d ido a nd aeneas
Early Modern Culture, 2007 [20] D. Kartschoke, in the Orphic tradition. Here, Persephone gives
Didos Minne – Didos Schuld, in: R. Krohn (ed.),
Liebe als Literatur. Aufsätze zur erotischen Dichtung
in Deutschland, 1983,99–116 [21] P. Kern,
Beobachtungen zum Adaptionsprozess von
Vergils ‘Aeneis’ im Mittelalter, in: J. Heinzle
(ed.), Übersetzen im Mittelalter, 1996, 109–
133 [22] K. D. Koch, Die Aeneis als Opersujet.
Dramaturgische Wandlungen vom Frühbarock
bis zu Berlioz, 1990 [23] W. Kofler, Aeneas
und Vergil. Untersuchungen zur poetologischen
Dimension der ‘Aeneis’, 2003 [24] E. Krum–
men, Dido als Mänade und tragische Heroine.
Dionysische Thematik und Tragödientradition
in Vergils Didoerzählung, in: Poetica 36, 2004,
25–69 [25] E. Leube, Fortuna in Karthago. Die
Aeneas-Dido-Mythe Vergils in den romanischen
Literaturen vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert,
1969 [26] T. Molke, Der Didomythos in
der englischsprachigen Literatur, in: G. Binder
(ed.), Dido und Aeneas. Vergils Dido-Drama
und Aspekte seiner Rezeption, 2000, 229–250
[27] Y. Nadeau, The Death of Aeneas. Virgil’s
Version (and Ovid’s): an Insight into the Politics of
Virgil’s Poetry, in: Latomus, 59/2, 2000, 289–316
[28] S. N. Orso, A Mythological Subject by
Jordaens Reinterpreted, in: Record of the Art
Museum, Princeton University, 35/2, 1976,
2–13 [29] G. Rauner-Hafner, Die Vergil–
interpretation des Fulgentius. Bemerkungen zu
Gliederung und Absicht der ‘Expositio Virgilianae
continentiae’, in: Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 13,
1976, 7–49 [30] U. Schöning, Thebenroman –
Eneasroman – Trojaroman. Studien zur Rezeption
der Antike in der französischen Literatur des 12.
Jahrhunderts, 1991 [31] E. Simon, Art. Dido, in:
LIMC 8.1, 1997, 559–562 [32] A. Syndikus,
Dido zwischen Herrschaft und Minne. Zur
Umakzentuierung der Vorlagen bei Heinrich von
Veldeke, in: Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen
Sprache und Literatur 114, 1992, 57–107 [33]
C. Weber, The Dionysus in Aeneas, in: Classical
Philology, 97/4, 2002, 322–343.
philipp theisohn (tübingen)
Dionysus
(∆ιόνυσος/Diónysos, epic ∆ιώνυσος/DiÈnysos;
Βάκχος/Bákchos; Latin Dionysus, Bacchus)
A. Myth
It is very difficult in the case of D. to distin-
guish cult, myth and poetic invention. The fac-
tor common to all traditions is of D. as the god
of wine and fertility. ‘Transgression’ as a crucial
characteristic is directly inherent in his sphere of
influence. In Greek antiquity, Diodorus Siculus
(1st cent. BC) distinguished two Dionysoi (Diod.
Sic. 3,63,3–3,64,7): one a son of ’ Zeus and the
earth goddess ’ Demeter (or ’ Persephone) and
the other a son of Zeus and the mortal Semele.
Nonnus, writing in the 5th cent. AD, sanctioned
the complete amalgamation of the two narratives
which had to some extent already taken place
236
birth, by Zeus, to Zagreus, who is destined for
the throne of Olympus. ’ Hera then has the
illegitimate child killed by Titans disguised as
women. In the death-struggle, the boy alternately
changes shape into a snake, a lion and finally a
bull (Nonnus, Dion. 6,204). Zeus then fathers on
Semele a boy who is the double of the first D.
(Nonnus, Dion. 5,546f): This is done by making
the mortal woman consume the ground-up heart
of the son of the god in a drink.
According to the most influential tradition, D.
is a son of Zeus and Semele (Hom. Il. 14,325;
Hes. Theog. 940f.), who, when she looks up at
her beloved a second time after the conception,
burns to ashes. After the child has gestated in the
thigh of the god (hence the motif, mentioned esp.
in Ov. Met. 4,12, of bimater/‘born of two moth-
ers’, ‘second birth’) Zeus either (the traditions
differ) has ’ Hermes bring him to the mythical
land of Nysa (retrospective etymological deriva-
tion of ‘God of the city of Nysa’ – ‘Dio-Nysos’,
cf. Diod. Sic. 1,15,6) or gives him into the care
of Semele’s sister, Ino. The jealous Hera tries to
find the boy, who for his own protection is being
brought up disguised as a girl, at the house of his
foster-parents. She torments them to such mad-
ness that they kill their own children. According
to the testimony of Pausanias, however, Semele
never actually dies, but is declared the legitimate
spouse of Zeus. Only in Laconia was the story
passed down of ’ Cadmus putting the pregnant
Semele in a chest and abandoning her to the sea
because of her illegitimate child. In this tradition,
when the vessel comes ashore at Brassiae, the
mother is found dead but the child is unharmed.
At this point, Ino steps into adopt the young D.
and bring him up. His education is entrusted to
Silenus (’ Silenus, Satyr).
From the outset, D. is a god of many guises
and disguises, which initially serve to protect
him against Hera or kings who bear him mal-
ice. Whether as a kid (Apollod. 3,4,3), as a fig-
ure overgrown with ivy (later e.g. in Bocc. Gen.
5,25) or, like ’ Achilles, as a girl, he is always
found behind a mask. D. was from the earliest
times a wandering god, for instance travelling
through Egypt and Syria after Hera has struck
him with madness (Apollod. 3,5,1; Diod. Sic.
1,2,3; Plut. De Is. et Os. 28,34,35), as well as
the discoverer of wine (Apollod. 3,5,1; Diod.
Sic. 3,62,2–5). According to Euripides’ Bacchae,
he moves almost exclusively in regions that are
associated with viticulture: Lydia, Phrygia and
Western Asia as far as the Indus. Phrygia is of
prime importance to the cult associated with D.
According to Apollodorus, it is there that he
is initiated by Cybele/Rhea before his voyage
to India, from where he later returns in glory
237
to Greece with his host of followers (Apollod.
3,5,1).
Apollodorus records a plethora of narratives
of D., all of which take up the main theme of
misidentification – vengeance – identification
(Apollod. 3,5,1–3) and hence, not least, antici-
pate elements of tragedy. First, there is the story
of Lycurgus, king of the Edoni, who drives out
D. and his followers, whereupon the god seeks
refuge in the sea (cf. also Hom. Il. 6,130–137).
Some time later, however, D.’ female followers,
the Bacchants or Maenads, drive the king insane,
so that he mistakes his own son for the branch of
a vine and kills him and hacks him to pieces with
an axe. His sanity restored, Lycurgus learns from
the oracle that, in further punishment, the land
will lie barren until the king himself is executed.
According to (Pseudo-)Apollodorus, he is ripped
to pieces by horses. In Sophocles, however, he is
merely sedated with wine and seduced into an
act of incest with his mother (Soph. Ant. 955f.).
Homer (Hom. Il. 6,139f.), meanwhile, has him
blinded by Zeus.
The story of D.’ ‘homecoming’ to Thebes
would also be influential. King Pentheus, who,
as the son of Semele’s sister Agave is related
to D., not only objects to D.’ decree that the
women of the city should process in Bacchic
frenzy across Mount Cithaeron, because all of
them (esp. the sisters of Pentheus’ mother) have
denied D.’ divine origins, but he also has the
god tied up and imprisoned in a stable. D. then
reveals himself with signs and wonders (lightning
and earthquakes in Eur. Bacch. 585–587), and
he cunningly persuades the king to observe the
Bacchic revel from the topmost branches of a
fir-tree, disguised as a Maenad. Pentheus is dis-
covered and dismembered by the raging women,
especially his mother, who mistakes him for an
animal.
But D. is not only a jealous god who knows
the art of effective revenge. He is also a true
friend to those who acknowledge him. He gives
gifts of vines in thanks for generous hospitality
(Apollod. 1,63; 1,65) – although this becomes
the doom of Icarius, D.’s amicable host: he gives
drinks to Attic shepherds, who, as the wine takes
effect, believe themselves to have been poisoned.
They kill Icarius and throw his body down a
well, whereupon his daughter Erigone hangs her-
self. D. avenges this by unleashing an epidemic
of suicide among the Athenians’ daughters. The
murderers’ execution lifts the curse and Icarius
and his daughter are transformed into celestial
constellations (transmitted in Myth. Vat. 2,61;
cf. Ov. Met. 6,125). The story of ’ Midas is also
popular: he extends his hospitality to Silenus,
who has become lost on his way to India. In
return, D. fulfils Midas’ wish for every object he
di ony s us
touches to turn to gold. D. proves merciful, and
lifts the disastrous spell (Hyg. Fab. 191,3–5).
The Odyssey is the main source for the rela-
tionship of D. and ’ Ariadne so frequently por-
trayed in (esp. Baroque) art and music, a union
from which Thoas, Staphylus, Oenopion and
Peparethus are said to have been born. Here, D.
drives the wife of ’ Theseus off course to the
island of Dia, later called Naxos, where Theseus
cedes her to the god (Hom. Od. 11,321–325;
cf. also Ov. Met. 8,174–177). Alongside this
association, central to the god’s biography, and
on an equal footing with it, Nonnus also men-
tions D.’ passionate love for the beautiful satyr
(’ Silen, Satyr) Ampelus (‘grape-vine’, Nonnus,
Dion. 10,175–192).
D. occurs once more in Pausanias (Paus.
2,37,5), as a god who reconciles separate spheres
and realms. This quality would be critical to his
fusion into Christianity in late antiquity and to
his reception in the age of Idealism. He descends
into Hades to fetch his mother Semele from
the realm of the dead and raise her up to the
celestial heights of the Olympian gods. Also
significant in iconography is his overpowering
of ’ Hephaestus, whom he first makes drunk
and then takes to Olympus on a mule to free
his stepmother Hera, after Hephaestus has been
forced to bind her to her throne with invis-
ible bonds Hyg. Fab. 166,1f.). Finally, D. takes
part in the Gigantomachy on the side of the
Olympians (another amalgamation of Zagreus
and D.).
