DIONYSUS THE DRAMA AND THE WINE

By Roberto Calasso

Dionysus’s first love was a boy. His name was Ampelos. He played with the young god
and the satyrs on the banks of the Pactolus in Lydia. Dionisyus notice the way his long
hair fell on his neck, the light that glowed from this body as he climbed out of the water.
When he saw him wrestling with a satyr and their feet became knotted together , he was
jealous. He wanted to be the only one to fight with Ampelos. They were – erotic
athletes- They threw each other to the ground, and Dionysus loved it when Ampelos got
him down and sat on his naked belly. Then they would wash the dust and sweat from
their skins, swimming in the river. They invented new games . Ampelos always won.
He plaited a crown of snakes and put it on his head the way he’d seen his friend do . He
also imitated Dionysus by wearing a mottled tunic. He learned to talk to bears, lions ,
and tigers. Dionysus encouraged him , but there came the day when he warned him too :
you needn’t fear any wild beast, he said , but watch out for the horns of the cruel bull.
Dionysus was alone one day when he witnessed a scene he felt must be an omen. A
horned dragon appeared among the rocks. On his back he was carrying a deer. He
tipped the creature off onto a stone altar and plunged a horn into its defenseless body. A
pool of blood formed on the stone. Dionysus watched and felt grieved, but along with
hiss grieving came an overwhelming desire to laugh, as if his heart wer3e being split in
two. Then he found Ampelos again , and they went on wandering about and hunting
together as usual. Ampelos used to like playing his reed pipes , and he played badly.
But Dionysus never tired of praising him, because while he praised he would watch
him. Sometimes Ampelos would remember Dionysus warning about the bull, but it
made less and less sense. By now he knew all the wild animals , and they were all his
friends: why on earth shouldn’t the bull be a friend too :::;;;And one day , when he was
out on his own , he met a bull among the rocks. The animal was thirsty, its tongue
hanging out. The bull drank, then stared at the boy, then belched, and a stream of saliva
dribbled from his mouth. Ampelos tried to stroke his horns. He made himself a rush
whip and a sort of bridle. He arranged a mottled pelt over the bull’s back and mounted
it. For a few moments he experienced a sense of elation no other animal had ever given
him. But Selene was jealous. She saw him from a high and sent a gadfly. Irritated , the
bull began to gallop, trying to escape that awful sting. Ampelos could no longer control
the beast. At last jolt trew him to the ground. There was a dry, cracking sound as his
neck snapped. The bull dragged him on, its horn sinking deeper and deeper into the
boy’s flesh.
Dionysus found Ampelos in the dust, covered in blood, but still beautiful. Gathered in a
circle, the satyrs began to mourn over him . But Dionysus couldn’t join in with them. It
wasn’t in his nature to weep. And he realized that he wouldn’t be able to follow
Ampelos into Hades , because he was immortal. Over and over he promised himself
he’d kill the whole bull species with his thyrsus. Eros, who had disguised himself as a
shaggy satyr, came over to console him. He told him a love sting could only be cured by
the sting of another love. So he should look elsewhere. When a flower has been cut, the
gardener plants another one. But now Dionysus was crying for Ampelos. It was a sign
that something had happened that would change his nature , and the nature of the world.
At that moment the Hours were hurrying toward the house of Helios , the sun. There
was a sense that something new was about to take palace on the celestial wheel. It was
time to consult the tablets of Harmony , where Phane’s primordial hand had inscribed
the events of this world in their order. Helios pointed to them where they hung on a wall
of his house. The Hours looked at the fourth tablet ; it showed the Lion and the Virgin ,
and Ganymed holding a cup. They interpreted the image. Ampelos would become the
vine. He who had brought tears to the god who never wept would also bring delight to
the world. Upon hearing which, Dionysus recovered. When the grapes born from
Ampelo’s body were mature, he picked the first bunches and, with a gesture he seemed
to know of old, squeezed them gently in his hands. He watched as a red stain spread
across his fingers. Then he licked them. He thought , Ampelos your end demonstrates
the splendor of your body. Even in death you haven’t lost your rosy color.
No other god , let alone Athena with her sober olive , or Demeter with her nourishing
bread, had ever had anything that could vie with that liquor. It was exactly what had
been missing from life, what life had been waiting for > INTOXICATION.
