Masks of Dionysus 9781501733680

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MASKS OF DIONYSUS

A volume in the series MYTH AND POETICS edited by

Gregory Nagy

A full list of titles in the series appears at the end of the book.

MASKS OF DIONYSUS Edited by

Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher A. Faraone

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA

AND

LONDON

Copyright © 1993 by Cornell University

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts

thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1993 by Cornell University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pubhcation Data „ Masks^f Dionysus / edited by Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher A. Faraone. p. cm. — (Myth and poetics) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8014-2779-7 — ISBN 0-8014-8062-0 (pbk.) 1 Greek literature—History and criticism. 2. Dionysus (Greek deity) in literature. 3. Dionysus (Greek deity)—Cult. 4- Euripides. Bacchae. 5. ®a“han‘“’ . 6. Dionysia. I. Carpenter, Thomas H. II. Faraone, Christopher A. III. Series. PA3015.R5D55 1993 88o.9'ooi—dc20

Printed in the United States of America 0 The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

92-54965

Contents

Foreword Gregory Nagy Transliteration and Abbreviation Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction Christopher A. Faraone

vii ix xiii xvii

i

INTERPRETATION

1

“He Has a God in Him”: Human and Divine in the Modern Perception of Dionysus Albert Henrichs

2

The Asexuality of Dionysus Michael Jameson

3

Dionysus Poured Out: Ancient and Modern Theories of Sacrifice and Cultural Formation Dirk Obbink

TRAGEDY

4

Mixtures of Masks: Maenads as Tragic Models Renate Schlesier v

Contents

vi

5

Dionysus as Destroyer of the Household: Homer, Tragedy, and the Polis Richard Seaford

6

115

Staging Dionysus between Thebes and Athens Froma I. Zeitlin

147

IMAGE

7

On the Beardless Dionysus Thomas H. Carpenter

8

On the Wildness of Satyrs Francois Lissarrague

9

185

207

Fufluns Pacha: The Etruscan Dionysus Larissa Bonfante

221

MYSTERY CULT

10

Dionysian and Orphic Eschatology: New Texts and Old Questions Fritz Graf

II

Bacchic Teletai in the Hellenistic Age Walter Burkert

12

239

259

Voices from beyond the Grave: Dionysus and the Dead Susan Guettel Cole

276

Glossary

297

Bibliography

303

Index of Passages Cited

331

Index of Greek, Latin, and Etruscan Words

335

General Index

339

Foreword

My goal as editor of the Myth and Poetics series is to encourage work that helps to integrate the critical study of literature with the approaches of anthropology and pays special attention to problems concerning the nexus of ritual and myth. Early volumes in the series set the groundwork for a broadened understanding of the very con¬ cepts of myth and ritual as reflected in the specific cultural context of ancient Greek poetics. The emphasis of the present volume, Masks of Dionysus, is not so much on the specifically poetic testimony about this all-important god in the history of Greek civilization. Rather, it is on the sum total of available empirical evidence about Dionysiac Rehgionsgeschichte, which in turn helps to broaden our perspectives on Dionysiac poetics. The contributors to this volume have paid special attention to the diversity of the Dionysus figure in the history of Greek religion. The more we understand the rich varieties of Dionysiac myth and ritual, as they show, the more we can appreciate the complexity of Dionysiac poetics, with Euripides’ Bacchae in the forefront. Thanks to Masks of Dionysus, the literary dimension of the Dionysus figure becomes even more interesting than it would be if only the literary evidence were examined, as is the case in most other works on this elusive but compelling god. Gregory Nagy

Vll

Transliteration and Abbreviation

In transliterating ancient Greek, we have thought it reasonable, if not entirely consistent, to use a Latinized spelling for words or proper names for which this has become “normal’ English usage and in other cases to use a direct transliteration from the Greek. In some instances, such as the nomenclature of clothing or types of Greek vases, the system is unavoidably inconsistent, as it depends more or less on the frequency with which these words have been used in English (e.g., chiton and krokotos; cantharus and khous). A similar inconsistency occurs in our rendition of the epithets and alternate names of the god Dionysus himself. Some of his more familiar names, well known to us from the Roman poets, appear in their familiar Latin form (e.g., Bromius or Bacchus), while rarer, epichoric forms (e.g., Meilikhios, Bakkheus, or Omestes) have been directly transliterated from the Greek. In hope of making the citation of ancient sources clearer to the non¬ specialist, we have devised the following two-tiered method of refer¬ ence: (i) the titles of better-known authors are cited either in full by their English titles (e.g., Aeschylus Seven against Thebes, Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus) or by easily decipherable abbreviations (e.g., Aesch. Seven or Soph. Oed. Col); (2) the works of more obscure authors are always cited in full and usually by their Latin titles (e.g., Philostratus Imagines). Most references to modern secondary literature consist of author’s name and the date of publication; full references can IX

Transliteration and Abbreviation

X

be found to these works in the bibliography at the end of the volume. We have limited our use of abbreviations to the following collections, dictionaries, and frequently used journals (please note that series or collections that are listed below without the name of an editor are the work of many hands).

Collections of Artifacts or Images ABE ABV ANRW ARV2 CSE CVA ES Gens antiq Para

C. H. E. Haspels. Attic Black-Figure Lekythoi. Pans, 1936.

J. D. Beazley. Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters. Oxford, 1956. Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt. Berlin, 1972-. J. D. Beazley. Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters. 2d ed. Oxford, 1963. Corpus speculorum Etruscorum. Corpus vasorum antiquorum. B. Gerhard, A. Klugmann, and G. Korte. Etruskische Spiegel. Berlin, 1840-97. Gens antiquissima Italiae: Antichitd dall ’Umbria a Lemngrado. Pe¬ rugia. J. D. Beazley. Paralipomena. Oxford, I971-

Collections of Inscriptions CIE

Corpus inscriptionum Etruscarum. Leipzig and Rome,

GIL

present. Corpus inscriptionum Graecarum. Berlin, 1828—77Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum. Berlin, 1863—present.

CIRB

Corpus inscriptionum Regni-Bosporani. Leningrad, 1965-

CIG

GV IG IGBR IGSK IGUR

1893

W. Peek, ed. Griechische Vers-Inschrijten. Berlin, 1955Inscriptiones Graecae. Berlin, 1873”present. G. Mihailov, ed. Inscriptiones Graecae in Bulgaria repertae. Sofia, 1956-66. Inschrijtengriechischer Stadte aus Kleinasien. Bonn, 1972-present. L. Moretti, ed. Inscriptiones Graecae urbis Romae. Rome, 1968-

IKlaudiu Polis

present. F. Becker-Bertau, ed. Die Inschrifien von Klaudiu Polis. IGSK 31.

IKyzikos

Bonn, 1986. E. Schwertheim, ed. Die Inschrijten von Kyzikos und Umgebung.

IMagnesia

IGSK 18 and 26. Bonn, 1980-83. O. Kern, ed. Die Inschrijten von Magnesia am Maeander. Berlin, 1900.

Transliteration and Abbreviation

xi

INikaia

S. Sahin, ed. Katalog der antiken Inschriften des Museums von Iznik

IPergamon

(Nikaia). Bonn, 1979-82. M. Fraenkel, ed. Die Insckriften von Pergamon. Altertiimer von Pergamon 8. Berlin, 1890-95.

ISmyrna

G. Petzl, ed. Die Inschriften von Smyrna. IGSK 23, 24.1, and 24.2. Bonn, 1982-90.

LSAM

F. Sokolowski, ed. Lois sacrees de VAsie Mineure. Paris, 1955-

LSCG

-, ed. Lois sacrees des cites grecques. Paris, 1969. ed. Lois sacrees des cites grecques: Supplement. Paris, 1962.

LSS OGI

W. Dittenberger, ed. Orientis Graeci inscriptiones selectae. Leip-

SEG

Supplementum epigraphicum Graecum. Leiden, 1923—present.

SIG3

W. Dittenberger, ed. Sylloge inscriptionum Graecarum. 3d ed.

zig, 1903-5-

Leipzig, 1921-24.

TAM

Tituli Asiae Minoris. Vienna, 1901-present.

Collections of Literary Fragments EGF FGrH FHG FVS Nauck2 OF PCG PLG PMG SVF TrGF

M. Davies, ed. Epicorum Graecorum fragmenta. Gottingen, 1988. F. Jacoby, ed. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Berlin and Leiden, 1923-58. C. Muller andT. Muller, eds. Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum. Paris, 1841. H. Diels and W. Kranz, eds. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Berlin, 1952. A. Nauck. Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta. 2d ed. Leipzig, 1889. O. Kern, ed. Orphicorum fragmenta. Berlin, 1912. R. Kassel and C. Austin, eds. Poetae comici Graeci. Berlin, 1983present. T. Bergk, ed. Poetae lyrici Graeci. Leipzig, 1882. D. L. Page, ed. Poetae melici Graeci. Oxford, 1962. H. von Arnim, ed. Stoicorum veterum fragmenta. Leipzig, 1903B. Snell and S. Radt, eds.

Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta.

Gottingen, 1971-present.

Collections of Papyri PAnlinoopolis

C. H. Roberts, J. W. B. Barns, and H. Zill.acus, eds. The

Antinoopolis Papyri. London, 1950-66. PGurob

J. G. Smyly, ed. Greek Papyri from Gurob. Dublin, 1921.

Transliteration and Abbreviation

PHerc

M. Gigante, ed. Catalogo dei papiri ercolanesi. Naples, 1979.

POxy

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. London, 1898—present.

Dictionaries and Lexica DA

C. Daremberg and E. Saglio, eds. Dictionnaire des antiquites

LIMC

grecques et romaines. Paris, 1877—19!9Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae.

LSJ

present. H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, and H. S. Jones, eds. Greek-English

RE

Lexicon with a Supplement. 9th ed. Oxford, 1968. Pauly-Wissowa. Real-Encyclopadie der classischen Altertumswis-

Zurich,

1981 —

senschaft. Stuttgart, 1894-1980.

Journals AA

Archdologischer Anzeiger.

AE

L’annee epigraphique. American Journal of Archaeology. Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archdologischen Instituts, Athenische

A]A AM

Abteilung.

Meded

Antike Kunst. Archaeological Reports. Bulletin de correspondance hellenique. Mededeelingen van het Nederlands Historisch Institut te Rome.

RA SBBerlin

Revue archeologique. Sitzungsberichte der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu

AntK AR BCH

Berlin, Klasse fur Sprachen, Literatur und Kunst. ZPE

Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik.

Contributors

Larissa Bonfante

is Professor of Classics at New York University.

She is author and coauthor of several books and numerous articles on aspects of Etruscan culture and language, including, most recently, The Etruscan Language (Manchester, 1983) and Etruscan Life and After¬ life (Detroit, 1986). Walter Burkert

is Professor of Classics at the University of Zurich.

He has published widely on Greek religion. Among his recent books are Elomo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley, 1983), Greek Religion (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), and Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, Mass., 1987)Thomas

H.

Carpenter

is Associate Professor at Virginia Polytechnic

Institute and State University with a joint appointment in the Cen¬ ter for Programs in the Humanities and the Department of Art and Art History. Among his publications are Dionysian Imagery in Archaic Greek Art (Oxford, 1986), Beazley Addenda, second edition (Oxford, 1989), and Art and Myth in Ancient Greece (London, 1991). Susan Guettel Cole

is Associate Professor of Classics at the State

University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of THEOI MEGALOI: Cult of the Great Gods of Samothrace (Leiden, 1984) and numerous articles on the history of Greek religion, with special em¬ phasis on the mysteries and the cult of Dionysus. Xlll

XIV

Contributors

Christopher

A.

Faraone

is Assistant Professor of Classics at the

University of Chicago. He is coeditor of Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion (Oxford, 1991) and author of Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Ancient Greek Myth and Ritual (Oxford, 1992) and several articles on ancient Greek magic. Fritz Graf

is Professor of Classics at the University of Basel. Among

his numerous books, articles, and reviews on Greek religion are Eleusis und die orphische Dichtung Athens vorhellenistischer Zeit (Berlin and New York, 1974) and Nordionische Kulte (Rome, 1985). Albert Henrichs

is Eliot Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard

University. He is the author of Die Phoinikika des Lollianos: Fragmente eines neuen griechischen Romans (Bonn, 1972), Die Goiter Griechenlands: Ihr Bild im Wandel der Religionswissenschaft (Bamberg, 1987), and nu¬ merous articles on Greek religion, especially concerning the cults and myths of Dionysus. Michael Jameson

is Crossett Professor Emeritus of Humanistic Stud¬

ies in the Department of Classics at Stanford University. He has published extensively on Greek religion, history, inscriptions, and archaeology. He delivered the Martin Lectures at Oberlin College on Greek sacrifice and, recently, the Martin Nilsson Lectures at the Swed¬ ish Institute at Athens on Greek religion. Franqois Lissarrague

is Charge de Recherches at the Centre National

de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. He is a contributor to A City of Images: Iconography and Society in Ancient Greece (Princeton, 1989) and is author of The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet (Princeton, 1990) and numerous articles on Greek iconography. Dirk Obbink

is Assistant Professor of Classics at Barnard College. He

is coeditor of Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion (Oxford, 1991) and author of the commentary Philodemus: De pietate (Oxford, 1993) and a number of articles on Greek religion and philosophy. Renate Schlesier

is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the

Free University of Berlin. She is editor of the collection Faszination des Mythos: Studien zu antiken und modernen Interpretationen (Basel and Frankfurt, 1985) and has published articles and reviews on Greek religion and literature and on the history of classical scholarship.

