Greek Studies A Series of Essays 3

Greek Studies A Series of Essays 3

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 __EXPRESSION__s 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

 

[53] So far, I have endeavoured to present, with something of the

concrete character of a picture, Dionysus, the old Greek god, as we

may discern him through a multitude of stray hints in art and poetry

and religious custom, through modern speculation on the tendencies of

early thought, through traits and touches in our own actual states of

mind, which may seem sympathetic with those tendencies. In such a

picture there must necessarily be a certain artificiality; things

near and far, matter of varying degrees of certainty, fact and

surmise, being reflected and concentrated, for its production, as if

on the surface of a mirror. Such concrete character, however, Greek

poet or sculptor, from time to time, impressed on the vague world of

popular belief and usage around him; and in the Bacchanals of

Euripides we have an example of the figurative or imaginative power

of poetry, selecting and combining, at will, from that mixed and

floating mass, weaving the many-coloured threads together, blending

the various phases of legend--all the light and shade of the [54]

subject--into a shape, substantial and firmly set, through which a

mere fluctuating tradition might retain a permanent place in men's

imaginations. Here, in what Euripides really says, in what we

actually see on the stage, as we read his play, we are dealing with a

single real object, not with uncertain effects of many half-fancied

objects. Let me leave you for a time almost wholly in his hands,

while you look very closely at his work, so as to discriminate its outlines clearly.