B. Reception
B.1. Antiquity
B.1.1. Philosophy and literature
As well as the mythic tradition, particular
importance attaches to the reports of the cults
associated with D. It is sometimes easier to anal-
yse the narratives based on the cult than vice
versa. Striking features of the ‘narrative’ D.,
(e.g. his lightning-fast appearance in the guise
of another, usually preceded by an epidemia
(‘arrival’); the exorbitant reaction to his mis-
idenfication, expressed in curses that endure for
generations; his preference for a female retinue)
suggest him as a god alien to Greek antiquity, an
inference studies in religious history have sought
to affirm ([18]; [16]; [6], also Johann Jakob
Bachofen’s theory of the D. cult as a violent tran-
sition from matriarchy to patriarchy [2]). The
transgression of legitimate spheres of existence is
apparent in cult, for instance at Athens, when D.
does not demand a chaste priestess as compan-
ion in his temple, but goes himself to the house
of the wife of the (sacral) king, the basilinna
(see below B.2.1.), to enact a mystical wedding
there (Aristot. Pol. 3,5): “In no other act of his
d iony sus
epiphany does his presence reveal itself in such
an impetuous seizure of possession” [16. 80].
Against ’ Athena as goddess of the city, with
whom he has a direct relation via the person of
their shared father ’ Zeus, D. must compensate
for a deficit of divinity, and this drives the sym-
bolic order of religion to its limits. There are
profound regional differences in the cult of D.
He is said to originate in Thrace, from where this
foreign god, in no way restricted to vegetation
and nature, spread into Greece probably around
the 8th cent. BC. The Thracian cult is thought
to have been related to the orgiastic cults of Asia
Minor. Herodotus reports the Thracians’ belief
in the immortality of the soul (which would
explain, among other things, Heraclitus’ identi-
fication of D. with Hades; many of the ceremo-
nies that took place for D. also included funerary
rites, which confirms him as a god of inversion
and liminality). D.’ success in Greece encour-
ages speculation that the indigenous deities may
have been undergoing a crisis of legitimacy. One
indication of this may be D.’ joining up with
’ Apollo, as attested by the history of the oracu-
lar sanctuary at Delphi (in the transition from
the lot oracle to the inspiration oracle): it may be
that the priests sought to prevent the imminent
collapse of their cult site by the very means of
adopting D. He reigned there during the winter
months.
Much thought has been provoked by the fact
that the orgiastic cult at any rate seems to have
been reserved for women, called Maenads, or,
e.g. at Delphi, Thyiads, who roamed through the
forests and mountains in an ecstatic frenzy dis-
membering fawns and other woodland creatures.
There is a tradition (esp. in Pausanias) that the
god was present in the form of a goat or other
animal, in which guise he himself was killed. The
range of readings of this ritual excess of violence
extends from Walter F. Otto’s concept of hys-
terical subjective dissolution at the bidding of
the ‘raging god’ (mainomenos Dionysos, Hom.
Il. 6,132) – a tumult simultaneously celebrating
life and death which in spring (the season of the
emergence of new life) becomes painfully aware
of the oneness of coming to life and coming
to death, and affirms the transrational basis of
being in frenzy – to its location within a herme-
neutics anchored in Judaeo-Christian culture,
which understands the dismembering of animals
as a displacement of the dismemberment of D.,
i.e. as a sacrificial offering (see below B.4.1.2.,
Freud and [9]).
The overlap of ‘foreign’ and ‘female’ is a
prominent characteristic of the cult, e.g. in
Strabo’s account (Str. 4,4,3–5) of the island of
the ‘Namnetes’, who only briefly visited their
menfolk for intercourse on the mainland, spend-
238
ing the rest of their time in complete devotion
to the god, conducting secretive rituals. Once
every year, his sanctuary was unroofed, then a
new roof put on the same day. A woman who
dropped her load of bricks during this process
would be dismembered by the others, who would
carry the pieces around the sanctuary, shrieking.
D. here appears in his double nature, as the god
who leaps or inspires leaping (the sphere of dis-
course of ‘leaping’ includes the entire realm of
fruitfulness, wine and sexuality) and the god who
induces the false step (the semantic shift from
anaskelos (‘raised leg’, for Dionysian games)
to the false derivation from askos (‘wineskin’)
might also be considered here) [6]. D. demands a
test that wine has been properly diluted: to stand
on one leg (or to hop on a wineskin). Stumbling
or falling are signs of a lack of respect for the
god as a bringer of culture. The Namnetes cel-
ebrate the presence of the hidden god in their
killing of the woman who has fallen. Also inter-
esting in this context is Pausanias’ account of D.
Sphaleotas (Paus. 10,19,3), to whom sacrifices
were made in a niche of the sanctuary of the
Delphic Apollo, to commemorate the defeat of
the king of Mysia, between whose feet D. made
a vine grow during his combat with ’ Achilles,
so that the king became caught up in it. While
the transition to a moral allegory is suggested
here, the cult of the Namnetes primarily affords
insights into a female society that is autonomous
through its service to the god. The peripheries
of Greek influence remained largely unaffected
by the taming of D. in the moral categories of
excess and healthy enjoyment, as practised since
Eubulus in the 4th cent. BC.
Those cults centring on D. as Zagreus and
taking as their theme his battle, death and
longed-for reawakening also became influential.
On Crete, a pregnant cow was kept in D.’ hon-
our, and its newborn calf was sacrificed to the
god (Lycophr. 29 [16.174f.]). The identification
of Zagreus with D., which is disputed at least in
Hesiod’s Theogony, was asserted by the Orphics
and became the focus of the mystery cult, their
conventions known as bakcheia. The metaphysi-
cal condition for this was their theory (which
influenced Pythagoreanism) of the transmigration
of souls. There was also a cosmology according to
which D. represented the principle of individua-
tion (cf. Plut. Mor. 388e-389a): the imperishable
god takes pleasure in changing himself, igniting
in fire and ultimately making everything equiva-
lent to everything else as Apollo, whose oneness
negates multiplicity. Occasionally, though, his
variety of forms, states and forces brings forth
a ‘world’ as a multiplicity (only in the modern
age would such an explicit identification of D.
with Apollo re-emerge, esp. in Nietzsche, see
239
below B.4.1.1.). Plurality is expressed by the
imagery of dismemberment, the figure of which
is D.-Zagreus.
Plutarch’s report of another Delphic cult is
worthy of mention in the context of various
doctrines of cyclicality. Here, the Thyiades were
said to attempt to revivify D. Liknites (D. ‘lying
in the winnowing-fan’) with songs (Plut. Is. 35).
The dithyrambs were sung for three months, but
before this the Thyiades would climb Parnassus,
where they performed wild dances in sacred
delirium. The fact that this is a staging of death
and rebirth (although Plutarch does not explic-
itly note this), and moreover one that takes place
in winter, at the time of the renewal of sunlight –
a structurally similar cult on the island of Andros
is attested in the epiphany celebrations on the
nones of January – permits the inference that
Zagreus and Liknites were identical. Indeed, this
seems more evident in the cult than in the myths.
Both Plato (Pl. Leg. 700b) and Pindar (Pind. fr.
83) associate the dithyramb with the myth of the
birth of D.
D. was the most important mystery deity after
’ Demeter. Plato (Pl. Phdr. 265b4) describes his
mania (‘rage’) as “intrinsic to the initiations”.
His theatrical aspect above all was also funda-
mental to the early spectrum of rituals associ-
ated with him. The focus of the so-called Bacchic
mysteries (bakcheuein denotes the entire scope of
cultic activities from at least the 5th cent. BC to
late antiquity) is on the hope of a blessed fate
in the afterlife, rebirth or even deification and
animal metamorphosis, elements associable with
the concepts used by Aristotle to characterize
Athenian tragedy. Opinions differ on the emer-
gence of tragedy from the Dionysia, the festival of
Dionysus (esp. the re-enactment of his death, the
lament for the dead god, the plea for his return).
The affinity of stage or cultic music (aulos music)
with cathartic orgiastics and Dionysian initiation
(the bakcheia) as described by Aristotle (Aristot.
Pol. 1341a21–25; 1341b32–1342b18) and later
made proverbial by Nietzsche is important. The
known vase-paintings attest to the primacy of
wind and percussion instruments.
Three of the five dramatic stage festivals dedi-
cated to D. (the Rural Dionysia, the Lenaea and
the City Dionysia) took place at Athens, city of
the great tragic and comic poets of the Classical
period. Theatre buildings were often directly
adjacent to sanctuaries of D. D. was present in
statue form at performances dedicated to him.
On stage, the association of myth and ritual was
most clearly evident in the satyr plays, esp. the
satyr chorus. The plots of the Athenian trag-
edies took up central Dionysian motifs (mis-
identification – vengeance – curse). D.’ nature
as the masked, constantly mutable god present
di ony s us
in his own absence also contributed to his func-
tion as lord of the theatre. In no other figure
is the mask itself a manifestation of the god,
evoking dramatic qualities of distance and near-
ness, suggestive liveliness and deathly rigidity,
through the frontality of its appearance. The
mask, which originally simply indicated age and
gender [4.85–98], enabled ‘transformative unity’
and ‘unifying transformation’, so that the very
form of theatre emerged from the ‘content’ of
the god figure.
Of central importance to our knowledge
of the tradition, and to tragic poetry and our
knowledge of the cult, are Euripides’ Bacchae
and Aeschylus’ (lost) Lycurgia, which tells of
Lycurgus’ resistance to the newly-emergent cult
and hence reflects the alien nature not only of the
god himself but also of the rituals. As in the ’
Prometheus trilogy, however, an accommodation
is reached between Lycurgus and D. Aeschylus
also, like Euripides, develops the Theban legend
of Pentheus, and he establishes the function of
the dithyramb: “Let the dithyramb, half-song,
half-shout, follow the Dionysian horde” (TrGF
3, Aesch. Lyc. 355).
The most important example of D.’ appear-
ance in comedy is the Frogs of Aristophanes (405
BC), which partly takes a critical approach to the
mythology and poetry. The tragedy here becomes
the subject of comedy, as D. is permitted to bring
the best of the three great tragedians Euripides,
Sophocles or Aeschylus out of the Underworld.
As the contest is to take place in Hades, D.
approaches his half-brother ’ Heracles, who
once dragged Cerberus out of Hades, to bor-
row his lion’s skin and club, a request which is
granted, but not without some mockery.
Diodorus Siculus’ clarificatory delineation of
the different D. traditions in his Bibliotheca
(c. 60–30 BC) is important in mythography,
and is an early work preparing the ground for
the study of comparative religion. The associa-
tion between D. and the Egyptian Osiris is here
explicitly discussed for the first time. “According
to their legend, he wandered across the whole
world, invented wine and taught men to plant
vines, and in thanks for this he was by unani-
mous acclaim accorded immortality” (Diod. Sic.
1,15,6–8). “While he was in Aethiopia, the satyrs
were presented to him – a people said to be
hairy about the hips – for Osiris enjoyed laugh-
ter and was a friend of music and the dance”
(Diod. Sic. 1,18,4). Later, Plutarch pointed to
the resemblances between Zagreus and Osiris
in particular in regard to their deaths, so that
one strand of the reception of D. would almost
entirely come to see him as a manifestation of
the Egyptian god (one characteristic example
Benjamin Hederich’s Gründliches mythologisches
d iony sus
Lexikon, 1770). One aspect originally not pres-
ent in Western mythology emerged through the
‘Indian D.’, whom Diodorus portrays as a just
ruler, extraordinarily wise in legislation (see
below B.2.1.).
B.1.2. Fine arts
In general, it can be said that the representa-
tion of D. in the visual arts developed from a
dignified, tall, fully-dressed, bearded man to an
often naked, fragile and sometimes wine-drunk
youth (from the 5th cent. BC). The earliest depic-
tions are found on vases, where he usually has a
garland of ivy in his hair and a drinking-vessel in
his hand (sometimes, as on the so-called ‘Lenaia
vases’ of Etruria and elsewhere, a mask hung on
a pillar also suffices to identify him). Vases of
an early date as yet lack the thyrsus staff, but
sometimes have a sceptre as attribute. Attention
is drawn to the metamorphoses of D. by having
him accompanied by goats, bulls, panthers and
mules. His retinue, i.e. Maenads, ’ silens, satyrs,
is also often shown, their demeanour ranging from
relaxed to debauched. The god himself, however,
refrains from such excess. A mixing-vessel from
Crete gives a portrayal of the aulos music that
dominated in the cult, showing the procession led
by the flute-playing satyr ’ Marsyas alongside a
D. striding along in high spirits, with kantharos
and long cloak (so-called Berlin Painter, c. 450
BC, Paris, Louvre). The myths of D. also become
visible with time. In the 6th cent. BC, D. is often
shown with ’ Hephaestus, requisitioned to res-
cue ’ Hera, and later (at the time of the trage-
dians Euripides and Aeschylus, 5th cent. BC) the
scenes with Lycurgus and Pentheus appear (e.g.
on the lost wall-painting at the Athenian Temple
of D. [10. 37]), as does the extremely detailed
story of D.’ childhood. The love story of D. and
the Cretan princess ’ Ariadne, meanwhile, only
began to find more widespread representation in
the Hellenistic period, esp. on Roman sarcophagi
(reliefs).
Among the scenes of D. among the Olympian
deities is the relief on the Parthenon frieze (east-
ern pediment), where the god, portrayed (for the
first time) as a youth, observes the birth of
’ Athena. Gigantomachy reliefs show D., from
the mid-6th cent., with no weapons but grapes
and thyrsus.
No statues from the Archaic period have
been firmly identified as D., but there are coin
finds. The portrayal of the youthful D. corre-
sponds to Praxiteles’ artistic ideal. Numerous
statues and heads survive from the 4th cent. on.
From around 300 BC, there are also depictions
of the young D. enlisting the aid of Silenus, e.g.
the statues showing the child god resting in the
arms of Silenus (e.g. Rome, Vatican Museums,
Galleria Chiaramonti; such images in particu-
lar bring D. into close proximity with Christ).
240
Portrayals such as the wall fresco frieze in the
Villa dei Misteri at Pompeii, showing D. and
Ariadne (70–60 BC), can be interpreted in the
context of the mystery cult.
B.2. Late antiquity and Middle Ages
B.2.1. Philosophy and literature
The most important text of late antique D.
reception is Nonnus’ Dionysiaca (5th cent.),
which brings together the various strands of tra-
dition and presents the god as a just and suc-
cessful ruler.
For all the diversity of his mythogenic quali-
ties, this epic above all celebrates D. as the voy-
ager to India, and hence presents the background
to the panegyric D. literature so widespread in
late antiquity. The idea of D. as a historical ruler
figure gained prominence from Lucian on, pre-
vailing, for instance, in Callisthenes’ Alexander
romance. The transformation from the god rul-
ing through mania to the god winning battles in
Asia through his courage and foresight derives
directly from the campaigns of Alexander the
Great (356–323 BC). An association is made
here between D. and the war god ’ Ares – albeit
rather differently from Euripides: “He also pos-
sesses a share of Ares’ nature. For terror some-
times flutters an army under arms and in its ranks
before it even touches a spear, and this too is a
frenzy from Dionysus.” (Eur. Bacch. 302–305) –
as he is made to combine kingly and warlike
attributes as D. triumphator. His cultic entry into
the house of the wife of the archon basileus (see
above, B.1.1.) at Athens, which took place at the
beginning of spring, may have been celebrated as
a rite of renewal of vegetal life, but here it seems
that the confirmation of royal authority and cos-
mic order coincide. The incorporation of D. into
such a context extended from the Hellenistic
period into Roman late antiquity.
However, D.’ figuration as ruler enabled
the displacement of the genuinely mythological
diversity of the figure and his reduction in late
antiquity and esp. the Middle Ages to the type
of a drink-sodden, morally dubious god of wine.
From the Roman point of view (expressed by
Seneca and Livy alike), Alexander may have been
accorded the initially positive qualities of the
expansionist, territory-creating conqueror (the
world-wandering D. thereby being interpreted as
a civilizing force), but this simultaneously laid the
foundations of an accusation against the great
figures of world history that they ultimately fall
victim to the unmanageability of their turbulent,
mercenary egos. While such criticism applied to
the rulers themselves, against the background of
the attributions of D., the intoxication of power
was derived directly from the god himself. It must
be said, however, that this tendency was already
inherent in the ancient D. Horace was already
asserting that D./B. is “not fit enough for fight-
241
ing” (“non sat idoneus pugnae ferebaris”: (Hor.
Carm. 2,19,26f.), “more suited to dances, fun
and games” (“choreis aptior et iocis ludoque”:
Hor. Carm. 2,19,25f.). The wandering god, con-
cealing himself behind masks, was becoming
associated with the odium of a deceiver.
Philosophical and speculative reception of
D. proved productive and its impact lasted into
the so-called ‘Sattelzeit’ (‘watershed period’)
towards modernism (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schelling, Friedrich Nietzsche). Early Christian
thought, seeking to advance its claim to uni-
versality in the face of the pagan traditions of
the west, had to engage with that tradition on
at least one, shared semantic field. The apologia
for Christianity given by Clement of Alexandria
is significant here, that it was the ‘mystery of
the logos’ against the Dionysian ‘mystery of
intoxication’. It must be noted, however, that
the rites associated with D. primarily occurred
in the Roman Empire as a mystery cult, i.e. in
the form of an exclusive religious phenomenon
of only slight mythological definition. In this,
it presented points of contact with Christianity
(see above B.2.2.). In his Exhortation to the
Greeks (Protreptikos), Clement adopted images
and metaphors from the sphere of D. The seer
Tiresias would thus henceforth support him-
self on “the wood” (i.e. the Cross). Similarly,
the semantics of ‘illumination’ intrinsic to the
mystery cults was deployed. The alliance of
intoxication and salvation, of eccentric spiritu-
ality and logos, favoured the double nature of
the transportation induced by wine throughout
late antiquity and the Middle Ages. While on
the one hand, negative consequences (e.g. stag-
gering, sexual debauchery) make clear the degen-
eracy of mortal life in this world, on the other
hand that reference to sources of inspiration (e.g.
divine or poetic intoxication, religious ecstasy of
the Eucharist) is preserved which would later be
incorporated into the Neoplatonist discourse (see
below B.3.1.1.).
For the natural philosopher William of
Conches, there were even analogies between D.
and the essence and influence of the Holy Spirit.
Divine love, to William, expressed itself not only
as caritas or contemplation, but also encompassed
sexuality and procreation in equal measure (cf.
the commentary to Martianus Capella, De nup-
tiis Philologiae et Mercurii). It is Christian uni-
versalism, no less, which is here turning against
the Pauline focus on the spirit, denying all physi-
cality, which had dominated around the turn of
the millennium. It must be emphasized that D.’
incorporation into Christianity in no way took
place on the basis of mythography, morality or
even historical approaches, but that the recep-
tion of certain of his attributes simply advanced
the emergence of a symbolic understanding of
di ony s us
the cosmos, which sought to integrate disparate
knowledge not authorized by the Church (e.g. of
the early natural sciences) at the peripheries of
the official doctrines.
With lukewarm interest in ‘mythological biog-
raphy’ in the Middle Ages as Greek sources were
forgotten and knowledge of Greek declined, the
official D., as the Latin Bacchus (B.), appeared
mostly as an allegory of drunkenness and car-
nal desires (the four ‘children’ of the union with
’ Ariadne became allegorized as scions of ine-
briation: dipsomania, forgetfulness, sexual lust,
madness; cf. Myth. Vat. II/Bernardus Silvestris,
12th cent.).
Augustine had paved the way here with his
etymology of the Roman god Liber, identified
from early times with D., as a symbol of sexual
release (cf. Aug. Civ. 6,9 and 7,21). The bynames
that are still known almost all also fell into this
category [7]. D. was opposed to Christianity as
a libertine and rager in German medieval litera-
ture, standing for all the ancient gods, cf. the
religious disputation between the Greek and the
Christian Barlaam in Rudolf von Ems’ Barlaam,
and in Otto von Freising’s Laubacher Barlaam.
The only occasion on which D. thus appears in
a positive light in medieval poetry is in praise of
wine. The association of wine poetry and Bacchic
poetry was made by the rhetorical practice of
metonymy and expressed itself as the personal-
ization of motives for action associated with the
enjoyment of wine (cf. the anonymous Carmina
Burana, 12th and 13th cents.). D. unfurled
explosive power, however, wherever the conven-
tionalized allegories parodied the partly ritual-
ized social and eating practices of the Middle
Ages in quasi-religious structures, whether in the
so-called ‘Bacchic Masses’ (a parody of the Mass
and the liturgy in the context of the monastic
way of life) or 9th-cent. potationes (‘drinking-
bouts’). Such genres not only provided relief from
the constant presence of death, but also signified,
in the form of wine as a shared point of reference
for people in the earthly Paradise, a society in
which social distinctions were abolished; the tab-
erna as a counter-image to the ecclesia (‘church’)
is sometimes also read as a documentation of
anti-clerical consciousness [21].
B.2.2. Fine arts
In line with the historical interpretation of D.,
numerous representations are preserved (mostly
on sarcophagi, cf. fig. 1) from the 2nd cent. AD
showing his triumphal homecoming from India.
D. is often shown on a chariot drawn by
’ Centaurs, elephants, oxen or tigers. It is clear
that D. is not only being portrayed as a success-
ful warrior here, but also a bringer of culture:
a mosaic in Sousse, Tunisia (late 2nd/early 3rd
cent.) has D. and ’ Ariadne together driving a
chariot drawn by predators, while ’ Heracles
d iony sus
Fig. 1: Procession of Bacchus and Ariadne, sarcophagus, front panel, left half, detail; mid-2nd
cent. BC, London, British Museum.
walks behind them. At the lower edge of the
image, animals drink from wine bowls and a lion
peacefully bears a satyr on its back. This motif
was also used, mostly on reliefs, for the por-
trayal of triumphs of Roman emperors, with the
emperor and his wife on a chariot drawn by
’ Centaurs, the opponent trodden underfoot, while
the wreath of ivy or laurel is handed down from
the upper edge of the image (cf. the so-called
Hague Sardonyx, the triumph of Claudius or
Constantine, The Hague, Royal Coin Cabinet).
These representations blend the episodes of
military success and the god’s visit to Arabia
associated with the gift of the vine, which in the
Dionysiaca follow one another (Nonnus, Dion.
40,275–280 and 40,291–297). The myth of D.
is suitable as the epitome of the ruler apotheosis
not least because, in Imperial Rome, the char-
iot was exclusively reserved for the use of the
emperor and his victorious generals [18. 36].
The Mausoleum of Constantia attests to the
appropriation of Dionysian/Bacchic symbolism
in the Christian context in 4th-cent. Rome, as
does the Julian Mausoleum beneath St. Peter’s
on the grounds of a late antique Roman necrop-
olis in the 6th cent. Grapes firstly indicate the
real presence of Christ in his Eucharistic guise,
while also suggesting the expectation of new
life as embodied in the Messiah through the
Dionysian spring myth. In the ascendant chariot
in the vault mosaic under St. Peter’s, references
to the sun god intermingle with those to the
god of wine. However, in interpreting early
Christian allegories, relating wine symbolism to
242
D. is only possible in the overall context of the
representation.
D. is sometimes discussed, not entirely accu-
rately, as a prefiguration of Christ in the Middle
Ages (in fact, the god as a whole was never
entirely subjected to Christological function,
even in the form of a ruler allegory), but what
is much more evident than the incorporation of
Dionysian attributes into Christian iconography
is the morally judgemental figuration of D. as
a soft and feminized god of wine, frolicsomely
bending forward and tottering along, with a
sickle in his right hand and the soporific bea-
ker in his left. This, at least, is how Martianus
Capella was already characterizing him in the 5th
cent. Fulgentius expatiates on the ancient iconog-
raphy, and offers an allegorical model of inter-
pretation that would prove valid to artists and
recipients alike and whose success would endure
to the end of the 18th cent.: D./B., he says, rides
on tigers, because drunkenness is associated with
wildness. He is shown young, because drunken-
ness never leads to maturity. He is naked because
drunks are robbed of their clothes and are inca-
pable of keeping secrets (striking depiction in
an early 15th-cent. manuscript: Ymago bachi
et ebrietatis secundum fulgencium et Rabanum,
Rome, Vatican Library, Cod. Palat. lat. 1726,
folio 45v). Isidore of Seville again drew upon
Augustine’s etymology of sexual release in Liber
and liberamentum (‘deliverance’) for D. The body
of B., he says, is presented as effeminate because
wine awakens lust and women follow him. He
wears a crown of vine leaves and horns because
243
wine enjoyed in moderation promotes convivial-
ity, but in excess it leads to strife. Neither the
mythical narrative as such, nor the prefigura-
tion of Christ, then, plays a decisive role in the
Middle Ages [7].
B.3. Early modern period
B.3.1. Philosophy and literature
B.3.1.1. 15th–17th centuries
The transformation in philological compe-
tence in the Renaissance compared to the Middle
Ages opened new dimensions in mythical recep-
tion, in consequence of which ancient mythology
contributed to the design of independent secular
spheres, while moral and theological allegory
lost its primacy. D. owes his high degree of dif-
ferentiation and his broader allegorical spectrum
above all to the rediscovery of Diodorus Siculus’
Bibliotheca (see above, B.1.1.), unknown in
the Middle Ages, of which a Sicilian transcrip-
tion from around 1300 and a first Latin trans-
lation from 1449 are attested. In the course of
this rediscovery, the theme of the god’s peaceful
and blessed rule emerged alongside that of the
negative value judgment of the drunken, delu-
sional god that had characterized the preced-
ing centuries. The sinful, frivolous D. was now
wholly identified in the relevant divine genealo-
gies with the son of ’ Zeus and Semele, while
the Renaissance ascribed the qualities of the cul-
tural hero to the Egyptian D. (Osiris) – although
this by no means prevented the enrichment of
the Egyptian D. with Bacchantic narratives. The
Indian D., whom Diodorus largely relieved of
transcendental content, could meanwhile even
be drawn upon as a founder of norms imma-
nent in the world. At the Council of Florence
in 1439, Georgius Gemistus Plethon recognized
him – entirely in accord with Italian commentary
literature of the time (e.g. Francesco Filelfo) – as
an outstanding legislator and legal theoretician.
Syncretisms in view of the historical D. con-
tinued through the relatively new genre of the
world chronicle (cf. e.g. Giacomo Filippo Foresti,
Supplementum Chronicarum, 1483), in which D.
is mentioned, mostly drawing upon Augustine, as
an ancient deity, while the Egyptian and Indian
D. are fused into a single figure (Herodotus and
Philostratus were other sources used here for
D.-Osiris). It becomes clear in Coluccio Salutati’s
De laboribus Herculis (1400) how domesticated
the mythical violence of the god had become by
this point when the author interprets the myth of
the death of ’ Orpheus by Maenads spurred on
by D. as a punishment for the poet’s pederasty,
practised after he finally lost Eurydice, thus pro-
moting D. as an advocate of sexual propriety.
The exploration of D. reached a high-point
in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gen-
tilium, in which the author firstly combines and
compares traditions, and secondly – unlike the
di ony s us
medieval interpreters – promotes the fable above
the various allegorical layers of meaning (“ad fig-
menta tendamus”, 5,25,12). The mythical nar-
rative, Boccaccio argues, should not vanish into
an all-encompassing corpus of Christian soterio-
logical truths, but should be allowed its impact
as secular wisdom, with a relevance to secular
history and intramundane morality.
The etymological interest of the Renaissance,
a mythography closely directed on the linguistic
material (the names and bynames of the ancient
gods), did not, however, keep alive the ‘grand
narrative’ of the god, but rather investigated
particular aspects of it. Whereas just eighteen
bynames of D. were known in the Middle Ages,
Johannes Basilius Herold, perhaps the most
important German Renaissance mythographer,
lists 84 [7.296 and 209]. Obviously, this rendered
impossible any historical mythography, and soon
any historical interpretation, of the mythological
D. However, the Humanist view of history as the
‘schoolmistress of life’ (after Cicero’s De oratore)
bestowed upon D. a contrasting function just as
late antiquity had, so that D. is always pres-
ent as the conqueror of India (for this reason,
he appears, albeit in the context of a topos of
supersession coloured by Christianity, in 16th-
cent. praise poetry, e.g. Francesco Franchini’s
poem about Hernán Cortés: “And so Cortesius
is greater than Bacchus. For he did not wish/
Himself to be a god: but Bacchus was a god
by his violence”; cf. also Tito Strozzi’s Borsias,
1472–1474, on Borso d’Este: “He [D.] sullied
his achievements with excesses, and the former
[Heracles] obeyed necessity, but the dignity of
Borso is taintless. Though he destroyed no man
or monster with weapons, this victor tamed
appetency with reason.” [26.45])
The association between D. and the institu-
tion of the triumph, which had generally been of
little importance in the Middle Ages, was now
revived, no doubt partly because of the rediscov-
ered Roman sarcophagus reliefs. There are par-
ticular indications of this in the military writings
of the Renaissance. It is relevant in this context
that the Italian Cinquecento saw the ancient
worship of D. in terms of the ‘procession of B.’,
in which the motif of the triumph blended with
that of liberation (refined to a sacramental con-
cept), with D. Lysios as the representative of life
revelling in existence, of a sensation of pleasur-
able relaxation elevated to the divine.
The disputes played out in the approach to
the Reformation and during it (freedom of will
and God-given potential of self-empowerment
in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; degeneracy
of the body founded in original sin, only to be
abolished by grace, in Erasmus of Rotterdam), as
to which of the ideal lives to emphasize – the vita
activa or the vita contemplativa – approached
d iony sus
a consensus in the Italian Renaissance, partly
through physiological explanations of the doc-
trine of affects, so that a relatively autonomous
sphere of discourse of earthly life was now scien-
tifically sanctioned. According to this, D. was the
embodiment of the vita voluptuaria, and accord-
ing to Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili (1499), this occupied the position mid-
way between the two aforementioned ways of
life, as a life focused on the present, enjoyment
of which the very transience of all earthly life
encouraged. In this context, D. lost his orgias-
tic impact, standing instead for a sociable life
obligated to the ’ Muses, which was already
associated with the carefully planned Carnival
festivals of the time through the term baccha-
nalia (the validity of the objection of debauched
‘Epicureanism’ is thus limited, as even a compar-
atively modest life can be celebrated under the
auspices of D., according to Girolamo Balbi). It
was in this context, as a canto carnascialesco,
that perhaps the most famous Renaissance poem
about D. appeared, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Tri-
onfo di Bacco e Arianna (1490), although recent
research has proposed that it may also be read
as a Neoplatonist allegory [25.106–110]. D.
served as an object of projection and a sym-
bol at court. As in antiquity, he and his retinue
dominated the theatrical performances associ-
ated with court festivities (cf. Tristano Calco,
Nuptiae Mediolanensium ducum about the 1489
marriage of Gian Galeazzo Sforza and Isabella
of Aragon; cf. also the Ludus Dianae of Conrad
Celtis for Emperor Maximilian, c. 1501).
The so-called ‘winged B.’ elicited another
sphere of influence for D.: D. as inspiration for
poets and philosophers. “The vine of poetry
tended by the Muses” (Plut. Mor. 1) is a Dionysian
plant, and François Rabelais invoked it in 1546
in the prologue of his Tiers Livre de Pantagruel:
“Homer never wrote sober. Cato only ever wrote
after drinking.” The inspirational power of wine
also features in the Renaissance ‘hymns to B.’
(cf. esp. Marcus Antonius Flaminius, 1515). It
must be noted here that the Greek strand of tra-
dition (D. as patron of the dramatic arts) and the
Roman (D./B. as patron of poets, cf. Prop. 4,1)
flowed together from 1500, while a stable tradi-
tion persisted from the Middle Ages in deriving
satire from the satyrs in the service of D. The
subordination of the Dionysian Mount Cithaeron
to Apollo’s Helicon was thus at least temporarily
abolished (Rabelais: “Just let me take a swig or
two from this bottle – she is my one and only
true Helicon”), and ’ Apollo and D. were some-
times explicitly declared to be identical (Johannes
Sulpitius, Philippus Beroaldus). In the context of
the vita voluptuaria – and in view of the hierar-
chy favouring the Apollonian realm of light that
still dominated the pictorial representations of
the time – D.’ appeal for Renaissance poets can
244
also be explained by his coming to be seen more
as the ‘God of Making Poetry’ than the ‘God of
Poetry’ (similar: [7.487]).
The inspirational power already ascribed to
D. in Plato’s Phaedrus (i.a. 245a) appeared in
two respects in the world of the Neoplatonist
schools (all of which shared the conception of a
system of stepwise gradation mediating between
the poles of spirit and matter, with the auton-
omy of the intellect emphasized as the means of
return to the supreme principle). Firstly, as wine,
effecting deliverance from disease and mental
constraints, and secondly as a mystical ardour
for the divine. The first of these aspects propa-
gated the purifying element of moisture, already
drawn upon in the idea developed in Plutarch’s
Moralia of the caterpillar metamorphosing into
a butterfly (one of the meanings of the Greek
psyche) as an allegory of the destiny of the soul
as a medium of transformation, and which had
its place in the medieval speculations of natu-
ral philosophy. Mystical ardour, conversely,
discussed by Marsilio Ficino in his commentary
on Plato’s Symposium, was one of four steps of
the soul on its way from temporality to eternity.
Through purification, sacrifice and cultic ritual, it
assisted in the unification of all forces of the soul
into the one spirit. Ficino was basing his argu-
ment on a mania that had less in common with
knowledge of the historical D. cults than with
Orphic mystery concepts. However, the positive
light in which D. was portrayed did not prevent
the characterization of the soul in contact with
moisture (as an explanation of descent) as Lethe-
drunk and hence disorientated in respect of its
origins and forgetful of self (most important ref-
erence: Pl. Phd. 79c).
Criticism of D. in this period was founded
(as the accusation of hedonistic dissipation) on
the reproof of paganism associated with the
iconoclasm of the Reformation. The rejection of
Catholic saints was also linked to the persistent,
originally medieval criticism of polytheism as a
moral sin (see above B.2.1.). Unlike the Catholic
who would ask St. Urban for good wine just as
the Romans once asked B., the Protestant ‘knew’
that only Jesus Christ could give true wine (cf.
A. Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Von abtuhung
der Bylder, 1522). The critique, purportedly an
attack on a syncretistic theology, was aimed at
the independence of a secular sphere.
B.3.1.2. The 17th and 18th centuries
Very little was added to mythological knowl-
edge of D. in the period between the Renaissance
and the Enlightenment, and there were few
new approaches of significance, at least until
the ‘genius’ aesthetic of Sturm und Drang in
Germany, and until Romanticism elsewhere.
Only the competition of the early colonial powers
fired the mind of the expanding Europe to engage
with western mythology. In Portugal, and still in
245
a Renaissance context, Luís de Camões created
a national epic in his Os Lusíadas (1572) which
mythologically reconceives Vasco da Gama’s dis-
covery of the sea route to India, with the envy
and resentment of the Asia explorer D. able to
do little harm to the new conqueror. This kind of
gesture of supersession, present, as seen above,
from the outset in the reception of D., gave
impetus to the ‘mythical’ fantasies of enlighten-
ment and secularization, but in its negative por-
trayal it once more created a coherent image of
the entire myth.
But to the same extent as spirit and power
were defining themselves against each other, so
the binding force of a concept of life developed
in view of D. in the Renaissance was waning. In
the light of an understanding (whether functional
or bourgeois) of reason as reasonableness, the
depotentiation of the myth and knowledge of it
went hand in hand with its reduction to particu-
lar qualities amply explored in the tradition. One
example worthy of mention here is Francesco
Redi’s Bacco in Toscana (1685), which its author
described as a “Ditirambo dei vini”. This rather
sedate D., mellowed and wearied by age (“Se
dell’uve il sangue amabile/non rinfranca ognor
le vene, / questa vita è troppo labile, / troppo breve
e sempre in pene.” “If the lovely blood of the
vine / Does not refresh every vein, / This life is too
fragile, / Too short and of constant pain”), vis-
its the vineyards dedicated to him in the Italian
countryside with his retinue and wife, and tastes
an entire viticultural catalogue. Redi makes com-
edy of the wine god’s classical qualities (“makes
the mind clear and wakeful”), as the protagonist
ultimately falls victim to his own creation. Unlike
in medieval or even late antique variations on
the theme, Redi’s long poem does not serve any
moral allegorical valorization, but rather pro-
vides a stage for the ingenuity of the author to
demonstrate his poetical skills at the (supposed)
extremes of linguistic control. The ancient god
(his allegorical productivity) is already entirely
disempowered, the parody in fact a homage.
A third stage, and a genuinely new concep-
tion of D., began with the awareness of the
historicity of the myth. The longing for the
‘childhood of Man’, for a prereflexive unity of
subject and world (or: for an alternating rela-
tionship as presented in the metamorphoses of
the myth) found its philosophical spiritus rec-
tor (for the German Sturm und Drang period)
in the monism of Spinoza, and integrated the
Greek gods as ‘potencies’ of the one World-Soul.
Thus, even Goethe, for instance in his Wanderers
Sturmlied (1778), introduced D. as “Vater
Bromius” (“Father Bromius”) and “Genius des
Jahrhunderts” (“Spirit of the Century”) with an
intertextual reference to the Greek dithyrambic
poet Pindar (the generally recognized point of
reference for the self-conception of the genius in
di ony s us
the second half of the 18th cent.), not to praise
wine as liberamentum (‘deliverance’) or simple
poetic inspiration, but to put himself in Pindar’s
adjuratory position and call upon the god to
kindle the same ‘glow’ in him as the Sun gives
to nature, to bring it to life. Goethe refers to D.
as a force of inspiration, but significantly does
so when drawing a parallel between himself and
a poet of the past. The reawakening of ancient
mythology is of no interest to him.
By contrast, Friedrich Schiller’s Götter Grie-
chenlands (first version 1788, second version
1793) is a rather elegiac retrospective survey
of the past which becomes present at the very
point when D. appears with his retinue (“Das
Evoe muntrer Thyrsusschwinger/und der Panther
prächtiges Gespann / meldeten den großen Freu-
denbringer, / Faun und Satyr taumeln ihm voran./
Um ihn springen rasende Mänaden, / ihre Tänze
loben seinen Wein, / und die Wangen des Bewirters
laden/lustig zu dem Becher ein”: “The lively
Thyrsus-swinger, / And the wild car the exulting
panthers bore, / Announced the presence of the
rapture-bringer – / Bounded the Satyr and blithe
Faun before; / And Maenads, as the frenzy stung
the soul, / Hymned in their maddening dance, the
glorious wine – / As ever beckoned to the lusty
bowl / The ruddy host divine!”; first version,
vv. 73–80). As the poem suggests, the ancient
gods fell to the invasion of the ‘north’ and the
Christian god (“Einen zu bereichern unter allen,/
mußte diese Götterwelt vergehn”: “And, to enrich
the worship of the one, / A universe of gods must
pass away!”, vv. 155f.). Countering the suspi-
cion that he was staging a direct glorification
of polytheism, Schiller wrote in his commentary
to the first version that the subject of his poem
was ‘ideal’ (idealisch) and not ‘real’ (wirklich). In
principle, to have given expression to “the gentle
qualities of Greek mythology” (“die lieblichen
Eigenschaften der griechischen Mythologie”, let-
ter to Körner, 25.12.1788) and thereby praised
the (prehistoric) “virgin-bloom on Nature’s face”
(“holdes Blütenalter der Natur”, v. 146) made
Schiller receptive to the idealistic and Romantic
project of the ‘new mythology’. The final verse of
the second version (“Was unsterblich im Gesang
soll leben, / muß im Leben untergehn”: “All that
which gains immortal life in song,/To mortal life
must perish!”) evoke a new concept of poetry,
which, however, had yet to master the transpo-
sition of mythically polyvalent oneness into an
envisioning art form under the sign of D. Still,
Schiller does already indicate the portal through
which D. would pass into modernity as the
‘alien god’.
B.3.2. Fine arts
Michelangelo’s depiction of the intoxicated
D. as an androgynous youth (cf. fig. 2) became
paradigmatic for sculpture. The evaluation of
this sculpture as the typical embodiment of a
d iony sus
Fig. 2: Michelangelo, Drunken Bacchus, marble
sculpture, 1496, Florence, Museo Nazionale del
Bargello.
Renaissance ideal of antiquity is evident from the
fact that it was originally purchased in the belief
that it was a genuine work of ancient art. A more
recent interpretation sees it meta-aesthetically as
a figure of auto-representation on the part of the
artist [12]. Michelangelo’s D. influenced works
by Jacopo Sansovino (marble statue, 1511/12,
Florence, Museo Nazionale), François Girardon
(stucco figure, 1663/64, Paris, Louvre) and
Balthasar Permoser (sandstone statue, c. 1670,
Vienna, Unteres Belvedere), through to Bertil
Thorvaldsen (plaster statue, 1804, Copenhagen,
Thorvaldsen Museum).
Among the modes of transmission of the
mythical biography of D. were the frescoes of
Daniele da Volterra (c. 1550, Rome, Palazzo
246
Farnese) and Paolo Veronese (1560/1561, Maser,
Villa Barbaro-Volpi). The technically virtuosic B.
paintings of Caravaggio are of outstanding impor-
tance in art history, depicting the mythical figure
in the spirit of unconventionality, for instance as
the Young Sick B. in the Galleria Borghese (cf.
fig. 3), a self-portrait subjected to mythological
alienation, or the likewise youthful B. raising a
drinking-vessel (c. 1596, Florence, Uffizi), making
ironic play on the imitation of antiquity. Diego
Velázquez later took up Caravaggio’s ironic ges-
ture in his B. painting The Drinkers (1628/29,
Madrid, Prado), where the wine god’s crowning
of drunken farmers evokes in parodic form the
crowning of ’ Ariadne. Typical of such comical
depotentiation of D. are the inn scenes in 17th-
cent. Dutch painting, showing D. as an inebri-
ate drinker (e.g. Jacob Jordaens, 1650, Brussels,
Koninglijk Museum).
Besides the tendency to use the figure in self-
reference, the many D. representations of the
Renaissance also reveal an unmistakable ambi-
tion of exploiting the myth for political pur-
poses [7]. Overall, it can be said that D. was an
ever-present mythological resource in the early
modern period available for the concretization
of stylistic tendencies of relevance at the time,
whether in the form of the triumph motif, the
Dionysian way of life of the vita voluptuaria
(e.g. in Baldassare Peruzzi’s frescos in the Villa
Farnesina (1511/12, Rome)) or in the allegorical
presentation of the seasons, in which D. with his
grapes and drinking-vessels represented autumn.
B.3.3. Music and dance
Both the Baroque conception of rulership at
court and more general political claims staged
themselves by appropriating the D. mate-
rial. Examples of importance in music history
include Le triomphe de Bacchus dans les Indes
by Jean-Baptiste Boësset and Jean-Baptiste Lully
(Paris 1666), in which the motif of the cultural
hero and ruler at the court of the ‘Sun King’
is prominent. Another successful work was
François Hippolyte Barthélemon’s The Slaves of
Conquering Bacchus (London 1784). Lully also
composed the pastoral Les Fêtes de l’amour et de
Bacchus to a libretto by Philippe Quinault based
on Molière (Paris 1672). Numerous so-called
‘B. cantatas’ appeared in the 18th cent., e.g. by
Jean-Baptiste Morin (Cantates françoises, Paris
1707) and Louis-Nicolas Clérambault (Cantates
françoises, Paris 1710). Georg Friedrich Händel’s
‘B.’ Speech in Praise of Wine’ (HWV 228,4) to
a text by Thomas Phillips, was included in an
English anthology (The Musical Miscellany,
London 1730).
The relationship between D. and ’ Ariadne
abandoned by ’ Theseus was received with par-
ticular enthusiasm in opera (cf. here esp. Claudio
247
Fig. 3: Caravaggio, Young Sick Bacchus, oil on
canvas, c. 1593/1594, Rome, Galleria Borghese.
Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna, 1623).
Examples include works by Richard Flecknoe
(Ariadne Deserted by Theseus and Found
and Courted by B., libretto by the composer,
London 1654), Louis de Mollier (Le Mariage de
Bacchus et d’Ariane, libretto Jean Donneau de
Visé, Paris 1672) or Johann Georg Conradi ([Die
schöne und getreue] Ariadne, libretto Christian
Heinrich Postel, Hamburg 1691; set again by
Reinhard Keiser: [Die betrogene und nachmals
vergötterte] Ariadne, Hamburg 1722). Many
18th-cent. libretti exploring Ariadne’s associa-
tion with D. are based on various versions of
the Pietro Pariati libretto Arianna e Teseo.
For instance, one variant of this text was set
by Johann Joseph Fux (La Corona d’Arianna,
Vienna 1726). Nicola Antonio Porpora (Arianna
in Nasso, libretto Paolo Antonio Rolli, London
1733) adapted the material radically, so that
D.-Liber compels Theseus to give up Ariadne.
The musical world of Mannheim produced an
Ariadne opera by Ignaz Jakob Holzbauer (Le
nozze d’Arianna, libretto Mattia Verazi, Schwet-
zingen 1756). Famous at the time but little per-
formed today are the works of typically prolific
18th-cent. composers such as Pasquale Anfossi
(Il trionfo di Arianna, libretto Carlo-Giuseppe
Lanfranchi-Rossi, Venice 1781), Angelo Tarchi
(Bacco ed Arianna, libretto Cesare Oliveri, Turin
1784) and Maria Theresia von Paradis (Ariadne
und B., libretto Johann Riedinger, Laxenburg
1791).
di ony s us
B.4. Modern period
B.4.1. Literature and philosophy
B.4.1.1. 19th century
The discovery of D. as a central concept of
Western culture (available to be enlisted, not
least, in opposition to contemporary cultural
theories) came about through the anti-classicist,
archaizing tendencies in literature and art (from
late 19th cent.) on the one hand and, on the
other, Idealist philosophy, the last great attempt
at a comprehensive interpretation of reality
(from 1800).
Friedrich Hölderlin’s elegy Brod und Wein (c.
1800) already marks out the context in which D.
and Christ work together in the “Götternacht”
(“Night of Gods”), insofar as they are the only
mythogenic values attesting simultaneously to
the remoteness and presence of the absolute in
a world stripped of its gods. Above all other
Greek gods, D. is distinguished by the fact that
he reconciles humanity and Olympus. In his
speculative fragments, Hölderlin undertakes a
survey of cultural history as universal psychol-
ogy – here very reminiscent of Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph Schelling’s Philosophie der Offenbarung
(see below) – proceeding from (1) the stage of
unconscious identical indifference of all forces
of nature, through (2) the differentiation of the
‘not-self’ (Nicht-Ich) from the self (the “age of
Zeus” – “Zeitalter des Zeus”) to (3) the recon-
ciliation of objectivity determined by the subject
and subjectivity determined by the object, in the
realm of “the tranquil god of time” (“der stille
Gott der Zeit”; cf. [3.425–441]). To Hölderlin,
D. stood at the end of the second stage (to
Schelling, between the second and third). In
the ancient age, he overcomes ’ Heracles and
with him the (nomadic) hunter-gatherer culture,
founding an element of higher culture (concord
of humanity and soil) with agriculture and viti-
culture. D. arrests the “peoples’ lust for death”
(“Todeslust der Völker”), while Christ, through
whom comes into force the perfection of a nature
that aspires upward towards auto-perception
and auto-observation in the process of teleologi-
cal development, bestows the power to endure
in the historical period by sending the ‘Spirit’
down on mankind. In the so-called ‘Hesperian’
age, the ‘nocturnal’ (nächtlich) society character-
ized by the end of the ‘real’ rule of the gods,
D.’ task is no longer to moderate enthusiasm
(as in Greece or the West) but to stimulate it,
as expressed in the image of the ‘torch-swinger’
(Fackelschwinger). Although D. and Christ pool
their ways of working (in Brod und Wein doing
so explicitly through the similarity of their sac-
raments), the spiritual content is allocated to
Christ, and the power of action and inspiration
in the world to D.: the latter is the reference
point for poets and singers.
d iony sus
To an even greater extent in the pagan myths
than in the scriptures of the Old Testament,
Schelling’s Philosophie der Offenbarung (1841/
42; publ. 1854) discovers the stations of self-
awareness – of subjectivity – in the diachronous
and synchronous morphology of the mytho-
logical figures, stations that culminate in the
idealistic unity of world and self as an expres-
sion of the concept of the Trinity. The Trinity
pervades reality on every level (approximately:
subject-object-whole). The task of mythological
exploration, meanwhile, is to enable mediation
in the incipient confrontation of the “false Pan”
(“falscher Pan”: nature governing conscious-
ness) and the subject. The object as the abso-
lute opposite of the self emerges in “limitless
omnipotence” (“unbeschränkte Allmacht”) at
the dawn of human history. But, absorbed into
self-consciousness, it demands individuation, i.e
the “birth” of the “real [ancient] gods” (“Geburt
[der] realen [antiken] Götter”) as guardians of
particular spheres of being (fertility, love, war).
In the figure of D., which Schelling judges the
“principle of every mythology” (“Prinzip einer
jeden Mythologie”), those objectively-conceived
external forces that rule consciousness become
permeable. D. as mediator between heaven and
earth is killed (as D.-Zagreus) by the “real gods”
(“real” in the sense of “having material con-
tent”, “visualized”), but returns, sublimated (in
his gifts), by this transformation paving the way
in human consciousness for the end of divine
rule. Through his sacrifice, the falsehood of the
pagan doctrine of the gods is understood, and
his actual act of sacrifice brings the context of
consciousness to representation. For Schelling,
more so even than for Hölderlin, D. assumes a
genuinely Christian, Messianic function – but as
a ‘principle’ (Prinzip), not a ‘person’ (Person)
(cf. Schelling, original version of Philosophie der
Offenbarung, lectures no. 34–38).
Schelling’s interpretation would only draw
renewed attention in reception from postmod-
ernism [9], while Hölderlin’s account of D. as
the “coming god” (“kommender Gott”), who
remains concealed in his gifts until the prepa-
rations for his arrival, but then (as the refer-
ence to Semele as the mother killed by lightning
suggests) appears with violence (Hölderlin’s
interweaving of ‘rescue’ (Rettung) and ‘danger’
(Gefahr) draws directly on the tradition of D.’
epiphanies), survived in the laments of the time
for the transcendental connection lost amid the
‘chill reason’ of the Enlightenment. Appealing
to Christ and D., Hölderlin drafted the type of
the tragic hero, who is capable of bearing the
“divine fullness” (“göttliche Fülle”) of the secret
concealed in the “Night of Gods” and keeps the
world now devoid of enchantment open to the
return of the numinous power – a synthesis of
priest and man of action. This functionalization
248
of the D. mythographemes emerged once more
in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of the ‘turn’
(Kehre).
While Hölderlin and Schelling still thought in
teleological terms, seeing the future of human-
ity as a return to a past it now understood
and whose potential for error it hence defused,
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie (‘Birth
of Tragedy’, 1872) marked the break with the
illusion of final determination. In the context of a
turn against Neoclassicism (i.e. denying the nor-
mative value of classical beauty) and Historicism
(i.e. proclaiming the idea of recurrence of his-
torical content), he developed the figure of D.
into the paradigm of his philosophy of life and
cultural theory. Nietzsche, who sought to pro-
ceed not only by ‘ascertainment’ (“mit logischer
Einsicht”, “with logical insight”), but significantly
on the basis of ‘direct apprehension’ (“Sicherheit
der Anschauung”, “certainty of apprehension”),
further focused Arthur Schopenhauer’s famous
‘world as will and representation’ (“Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung”) when he described ‘rep-
resentation’ as Apollonian, objective and opposi-
tional (hence ‘moderating’: the subject, distancing
itself from the object, ascribing to the present the
quality of ‘appearance’ (Schein)), whose ultimate
basis, however, lay in the ‘world as will’, in the
Dionysian as the “truly essential and primordially
whole” (“Wahrhaft-Seiendem und Ur-Einem”).
The Dionysian, to Nietzsche, was painful, “the
eternally suffering and contradictory” (“ewig
Leidende und Widerspruchsvolle”) – as expressed
musically in auletic music – and “for its constant
redemption” (“zu seiner steten Erlösung”) it
needed the Apollonian: beauty and measure. In
the world of ancient Greece, this became visible
in the Olympian pantheon. Although Nietzsche,
too, saw this pantheon primarily as aesthetic,
unlike to the Classicists and Neoclassicists the
Apollonian world of beauty and measure was
to him not a phenomenon of some ‘original’ or
even ‘naïve’ humanity, but a sublimation. The
greatness of the Greeks, he argued, consisted in
their having introduced art as the means of over-
coming suffering – art, and esp. tragedy, which
works towards Apollonian release in a dialogue
with the chorus as an expression of Dionysian
suffering and as the unmediated “language of the
will” (“Sprache des Willens”). The chorus parts
were thus “to some extent the womb of the entire
so-called dialogue, that is to say of the entire
staged world, of drama as such” (“. . . gewisser-
maßen der Mutterschoß des ganzen sogenannten
Dialogs, das heißt der gesamten Bühnenwelt,
des eigentlichen Dramas”). The pantheon was a
result of sublimation, explicable solely as arising
from experiential terror.
In Götzen-Dämmerung (‘Twilight of the Idols’,
1889) Nietzsche praises D. as the “god of excess”
(“Gott des Zuviel”), whose “will to life” (“Wille
249
zum Leben”) expresses itself as the “essential
fact of the Hellenic instinct” (“Grundtatsache
des hellenischen Instinkts”) in the mysteries (and
is thereby mediated through Nietzsche’s “amor
fati”, the imperative of a religion devoid of
transcendence). The crux here was the “eternal
return of life” (“ewige Wiederkehr des Lebens”),
the “triumphant ‘Yes!’ to life beyond death and
change” (“triumphierende Ja zum Leben über
Tod und Wandel hinaus”). Like Walter Otto
after him [16], Nietzsche saw life and death
converge in the act of conception (or inception),
so that the “sacredness” (“Heiligkeit”) of pain
(admittedly only labour pain) would be legiti-
mized by “becoming and growing” (“Werden
und Wachsen”; cf. here KSA 6, 82–87 and
309–315). According to Nietzsche, Christianity
stood against this as the religion of the negation
of life, ripping up the unity of being to benefit
a transcendent power and “fouling the inception
with filth” (“es [sc. das Christentum] warf Kot
auf den Anfang”). Nietzsche’s position may be
read as an attempt to free the idealistic interest
in an ‘inception’ from the dogma of a temporal
process and to make the Dionysian inception of
culture workable. He was the first modern theo-
retician to make manifest the delimiting of D.
and to free ancient religion from the categories
of Historicism. Nietzsche believed himself able,
in the spirit of D., to trace the Enlightenment
itself (as sublimation) back to its dark core and
subject it to psychological interpretation.