Contributors Richard Seaford

xv

is Reader in Greek Literature at the University of

Exeter. He is author of Euripides: Cyclops, with Introduction and Com¬ mentary (Oxford, 1984) and numerous articles and reviews concerning Greek literature and religion. Froma

I.

Zeitlin

is Charles Ewing Professor of Greek Language and

Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton Uni¬ versity. She is author of Under the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus' “Seven against Thebes” (Rome, 1981) and numerous articles on Greek myth and literature. She coedited Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient World (Princeton, 199°) and Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context (Princeton, 1990) and edited Mortals and Immortals (Princeton, i99:)> a collection of essays by Jean-Pierre Vernant.

X

Acknowledgments

All the papers published here were originally presented at a con¬ ference entitled “Masks of Dionysus

held at Virginia Polytechnic

Institute and State University on 11-14 October 1990. This volume is not, however, a conference “Proceedings

and has in fact been orga¬

nized in an entirely different fashion, one that cannot adequately re¬ flect (nor should it even try) the dynamics of a conference that from the very start was designed to maximize cross-disciplinary dialogue. For the conference eight thematic sections (e.g., “Dionysus and Sexu¬ ality,” “The Companions of Dionysus,” “Dionysus and Sacrifice”) were assembled, and whenever possible the dais was shared by indi¬ viduals of widely varied scholarly interests and training, including archaeologists, literary critics, political and religious historians, epigraphists, and philosophers. The result was a cross-disciplinary dis¬ course of great vivacity and variety—a discourse that informed and transformed all the essays collected here. Because the published collec¬ tion of essays by its very nature reflects so little of the dynamics of the conference, the reader can have little insight into the extraordinary performances of the conference’s “unsung” heroes, Mary Whitlock Blundell, Helene P. Foley, David Halperin, Sarah lies Johnston, Jon Mikalson, John Oakley, James Redfield, and Charles Segal, who were given the most difficult task of commenting on papers that by design were outside or (at best) at the periphery of their own expertise. In XVII

xviii

Acknowledgments

each case the commentaries were insightful and extremely helpful in creating a broader context for the discussion that followed. We also owe special thanks to three of our contributors: to Susan Guettel Cole and Dirk Obbink for their expert advice in the early planning stages of the conference; and to Froma Zeitlin for her wonderful translation of Francois Lissarague’s essay. Our colleague Nicholas Smith also gave much practical advice on planning the conference and this publication. The success of the conference was guaranteed by a unique amalgam of federal, state, and local resources. Derek Meyers, Chairman of the Art Department, and Robert Landen, Director of the Center for Pro¬ grams in the Humanities at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, provided the all-important seed money for the conference. Robert Bates, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences, was an early and staunch supporter of the project, and when looming budget cuts threatened to overwhelm it, both he and Dean Herman Doswald stood by us and provided additional funds at a crucial juncture. We owe thanks to the Virginia Council for the Humanities and Public Policy for several fellowships that allowed broad participation by educators and future educators from all over the Commonwealth of Virginia. Our greatest thanks, however, goes to the National Endow¬ ment for the Humanities, which underwrote most of the expense of the conference, and to Christine Kalke of its Research Division, who offered much advice and help throughout the planning process. T.H.C. and C.A.F.

MASKS OF DIONYSUS

r

Introduction Christopher A. Faraone

Dionysus has exerted a powerful attraction for scholars, artists, philosophers, and poets for over two thousand years. Part of this attraction can, I think, be attributed to the fact that he was for the ancient Greeks and he remains for us “all things to all people.” He is undoubtedly the most complex and multifaceted of all the Greek gods, appearing alternately as the urbane inventor of wine and the sym¬ posium, the master of uncontrollable madness and intoxication, the civic patron of Athenian music and drama, the wild hunter who rends his victims with his bare hands and eats them raw, a fertility god represented by the erect phallus, and the mysterious god who com¬ forts the dying and frees them from the fear of death. To the modern observer he is a bundle of contradictions, appearing in one myth as a maniacal and destructive figure and in another as an innocent child who is himself cruelly slain and dismembered. The poets speak of him as a foreign god dressed in Eastern or Thracian garb, a late addition, it would seem to the Hellenic pantheon; yet this image is directly contra¬ dicted by the appearance of his name among the divinities listed on Linear B tablets from Pylos, which date to around 1250

b.c.

and are

among our first written records from the Greek mainland. His wor¬ ship is strangely conditioned by the gender of the worshiper—men exalted him by drinking wine in symposia, while women danced apart on the mountain. In art and literature he is sometimes depicted as an 1

2

Christopher A, Faraone

effeminate youth, but more often as a bearded man distinguishable from Zeus and Poseidon only by his cantharus or an ivy wreath.1 On the face of it, it might appear that we have here a number of different gods who, perhaps after a long process of assimilation or syncretization, came to share the name Dionysus. Recent work on the god Apollo suggests a parallel for the assimilation of two or more originally discrete deities into a single multifaceted Panhellenic god.2 The case of Dionysus, however, is far more complicated, for he fre¬ quently appears in myth as a shape shifter or a master of disguise; in Euripides’ Bacchae he purposely hides his divine form and takes on a deceptive human one designed to further his purposes; to arrogant disbelievers like Pentheus or the Tyrrhenian pirates, he appears in animal form as a bull or a lion. To put it simply: Dionysus is a god who by his very nature is disposed to wear different masks and who was known to reveal himself in different ways at different times to his worshipers. Significantly, these various masks or guises appear not infrequently in a ritual antithesis. At Sicyon on the coast of Attica two images of the god were carried together in a single nocturnal proces¬ sion, one of Dionysus Bakkheios (“the one who brings madness”) and the other of Dionysus Lusios (“the one who frees [one from mad¬ ness]”).3 A similar polarity seems to underlie the worship of Dionysus at Naxos, where the islanders venerated a mask (prosopon) of Dionysus Bakkheus made from vine wood, as well as a mask of Dionysus Meilikhios (“the mild”) made from the wood of a fig tree; here the antithesis seems to lie in Bakkheus as a harsh god and Meilikhios as a gentle one.4 For us the central enigma remains: Is Dionysus a unity, a single deity who purposely reveals himself to mortals in a dizzying array of

1 For a general introduction to Dionysus and his worship, see Otto 1965, 47“D9; Henrichs 1979; Simon 1983, 89-105; and Burkert 1985, 161-67. For recent work on his iconography in Greek art, see Carpenter 1986. 2Burkert 1985, 143-49, provides an excellent overview of recent work, especially Burkert 1975a and 1975b, Graf 1979, and Jameson 1980. 3Versnel 1990a, 139, discusses the main ancient source (Pausanias 2.2.6 and 2.7.6) and gives the most up-to-date bibliography. Fie does not see any polarity here, preferring to understand Lusios as another facet of the god of wine, i.e., one who “loosens” the cares and sorrows of daily life. On the polarity of Bakkheios/Lusios, see Burkert’s essay in this volume, p. 273. 4 Athenaeus 3.78c. See Burkert 1985, 166-67, for a good discussion of the polarity.

Introduction

3

contradictory roles and images? Or is he simply a modern academic and artistic construct—a false unity created from a half-dozen different Dionysi with entirely different cults and myths anchored to specific times and places in the ancient world? Or finally, and less pessimisti¬ cally, is there a middle ground between the two positions, where we can allow the impossibility of discovering any simple unity or Dionysiac essence in the evidence, admitting at the same time the possibility of developing a coherent conceptual framework upon which we can hang the different masks of the god and appreciate their interrelation¬ ships with one another? It is in such a hope that Thomas Carpenter and I have entitled this collection of essays Masks of Dionysus. The book is divided into four sections, each containing three essays. In the first, entitled “Interpretation,” three of our contributors explore and critique Dionysiac studies in the nineteenth and twentieth cen¬ turies and examine anew three different problems that confront mod¬ ern interpretations of Dionysus: the emphasis in modern criticism on his humanity, his allegedly ambivalent sexuality, and his central role in the academic conceptualization of all Greek sacramentalism. In the first essay of the section, “He Has a God in Him”: Human and Divine in the Modern Perception of Dionysus,” Albert Henrichs explores the problematic stress in recent literature on Dionysus as a figure of the human imagination or a projection of the human psyche, arguing that such modern formulations repeatedly obscure the fact that for the Greeks he was first and foremost a supernatural being whose existen¬ tial status was not only superior to that of humankind but also com¬ pletely independent of it. Tracing this modern “internalization of Dionysus” back to Nietzsche and (to a lesser degree) the advent of Freudian psychology, Henrichs argues that by taking for granted or neglecting the obvious fact of Dionysus’ divinity nearly all twentiethcentury scholarship, from the Cambridge Ritualists and their “suffer¬ ing god” to the most recent work of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, tacitly shares a fundamental misperception that frames our modern understanding of the god in a manner that would have been incomprehensible to those who worshiped Dionysus in the ancient world. Michael Jameson’s essay, “The Asexuality of Dionysus,” questions recent assertions that the Greeks perceived Dionysus as “asexual” or “sexually ambivalent,” and raises two primary objections: the impor-

4

Christopher A. Faraone

tance of phallic images and processions to the worship of Dionysus, and the central and overtly sexual role the god plays as husband in his annual ritual marriage to the wife of the basileus during the Athenian celebration of the Anthesteria. Marshaling three related bodies of evidence (iconography, myth, and cult practices), Jameson suggests that in an effort to understand, for example, the popular depiction of a soft, gentle, unaroused Dionysus presiding over a swirl of often vio¬ lent sexuality (particularly the activity of his satyr companions), we must see him not as a figure who lacks a clearly defined sexuality, but rather as one who mediates between male and female, a necessarily calming and nonthreatening role because his cult repeatedly releases forces that threaten to destroy social order in the Greek polis. Dirk Obbink closes the first section of the book with an essay entitled “Dionysus Poured Out: Ancient and Modern Theories of Sacrifice and Cultural Formation” in which he argues that although much of James Frazer’s anthropology has been discredited (for exam¬ ple, the notorious “Corn Spirit” and the “Year Daimon”), his concept of the “savage logic” that underlies all sacrificial ritual—if you want to become like god, you must eat god—persists unchallenged in many modern theories of the origin and development of ancient sacrifice. His essay divides neatly into two parts. In the first he surveys a vari¬ ety of distinctly Dionysiac forms of sacrifice (inter alia, maenadic omophagy and sacramental wine drinking), showing how specific aspects of idiosyncratic Dionysiac rites have been inappropriately used as a general model for all Greek forms of sacrifice. In the second, he goes on to contrast modern theories of Greek sacramentalism with ancient Greek theories in order to reveal that Dionysiac ritual is, in fact, important for understanding the general phenomena of Greek sacrifice, but in a way very different from that envisioned by Jane Harrison or E. R. Dodds. The second section, “Tragedy,” provides new approaches to some old questions about the relationship of Dionysus to tragedy and tragic plot and his relative absence in the Homeric poems. It is, I think, significant that none of our contributors chose to discuss Euripides’ Bacchae in any detail. Looking instead at Dionysus as the patron of tragedy at Athens and drawing on recent work that stresses the re¬ ligious setting of tragic performances at the festival of Dionysus,5 all 5E.g., Winkler and Zeitlin 1990; Bierl 1989 and 1991.

Introduction

5

three approach the question (once summarily dismissed by an old Greek proverb) of the “Dionysian” or “Dionysiac” as an inherent generic element of central importance to the composition and appre¬ ciation of Greek tragedies. Appearing first in this triad, Renate Schlesier provides a smooth transition from the previous section by opening her essay, “Mixtures of Masks: Maenads as Tragic Models,” with a brief survey of the recent surge of scholarly interest in this area, pointing out that the origins of this approach also lie in the work of the Cambridge Ritual¬ ists, who despite their obsession with speculations about the origins of tragedy in Dionysiac ritual nevertheless had a great appreciation for the central role of Dionysus in the theater and the civic ideology of fifth-century Athens. Schlesier then goes on to show how references to maenads and maenadic behavior in the extant tragedians, rather than being dismissed as mere metaphors, should be appreciated as impor¬ tant models whereby the intervention of gods other than Dionysus (e.g., Ares, Hera, Aphrodite) or even of the supernatural spirits of the dead (e.g., the Erinyes and the ghost of Polydorus) is presented and understood according to the model of Dionysus’ intervention into the human sphere. In this way Dionysus is “subtly included as a vigorous agent and an object of reference even in those plots where the decisive divinity is not Dionysus himself,” and tragedy itself is revealed as a genre intrinsically Dionysiac. Richard Seaford’s essay, “Dionysus as Destroyer of the Household: Homer, Tragedy, and the Polis,” also examines references to maenadic behavior in tragedy, but he takes a quite different tack by identifying what he calls the “Dionysiac metaphor,” a device whereby a female character is labeled or described as a maenad. Beginning with its only appearances in Homer (the description of Andromache in Iliad 6 and 22) and then moving on to a variety of scenes from tragedy, he reveals that this Dionysiac metaphor appears repeatedly in combination with a negation of wedding ritual. Seaford argues this is not coincidental, because maenadism at its heart is subversive of the process of mar¬ riage, and he suggests that a recurrent Dionysiac pattern in tragedy requires that the salvation of the polis be accomplished only by the destruction of the royal household—a destruction repeatedly evoked in maenadic terms or metaphors as a rejection of endogamy. Approaching the question of generic Dionysiac factors in tragedy from yet another angle, Froma Zeitlin’s contribution, “Staging Di-

6

Christopher A. Faraone

onysus between Thebes and Athens,” compares and contrasts the different outcomes of Dionysiac confrontations in those two cities and develops her previous examination of Thebes (as it is portrayed in Attic drama) as a negative configuration of Athens—an “anti-city” that has no viable future because it is closed upon itself by incestuous unions and civil wars. Surveying a number of tragedies, Zeitlin argues that in plays set in Thebes Dionysus is regularly invoked or described in a way that draws him into the circle of destructive deities such as Ares or Aphrodite, and that these plays invariably end in catastrophe. In plays set in Athens, however, or (like Euripides’ Ion) directly con¬ cerned with Attic myth, Dionysus is stabilized by the presence of protective and nurturing goddesses such as Athena or Demeter, and the drama moves from sorrow to joyous finale in which the future greatness of the city is assured. The third section of the volume, “Image,” treats the enormous body of artistic representations ofDionysus and his followers in Greek and Etruscan art. These artifacts, because they can often be dated more precisely than literary texts, provide excellent materials for tracing chronological developments in the ancient perception of the god. All three contributions take their inspiration in part from the growing interest in the last two decades in the iconography of ancient art, a trend that reverses the traditional focus on artistic technique and the development of individual styles. This emphasis on the content in¬ stead of the form has reinvigorated and transformed the study of Greek society and religion by breaking down the traditional academic barriers between the previously separate disciplines of archaeology, literature, drama, art history, and history of religions.6 Thus Thomas Carpenter in his contribution, “On the Beardless Dionysus,” raises the problem of the advent of the young, beardless Dionysus, who begins to appear on Greek vase paintings in the last quarter of the fifth century

b.c.

and quickly replaces the archaic,

bearded figures of the god. In trying to understand this change, Car¬ penter examines a pair of apparently idiosyncratic images painted some forty years earlier, arguing that the beardless face and the foreign garb of these figures point to a theatrical production of the story of

6E.g., Berard, Bron, and Pomari 1987; Berard et al. 1984; Carpenter 1986; and Arafat 1990.

Introduction

7

Lycurgus in which Dionysus appears to the king in the guise of an effeminate young man. Carpenter closes his essay by pointing out that despite the often pervasive influence of tragic productions on Attic vase paintings, these innovative images of the beardless Dionysus failed to gain popularity, a fact that suggests that some profound changes in the Athenian perception of the god took place in the forty years that separated this first unsuccessful experiment and its spec¬ tacularly successful repeat in the Dionysus sculpted for the east pedi¬ ment of the Parthenon some four decades later. Francois Lissarrague begins his essay, “On the Wildness of Satyrs,” by pointing out that although the god’s more stately and dignified female votaries have been repeatedly discussed over the years, the lowly satyr, that peculiar hybrid of animal and human, has been for the most part ignored. Examining a number of archaic and classical vase paintings, Lissarrague argues that satyrs display their wildness or alterity in a variety of ways, albeit mostly comic, and that in stark contrast to centaurs (those other hybrid “wild men” who in myth live on the margin of the Greek world), satyrs are regularly depicted as subordinates living in the human sphere, either as slaves and servants to Dionysus or engaged in banausic human tasks such as cooking or metallurgy. Lissarrague also illustrates two antithetical ways in which vase painters play upon the animality of the satyrs, either by stressing their close kinship with animals or by masquerading them in the most refined clothing and postures of high Athenian society, with the result that satyrs appear “to invent or deform rules of culture” in a manner that (aside from being comic and entertaining) helps Athenian society to define an image of “normal” human behavior. The third section closes with an essay by Larissa Bonfante entitled “Fufluns Pacha: The Etruscan Dionysus,” in which she surveys one aspect of the fascinating interrelation of Greek and Etruscan culture in the classical and early Hellenistic periods. After a quick survey of the inscriptional evidence for the Etruscan vegetation god Fufluns Pacha, Bonfante shows how he was quickly assimilated to the Greek Di¬ onysus, a process that results in a peculiarly Etruscan modification of traditional Greek iconography. Of crucial importance is the popular Etruscan depiction of the beardless Dionysus as one-half of a divine couple, a configuration rare in Greek art before the late fifth century b.c., but (as Bonfante argues) very predictable in the Etruscan world,

8

Christopher A. Faraone

where the heterosexual couple and not the individual seems to have been the basic unit of society. Bonfante then uses the images of Di¬ onysus and his mother, Semele, as a focus for her second major point of comparison: the important role of Fufluns as a god of the dead. Bonfante closes her essay by arguing that the popular tradition of pairing images of Fufluns/Dionysus with Ariadne and with Semele seems to be generated by Fufluns’ special role as an agent of rebirth. The conclusion of Bonfante’s essay, with its discussion of death and rebirth, provides the perfect bridge to our last triad of essays, all concerned with the Dionysiac mysteries. The most obvious way in which our view of the ancient world changes is by the discovery of new texts, and in recognition of the importance of the newly pub¬ lished gold leaves from Pelinna,7 we have devoted the entire final section, “Mystery Cult,” to the vexed question of the so-called Diony¬ siac eschatology and the special relationship that the god had with the dying and the dead. Fritz Graf, in an essay entitled “Dionysian and Orphic Eschatology: New Texts and Old Questions,” begins by docu¬ menting how discoveries in the past two decades have completely altered our understanding of the eschatological beliefs of those indi¬ viduals buried with inscribed gold tablets that proclaim their special status and provide instructions for obtaining a better lot in the under¬ world. Graf documents the way in which long-held scholarly distinc¬ tions between Pythagorean, Orphic, and Dionysiac eschatological doctrines have collapsed in the face of these new texts and argues that the Dionysiac mysteries, once thought to be a peculiar invention or development of the late classical and early Hellenistic world, were in fact already widespread in the classical period. After a close reading of the new gold tablets from Pelinna, Graf argues that they provide fur¬ ther evidence for the assimilation or blending of Orphic and Diony¬ siac doctrines. He closes with the important observation that the Pelinna tablets, found in the tomb of a wealthy female devotee of Dionysus, confirm the suspicion raised by earlier archaeological finds that affluent women were as active in these earlier Bacchic groups as they were in the better documented groups of the Roman period. If, as now seems the case, this new evidence proves that Dionysiac mysteries were spread widely over Magna Graecia, Crete, and parts of 7Tsantsanoglou and Parassoglou 1987.

Introduction

9

mainland Greece in the classical period, one is forced to see the Helle¬ nistic period as one not of invention of these mysteries, but rather of transformation. Walter Burkert takes just this view in his essay, “Bac¬ chic Teletai in the Hellenistic Age,” where he focuses in particular on the conditions under which the Dionysiac mysteries were patronized by the political leadership and transformed from an essentially private form of cult into rather elaborate religious and political organizations. He identifies two new features of these transformed mysteries: the role of the theater and the “theatrical artists” (tekhnitai), and the appropria¬ tion of the patronage of Dionysiac worship and mysteries by the new kings of Egypt and Pergamon. Burkert goes on to argue that as these rituals passed from private ceremony to public spectacle, the older practices of the wandering charismatics were suppressed or closely controlled by the government. He closes his essay with a discussion of an inscription and a sculpted altar, both from the island of Cos, which seem to be the last attestations of the older form of teletai. In the last essay of the “Mystery Cult” section, Susan Guettel Cole questions whether we should generalize the eschatological beliefs of the initiates of Dionysiac mysteries and attribute such doctrines more widely to all devotees of the god. In “Voices from beyond the Grave: Dionysus and the Dead,” she presents a wide-ranging survey of funer¬ ary inscriptions of individuals who call attention to themselves as special worshipers of Dionysus. Drawing a distinction between pri¬ vate documents (the gold tablets buried in the grave) and public documents (the epitaphs erected in full view over the grave), Cole points out that only rarely do we find any hint in the public documents that the dead or their relations believed that special devotion to Di¬ onysus would result in special treatment in the afterlife. While conced¬ ing that much of the iconographical evidence for Dionysiac beliefs in the Roman period (especially the images depicted on sarcophagi) can be interpreted as a continuation of the eschatological doctrines es¬ poused in the gold tablets, she questions how representative these doctrines are for the worshipers of Dionysus in general. She argues, in fact, that the tame conventionality of the epitaphs of Dionysiac wor¬ shipers and the very rare expressions of hope for a better afterlife suggest either that the Dionysiac mysteries, despite their wide geo¬ graphical distribution, undergo some profound change in the later periods with regard to their content or goal or that the eschatological

io

Christopher A. Faraone

doctrine becomes so secret that it leaves hardly any trace at all in the funerary inscriptions. The immediate contribution of this collection of essays will, we hope, be a broader and much more diverse discourse about the god, not only as he is rooted in the specific historical and social contexts of the Greek world, but also as he has been taken up by succeeding generations of scholars. This, a work of many voices, is by no means intended to produce consensus or a final, authoritative statement on the god Dionysus or the “correct” critical approach to understanding him. Even to the casual observer there are obvious and fundamental disagreements among the contributors. It is, however, our sincere hope that this volume will appear as a beginning of a more productive, if occasionally discordant, understanding of perhaps the most myste¬ rious and interesting of all the Greek gods.

INTERPRETATION

CHAPTER

I

“He Has a God in Him”: Human and Divine in the Modern Perception of Dionysus Albert Henrichs

Greek gods aren’t easy to get along with, as their myths show. Time and again they destroy the lives of mortals for reasons that are hard to comprehend, and even harder to accept. If judged by their actions and their behavior, these gods don’t make much sense, cer¬ tainly not to our modern minds, which are attuned to the monotheistic theologies and ethics ofjudaism and Christianity. TheJudeo-Christian god embodies justice, compassion, and a moral code. Perceived as a spiritual rather than corporeal entity, he is invisible and yet intelligible. The gods of Greek myth are the exact opposite. They are anthropo¬ morphic, vindictive, and, in human terms, flagrantly immoral; and while they are highly visible, they are anything but transparent or rationally comprehensible. Of all the Greek gods, Dionysus is the most visible as well as the most elusive. Present in myth, art, and literature, he conceals his divine identity behind an abundance of physical manifestations that has challenged ancient and modern sensitivities. In the pages of this volume, Dionysus reveals many unexpected traits—he always does— which make him a more interesting and, ultimately, a more familiar figure. But when all is said and done, we are still baffled by the enigma that is Dionysus and by the polymorphous nature with which the Greeks so amply endowed him. Who is Dionysus? He is first and foremost the god of wine. He is 13

14

Albert Henrichs

also the god of the mask, who presided over dramatic performances in Athens and Attica and whose name and rituals were closely associated with the origins of tragedy and comedy. In addition, he was believed to inspire the female votaries known as maenads and to lead them to the mountain for their biennial rites of dancing and sacrifice. And finally, he recruited his followers not only among the living but also among the dead. It was in these four provinces—the wine, the theater, maenadism, and the underworld—that Dionysus exercised his power over the Greeks and their imagination. The Greeks made no attempt to integrate Dionysus’ different roles and to reduce them to a common denominator. Modern students of the god, however, have been reluctant to acquiesce in a Dionysus who amounts to nothing more than the sum of his multiple components. In their quest for a more cohesive and integral definition of Dionysus, they have been quick to identify shared elements that connect and consolidate the god’s multiple identities. The wine and the theater in particular represent two powerful sources of illusion, escape from the realities of normal life, and a temporary expansion of individual hori¬ zons. The maenads and the dead, on the other hand, share several distinctive features, provided we perceive the dead not as corpses but as the spirits of the deceased who return periodically to the world of the living. In Greek tragedy, for instance, ghosts as well as maenads are described as “night stalkers” (nuktipoloi) because they come to life only at night.1 In actual cult, both groups were assigned habitats that lay outside the secure confines of the polis, and while the rituals associated with the practice of maenadism and with the cult of the dead were not identical, they were both strikingly different from ordinary forms of worship. What is more, in the Greek imagination maenads and ghosts inhabited an existential twilight zone where vital energies ebbed and flowed in reciprocal rhythms and where the boundaries of life and death converged. * Dionysus and his followers can be seen as abandoning, shifting, or transcending the limits of everyday experience through their associa¬ tion with exalted or anomalous conditions such as intoxication, mas1 Aeschylus. Psychagogoi frag. 27339 (TrGF 3); Euripides Ion 717 versus 1048-49; cf. Helen 570 and Cretans frag. 79.11 (Austin 1968); Henrichs I99U I9°~92- Also relevant here is the similar representation of maenads and Erinyes in art and their affinity in tragedy, first noted by Harrison 1899, 220 (with Schlesier 1991, 208 n. 78); cf. Whallon 1964, 320-22; Napier 1986, 43; Bierl 1991, 90 n. 146, 120, and 122 n. 30.

