Myth · Greek

Dionysus

Greek mythology — Olympian, god of wine, ecstasy and the theatre

Dionysus is the god of wine, of ritual madness and of the theatre — the outsider god who arrives from abroad with a train of maenads and satyrs and undoes whoever resists him. Twice-born, from his incinerated mother and then from his father's thigh, he crosses every boundary: male and female, Greek and foreign, human and animal, joy and terror. Athenian tragedy and comedy were performed at his festival, and his cult offered ecstatic release of a kind no other Olympian did.

How to spot them

▸The thyrsus — a fennel staff tipped with a pine cone — ivy, grapes, the leopard and the drinking cup
▸Attended by maenads or bacchantes and by satyrs and Silenus
▸Epithets Bacchus, Bromios ('the roarer'), Eleutherios ('the liberator') and Dithyrambos
▸The twice-born god, and the last to join the Olympians
▸The City Dionysia at Athens, where tragedy and comedy were performed

Stories & episodes

Sewn into his father's thigh after his mother was burned to ashes

Semele asked Zeus to appear in full glory; the rescued foetus was carried to term by Zeus himself.

Turned pirates into dolphins after they tried to sell him as a slave

Vines and ivy grew over the ship; the story of the Homeric Hymn 7 and the Exekias cup.

Granted a wish that turned a king's food and drink to gold

Midas, who had entertained the lost Silenus, was cured by washing in the Pactolus.

Drove a king's mother to tear her son apart on the mountainside

Agave and Pentheus of Thebes, the plot of Euripides' Bacchae.

Found a princess abandoned on Naxos and married her

Ariadne, left by Theseus; her crown became the constellation Corona Borealis.

Went down to the underworld and brought his mother up to be made a goddess

Semele was renamed Thyone.

Made the lame smith-god drunk and brought him home to Olympus on a mule

A favourite comic scene on Attic vases.

Struck the daughters of Minyas mad for refusing to join his rites

They tore a child to pieces and were turned into bats.

Key ideas

Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872) sets the Dionysian — intoxication, dissolution of the self, music — against the Apollonian form and clarity, and argues Greek tragedy was born from their union
Tragedy is traditionally derived from the dithyramb, the choral hymn sung to him, and from tragos, 'goat'; every Athenian dramatic performance was part of his festival

Quick-fire facts

•Roman equivalents: Bacchus, and the older Italian Liber (Liber Pater)
•Son of Zeus and the Theban princess Semele, daughter of Cadmus — the only Olympian with a mortal mother
•Called 'twice-born' (Dithyrambos) after his rescue from Semele and gestation in Zeus's thigh
•Linear B tablets from Pylos and Khania record di-wo-nu-so, proving the cult far older than the myth of a foreign newcomer
•Euripides' Bacchae, produced posthumously about 405 BC, is the greatest surviving account of his cult
•Athens' City Dionysia, in March, staged the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in competition
•In Orphic tradition he is Zagreus, torn apart by the Titans and reborn
•The Roman Senate suppressed the Bacchanalia in 186 BC by the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus
•The Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii carries a famous fresco cycle of a Dionysiac initiation
•He replaced Hestia in some lists of the twelve Olympians, and was said to be the last god admitted

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Sources

Aaron J. Atsma, the Theoi Project — Dionysos
Euripides — Bacchae The god's arrival at Thebes and the destruction of Pentheus