B.4.1.2. Early 20th century
At this point, Sigmund Freud’s work on D.
also enters the picture, albeit concerned only
with the primary aspect of ‘patricide’ (i.e. mostly
referring to D.-Zagreus). This figure, according
to Freud in Totem und Tabu (1913; English
version Totem and Taboo, 1918), stands at the
beginning of every culture, but only becomes vis-
ible once the killed father is stylized as a god.
According to Freud, then, Nietzsche’s remark
about the death of God concerns the embellish-
ment of a crime committed against a mortal. His
scholarly dealings with D. took place in the con-
text of an ethnology turned in a psychoanalyti-
cal direction and closely connected with Charles
Darwin’s theory of the ‘primal horde’. Freud drew
on infantile animal phobias to explain totemism,
and attempted to expose the totem animal as ‘the
father’. He went on to explain the totem meal (a
central ritual phenomenon of totemism in which
the sacrificial victim is eaten raw and the cel-
ebrants wear animal masks) as the “commem-
oration of a mythical tragedy” (following the
anthropologist William Robertson Smith), “the
attendant lament [not being] characterized by
spontaneous sympathy, but [displaying] a com-
pulsive character, something that was imposed
by the fear of a divine wrath” (“die Klage dabei
nicht den Charakter einer spontanen Teilnahme
di ony s us
hatte, sondern etwas Zwangsmäßiges, von der
Furcht vor dem göttlichen Zorn Gebotenes an
sich trug” [8.206f.]). Freud’s strategy consists
in the identification of Christ as the postfigura-
tion of D. He also saw the Christian conscious-
ness of guilt at the killing (“. . . who died for our
sins”) anticipated in the cult of the ancient god:
“The theory of original sin is of Orphic origin;
it was preserved in the mysteries and thence
penetrated into the philosophic schools of Greek
antiquity. Men were the descendants of Titans
[chthonic deities; author’s note], who had killed
and dismembered the young Dionysos-Zagreus;
the weight of this crime oppressed them”. (“Die
Lehre von der Erbsünde ist orphischer Herkunft;
sie wurde in den Mysterien erhalten und drang
von da aus in die Philosophenschulen des
griechischen Altertums ein. Die Menschen waren
die Nachkommen von Titanen [der Erdgötter,
Anm. d. Verf.], welche den jungen Dionysos-
Zagreus getötet und zerstückelt hatten; die Last
dieses Verbrechens drückte auf sie” [8.208]).
Clearly, ’ Zeus still stands behind D. for
Freud. The killing of D., to him, was really car-
ried out to reconcile with the primaeval father
through the murder. As an interpretation of
Christian doctrine, this reads: the son must die
for all in order to re-establish that peace with
the murdered father which had fallen victim to
the incestuous desire (’ Oedipus). Or, in terms
of cultural history: “When one bears in mind the
suffering of the divine goat Dionysos in the per-
formance of the Greek tragedy and the lament
of the retinue of goats who identified themselves
with him, one can easily understand how the
almost extinct drama was revived in the Middle
Ages in the Passion of Christ” (“Waren speziell
in der griechischen Tragödie die Leiden des göt-
tlichen Bockes Dionysus und die Klage des mit
ihm sich identifizierenden Gefolges von Böcken
der Inhalt der Aufführung, so wird es leicht ver-
ständlich, daß das bereits erloschene Drama sich
im MA an der Passion Christi neu entzündete”
[8.211f.]).
Doubts surrounding Freud’s theory of totem-
ism from the mid-20th cent. cast doubt not least
upon his psychologizing cultural anthropology.
Thus, although René Girard recognized the con-
nection between sacrifice and cultural founda-
tion, he emphasized the shift of perspective from
sacrificer to sacrificial victim (and consequently
the emergence of the victim as a ‘scapegoat’ pro-
duced from within the community) in the transi-
tion from pagan to Christian mythology [9].
Anti-Neoclassical modernist literature trans-
fers the D. ‘nocturnus’ (‘nocturnal D.’) of
Hölderlin and Schelling into the form of D.
‘barbaros’. Reception of the god now no lon-
ger proceeded by way of mythographic content,
but based itself on the current state of knowl-
edge of his cult. D. was thus implicitly largely
d iony sus
historicized, as indeed were the other gods, and
the potential of the ‘narrated’ D. was largely
exhausted. D. was now subject to no further dif-
ferentiation, but to de-differentiation. Apocryphal
traditions, but esp. pictorial compositions associ-
ated with the decline of the Neoclassicist con-
structs of Hellenism (e.g. Bonaventura Genelli’s
inauguration of D. as leader of the Muses, tak-
ing the place of ’ Apollo and hence supporting
Nietzsche in his dispute with von Wilamowitz-
Moellendorff [22]; see below B. 4.2.), prepared
Nietzsche’s D. as the expression of the ‘omnipo-
tence of Nature’ and the very archetype of man-
kind [20]. In the light of this development, the
step from the Bacchic D. to D. ’ Prometheus (as
already present in Schelling but more clearly in
Nietzsche) is relatively small. A trenchant argu-
ment might be made for ‘the Dionysian’ (from
1872) as an accentuation of an understanding
of reality addressing the antagonism between
growth and decay, life and death, heroism and
humiliation having almost entirely superseded
the actual figure of D.
The association of exclusive knowledge (ref-
erence: the D. of the Mysteries) with power
may have held considerable attraction for the
artists of the time whose social connections
were weak. The ‘patchwork’ D. is certainly an
occasional guest in the esoteric circles of the
Decadent movement (traces of the ‘barbaric D.’,
though, can already be found in the self-image
of Gustave Flaubert [Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus in:
1.119–241], then later in Gabriele d’Annunzio,
e.g. in Alcyone, 1904).
The turn of the century produced an odd
blend of fatigue and imaginary agonal ecstasies
of power, esp. in the Art Nouveau centres of
Paris and Brussels, e.g. in reference to the cruel
Roman Emperor Elagabalus (AD 218–222), who
had a black phallus worshipped as the Sun and
who, at the end of his capricious reign, was dis-
membered and the body parts thrown into the
Tiber.
This youthful emperor returns in the novels
of Jean Lombard (L’Agonie, 1888) and Louis
Couperus (De berg van licht, 1905/1906),
enabling the pursuit of countless erotic extrava-
ganzas and ascending to become a patron saint
of European aestheticism. His death was not the
least of the factors linking him to famous stories
of D. In Gabriele d’Annunzio’s great Nietzsche
ode (contained in Elettra, 1903), meanwhile,
D. embodies a vitalism constructed to counter
fin de siècle decadence and aiming at a cultural
renewal conceived in a ‘Mediterranean national-
ist’ spirit.
In early 20th-cent. German literature, D. is
the force arising from the soil, not the god of the
Naturalists alone (as Gerhart Hauptmann pre-
250
sented himself under the sign of the ivy-twined,
creative ecstatic, a reminiscence still present in
Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg). The classifi-
cation and interpretation of cults and rituals of
D. first undertaken in Johann Jakob Bachofen’s
Mutterrecht [2] and later in Erwin Rohde’s
study of the Greek beliefs in the afterlife [18],
now using historical speculation to support
Heraclitus’ erratically influential remark “Hades
and D. are the same”, permit insight into both
the aggressiveness (esp. as attested in cult) and
the realm, extending into the Underworld, of
an omnipotent principle (e.g., for instance, the
omens of Gustav Aschenbach’s impending death
in Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig, furnished
with Dionysian insignia).
The “myth of all life” (“Mythos des ganzen
Lebens”: Wilhelm Kühlmann in: [1.363–400]),
however, tended more to use the figure of
’ Pan than D. in Art Nouveau and Expressionism.
’ Eros and Thanatos here come together in an
unio mystica in the full light of day, intervening
in the moment of deepest calm. D. as protago-
nist of midnight frenzy, intervening and install-
ing his order in the absence of the gods (of day),
is obscured behind the ‘midday’ consciousness,
within which a dualism (dark/light) at first sight
seems less inherent. Whereas D. enters as the
entirely ‘other’, Pan is found in the ‘always-
the-same’. He embodies the (latent) modernist
power of enchantment, precisely because he is
linked to no transcendent order. The layering of
typical D. motifs (autumn, the thyrsus, phallic
lust, e.g. in Georg Heym’s poem Herbst, 1911)
takes place at the cost of a loss of intellectual
layeredness. Pan and a D. entirely reduced to
his effects and no longer figural now become
interchangeable. However, occasional examples
still permit the differences to be seen. In Ernst
Stadler’s Zug ins Leben (1905), the cultic ritual
transition from night to the plenitude of the
Mediterranean day (“Altäre wachsen blendend
aus Girlanden/Festglocken dröhnen – Farben
schießen auf/ und trunken betend sinken wir
ins Licht”: “Altars grow, dazzling, out of gar-
lands/Bells clang – colours surge/And drunken
in prayer, we sink into the light”) is staged in
recourse to the processions of the Maenads, an
epiphany almost reminiscent of Easter, taking up
Dionysian motifs. Against this is the elegiac noon
in Pans Trauer (1911), as the god’s flute gives
voice to the wistfulness of an alienated nature,
understood entirely in historical terms and as the
subject’s space of resonance. The poet is Pan,
and he laments not the otherness of himself, but
simply himself.
B.4.1.3. After World War II
The experience of World War II and Exist-
entialist philosophical considerations formed the
251
background to Jean Cocteau’s B. in his play of
that title (first performance Paris, 10.10.1950).
Cocteau used a Swiss mystery play of the
Reformation period, in which a farmer’s son,
who is also a pupil of a heretic burned by the
Inquisition, is declared ‘B.’ for seven days and
made absolute ruler of the village, before his
clothes are symbolically burned to depict the
unconditional ethical principle (“Aimer comme
on tue. [. . .] Ne pas savoir où cela conduit”:
“Love as you kill. [. . .] Know not where it
leads.”) in its ultimately self-annihilatory conse-
quence. Because the ‘love’ of ‘B.’ engenders only
hate, he proposes to take the weight of human
damnation on his own shoulders like Christ,
but is shot dead by a friend before he can do
so. With D. thus fails a claim to absoluteness
of (original) Christian provenance which at the
same time represents the failure of humanism.