Human and Divine in Dionysus

15

querade, illusion, trance, or madness. They are thus linked with an expansion of physical and mental faculties—one that leads either to states of heightened self-awareness or to destructive disruptions of the personality and even to the annihilation of life. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the god whose myths and rituals call into question the normal identities of his worshipers should himself adopt a fluid and changeable identity based on disguise, on transformation, and on the simultaneous presence of opposite characteristics. The question re¬ mains, Are we dealing with one coherent divinity? Who is this Di¬ onysus?

Seeing Is Believing: The Paradox of Dionysus’ Self-Revelation If Dionysus is best defined through his complex image in ancient art and literature, his special place in Greek myth, and his various func¬ tions in Greek or Roman society, the present volume covers much of this territory. It opens new perspectives on the cults and rituals associ¬ ated with Dionysus, on his worshipers and his mythical entourage, on the importance of gender roles and social status, and on his representa¬ tion in art and in tragedy, not to mention his assimilation by nonGreek cultures. There is one fundamental aspect of Dionysus, how¬ ever, that as scholars we generally ignore: namely, his divinity. That is the aspect I wish to explore. For the vast majority of the Greeks from Homer to Longus, Dionysus was neither a figure of the imagination nor a projection of the human psyche. He was instead a supernatural being whose existential status was not only superior to that of mortals but also independent of it—he was a god. Poets ancient and modern have always been more prepared than historians of Greek religion to acknowledge the god in Dionysus and to celebrate his divinity—to experience him rather than analyze his different realms and functions. Ezra Pound can serve as a modern English voice articulating Dionysus’ godhood. In the second of his pre-Pisan cantos, first published in 1922, Pound reworks the story of Dionysus and the sailors turned into dolphins as told by Ovid in the third book of his Metamorphoses.2 As the mysterious young boy, ef-

2Ovid Metamorphoses 3.572-691.

16

Albert Henrichs

feminate and slightly drunk, staggers into their midst, Acoetes ex¬ claims: “He has a god in him, though I do not know which god” (3.611 — 12 quod numen in isto / corpore sit, dubito’, sed corpore numen in isto est!). The fully anthropomorphic appearance of Diony sus, which con¬ ceals his divinity, thus becomes the touchstone that polarizes mor¬ tals and separates believers like Acoetes from nonbelievers. Here is Pound’s vivid recreation of the scene: The back-swell now smooth in the rudder-chains, Black snout of a porpoise where Lycabs had been, Fish-scales on the oarsmen. And I worship. I have seen what I have seen. When they brought the boy I said: “He has a god in him, though I do not know which god.” And they kicked me into the fore-stays. I have seen what I have seen: Medon’s face like the face of a dory, Arms shrunk into fins. And you, Pentheus, Had as well listen to Tiresias, and to Cadmus, or your luck will go out of you.3

Pound here captures the presence of Dionysus as a paradox—a power¬ ful but elusive paradox that Ovid’s sailors, like the Pentheus of Eu¬ ripides’ Bacchae, failed to understand until it was too late. Pentheus refused to recognize Dionysus as a god because he was deceived by the anthropomorphic guise and did not see the divine in Dionysus. By contrast, the Acoetes of Ovid and Pound feels intuitively that he is in 3Canto 2 (Pound 1983, 9). Much has been written on Pound’s Dionysus by interpreters tempted to compress Pound’s complex and changing perception of the god into ready-made formulae that reflect general trends in the modern discussion of Dionysus—“Pluto or chthonic Dionysus” (Surette 1979, 44), “a symbol of the sacred energies of the cosmos” (Woodward 1980, 88), or “the god of sex and wine” (Terrell 1984, 426). Especially in his later cantos Pound favored a distinctly Frazerian concept of Dionysus, with emphasis on vegeta¬ tion and agrarian rituals, the Eleusinian mysteries, the Zagreus myth, and sacramental union. A similar emphasis can be found in Dodds i960, xi—xiii, a passage

vigorously and

approvingly initiated [read: initialed]” by Pound during his Venice years (Littlefield I972, 131). in its Ovidian focus on theophany, the second canto is a remarkable exception to Pound’s general treatment of Dionysus (Surette 1979, 53—54)-

Human and Divine in Dionysus

17

the presence of a divinity, even though the god is concealed in a human form—sed corpore numen in isto est; and when Dionysus finally demon¬ strates his divine power in the miracle of transformation, Acoetes sees his intuition suddenly confirmed: “I have seen what I have seen.”4 The encounter is acknowledged and its force felt. Seeing is believing, not only for Acoetes but also for Horace. In the most revelatory of his Dionysiac poems, Horace poses as a true be¬ liever who has seen Dionysus and felt the force of this encounter so strongly that he expects his audience to share his belief in the divine revelation: “I have seen Bacchus among the far-off mountain cliffs— believe me, men of future generations—as he was teaching his songs to the attentive nymphs and to the sharp ears of the goat-footed satyrs” (Odes 2.19.1—4 Bacchum in remotis carmina rupibus / vidi docentem— credite posteri—/ nymphasque discentis et auris / capripedum satyrorum acutas). Horace’s vision (vidi), poetically projected into the imaginary space of a distant Dionysiac retreat populated by nymphs and satyrs, thus presents itself to the world at large as the poet’s personal valida¬ tion of a universal Dionysiac creed (credite). As the unique eyewitness of that vision, the poetic voice recalls the mythical as well as cultic experience of divine revelation.5 The poet’s emphatic avowal Bacchum vidi confirms the Greek and Roman perception of Dionysus as an epiphanic god; in particular, it helps to explain why visual representa¬ tions of the god and his entourage constitute such a prominent aspect of the religion of Dionysus—the god’s power manifests itself in his presence, which is revealed and commemorated in his images.6 4 Ovid’s Acoetes infers the divinity of Dionysus in human disguise from the god’s physical appearance, his dress, face, and gait (Metamorphoses 3.609-10 specto cultum faciemque

gradumque: / nil ibi, quod credi posset mortale, videbam), and he reaches his conclusion long before the series of miracles takes place (658ff.). In Ovid’s model, the Homeric Hymn to

Dionysus, the pious helmsman recognizes Dionysus by his miracles (13-24). By conflating the two traditions, Pound strengthens the visual quality of the recognition. 5 Some interpreters consider Horace’s visionary testimony contrived, if not cynical. But there was more on Horace’s mind than mere poetic craftsmanship or religious make-believe. By juxtaposing the dramatic account of the vision with a hymnic catalogue of the god’s mythical accomplishments, he merged the traditional form of the literary hymn with the cultic convention of written records, known as “aretalogies,” that bear personal testimony to direct divine intervention. The poet’s vision thus reproduces the experience of cultic epipha¬ nies and succeeds in capturing its spirit. Cf. Henrichs 1978b. 6 Dionysus’ distinctive epiphanic quality has been explored by Otto (below, n. 42); Oranje 1984, 114-42; Vernant 1986a, 247-55 (= 1988, 390-98); Detienne (below, n. 45); and Versnel 1990a, 137-46, 165-67. One of the most emphatic images of Dionysus’ epiphany

18

Albert Henrichs The Greeks perceived the divinity of Dionysus as they perceived the

divinity of any of their gods, as a cohesive conglomerate of three qualities: immortality, superhuman power, and the capacity for self¬ revelation, which is an inherent correlate of the anthropomorphic appearance of the Greek gods. While the shared human form mini¬ mizes the physical separation of gods and mortals, the existential distance between them is maximized by the gods’ immortality and power. In the case of Dionysus, however, each of these divine preroga¬ tives takes on a special significance because it defines the divinity of Dionysus, exceptionally and paradoxically, in terms of his apparent humanity. What distinguishes Dionysus’ epiphanies is not only “their physical immediacy” (Walter F. Otto), but also their deceptive human quality, which exceeds the normal expectations of Greek anthropo¬ morphism.* * * * * * 7 For each of the three categories, I want to draw attention to the unmediated tension between human and divine that abounds in the Dionysiac record: “the contradictory identity of the god who is mor¬ tal.”8 First, Dionysus’ immortality. Although this is indisputably part of the myth, it is also shot through and even defined by suggestions of mortality. Dionysus has a mortal mother and endures a double birth. He is rarely depicted in the company of other gods—instead, he is accompanied by a constant entourage of satyrs, nymphs, and mae¬ nads, who are mortal rather than divine. Finally, the god’s death as well as rebirth is emphasized in the myth of Dionysus Zagreus.9 Second, his power. Dionysus is powerful because he is a god; but in myth, at least, the god conceals his divinity in order to impress his presence all the more forcefully upon mortals. In his mythical epiph¬ anies, he exercises his destructive power from a position of apparent

appears on the Exekias cup, which shares the epiphany theme with the Homeric Hymn to

Dionysus (above, n. 4) without representing the same myth (Lissarrague 1987b, 116-18 [= 1990c, 120—22]; Henrichs 1987a, 109—11; Siedentopf 1990). Images of Dionysus and his circle: Simon 1985, 269-94; LIMC s.v. “Dionysos”; Carpenter 1986; Lissarrague 1987b (= 1990c); Vierneisel and Kaeser 1990. For different ways of interpreting the religious signifi¬ cance of Dionysiac iconography see most recently Berard et al. 1984 (= 1989); Merkelbach 1988; Schlesier 1987a (review of Carpenter 1986); Henrichs 1982 and 1987a. 7Otto 1933, 80 (= 1965, 85). On Otto’s Dionysus see below in the section titled “Polarities.” 8Daraki 1985, 28. 9 See below in the section titled “The Suffering God.”

Human and Divine in Dionysus

19

weakness and inferiority, as in the Lycurgus episode of Iliad 6, the •Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, and the Bacchae. When provoked by mortals, he confronts them directly and stares them down—the fron¬ tal face and the irritating smile are visual hallmarks of Dionysus’ selfrevelation in art and literature.10 But the punishment he inflicts is often indirect, deceptive, and designed to hide his presence and downplay his power; unlike Apollo or Artemis, he does not kill his victims through direct divine intervention but relies on those self-destructive drives within their human nature that cause madness, self-mutilation, or transformation. Similarly, when Dionysus bestows his two ambig¬ uous gifts, the wine and ritual ecstasy, he brings about changes in the personality of the human recipient. The “blessings of madness” in particular, whether they take the form of maenadic bakkheia or of mixed orgia of men and women, create a powerful emotional bond between Dionysus and his human worshipers, which blurs the bound¬ aries between human and divine.11 Third, Dionysus’ self-revelation. As perceived by the Greeks, the transformative power of Dionysus is inseparable from his epiphanies. It is his physical presence as an anthropomorphic god that empowers him to interact with mortals. Dionysus, deus praesentissimus, “the god of the most immediate presence,”12 reveals himself more often, more ostentatiously, and with greater emphasis on his anthropomorphic properties than any other Greek god—witness the frequency of epiph¬ any scenes in Dionysiac myth and art, and the close ritual resemblance between the god and his worshipers in cult. More specifically, Di¬ onysus appears as a child surrounded by his nurses in Iliad 6, as an ephebic youth in the Homeric Hymn, as an effeminate intruder in

10On Eur. Bacchae 439, 1021 (smile), see Dodds i960, 131; Segal 1982, 249; and Foley 1980, 127 (= with revision 1985, 247). On the frontal face/mask of Dionysus, “the only Olympian god to be represented facing front” (Frontisi-Ducroux and Vernant 1988, 191 [ = 1986, 28]), see Korshak 1987; and LIMC s.v. “Dionysos” nos. 6-48; Frontisi-Ducroux 1991, 177-230, 253-63 (catalogue); below, nn. 62 and 64-65. nOn wine, maenadism, and ritual gender roles see Henrichs 1978a, 1982, and 1984a; Lissarrague 1987b (= 1990c); and Versnel 1990a, 123-55. Some of the anthropological, psychiatric, and neurophysiological aspects of Dionysiac mania and enthousiasmos (under¬ stood as “possession,” “group hysteria,” or “trance”) have been explored by Dodds 1951, 64-101 (“The Blessings of Madness”); Jeanmaire 1951, 105-56; Simon 1978, 251-57; and Bremmer 1984. 12Otto 1965, 90 (= 1933, 85).

20

Albert Henrichs

Aeschylus’ Lycurgus trilogy, and as the youthful and effeminate Lyd ian stranger in the Bacchae. On scores of Attic vases he appears in human form and in the midst of his followers as the divine role model for his thiasos: he leads the Bacchic dance, performs sparagmos, both gives and receives his own gift, the wine, adopts the posture of a symposiast, and pours libations.13 In actual cult, the ritual affinity between Dionysus and the members of his thiasos is so close that the god bears the same name as his worshipers: they are bakkhai or bakkhoi, while he is the bakkhos par excellence, both an ideal participant in and the divine recipient of the Bacchic ritual.14 As their ritual identities converge and merge, the god and his human entourage act and look alike, but their similarity, though close, merely reflects the perfor¬ mance and mood of the ritual occasion; it does not amount to a “fusion” of god and mortal, let alone to an “identification” with the divine through some kind of sacramental union or even commu¬ nion.15 Nor must we conclude, as Jane Harrison did in her quest for ritual origins, that the divinity of Dionysus is nothing but a ritual con¬ struct, a “projection from the group,” the thiasos.16 For the Greeks, 13 Above, n. 6. .r 14 On bakkhos and its derivatives in the context of ritual identities and identification through ritual see Graf 1985, 285-91.

