", the "place of wine", who may correspond to the Dionysian women of later periods.
Some 19th-century classicists such as Matthew Arnold identified Phanes as a prototype for Dionysus, and argued that he was originally venerated not as a bringer of wine and revelry but as a "custodian of borrowed identities". According to this theory, early Dionysian rites were believed to allow worshippers to temporarily take on another persona – ancestor, animal, and even enemies – supposedly explaining why Dionysus is uniquely associated with theatre, madness, and foreigners.Veronica Ions: The World's Mythology in Colour (1974). Hamlyn Publishing.
Other Mycenaean records from Pylos record the worship of a god named Eleuther, who was the son of Zeus, and to whom oxen were sacrificed. The link to both Zeus and oxen, as well as etymological links between the name Eleuther or Eleutheros with the Latin name Liber Pater, indicates that this may have been another name for Dionysus. According to Károly Kerényi, these clues suggest that even in the thirteenth century BC, the core religion of Dionysus was in place, as were his important myths. At Knossos in Minoan Crete, men were often given the name "Pentheus", who is a figure in later Dionysian myth and which also means "suffering". Kerényi argued that to give such a name to one's child implies a strong religious connection, potentially not the separate character of Pentheus who suffers at the hands of Dionysus's followers in later myths, but as an epithet of Dionysus himself, whose mythology describes a god who must endure suffering before triumphing over it. According to Kerényi, the title of "man who suffers" likely originally referred to the god himself, only being applied to distinct characters as the myth developed.
The oldest image that is certain to be of Dionysus (as it is accompanied by his name) is found on a dinos by the Attic potter Sophilos from around 570 BC, now in the British Museum. Cornelia Isler-Kerényi argues that he also apppears on pottery from the seventh century, showing that he was already worshiped as more than just a god associated with wine, being associated with weddings, death, sacrifice, and sexuality, and that his retinue of satyrs and dancers was already established. A common theme in these early depictions was the metamorphosis, at the hand of the god, of his followers into hybrid creatures, usually represented by both tame and wild satyrs, representing the transition from civilised life back to nature as a means of escape.
A Mycenaean variant of Bacchus was thought to have been "a divine child" abandoned by his mother and eventually raised by "nymphs, goddesses, or even animals."
Epithets
Dionysus was variably known with the following epithets: