Book: Greek Studies: A Series of Essays

W >> Walter Horatio Pater >> Greek Studies: A Series of Essays




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 Doppelganger; 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: pyrigenes. Liddell and Scott
definition: "born of fire."

38. +Transliteration: Oinophoria . . . Anthesteria. Liddell and
Scott definition of Anthesteria: "The Feast of Flowers, the three
days' festival of Bacchus at Athens, in the month Anthesterion."

40. +Transliteration: eskiatrofekos. 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.

This tragedy of the Bacchanals--a sort of masque or morality, as we
say--a monument as central for the legend of Dionysus as the Homeric
hymn for that of Demeter, is unique in Greek literature, and has also
a singular interest in the life of Euripides himself. He is writing
in old age (the piece was not played till after his death) not at
Athens, nor for a polished Attic audience, but for a wilder and less
temperately cultivated sort of people, at the court of Archelaus, in
Macedonia. Writing in old age, he is in that subdued mood, a mood
not necessarily sordid, in which (the shudder at the nearer approach
of the unknown world coming over him more frequently than of old)
accustomed ideas, conformable to a sort of common sense regarding the
unseen, oftentimes regain what they may have lost, in a man's
allegiance. It is a sort of madness, he begins to think, to differ
from the received opinions thereon. Not that he is insincere or
ironical, but that he tends, in the [55] sum of probabilities, to
dwell on their more peaceful side; to sit quiet, for the short
remaining time, in the reflexion of the more cheerfully lighted side
of things; and what is accustomed--what holds of familiar usage--
comes to seem the whole essence of wisdom, on all subjects; and the
well-known delineation of the vague country, in Homer or Hesiod,
one's best attainable mental outfit, for the journey thither. With
this sort of quiet wisdom the whole play is penetrated. Euripides
has said, or seemed to say, many things concerning Greek religion, at
variance with received opinion; and now, in the end of life, he
desires to make his peace--what shall at any rate be peace with men.
He is in the mood for acquiescence, or even for a palinode; and this
takes the direction, partly of mere submission to, partly of a
refining upon, the authorised religious tradition: he calmly
sophisticates this or that element of it which had seemed grotesque;
and has, like any modern writer, a theory how myths were made, and
how in lapse of time their first signification gets to be obscured
among mortals; and what he submits to, that he will also adorn
fondly, by his genius for words.

And that very neighbourhood afforded him his opportunity. It was in
the neighbourhood of Pella, the Macedonian capital, that the worship
of Dionysus, the newest of the gods, prevailed in its most
extravagant form--the [56] Thiasus, or wild, nocturnal procession of
Bacchic women, retired to the woods and hills for that purpose, with
its accompaniments of music, and lights, and dancing. Rational and
moderate Athenians, as we may gather from some admissions of
Euripides himself, somewhat despised all that; while those who were
more fanatical forsook the home celebrations, and went on pilgrimage
from Attica to Cithaeron or Delphi. But at Pella persons of high
birth took part in the exercise, and at a later period we read in
Plutarch how Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, was devoted
to this enthusiastic worship. Although in one of Botticelli's
pictures the angels dance very sweetly, and may represent many
circumstances actually recorded in the Hebrew scriptures, yet we
hardly understand the dance as a religious ceremony; the bare mention
of it sets us thinking on some fundamental differences between the
pagan religions and our own. It is to such ecstasies, however, that
all nature-worship seems to tend; that giddy, intoxicating sense of
spring--that tingling in the veins, sympathetic with the yearning
life of the earth, having, apparently, in all times and places,
prompted some mode of wild dancing. Coleridge, in one of his
fantastic speculations, refining on the German word for enthusiasm--
Schwarmerei, swarming, as he says, "like the swarming of bees
together"--has explained how the sympathies of mere numbers, as such,
the random catching on [57] fire of one here and another there, when
people are collected together, generates as if by mere contact, some
new and rapturous spirit, not traceable in the individual units of a
multitude. Such swarming was the essence of that strange dance of
the Bacchic women: literally like winged things, they follow, with
motives, we may suppose, never quite made clear even to themselves,
their new, strange, romantic god. Himself a woman-like god,--it was
on women and feminine souls that his power mainly fell. At Elis, it
was the women who had their own little song with which at spring-time
they professed to call him from the sea: at Brasiae they had their
own temple where none but women might enter; and so the Thiasus,
also, is almost exclusively formed of women--of those who experience
most directly the influence of things which touch thought through the
senses--the presence of night, the expectation of morning, the
nearness of wild, unsophisticated, natural things--the echoes, the
coolness, the noise of frightened creatures as they climbed through
the darkness, the sunrise seen from the hill-tops, the disillusion,
the bitterness of satiety, the deep slumber which comes with the
morning. Athenians visiting the Macedonian capital would hear, and
from time to time actually see, something of a religious custom, in
which the habit of an earlier world might seem to survive. As they
saw the lights flitting over the mountains, [58] and heard the wild,
sharp cries of the women, there was presented, as a singular fact in
the more prosaic actual life of a later time, an enthusiasm otherwise
relegated to the wonderland of a distant past, in which a supposed
primitive harmony and understanding between man and nature renewed
itself. Later sisters of Centaur and Amazon, the Maenads, as they
beat the earth in strange sympathy with its waking up from sleep, or
as, in the description of the Messenger, in the play of Euripides,
they lie sleeping in the glen, revealed among the morning mists, were
themselves indeed as remnants--flecks left here and there and not yet
quite evaporated under the hard light of a later and commoner day--of
a certain cloud-world which had once covered all things with a veil
of mystery. Whether or not, in what was often probably coarse as
well as extravagant, there may have lurked some finer vein of ethical
symbolism, such as Euripides hints at--the soberer influence, in the
Thiasus, of keen air and animal expansion, certainly, for art, and a
poetry delighting in colour and form, it was a custom rich in
suggestion. The imitative arts would draw from it altogether new
motives of freedom and energy, of freshness in old forms. It is from
this fantastic scene that the beautiful wind-touched draperies, the
rhythm, the heads suddenly thrown back, of many a Pompeian wall-
painting and sarcophagus-frieze are originally derived; and that
melting languor, that perfectly [59] composed lassitude of the fallen
Maenad, became a fixed type in the school of grace, the school of
Praxiteles.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.