15 Rohde (1898b, 14-15 [= 1925, 258 and 272 n. 32]) and Dodds (1951, 278 n. 1, and i960 on Eur. Bacch. 115,

135, 136, 144-50) represent extreme attempts to assimilate the worshiper

to the god and to blur the distinction of human and divine; for a critique see Jeanmaire 1951, Henrichs 1982, 159-60 and 234-36; Henrichs 1984b, 229-31; Schlesier 1991, esp. 222-26. 37 Cf. Henrichs 1982, 159-60 and 234-36; Jones 1984; Jones 1991, m-17; and Obbink s contribution to this volume. Like the dying god, Frazer s Dionysiac sacramentalism (see following note) resurfaces periodically, most recently in an extreme form: “Omophagy, ritual eating of raw flesh, is the assimilation and internalization of godhead. Ancient mystery religion was posited on the worshipper’s imitation of the god. Cannibalism was impersona¬ tion, a primitive theater. You are what you eat” (Paglia 1990, 95). 38 Kott 1974, 186-230; the quotation is from p. 222. Dionysus continues to be regarded as a forerunner of Christ, both in terms of sacramentalism and anthropomorphism: “To drink wine in the rites of Dionysus is to commune with the god and take his power and physical presence into one’s body. . . . Euripides’ popular depiction of the god anticipated the Christian concept of Christ as God incarnate in human form, a man-god [above, n. 16], conceived by a mortal woman from the impregnating action of the Holy Spirit, just as it foreshadowed the image of the miracle-worker who turns water into wine and who is physically present in wine-sacraments conducted in his honor” (Evans 1988, 148, in a chapter entitled “Dionysos and Christ,” followed by another called “Dionysos and Us ; Evans’ book has added a new dimension to the modern Dionysus by claiming him as a symbol for “the gay liberation movement”).

Human and Divine in Dionysus

29

the Zagreus myth without Christian prejudice, but with strict atten¬ tion to the ritual process of blood sacrifice and to sacrificial as well as structural connections between killing and eating.39 According to the majority of ancient sources, the Titans boiled the limbs of Dionysus before they consumed them; in a different version reported by Cle¬ ment of Alexandria, the flesh of the god was first boiled and then roasted.40 Detienne argues, too ingeniously to my mind, that the sequence of boiling and roasting represents an inversion of the normal sacrificial ritual, and that the Zagreus myth must be seen as an Orphic protest against animal sacrifice, especially in its Dionysiac form of the ritual rending of animals and the eating of raw meat. In the final count Detienne’s emphasis on the esoteric Zagreus myth and on the so-called cuisine of sacrifice treats Dionysus not as a god but as food for human consumption.

Polarities The Dionysus of Nietzsche, Rohde, Frazer, and Detienne is a god whose divine identity is interchangeable with the human identity of his worshipers—the ultimate goal is oneness with the deity, whether the supposed union is understood as psychological or sacramental. Can a Dionysus who is barely distinguishable from his human fol¬ lowers still be considered a god in the full Greek sense of the term? An emphatically negative answer to this question was given in 1933 by Walter F. Otto, who construed a radically different Dionysus. Otto was a spiritual disciple of Nietzsche, who inspired Otto’s dithyrambic style and emphasis on Dionysian emotionalism.41 In a striking depar¬ ture from Nietzsche, however, Otto took Dionysus seriously and

39Detienne 1977, 163-217 (= 1979, 68-94, 109-17). Detienne is more respectful of Dionysus’ divinity than Frazer, but his alimentary reading of the Zagreus myth makes too much of variable narrative details and ignores the fundamental distinction between myth and ritual. In his most recent book on Dionysus, however, Detienne examines a much more representative spectrum of the Dionysiac record and does so with a fresh emphasis on regional cult and on Dionysus as an epiphanic god (below, n. 45). 40 Clement of Alexandria Protrepticus 2.18.1 = OF 35. Cf. Henrichs 1972, 67-68; West 1983a, 160-61. 41 On Otto’s Dionysus see McGinty 1978, 141-80 and 233-43; Cancik 1986; Henrichs 1987b, 26-28 and 44-45 (= Flashar 1990, I39~4i and 157-58).

30

Albert Henrichs

redirected attention to him as a god whose divinity is absolute, uncon¬ ditional, and not transferable to human substitutes. Otto championed a dynamic Dionysus who is revealed in frequent epiphanies and defined by polarities. He is the god who comes, as well as the god who disappears: it is his dual nature that compels him to conceal and to transform his divinity by wearing a human mask.42 In a dramatic passage, Otto characterizes the two sides of his Dionysus as follows: His duality has manifested itself to us in the antitheses of ecstasy and horror, infinite vitality and savage destruction; in the pandemonium in which deathly silence is inherent; in the immediate presence which is at the same time absolute remoteness. All of his gifts and attendant phe¬ nomena give evidence of the sheer madness of his dual essence: proph¬ ecy, music, and finally wine, the flamelike herald of the god, which has in it both bliss and brutality. At the height of ecstasy all of these paradoxes suddenly unmask themselves and reveal their names to be Life and Death.43 Otto’s concept of the polar Dionysus is indebted to Euripides and Plutarch, and also to Nietzsche. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche had paid but scarce attention to the dual nature of Dionysus and to the mixed emotions of his followers, because he was too preoccupied with the larger polarity of Apollo versus Dionysus to develop the idea of a polar Dionysus and to exhaust its potential. Otto saw the opportunity and seized it.44 42 Otto devoted two chapters of his book to Dionysus as “the god who comes” and who displays his mobility and power in his epiphanies (Otto 1933, 71-81 [= 1965, 74-85]). The nineteenth-century reception of the epiphanic Dionysus from Georg Friedrich Creuzer to Friedrich Holderlin, who characterized Dionysus as “der kommende Gott,” has been studied at length by Frank 1982. 43 Otto 1965, 121 (= 1933, 113). 44 Significant Greek examples of a polar articulation of Dionysus include the fifthcentury bone tablets from Olbia (unknown to Otto; see the discussions by Graf and Burkert in this volume), the Bacchae of Euripides, and various remarks in Plutarch (Flenrichs 1984b, 235

n- 85, 236f. n. 88). On Dionysiac polarities in Nietzsche see Flenrichs 1984b, 234-36;

Henrichs 1986, 395~96. Current rearticulations of Otto’s polar Dionysus can be found in Segal 1982; Henrichs 1982, 158-59; Vernant 1986a, 255-57 (= 1988, 398-400); Vernant 1987, 113-14 (= 1990a, 99-100; quoted below at n. 51); Goldhill 1990, 126-27; Bierl 1989, 52-54; Bierl 1991, esp. 13-20, 128-29, and 227 (with emphasis on both sides of Dionysus’ polarity); Hoffman 1989, 103-7; and Versnel 1990a, 131-37 (Dionysus as “the god of ambiguity”).

Human and Divine in Dionysus

31

Dionysus as the embodiment of opposites—Otto’s construct— remains to this day the most successful attempt to deal with the multiple identities of Dionysus. The divinity of Dionysus is recog¬ nized in his superhuman ability to embody opposite qualities simulta¬ neously. By the same token, the polar qualities that constitute the god also destroy his human followers, who cannot sustain the full force of both of the god’s sides at once.

Dionysus as the Other The French translation of Otto’s book on Dionysus appeared in 1969, and his influence can be seen in the Parisian Dionysus of JeanPierre Vernant and, more recently, of Detienne, who has developed one of Otto’s most fruitful categories, that of the god’s epiphanic presence, his parousia.45 In coming to terms with the Dionysus of Nietzsche and Otto, Vernant in particular has left his own subtle imprint on the modern Dionysus and given new meaning to an old concept—Dionysus as the “strangest” of gods or, more pointedly, as “l’etrange etranger.”46 In what sense can we speak of the “strangeness” of Dionysus? Ac¬ cording to Greek myth, the god came from Lydia, Phrygia, or Thrace; in Euripides’ Bacchae, the Dionysus in human disguise who returns to Thebes is repeatedly characterized as “the stranger” (ho xenos). Rohde took these arrival myths as historical fact and argued that the cult of

45 Detienne 1986 (= 1989a; summarized in 1987, 360-61). Detienne prefers the term parousia to epiphany (cf. Diodorus Siculus 4.3.3: “to praise the presence of Dionysus,” ten parousian hymnein tou Dionysou). Of the various epiphanic verbs used by Dionysus in the prologue to Euripides’ Bacchae, hekd comes emphatically at the beginning of line 1 and pareimi at the beginning ofline 5 (cf. Vernant 1986a, 24-7—50 [— 1988, 39® 94])- Unlike Otto, Detienne emphasizes the dual nature and regional characteristics of Dionysus epiphanies, he associates the god’s beneficial presence with Athens and his destructive visitations with the Argolid, Boeotia, and Thrace. I believe this particular polarity has more to do with the different articulations of Dionysus in myth and cult than with regional differentiation. 46 Detienne 1986, 21 (= 1989a, 10); Vernant 1990a, 96. Renate Schlesier suggested to me in conversation that “l’etrange etranger” as well as Vernant’s “deconcertante etrangete” (below, n. 58) recalls “L’inquietante etrangete,” the standard French version of Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” (1919). For different attempts to articulate Dionysus as the “dieu etranger” in political, historical, or structuralist terms see also Gernet 1953, 392 (= 1968, 85, and 1981b, 66-67); Daraki 1985, 12-14; Detienne 1986, 21-25 (= 1989a, 10-13).

32

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Dionysus had invaded Greece literally “from abroad and as something foreign.”47 He drew attention to the “strange” behavior of the god’s “Thracian” followers—their ecstatic dances, overt sexuality, halluci¬ natory intoxication, ritual dress, and bloodthirsty violence. Inspired by his reading of the second volume of Rohde’s Psyche (1898), Thomas Mann in Death in Venice (1912) transformed the Thracian Dionysus into the mysterious Venetian “stranger” and into the “stranger god” (“der fremde Gott”), whom he understood as a dimension of the hu¬ man psyche—the dangerous Dionysiac “stranger” within us, a sym¬ bol of “freedom, release, forgetfulness.”48 With the intuition of the novelist, Mann had opened a new chapter in the modern study of Dionysus. Yet the scholarly world did not take notice until several decades later. In 1933 Otto pointed out that the mythical image of Dionysus as the “stranger” does not refer to the god’s arrival from abroad in the distant historical past but to his disturbing epiphanic presence in the here and now.49 Otto realized even more acutely than Mann that the strangeness of Dionysus was as much a reflection of the mental state of his worshipers as it was a description of Dionysus’ special status as a god. In retrospect, however, Mann and Otto were mere precursors of a more far-reaching revaluation of Nietzsche’s “psychology of the Di¬ onysian state” that continues to be undertaken in Paris. Forty years ago Louis Gernet, the great French social historian, identified Dionysus tentatively, almost casually, as “the Other” (“l’Autre”), a divine power perceived neither as sameness nor as polarity but as alterity or other¬ ness.50 Of all the conceptual categories marshaled in the modern 47 Rohde 1925, 283 (= 1898b, 41): “aus der Fremde und als ein Fremdes”. The particular arrival myth of the Bacchae does have a historical context, but it is very different from the one imagined by Rohde. As Versnel (1990a, 102-31 and 158-63) has made abundantly clear, Euripides modeled his dramatization of the mythical arrival of the stranger god Dionysus in Thebes on the actual introduction of foreign cults and “new gods” into Athens in the late fifth century. 48 Mann 1963, 4-8 and 67. On Mann’s refictionalization of Rohde’s fictional construct of the Thracian worship of Dionysus see Flenrichs 1984b, 208 n. 8. 49Otto 1933, 70-73 (= 1965, 74-76), where he virtually defines Dionysus as the Other without fully exploring the concept (1965, 74): “He entered the world differently (“anders”) from the way in which we are told the other gods did, and he encounters man, too, in a very special way. In both instances his appearance is startling, disquieting, violent.” 50Gernet 1981b, 67 (= 1953, 393, and 1968, 86): “Dionysus brings to mind the Other. He would at least be its symbol, since he is, in terms of his function and nature, a god who is beyond our reach.” Gernet does not elaborate; it is Vernant who provides the exegesis.