Also capable of being read in a context of cul-
tural criticism are Cesare Pavese’s Dialoghi con
Leucò (1947), in which figures of Greek mythol-
ogy delineate their relationships to each other
and to mortals in mythical narratives neglected
by the tradition. Pavese takes up a humanist
existentialist genealogy of the gods. The gods are
in essence elemental primal forces which became
agents through the ‘temporalizing touch’ of
humans. In the dialogue Il mistero, ’ Demeter
accuses D. of indifference to earthly unreason,
esp. the death of Icarius (see above A.): “La
morte è per te come vino che esalta!” (“Death,
to you, is like exalting wine!”) and points out to
him that humans found the gods in their blood,
in cyclicalities and in death as the beginning and
end. The task of the gods is to tame mortals, to
stop them from seeing the return of the gods in
killing. But a victory over death would bring the
story of the gods to an end, if that victory were
achieved by mortals. Therefore, for the sake of
their own existence as individuals, the immor-
tals must themselves reveal to mortals the over-
coming of death and killing. Wine and bread,
the gifts of D. and Demeter, should acquire the
sense of eternal life. D. declares himself ready to
spread this message, but doubts its effect: “Do
you know what they’ll see in the bread and the
wine? Flesh and blood, as today, as ever.” To
Pavese, Christ is D. fighting for his integrity –
deceiving in order to assuage. The story of the
gods is the story of a mythical persistence, whose
enlightenment will come to nothing.
In modernism and postmodernism, D. com-
prises a reference for those acts in which the
transgression, crucifixion and extinguishing of
the body occur. Antonin Artaud’s ‘theatre of
cruelty’ cited him, as did Acéphale, a periodi-
cal of the French Surrealists, and the Austrian
avant-garde artists of the 1960s. If, as for the
di ony s us
philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the face is the result
of the ‘abstract machine’ to which people entrust
themselves for the sake of exhibitability, conceiv-
ability and determinability (most strikingly in the
authoritative gaze of the incarnate god), the reac-
quisition of the multifariousness of the physi-
cal freed from representational duties becomes
a celebration of life in which all artistic forms
of expression participate. The destruction of the
body as its liberation at first seems a primitivist
concept feeding on promises of the exotic, the
‘other’ of reason and the ‘other’ of myth. D. thus
becomes a symbol of the postmodern, scarcely
now restrictable to specific genres. He is capable
of this because (e.g. in the Orphic fragments)
he embodies the longing for the self as for the
‘other’ of the self which, in the attempt to com-
prehend itself, produces a simultaneous plurality
rather than the idealistic, successive reflection.
After the end of the “grand narratives” (“grands
récits”, François Lyotard), this plurality foils, in
an exemplary way, the faith in progress of art
and philosophy, and, moreover, shifts the long-
ing for ‘oneness’ from a conceivable (Spinoza,
Kant, Schelling) reference to a poetical one:
“Hephaestus made a mirror for D., and the god
made plurality when he looked into it and saw
his image. [. . .] Then, as he put his image into the
mirror, D. followed it, and so both he and the
mirror were quite dashed to pieces” [24.89].
B.4.2. Fine arts
A youthful D. appears in a marble relief
by Bertil Thorvaldsen (1809, Copenhagen,
Thorvaldsen Museum) and in marble sculp-
tures by Heinrich Kümmel (1846, Hannover,
Landesmuseum), Jean-Baptiste (called Auguste)
Clésinger (1869, Paris, Musée d’Orsay) and
Auguste Rodin (1912, marble sculpture, Paris).
Bonaventura Genelli took up an important
mediatory position between Neoclassical consis-
tency of form and the fantasy of a hidden, dark
Hellenism. His B. Sketches (originally intended
for the design of an imitation ‘Roman’ villa
at Leipzig, today exhibited e.g. at the Schack-
Galerie, Munich) inspired Richard Wagner,
Nietzsche and Rohde. In one small-format water-
colour sketch (which Wagner acquired in 1865),
the youthful D. sits among the nine ’ Muses.
A panther lies near him. Also discernible are a
typically Bacchic group of dancers, a silen, Amor
and a Pan stela. Genelli was the first northern
painter to show D. as leader and inciter of the ’
Muses (there is a similar iconography in Nicolas
Poussin’s three Bacchanales). D. here is not
alongside Apollo but stands in his place. Wagner
considered this in a letter to Peter Cornelius (s.d.,
1865): “The quite indescribable impression made
upon me by this composition gave me at a glance
an insight into antiquity upon which I have
d iony sus
inwardly nourished myself again and again”
(“Der ganz unbeschreibliche Eindruck, den diese
Composition auf mich machte, gab mir in einem
Blick Aufschluß über die Antike, ich habe mich
immer innerlich wieder damit genährt”; cf. [20]).
The adjective ‘Dionysian’ (dionysisch), usually
said to have been used first in Nietzsche’s Geburt
der Tragödie, was really coined – in the sense,
moreover, that subsequently became canonical –
in reference to Genelli the artist and his work
[17.298].
Similar motifs are found in the work of
the Secessionists and Arnold Böcklin (cf. here
’ Pan). Vitalist concepts are reflected in Oskar
Kokoschka’s Portrait of Bob Gésinus Visser I as
B. (1933, Minneapolis, Institute of Art). Among
works of a Surrealist context are Salvador Dalì’s
Triumph of D. (1953, New York, private collec-
tion) and André Masson’s Apollo and D. (draw-
ing, 1967).
B.4.3. Music and dance
D.’ exoticism, but especially the immanen-
tistic concepts of redemption associated with it,
inspired music, which thus acquired new legiti-
macy as a non-mimetic art. Claude Debussy
worked on two D. projects which are either lost
or remained fragmentary: one orchestral suite
after Théodore de Banville (Le triomphe de B.,
c. 1882) and an opera to a libretto by Joachim
Gasquet (D., begun 1904). Jules Massenet wrote
an opera B. (libretto Catulle Mendes, Paris,
1909), examining D.’ Indian expedition from
a new perspective. B., whose goal is to rescue
humanity and who is deified at the end of the
opera, attempts to convert the Indians from
Buddhism.
D. as B. is conceptually central to Richard
Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, the libretto for which
is by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (first performance
1912, revised version 1916). B. appears as the
young god who redeems ’ Ariadne and himself
through love. The mythological plot is incorpo-
rated into a metatheatrical comedy, each story
providing a perspective on the other. The pathos
of mythologically intensified love is presented
with ironic reservations. The same constella-
tion forms the foundation of Erich Korngold’s
Violanta (first performance 1916), highly suc-
cessful in its day: like almost all stage works of
the time dealing with the D. material, it is heav-
ily influenced by a vitalist, delimiting interpreta-
tion of Nietzsche and deeply in musico-dramatic
debt to Richard Wagner. Gustav Holst set parts
of the Euripidean tragedy (Bacchae) in his Hymn
to D. (London 1913/14). Albert Roussel (music)
and Abel Hermant (text) wrote B. et Ariane
(Paris, 1931) for Serge Diaghilev’s ballets russes.
Hans Werner Henze’s The Bassarids (libretto:
W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, Salzburg
252
1966) explores the contrast between reason, as
represented by Pentheus, and the dark, danger-
ous seduction of Eros the breaker of fetters,
who represents D. Euripides’ Bacchae serves as
a hypotext.
B.4.4. Film
The protagonist of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
Teorema (Italy, 1968) calls to mind the epipha-
nies of D. in the Bacchae. While embarking on
sexual relations with all members of a single
family, he as it were reveals the underbelly of
their apparently normal structures of interrela-
tion, their fears, their latent power and vio-
lence. D. appears as the god of alterity (in which
Europe and Africa shed light on one another
against the background of colonialism) in Jean
Rouch’s experimental Dionysos (France, 1984).
The Dionysian is experienced on the way to self-
knowledge, for which frenzy and sexual ecstasy
are cathartic preconditions in adolescence, in
such works as Alexander Payne’s Sideways (USA
2004). Yuppie hedonism raised to the Dionysian
appears purged of all mysticism, but nonetheless
offers a momentary reconciliation of man and
nature.
’ Apollo; Ariadne; Silen, Satyr; Zeus
Scholarly literature [1] A. Aurnhammer/
T. Pittrof (ed.), Mehr Dionysus als Apoll. Anti-
klassizistische Antike-Rezeption um 1900, 2002
[2] Johann Jakob Bachofen, Mutterrecht und
Urreligion [1861], 61984 [3] U. Beyer, Christus
und Dionysus, 1992 [4] C. Calame, Le recit en
Grèce ancienne, 2000 [5] H. Cancik, Dioniso in
Germania. Da Heinrich Heine a Walter F. Otto.
Una revisione di cent’anni, 1988 [6] M. Detienne,
Dionysus. Göttliche Wildheit, 1992 [7] A. Emmer-
ling-Skala, Bacchus in der Renaissance, 1994
[8] S. Freud, Totem und Tabu [1912/13], ed.
M. Erdheim, 1991 [9] René Girard, Der Sünden-
bock, 1998 [10] F. W. Hamdorf, Dionysus –
Bacchus. Kult und Wandlungen des Weingottes,
1986 [11] K. Kerényi, Der frühe Dionysus, 1961
[12] L. A. Koch, Michelangelo’s Bacchus and the
Art of Self-Formation, in: AH 29/3, 2006, 345–
386 [13] M. Landfester, Nietzsches Geburt der
Tragödie. Antihistorismus und Antiklassizismus
zwischen Wissenschaft, Kunst und Philosophie, in:
A. Aurnhammer/T. Pittrof (ed.), Mehr Dionysus
als Apoll. Antiklassizistische Antike-Rezeption um
1900, 2002, 89–113 [14] P. McGinty, Inter-
pretation and Dionysus, 1978 [15] D. Noel, Le
vin mélangé entre Dionysus et la cité, in: Pallas 48,
1998, 43–66 [16] W. F. Otto, Dionysus. Mythos
und Kultus, 1933 [17] H. Riegel, Deutsche
Kunststudien, 1868 [18] E.Rohde, Psyche. Seelen-
cult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen, 1894
[19] R. Rosenthal-Heginbottom, The Icono-
graphy of Dionysus’ Indian Triumph, in: I. Zinguer
(ed.), Dionysus. Origines et Résurgences, 2001, 33–40
[20] H. Schwerte, Dionysus unter den Musen, in:
E. Beutner et al. (ed.), Dialog der Epochen. Studien
253 di ony s us

zur Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Fest- Sources cited [24] G. Arrighetti (ed.), Fram-
schrift W. Weiss), 1987, 76–87 [21] K. Smolak, menti orfici, 1989 [25] Lorenzo de’ Medici,
Die Bacchusgemeinschaft (drei mittellateinische Canti Carnascialeschi, ed. P. Orvieto, 1991 [26]
Trinklieder), in: Wiener Studien 99, 1986, 267– T. Strozzi, Borsias. Ein lateinisches Epos der
287 [22] U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Renaissance, ed. W Ludwig, 1977.
Der Glaube der Hellenen, 2 vols., 1931–1932 ulrich van loyen (munich)/
[23] B. Zimmermann, Dithyrambos. Geschichte gerhard regn (munich)
einer Gattung, 1992.
Dioscuri see ’ Castor and Polydeuces