- Looks after
- Wine, festivity, theatre and ecstasy
- Roman name
- Bacchus
- Often shown with
- The grapevine, the thyrsos, ivy, the panther, the wine cup.
Dionysus
Διόνυσος
Dionysus is the god of wine, ritual madness and theatre, born from Zeus and the mortal Semele.
Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, a Theban princess. Semele asked to see Zeus in his full glory, and was burned up by the lightning. Zeus saved the unborn child and sewed him into his thigh until he was ready to be born, which is why he is called twice-born.
He travelled through the world, introducing the vine and the cult of wine, accompanied by satyrs and maenads, the women who followed him in ecstatic rites. Those who rejected him were punished, as in Euripides' Bacchae, where King Pentheus of Thebes is torn apart by his own mother, who had been driven mad by the god.
In Athens, he was the god of the theatre. The City Dionysia festival, in spring, was the occasion for the performance of tragedies and, later, comedies, and the theatre of Dionysus lies below the Acropolis. He also went to the underworld to bring back his mother, and she was made immortal as Thyone.
He married Ariadne, who was abandoned on Naxos by Theseus, and made her a goddess.
In later art and language
Greek tragedy and comedy both grew out of his festivals, and Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872) built a whole theory of art on the contrast of Apollo and Dionysus.
Ancient sources
- Euripides, Bacchae
- Homeric Hymn 7 and 26 to Dionysus
- Hesiod, Theogony 940-942
- Apollodorus, Library 3.4.3
The family of Dionysus
Semele was a mortal princess of Thebes.