Human and Divine in Dionysus

33

interpretation of Dionysus, that of the Other, with its inherent sug¬ gestiveness and polyvalence, promises to become the most popular. It does convey more directly than most other categories something of the shock of the contact between divine and human; but it too suf¬ fers from abstraction and schematization. Unlike the polar Dionysus, who is overcharged and overdetermined, Dionysus understood as the Other is defined in terms of what he is not—he is not what the mortal self who faces him expects him to be. Following Gernet, Vernant has articulated most forcefully the concept of the Other: Even in the world of the Olympian gods, to which he had been admit¬ ted, Dionysos personified, as expressed so well by Louis Gernet, the presence of the Other. He did not confirm and reinforce the human and social order by making it sacred. Dionysos called this order into ques¬ tion; indeed, he shattered it. In so doing he revealed another side of the sacred, one that was no longer regular, stable, and defined but strange, elusive, and disconcerting. As the only Greek god endowed with the power of may a (“magic”), Dionysos transcends all forms and evades all definitions; he assumes all aspects without confining himself to any one. Like a conjurer, he plays with appearances and blurs the boundaries between the fantastic and the real. Ubiquitous, he is never to be found where he is but always here, there, and nowhere at the same time. As soon as he appears, the distinct categories and clear oppositions that give the world its coherence and rationality fade, merge, and pass from one to the other. He is at once both male and female. By suddenly appearing among men, he introduces the supernatural in the midst of the natural and unites heaven and earth. Young and old, wild and civilized, near and far, beyond and here-below are joined in him and by him. Even more, he abolishes the distance that separates the gods from men and men from animals.51

In this eloquent statement, Gernet’s Other coexists, however pre¬ cariously, with Otto’s polar Dionysus.52 Elsewhere Vernant defines 51 Vernant 1987, 113-14 (= 1990a, 99-100). Earlier definitions of Dionysus as “la figure de l’Autre” include Vernant 1981, 2: 82 (= 1983, 325); Frontisi-Ducroux and Vernant 1986, 42-43 (= 1988, 205-6); Vernant 1986a, esp. 246 (= 1988, esp. 389-90); and Vernant 1986b, 291 and 300. 52 Otto's Dionysus is composed of opposite characteristics, the two sides ot each pair are treated as equivalent. By contrast, alterity is a more discriminating category; it establishes a hierarchical relationship between opposites by treating one as normal and the other as abnormal. Vernant and Detienne rend to overemphasize the negative side of the polarity

34

Albert Henrichs

the Other more appropriately in contradistinction to the concrete manifestations of the self—if the self is perceived as male, Dionysus as the Other is female; if Greek, he is barbarian, if rational, irrational.53 The particular strength of the concept of the Other, especially in Vernant’s articulation, lies in its emphasis on the human psyche and its emotional response to the extraordinary, the deviant, the unknown. To the extent that the Other is a source of apprehension as well as fear, it constitutes a psychological category.54 For Vernant, every Greek god inspires awe and is by definition the Other. What makes Dionysus the Other par excellence is his tendency to change into whatever one least knows, least expects, or least sees the necessity of fearing. In particular, his deceptive humanity conceals the latent force of his divinity while intensifying its actual impact.55 Vernant’s Dionysus appeals to our imagination, takes us by sur¬ prise, and reminds us that awe, fear, and even terror are inseparable from the Greek notion of divinity. In his concern for the human reaction to Dionysus, however, Vernant also sometimes defines the god in all-too-human terms. While emphasizing the alterity of Di¬ onysus as a divinity, he finds the concrete manifestations of the god’s otherness in the “strange” behavior not only of his followers, but also of ourselves: “With Dionysos, the music changes. At the heart itself of life on this earth, alterity is a sudden intrusion of that which alienates us from daily existence, from the normal course of things, from our¬ selves: disguise, masquerade, drunkenness, play, theater, and finally, trance and ecstatic delirium. Dionysos teaches or compels us to be-

because it reflects their notion of the Other as a subversive and disruptive force (cf. Bierl 1991, 14-16, esp. nn. 34, 37, and 40). The two models, though deceptively similar, are difficult to reconcile. 53 Vernant 1985a, n-13 and 25-30 (= 1991, m-12, 195-96, and 204-6); and Vernant 1989, ii (= 1991, 20). 54 Like Gernet, Vernant derives his notion of the Other rather casually from the Platonic categories of tauton and to heteron (1985a, 83 n. 2 [= 1991, 195 n. 2]). In current usage, however, including Vernant’s own, the Other is a decidedly post-Freudian, psychological category rather than a Platonic one. Vernant’s Other invites comparison with Freud’s definition of “das Unheimliche” (above, n. 46) as something that evokes ambivalent feelings because it is at the same time alienating and uncannily familiar, and with Rudolf Otto’s concept of the sacred as “the entirely Other” (“das ganz andere”), which inspires a special kind of fear (cf. Schlesier 1987b); it is less comparable to the self/other distinctions found in Lacan and Bakhtin. 55 Vernant 1986a (= 1988).

Human and Divine in Dionysus

35

come other than what we ordinarily are, to experience in this life here below the ,sensation of escape toward a disconcerting strangeness.”56 The Dionysus in us, first championed by Nietzsche, has come full circle. Both Nietzsche and Vernant understand Dionysus as the exter¬ nalized exponent of an inner experience that amounts to a surrender of one’s individuality. While Nietzsche saw Dionysus as an innate drive that unites human beings with nature and with their true selves, Vernant now sees him as an intrusive force that alienates us from ourselves as well as from the world in which we normally live. If the Other manifests itself in the mask, cross-dressing, the symposium, and role-playing, we are no longer in the presence of a divine fig¬ ure, but of the kind of behavior that fits a familiar anthropological pattern—the period of license, rites of reversal, anomie.57 That the Greeks associated this pattern occasionally with Dionysus tells us something about their self-definition and about the social functions of the god, but it barely touches upon the Greek perception of his di¬ vinity. In its most consistent form, Vernant’s concept of the Other thus separates us from Dionysus as a personally conceived god. Vernant’s Dionysus quickly ceases to be the divine embodiment of the Other and becomes a mere mediator between the self and “the multiple config¬ urations of the Other,” a conductor of psychic energies who “opens for us the path of escape toward a disorienting strangeness.”58 On this reading, Dionysus comes close indeed to being a divine magician “endowed with the power of mdyT”59 Magic, illusion, and “strange56 Vernant 1991, 196 (= 1985a. I2_I3)57 Above, n. 25. 58 Vernant 1986b, 300: “[Dionysus] joue a faire surgir, des cette vie et ici-bas, autour de nous et en nous, les multiples figures de 1 Autre. II nous ouvre, sur cette terre et dans le cadre meme de la cite, la voie dune evasion vers une deconcertante etrangete.” See above, n. 46. 59 Vernant’s evocation of the Sanskrit word maya in the first of the two texts quoted above recalls both Gernet’s description of Dionysus as “un dieu de maya ’ (1953. 393 [=1968, 86, and 1981b, 67]; cf. Vernant 1986b, 291: “dieu de magie, de maya') and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (secs. 1 and 18), where maya is used in the sense of “illusion” or “mere phenomena,” that is, as an Apollinian rather than Dionysian term. Both Nietzsche and Pentheus consider Dionysus a magician, but they attach different values to the word. According to Nietzsche, Dionysus’ magic (“Zauber”) transforms the world (below, n. 75); in the eyes of Pentheus, Dionysus is not only a “stranger” (Eur. Bacch. 233 xenos), but also “a magician and charlatan” (.Bacch. 234goes epoidos; cf. Versnel 1990a, 116-18). When the god in disguise tricks Pentheus in the so-called palace miracles, he does pose as “the whimsical magician, the master of fantasies” (Dodds i960, 151).

36

Albert Henrichs

ness” are important aspects of Dionysus’ mythical identity, but they become much less relevant if we look beyond myth and ask how the god was perceived in the context of cult. With increasing frequency, the concept of the Other is applied to various aspects of the Dionysiac experience—to the wine and the mask, to nonconformity and violence—rather than to the god him¬ self60 This tendency reflects a widening of horizons and an ability to mediate between the various realms of Dionysus. At the same time it further contributes to the erosion of the god in Dionysus. Instead of sharpening our eye for the concrete signs of his divinity, the category of the Other, like the related categories of the liminal and the marginal, ultimately invites an indifference that blurs all distinctions by subsum¬ ing them under a single denominator, that of alterity.61

The Mask as a Sign of the Other Associated with cult and drama, art and literature, impersonation and transformation, the mask is of particular interest as a locus in which many Dionysiac ambiguities come simultaneously into play.62 60Detienne describes the wooden mask of Dionysus retrieved from the sea by the Methymnians as “other in the sense that it is both strange and foreign, reflecting the double meaning of the Greek word xenos” (1989a, 9 [= 1986, 19]); also, “the appearance of Dionysos requires the revelation of otherness through its exacting violence” (Detienne 1987, 360). For Lissarrague, “1’experience du vin, on Fa vu, est aussi experimentation de l’alterite,” translated as “the experience of wine is also the experience of the Other” (1987b, 57 [= 1990c, 10-13, 58]). According to Zeitlin, Thebes, the native city of Dionysus, “functions in the theater as an anti-Athens, an other place” (1990b, 144; cf. her contribution in this volume); along similar lines, Bierl understands Antigone as a Dionysiac figure who represents the Other (“vertritt die Umkehrung des Gewohnlichen”: Bierl 1989, 49 n. 33; cf. Bierl 1991, 1, 15-16, 66). 61 For Hoffman 1989, Dionysus is by definition the liminal god (esp. p. 114: “Although all deities have liminal characteristics, none is more liminal than Dionysus himself’). A critical assessment of the value and limitations of such general anthropological categories as marginality and liminality for the study of Greek myths and rituals can be found in Versnel 1990b, 50-55, who reminds us that apart from Dionysus gods as different as Apollo, Artemis, Athena, Hermes, Pan, and Poseidon have all at one time or another been labeled “marginal.” 62 The principal studies of the Dionysiac mask as a symbol of ambiguity and mirror of meaning are Otto 1933, 81-86 and I94~95 (= 1965, 86-91 and 209-10); Foley 1980, 126-32 (= with revision 1985, 246-54); Segal 1982, 223-24 and 238-40; Frontisi-Ducroux and Vernant 1986, 38-42 (= 1988, 201-5); Vernant 1986a (= 1988); and Frontisi-Ducroux 1984

Human and Divine in Dionysus

37

According to Otto, whose brief chapter on the mask has inspired much of the recent interest in the subject, Dionysus, “the god of the mask

( der Maskengott,” “le dieu-masque”), is both present and

absent in his mask, which thus becomes the symbol of the “duality and paradox inherent in his epiphany. For Vernant, the enigmatic mask of Dionysus functions as the visible sign of that “otherness” or “strange¬ ness

that disorients and alienates the mortals who encounter him.

The image of the mask conceals more than it reveals; it challenges our imagination and raises questions—“the mask is pure confronta¬ tion. 63 A late archaic neck amphora in Tarquinia offers an example of this confrontation and invites us to confront the issue of representation and identity that attaches to every mask. From both sides of the vase, the same frontal image of a bearded, ivy-wreathed head stares at us with big saucer eyes, which seem to epitomize the enigma of the mask. Are we dealing with the image of a face or with the representation of a mask, the image of an image? And who is represented on the vase— Dionysus or one of his satyrs?64 Whether used in drama or in cult, masks create the impression of otherness and impose “strange” identities on the wearer as well as the observer. The so-called Lenaia vases depict cubic masks of Dionysus that are suspended from poles or pillars.65 These masks simulate the (= 1989) and esp. 1991. Cf. Vernant 1985a, 28-82 (= 1991, 111-38), for a discussion of Gorgo; and Napier 1986 for some cross-cultural comparisons. 63Otto 1965, 91 (= 1933, 85: “die Maske ist ganz Begegnung”); Calame 1986. 64 Tarquinia, National Museum inv. no. RC 1804, ca. 520/510 b.c. (formerly assigned to the Antimenes Painter); ABK275.5; CVA Tarquinia 2, pi. 32.4; Simon, Hirmer, and Hirmer 1981, 90 with pi. XXVIII (identified as the “mask of Dionysus”); Berard et al. 1984, fig. 214 (= 1989, fig. 214); Simon 1985, pi. 268; Carpenter 1986, 97; Frontisi-Ducroux 1991, 183; cf. LIMC “Dionysos” nos. 6-48 (Dionysus as “Maskengott”); and Korshak 1987 (frontal images of Dionysus, satyrs). The massive snub nose is the hallmark of satyrs, but the human ears and the ivy wreath around the head link the face iconographically to Dionysus. 65 Frontisi-Ducroux 1991, 8-9, differentiates between (1) the “culdc masks” of Dionysus represented on the “Lenaia vases,” which were objects of worship and which were un¬ paralleled outside of the Attic cult of Dionysus; (2) the “ritual masks” worn by human celebrants on ritual occasions; and (3) the “dramatic masks,” especially of tragedy. For an exhaustive dossier of the Dionysus masks see Frontisi-Ducroux 1991, preceded by Durand and Frontisi-Ducroux 1982, Frontisi-Ducroux 1986 and 1987a, and Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 32-34. The history of the ongoing debate over the festive occasion for the cultic display of the mask image of Dionysus—Lenaia or Anthesteria?—has been fully traced by Frontisi-Ducroux 1991, 17-63, who argues that the ritual scenes on the vases evoke the cultic presence of Dionysus as “le dieu-masque” without referring to a specific festival. As for her second category (“ritual masks”), Burkert 1977a, 171 and 288 (= 1985, 104 and 186)