Bursting with youth, his Bacchants buzzing all around him, Dionysus stormed over to
Naxos to appear before the abandoned Ariadne. Eros daring about him like a weet
hornet. The women following the god were holding leafy thyrsus, bloody shreds of
young bull’s flesh , baskets of sacred objects . Dionysus had come from Attica , where
he had done something no one world ever forget ; he had revealed the secret of wine to
man. Behind him he was leaving an extraordinary new drink and the body of another
abandoned girl. On his departure, Erigone had hung herself from a tree. But here was no
royal frame to put her story in, and it was not to be handed down from one rhyme to the
next by a chain of poets. Erigone wouldn’t find her poets until much later, two scholars
of the latter days of the ancient world , who, oppressed like others by the times in which
they lived , felt almost obliged to write about secrets hitherto left untold. They were
Eratosthenes and Nonnus, tow Egyptians’.
The secret of bread had been revealed by Demeter in Attica , and a holy place, Eleusis,
had been established to celebrate the event. The secret of wine had been revealed in
Attica by Dionysus , to common people, but that day was to be commemorated only by
a ceremony with masks, dolls , and swings. There was something very obscure about
the whole business, and the ritual commemoration suggested an aura of playfulness at
once childish and sinister.
Dionysus had turned up in the role of Unknown Guest in the house of an old Attican
gardener , Icarius , who lived with his daughter Erigone and loved to plant new types of
trees. His house was a poor one. All the same , he welcomed the Stranger with the same
gesture with which Abrahan welcomed the angel , by keeping a place in his mind empty
and ready for his guest. It was from that gesture that every other gift would derive.
Erigone immediately went off to milk their goat for the guest. Sweetly , Dionysus
stooped her from making what a philologist would one day describe as ‘an adorable
faux pas’ He was about to reveal to her father ‘’ as a reward for his fair-mindedness and
devotion’’ something that no one had ever known before ; wine . And now Erigone was
pouring cup after cup of the new drink for her father. Icarius felt good. Then Dionysus
explained that this new drink was perhaps even more powerful than the bread Demeter
had revealed to other farmers, because it could both wake a man up and put him to
sleep, dissolve the pains that afflicted the heart and make them liquid and fleeting. Now
it was Icarius’s job to pass this revelation on to others, as Triptolemus had passed on
revelation of grain.
Icarius obeyed Dionysus orders. He got onto his cart and se off around Attica to show
people this plant with the wondrous juice. One evening he was drinking with a few
shepherds. Some of them fell into a deep sleep. It seemed they would never wake up.
The shepherd began to suspect Icarius was up to something. Maybe he’d come to poison
them and steal their sheep ::: They felt the impulse to kill. They surrounded Icarius .
One picked up a sickle , another a spade, a third an ax , a fourth a big stone. They all hit
out at the old man. Then , to finish the job, they ran him through with their cooking spit.
As he lay dying , Icarius remembered something that had happened not long before.
Dionysus had taught him how to plant the vine and look after them. Icarius watched
over their growth with the same love he had for his trees, waiting for the moment when
he would be able to squeeze the grapes with his own hands. One day he caught a goat
eating some vine leaves. He was overcome by anger and killed the animal on the spot.
Now he realized the goat had been himself.
But something else had happened that had to do with that goat. Icarius had skinned it,
put on its pelt , and with some other peasants, improvised a dance around the beast’s
mangled corpse. Icarius didn’t appreciate , as he lay dying , that the gesture had been
the origin of tragedy, but he did sense that the death of the goat was connected with
what was happening to him, the shepherds circling him , each one hitting him with a
different weapon , until he saw the spit that would pierce his heart.
As the origin of tragedy , all reconstructions ultimately come up against this
contradiction. On the one hand there is Eratosthenes remarks : ‘’It was then that the
inhabitants of Icarius danced around a goat for the first time ‘’. Here tragedy seems to
involve singing and dancing around the goat . But then Aristotle says that early tragedy
was the singing and dancing of the goats. An ancient and pointless dispute was to go on
for generations around this contradiction , which isn’t actually a contradiction at all. ‘’If
one wishes to dress up as a satyr , a goat, one first has to kill a goat and skin it ‘’
Eratosthenes and Aristotle were saying the same thing , except that Aristotle omits the
first and decisive part of the process ; the slaying of the goat. Thus it is to Eratosthenes
that, along with the first extremely accurate estimate of the circumference of the earth,
we owe an extremely concise definition of the process from which tragedy developed.
There are three phases . Icarius kills the goat ; Icarius skins the goat and stretches part
of the pelt into a wineskins ; Icarius and his friends dance around the goat and stamp on
the wineskin while wearing strips of the pelt. Thus the dance around the goat is alos a
dance of the goats. It is as if a long , tortuous , and obscure process were suddenly
reduced before our very eyes to a few shabby elements which are nevertheless capable
of realeasing an enormous power.