38

Albert Henrichs

epiphany of a god believed to be present in his image, but they were never worn by men impersonating Dionysus. Wearing a mask on the tragic stage, on the other hand, was tantamount to “playing the other”—mythical heroes, women, non-Greeks, or gods such as Di¬ onysus.66 The Dionysus of the Bacchae is different from any other stage god in tragedy: his presence dominates the entire action, and he masks his “true self,” his divinity, behind a deceptively human face. He plays both a human and a divine role and wears two opposite “masks”—a doubling of the Other that reflects Dionysus’ own polar¬ ity.67 records a single case of a divine mask (prosopon; on the term see Segal 1982, 248-49) worn by a priest in a ritual setting—the mask of Demeter Kidaria at Pheneos, Arcadia (Pausanias 8.15.3). The various masks worn in the earliest stages of the cult of Artemis Orthia do not portray the image of Artemis (Graf 1985, 89; Carter 1987; Vernant 1989, 173—209 [= 1991, 220-43]). On Frontisi-Ducroux’s third category (“dramatic masks”) see the following note. 66Zeitlin 1990a. On the pictorial and textual evidence for tragic and satyric masks in Attic drama see Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 180-96, and Kachler 1991 (with excellent illustrations); for a fascinating analysis of the dramatic effects generated by tragic masks see Melchinger 1990, 201-16 and 290-98; Kachler 1986 offers a spectacular collection of theater masks made for modern Swiss productions of Greek tragedies and comedies. The fascination of the theatrical mask, whether we call it paradox, illusion, ambiguity, or ambivalence, lies in the interplay of multiple identities, both real and imaginary, that are simultaneously revealed or concealed by the mask. I am thinking particularly of the following: the distance as well as the affinity between the dramatic identities of the masked characters and the civic identities of the individual actors and members of the audience (Segal, 1982, 215-16 and 239; Goldhill 1990; see above, n. 15); the convention of repeated role changes, which required each actor to play several parts, marked by a succession of different masks, in the course of a single play (Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 135-49); the representation of female characters by male actors through the mediation of the mask (Melchinger 1990* 208—10); the contrast between the visible face presented by the mask and the verbal image of the same face mirrored in the tragic text (Frontisi-Ducroux 1991, 226-27), and a related aspect, the tension between the fixed immutability of the mask and the physical or mental transformations that affect many tragic characters (Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 173-74; Melchinger 1990, 213-16; Blume 1978, 9t

92)> and finally, the double role, enhanced by costume and/or mask, played by dramatic

characters such as Pentheus, who cross-dresses as a maenad (above, n. 18), and Dionysus, who assumes a false identity in the Edoni of Aeschylus, the Frogs of Aristophanes, and the Bacchae of Euripides (see following note). Cf. Segal 1982, 27—31, Vernant 1986a (— 1988); Goldhill 1988; and Frontisi-Ducroux I99I> 225_3°- The actor who played the character of Dionysus either wore the same smiling mask throughout (Roux 1970, no; Foley 1980, 126—31 [= with revision 1985, 246—54]; on Dionysus’ smile see above, n. 10) or alternated between the god mask of Dionysus (above, n. 65) in the prologue and the closure scenes and the deceptive “human” mask of the smiling, effeminate Stranger in the three encounters with Pentheus (Segal 1982, 240). There is a third possibility, suggested by Dionysus’ emphasis on his human disguise in the prologue, namely, that he wore the god mask and divine costume only for his elevated deus-exmachina appearance in the closing scene (cf. Mastronarde 1990, 273, 284, no. 15).

Human and Divine in Dionysus

39

All the celebrated figures of the Greek stage—Prometheus, Oedi¬ pus, etc.—are mere masks of this original hero, Dionysus.”68 It was Nietzsche who extended the concept of the Dionysiac mask from the image that reveals the face of the tragic hero to the tragic identities of the characters and of the divine role models that some of them repre¬ sent. The mask as a metaphor thus signals an interiorized, invisible otherness that either confirms or contradicts the visual mask. In Eu¬ ripides, for instance, Antigone, Cassandra, and Hecuba are character¬ ized through verbal “masks” that associate their abnormal behavior with the realm of Dionysus, thus adding new facets to their traditional identities.69 More than five centuries later, Longus closed his Di¬ onysiac novel with the arrival of Dionysophanes, the natural father of Daphnis, who reenacts the divine epiphany reflected in his name, which serves as his verbal mask.70 From Euripides to Longus, Di¬ onysiac masks, whether visual or verbal, invariably reflect the chang¬ ing identities that take shape and disintegrate under the sign of Di¬ onysus.

Recognizing the God The modern Dionysus is intense and fascinating; at the same time, he is a highly secular product of conceptualization and compartmentalization. We have gone through half of the old myth—during the past 120 years, Dionysus has been dissected and divided into detached concepts that have taken on a life of their own and continue to feed our imagination, just as in the myth Dionysus is dismembered by the Titans, who feed on his limbs. Is it possible to collect the scattered pieces and to bring the god in Dionysus back to life? And where do we find the god in him? The history of Western theology suggests that the notion of pure godhood, undiluted by anthropomorphic accretions, is beyond the comprehension of most people. The Greeks themselves

68 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, sec. 10 (= 1967, 73); cf. sec. 9 (= 1967, 72). 69Schlesier 1988a, 1988b, and her essay in this volume; Bierl 1991, 228-31. 70 Longus 4.13-38; cf. Merkelbach 1988, 143 and 185-97. IF it is indeed true that sex and the relation of the sexes are not merely portrayed in Daphnis and Chloe but subjected to critical scrutiny (Winkler 1990b, 101-26), Dionysophanes as the embodiment of the married state represents a more complex and ambiguous figure than Longus is normally given credit for.

40

Albert Henrichs

never attempted to detach the divinity of Dionysus from his physical manifestations. They believed with Aby Warburg that “god lies in the particulars” (“der liebe Gott steckt im detail”).71 Taken literally, this maxim provides a preliminary answer to our question. If it is true that Dionysus was perceived in antiquity essentially as an epiphanic god who revealed himself in concrete physical manifestations, as his myths and images suggest, we need to concentrate on recognition, on the encounter of his particulars. Throughout antiquity, to accept Diony¬ sus was tantamount to being in the presence of the god, whether by a stretch of the imagination or by a leap of faith. His divine status is inseparable from the ability of his worshipers to recognize him not only in his human form, but also behind the particulars of his other manifestations—for instance, his sacred plants or animals, his myth¬ ical entourage, or his special gift to mortals, the wine.72 In an epigram from Thasos, the local physician Timokleides dedi¬ cates to Dionysus, the “Lord of the maenads,” a temple “under the open sky, surrounding an altar and covered with ivy,” as well as a “handsome evergreen cave.”73 Timokleides goes on to describe how he will mix the wine of Dionysus with the water of the nymphs. The epigram, which culminates in a prayer for the doctor’s personal wel¬ fare, is a good example of how Dionysus is perceived through the

71 Cf. Sassi 1983, 86 89; Kany 1987, 131-90, esp. 173-74; Gombrich 1970, 13-1411. 1, 229, and 286. In this maxim (penned in 1925) the art historian Warburg epitomized the interpretive process as he saw it

a painting’s most telling details, understood as “cultural

symbols,” reveal the true spirit of its epoch and exemplify the formative role of historical recollection in general, which informs all culture.

72 See above in the section titled “Seeing Is Believing.” 73A French translation of the epigram was published by Pouilloux (in Ecole d’Athenes 1967, 172) and reprinted with tidbits of Greek by Roux (1972, 633-34); a brief discussion of the epigram can be found in Merkelbach 1988, 19, 60. The first two lines of the iambics can be reconstructed from Roux 1972, 244, 633-34: hupaithrion soi naon amphibdmion | [sjkepaston ampeloisi, mainadon ana. The phrase kalon antron followed in line 3 (Roux 1972, 287). In 1976 Jean Pouilloux was kind enough to send me a copy of the entire Greek text, then to be published by F. Salviat, with the proviso “publication reservee.” He also confirmed that the inscription dates from the late Hellenistic or early imperial period, and not from the third century b.c. (Roux). Timokleides apparently built a “roofless” temple, that is, a temple with a large skylight (the hupaithrios naos is defined as a colonnaded structure without a roof, medium autem sub divo est sine tecto, by Vitruvius De architectura 3.2.8). The Dionysiac antron, toujours vert,

was a bower-grotto, “a frequent setting for Dionysiac symposia” (Rice

1983, 60 and 81-82; Merkelbach 1988, 63-66, with additional bibliography; Nilsson 1957a, 61-63, who compares the Dionysiac grottoes with “Laubhutten”).

Human and Divine in Dionysus

41

particulars of the local setting and how his divinity is poetically con¬ firmed by the evocation of a complex divine ambience that includes the “open sky”;74 his female worshipers, the maenads; the Dionysiac grotto; the clubhouse (oikon . . . euasterion) where the initiates raise their cry of euhoi; and finally, the god’s gift to mankind, “the nectar that ends pain, the sweetest thing for mortals” (an echo ofBacchae 772). What is more, Timokleides’ prayer recognizes Dionysus as a god who receives sacrifice and is worshiped by the initiates. Dionysus’ divinity, detailed in the particulars and confirmed in cult, is the focus of the poem rather than conceptualization. As we struggle to confront Dionysus, the god will emerge from his hiding in those elusive interstices that separate the ancient from the modern world to make an epiphany that invites understanding rather than belief. Dionysus once again joins his entourage of maenads and satyrs, mounts his panther, and embarks upon a conquest that re¬ establishes him in his traditional provinces and confirms his connec¬ tion with the wine and the theater, with mystery cults and ecstatic ritual, and with the world of the dead. He appears in this volume too under his contradictory and paradoxical guises, at once masculine and effeminate, bearded and youthful, sober and intoxicated, tragic and comic, ephemeral and timeless, an embodiment of life as well as death, thus incorporating the whole spectrum of human experience. But insofar as we speak of Dionysus as a god whose divinity can be grasped only in his actual presence, neither my rather academic sketch of the modern quest for Dionysus nor my unacademic conclusion is likely to do the job and answer the question with which I began: Who is this Dionysus? I am not suggesting that we become devotees of the god. What I want to emphasize is that the immediacy of the Greek encounter and the particulars of that encounter must remain central to our scholarly endeavors, whether we look for Dionysus in vase painting or in literature, in inscriptions or on monuments. Too often experts in one or another branch of the Dionysiac record who know everything 74 Pouilloux’s translation of hupaithrion, “a del ouvert,” was adopted by Detienne as the programmatic title of his most recent book on Dionysus (cf. Detienne 1986, 72 and 80-81 [ = 1989a, 46 and 51-52]). Like Artemis, Dionysus is indeed “der Gott des Draussen” who frequents the outdoors (cf. Graf 1985, 295, and Merkelbach 1988, 60-61, on Dionysus pro poleds).

42

Albert Henrichs

about the particulars are not interested in Dionysus. Conversely, some of the scholars who think hardest about the nature of Dionysus and conceptualize him for the rest of us are not always sufficiently attentive to all the particulars. Dionysus would be better served if the two sides joined forces, if a more constructive balance could be achieved. To conclude what must perforce remain a set of questions and to offer a conclusion that does more justice to Dionysus, it is necessary again to listen to the poets, and especially Pound. In a much later poem, one of the eleven cantos of 1945 composed in the detention camp at Pisa, Pound looks back at his life’s work and decides to do things differently. Instead of reviving yet another ancient myth by echoing his predecessors, as he had done in the second canto, he now has the courage to speak in his own voice, to be himself. From his prison cell, his cage, once more he invokes the presence of Dionysus, the god who liberates. The lynx is one of Pound’s principal poetic surrogates for Dionysus, and it appears suddenly, like a divine epiph¬ any, halfway into the poem, and in the form of a lyrical refrain: “O Lynx, my love, my lovely lynx,/Keep watch over my wine pot.” The refrain undergoes several transformations amid an ever-expanding Dionysiac paradise, or in Nietzsche’s poignant phrase, amid a “world bewitched”75 that is laden with fruit, populated by felines, nymphs, and maenads—“maelid and bassarid among lynxes”76—and accentu¬ ated with polytheistic invocations of Iakchos, Kore, Pomona, and Kythera—“O Lynx, keep watch on my fire”—“O Lynx, guard this orchard, Keep from Demeter’s furrow”—“Lynx, beware of these vine-thorns”—“O lynx, keep the edge on my cider.” The canto culmi¬ nates in a full-scale theophany that is exceptionally rich in Dionysiac detail: Therein is the dance of the bassarids Therein are centaurs 75 In

Die dionysische Weltanschauung” (summer 1870; cf. Cancik 1986, 118) and “Die

Geburt des tragischen Gedankens” (December 1870), two precursors of The Birth of Tragedy, letzsche described the topsy-turvy world of Dionysus as “die verzauberte Welt” (adopted y Otto 1933, 89 [= 1965, 95] as the title of a chapter on Dionysiac miracles). In the first paragraph of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche imagines that human individuals and nature will be reunited “unter dem Zauber des Dionysischen.” See above, n. 59. 76 The

maelids,

properly Mehai (Hesiod Theogony 187; Callimachus Hymn to Zeus 47,

Hymn to Delos 79-81), are tree nymphs, in particular, nymphs associated with the ash tree (mehai), and by extension with other trees as well.

Human and Divine in Dionysus

43

And now Priapus with Faunus The Graces have brought ’A(f)po8irr)v Her cell is drawn by ten leopards O lynx, guard my vineyard As the grape swells under vine leaf "HA.109 is come to our mountain there is a red glow in the carpet of pine spikes.77

The principal divinity here is Dionysus. He does not appear in person, nor is he named, but the poet, like Acoetes in the earlier poem, recognizes the god because he is visible in the particulars. “Der Gott steckt im detail”—in the dance of the maenads, in the leopards and the lynx (‘safe with my lynxes, feeding grapes to my leopards,” says Dionysus to Acoetes in canto 2), in the vineyard, the vine leaf, and the mountain, and most comfortingly in the red glow under the pine trees, sacred to Dionysus.78 77 Canto 79 (Pound 1983, 491-92). 78Jan Bremmer (Groningen) and Renate Schlesier (Berlin) have given me the benefit of their advice on various matters. I owe special thanks to Florence Verducci of the University of California at Berkeley for drawing my attention to Pound’s Dionysiac cantos and, what is more, for reading and explaining them to me. I gratefully dedicate this paper to her, as well as to the enthusiastic thiasos of Berkeley students who explored the modern Dionysus with me in the spring of 1990.

CHAPTER

2

The Asexuality of Dionysus Michael Jameson

In this essay I examine a phenomenon which has been remarked on before—it is so conspicuous that it could hardly be overlooked— but which has received less attention than one might expect. In essence it is this. Dionysus was, of all gods, the most closely associated with the phallus, the erect male member, at once the instrument and symbol of male sexuality. His myths and cults also refer to the liberation, if only temporary, of both women and men from social controls, includ¬ ing sexual controls, which in most cultures are among the most rigid. The god himself is represented to a surprising degree as detached and unconcerned with sex. There certainly are a number of exceptions, as is to be expected in a body of evidence that is spread over a millennium and comes from very diverse sources. I do not suggest, however, that these exceptions are insignificant; there is a persistent ambivalence about the god’s involvement with sex. One can refer to the god’s detachment as “asexuality,” as I have in the title of this essay. But one might also speak of his bisexuality, the coexistence of elements of both genders that may, in effect, cancel each other out, or even of his transcendence of sexuality.1 There are fre1 “Asexuality” is also used by Hoffman 1989, 105, and by Stephen Fineberg in an unpublished paper, “Dionysos in the New Democracy,” which he has kindly let me see and which will be incorporated in a longer study, forthcoming. Both scholars were members of a National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar on Greek religion and society that I

44

The Asexuality of Dionysus

45

quent references to his effeminacy. Aeschylus in his lost play Edoni has that Pentheus-like figure Lycurgus ask, “Where does this woman-man come from?

and in his satyr play Theori the god himself protests the

satyrs calumny, that he is a cowardly woman-man who is not counted as a male.2 There is, indeed, “something feminine in his nature.”3 Is this paradox, the effeminate god of the phallus, the phallic god of women, illusory, trivial, or quite central to the conception of the god and the nature of his cults? The subject can be examined under, roughly, three headings—iconography, myth, and cult.

Iconography The contrast is between the environment of the god and the depic¬ tion of his person. It is largely in vase painting, which as usual is mostly Attic, that he and his company are to be found. These scenes have been studied intensively, and I draw only on the most generally accepted conclusions.4 Dionysus’ company consists of both females and males

nymphs and maenads (the former usually thought to give

way to the latter in the course of the sixth century), and satyrs and sileni. When the god is alone with the females the sexuality is not overt organized at Stanford University in the summer of 1983. I profited from the stimulating experience the seminar provided, not least from the contributions of Fineberg and Hoffman. “Bisexuality” is the term used by Deutsch 1969 and Zeitlin 1982, while Frontisi-Ducroux and Lissarrague 1990, 232 n. 109, speak of the “alternation . . . between hypervirility and the transcendence of sex.” 2 Aeschylus Edoni frag. 61 (TrGF 3), quoted by Aristophanes Women of the Thesmophoria 136, and Theori (or Isthmiastae) frag. 78a (TrGF 3). Devereux 1973 took the word khlounes in another fragment of the Edoni, frag. 62 (TrGF 3), to be a reference to Dionysus as a eunuch. 3 Otto 1965, 175. Otto explores this aspect of the god at some length. He stresses Dionysus’ love for women and theirs for him. He cites Philostratus Imagines 2.17 (p. 367, 1-7 Kayser 1870): the Bacchant, ignoring the drunken Silenus who reaches for her, desires (erosa) the absent Dionysus and sees him before her eyes (Otto’s free rendering [p. 177] is consider¬ ably more fervent and mystical). The relevance of this mutual eroticism for the Dionysus of earlier centuries is questionable, but it turns out that, in Otto’s view, “true womanliness reveals itself in the slighter importance of sexual desire” when compared with men (p. 178). He sees the maternal, nursing role of Dionysus’ women as more significant. The relationship of Dionysus and his mother is also important for the very different, psychoanalytic perspec¬ tives of Slater 1968 and Deutsch 1969.

4Cf. Rapp 1872; Lawler 1927; Edwards i960; McNally 1978; Carpenter 1986; Schone 1987. I omit the South Italian repertoire, in which I have the impression the languid, beardless Dionysus of the later Attic vases prevails.

\6

Michael Jameson

Fig. 1. Dionysus, holding a cantharus and vine branch, moves to the right among satyrs and nymphs. Two nymphs play krotala; one carries a bearded snake. Attic red-figure cup from the late sixth century. (London, British Museum E 16, ARV2 61.75.)

but latent, if we grant that the swirling dances of young and lovely superhuman women have sexual overtones (fig. 1). When the satyrs too are in the scene they show by their arousal and their behavior that they are not indifferent to their companions (fig. 2). By the second quarter of the fifth century they are usually no longer shown with erections and are generally less enthusiastically indecent in their ac¬ tions (fig. 3). Perhaps it is worth remarking on what we all take for granted there are only male satyrs. Even a detumescent satyr next to a woman or a nymph embodies male sexuality.5 5At the same time it is worth noting that only satyrs, not men (except in scenes of actual or anticipated intercourse), are shown with erections, a point Lin Foxhall has made to me. Truly human males, we are to understand, show self-control. The sexuality of satyrs, by

The Asexuality of Dionysus

Fig. 2. A nymph resists the advances of two satyrs. The nymph, with a snake wrapped around her left arm, swings a thyrsus with her right. One satyr also holds a thyrsus, and both carry wineskins. Attic red-figure cup from the first quarter of the fifth century. (Munich, Direktion der Staatlichen Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, 2644, ARV2 461.37.)

The god, meanwhile, is never shown in art as involved in the satyrs’ sexual shenanigans. He may dance, he may drink, but he is never paired with or shown taking any interest in any of the female compan¬ ions of his rout. He is not shown with an erection, but then gods almost never are, except for a single goat-headed Pan chasing a shep¬ herd boy and the semi-iconic pillars of Hermes we call herms, which are shown with phalli at the right height in the archaic and early classical periods.* * * 6 What has not been remarked, as far as I know, is that contrast, does not need the presence of women for arousal (cf. Lissarrague 1990a, a valuable study that, along with Frontisi-Ducroux and Lissarrague 1990, 1 was able to use only in the revision of this essay). 6Keuls’s statement (1984, 291) that gods are never shown with an erection is too sweep-

48

Michael Jameson

Fig- 3- Dionysus, holding a cantharus and an ivy sprig, moves to the right, led by a satyr playing pipes. Three satyrs follow: one, infibulated, pesters a nymph; the last in the procession carries a pointed amphora on his shoulder and a drinking horn in his right hand. Attic red-figure cup from the first quarter of the fifth century. (Munich, Direktion der Staatlichen Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek 2647, ARV2 438.132.)

before the change to a preference for a beardless Dionysus, the god’s member is rarely shown, even at rest, though examples can be found (fig. 4). In archaic art and for most of the fifth century Dionysus is a full-bearded, full-grown but youthful male, usually wearing an anklelength chiton that covers his body completely, on top of which a himation or a deerskin or leopard skin may be draped. Even when he ing. The aesthetic preference for the small penis must also have been a factor (cf. Dover 1978, I25-27; Lissarrague 1990a, 56). The large penis and thus the phallus were comic and grotesque, inappropriate for beautiful and powerful gods. Pan: bell krater by the Pan Painter in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 10.185; ARV2 550.1; Borgeaud 1988, pi. 4.

The Asexuality of Dionysus

49

Fig. 4. A drunken Dionysus, naked except for Thracian boots and a cloak over his left shoulder, holds a thyrsus and a cantharus as he moves to the right in a procession of nymphs and satyrs. The nymph Methyse with a lyre (barbiton) leads the procession. The satyr Oinobios helps the god and is followed by the nymph Chryseis playing pipes and the satyr Maleos with a cantharus and wineskin. Attic red-figure bell krater from the mid-fifth century. (New York, Metropolitan Mu¬ seum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1907, 07.286.85, ARV2 632.3.)

wears a shorter chiton his loins remain hidden.7 The contrast is not only with the satyrs in these scenes but with the representation of other 7On his dress, see Stone 1981, 313-16; Veneri 1986, 414-15; Miller 1989, 314-19; Frontisi-Ducroux and Lissarrague 1990, 230-31.

50

Michael Jameson

male gods. Nudity is common both on vases and in sculpture, for Zeus, Poseidon, and especially for the beardless Apollo.8 * The display of their bodies is consistent with their ostentatious masculinity. Di¬ onysus, to be sure, fights in the ranks of the Olympians against Titans and Giants according to the mythographers and in some vase painting. But even though Dionysus, like all Greek gods, could be violent and dangerous, one suspects that the more characteristic images for the Greeks were the terrified Dionysus who takes refuge in the bosom of Thetis (Homer Iliad 6.135-37) and the cowardly, if comic, figure who “gilds” his elegant Ionic gown when confronted with the Hound of Hell in Aristophanes’ Frogs (479). The dress itself is not a feminine garment. With jewelry in hair worn long it is part of the old-fashioned style of aristocratic Athenians of the archaic period. Other sixth-century depictions of male gods show a similar if simpler costume. Dionysus, however, continues to wear it long after it has been abandoned by the others. The saffrondyed robe (krokotos) he is described as wearing in comedy has un¬ mistakable feminine connotations.10 11 When the rendering of Dionysus changes from a bearded adult to a beardless youth in the later fifth century the god is shown wholly or partly naked, but, as if to compensate for the absence of the symbolism of dress, his whole image is now even less virile—a graceful, languid figure, a pais kalos (fig. 5). This too may be suggested in Euripides’ depiction of Dionysus as the young stranger in the Bacchae (e.g

451-

bo).11 Dionysus chiton is also seen on a cultic image in Athenian scenes of ritual. A trunk or pillar is set up, to which is fastened a mask (some8 On the uses of nudity, see Bonfante 1989. Diodorus Siculus 3.74.6 and Apollodorus 1.6.2; for the scenes on vases see Lissarrague 198yd.

10Cf. Aristophanes Frogs 46; Cratinus frag. 40 (PCG 4); and Dodds 1944, on Euripides Bacchae 4S3-S4. 11 Evans 1988, 33 (and cf. 134), is convinced that Dionysus tries to seduce Pentheus in this scene and is angered by the king’s rejection of him. The latter point is surely mistaken. The king s fate is sealed by his opposition to the new cult. The god only toys with him. But Dionysus attractiveness as a love object is consistent with the later conception of him. The first, early appearance of the beardless Dionysus is not effeminate, as is shown by Carpenter in this volume ( On the Beardless Dionysus,’ pp. 185—206). That is not the case when he reappears later in the century. (On this and other points I have profited from Carpenter’s knowledgeable comments.)

The Asexuality of Dionysus

51

Fig. 5. A beardless Dionysus with a lyre and Ariadne (?) move to the right, followed by Eros who strikes a tumpanon as he hovers beside them. Dionysos carries a lyre, Ariadne a tumpanon. Attic red-figure cup from the last quarter of the fifth century. (London, British Museum E 129, ARV2 1414.89.)

times a pair, facing in opposite directions), and draped with a chiton, short or long (fig. 6).12 The image of Dionysus Eleuthereus set up in the theater in Athens during the dithyrambic and dramatic perfor¬ mances may have been such a pillar topped with the god’s head.13 The

12Cf. Simon 1969, figs. 264-65, 274-75; Simon 1983, pi. 32, fig. 2; L/MC s.v. “Di¬ onysos” nos. 298-300. The most careful analysis of the vases depicting a pillar and the mask of Dionysus is by Richard Hamilton 1992, 134-38, who shows that they do not form a consistent group representing a single cult. Other Dionysiac rites, such as the Lenaia, the Choes, and private rituals, have been proposed. 13Cf. Simon 1969, figs. 263, 274.

52

Michael Jameson

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