Dionysia

“ The years passed rapidly and each year the little princess grew to be a larger and larger princess. At last she was sixteen years old and a very grown-up princess indeed. She still enjoyed her old playmate, Labismena, and they were often together on the seashore.
One day when they were walking up and down together beside the sea the sea serpent looked at Dionysia with sad eyes and said, "I too have been growing older all these years, dear Dionysia. Now the time has come that we can no longer play together. ”

“ Dionysia as the symbol of Woman—she is highly Viennese in her capacity for adultery—is conducted through assorted aspects of life with a cleverness which actually fascinates; it is the sort of amazing skill which one is conscious of in a marksman who can spin quarters with one hand and put revolver bullets into them with the other, it is hopelessly inimitable. The ordinary observer cannot escape a reverent admiration for Schnitzler. ”

“ Public taste at its highest made the presentation of plays the chief element in the Greater Dionysia in March, but the drama had originated in the December 141festival of the country Dionysia, which continued to be celebrated with a jollity and abandon that probably lost nothing in the descriptions of Aristophanes. The same poet also found plenty of material to his liking in the Anthesteria, another Dionysiac celebration, in which Pots and Pitchers figured in drinking competitions and in offerings to the dead. ”

“ And Dionysia? She loves you so much she cannot keep it to herself. She stops her friends to tell them all about her marriage, and to assure them of her happiness. Oh, yes, indeed, very happy! That love which was my disgrace is her honor. I was forced to conceal it like a crime: she can display it as a virtue. Social forms are, after all, very absurd and unjust ”

“ Then comes the summons to the first competing poet.
“Lead on your chorus.” [*] The intellectual feast of the Dionysia has begun.
[*] In the fourth century B.C. when the creation of original tragedies was in decline, a considerable part of the Dionysia productions seem to have been devoted to the works of the earlier masters, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
To analyze the Attic drama is the task of the philosopher and the literary expert. We observe only the superficialities. There are never more than three speaking actors before the audience at once. ”

“ There was no escape for Labismena. She had to remain in the form of a sea serpent because of Dionysia's neglect. She had lost her chance to come out of the [197] sea and become a lovely princess herself and find a charming prince of her own. For this reason her sad moan is heard in the sea until this very day. Perhaps you have noticed it.
You will often hear the call come from the sea as it breaks against the shore, "Dionysia, Di-o-ny-si-a." No wonder that the sea moans. It is enough to make a sea serpent sad to be forgotten by the very person one has done most to help. ”

“ For out of the Dionysian festival grew that supreme form of Greek art, the tragic drama; this may be briefly characterized as an Apollinic treatment of the Dionysiac experience—a marriage of the two. If we fancy to ourselves a worshiper, who has wandered off from the rest in his intoxication and mystic self-oblivion, sinking to the ground for a moment, and, as he lies there, seeing himself and his rapt state and union with the God as in a dream, we have the Dionysiac experience and the rudiments of an Apollinic vision united in the same person. ”

“ The state festival of the Dionysia, in the city of Athens, was celebrated with dramatic entertainments, and the once rich harvest of Athenian tragedy and comedy was thrown up under its auspices. The ceremonies of the Kurêtes in Krête, originally armed dances in honor of the Idæan Zeus, seem also to have borrowed from Asia so much of fury, of self-infliction, and of mysticism, that they became at last inextricably confounded with the Phrygian Korybantes or worshippers of the Great Mother; though it appears that Grecian reserve always stopped short of the irreparable self-mutilation of Atys. ”

“ Of all the pagan Mysteries instituted by the ancients none were more extensively diffused than those of the Grecian god Dionysus. They were established in Greece, Rome, Syria, and all Asia Minor. Among the Greeks, and still more among the Romans, the rites celebrated on the Dionysiac festival were, it must be confessed, of a dissolute and licentious character. [1] But in Asia they assumed a different form. There, as elsewhere, the legend (for it has already been said that each Mystery had its legend) recounted, and the ceremonies represented, the murder of Dionysus by the Titans. ”

“ From the Peloponnesus Lasus brought the new art to the court of the Pisistratidæ at Athens. At that time everything connected with the worship of Dionysus was regarded with special favour, the dithyrambus was introduced into state festivals, and wealthy citizens vied with one another in equipping and training Bacchic choirs, composed of fifty singers who danced circling the flaming altars of Dionysus; and no expense was spared to procure new songs for the Attic Dionysia from the greatest masters, such as Pindar and Simonides. ”

“ Availing ourselves of Plato's terminology, however, we should have to speak of the tragic figures of the Hellenic stage somewhat as follows. The one truly real Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of forms, in the mask of a fighting hero and entangled, as it were, in the net of an individual will. As the visibly appearing god now talks and acts, he resembles an erring, striving, suffering [Pg 82] individual: and that, in general, he appears with such epic precision and clearness, is due to the dream-reading Apollo, who reads to the chorus its Dionysian state through this symbolic appearance. ”

“ From the ashes of these last, men were born, while Dionysos himself became Hades, the King of the Dead, over whom he rules with his consort Persephone, the daughter, as Dionysos is the son, of Zeus and Demeter, and perhaps known to the initiate as only the female form of her consort [448] . This pair preside over the life and death of mortals, the soul or Dionysiac spark within each man or woman having to pass repeatedly through the bodies of other human beings and animals until finally purified, when it will be united with Dionysos and thus become god [449] . ”

“ Or at least as a philologist—even today in this area almost everything is still there for philologists to discover and dig up, above all the issue that there is a problem right here and that the Greeks will continue to remain, as before, entirely unknown and unknowable as long as we have no answer to the question, "What is the Dionysian?"
4 Indeed, what is the Dionysian? This book offers an answer to that question: a "knowledgeable person" speaks there, the initiate and disciple of his own god. ”

“ But they who conquer, these are our Saviours; they shall follow in the train of Dionysus; they shall lift us to the heavens, and sanctify in our remembrance the Sunday of Palms!
But Dionysus not only looks back with triumphant remembrance to ancient conquest, but has his victories in the present, also, and in the great Hereafter. For triumph was connected with all Dionysiac symbols, hints of which are preserved to us in representations found upon ancient vases: such, for instance, as the figure of Victory surmounting the heads of the ivy-crowned Bacchantes in their mystic orgies ”

“ Dionaea, Venus' fly-trap, homoeopathic magic of, i. 144
Dione, wife of Zeus at Dodona, ii. 189;
the old consort of Zeus, ii. 381, 382 [pg 244]
Dionysiac festival of the opening of the wine jars, ix. 351 sq.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, on the simplicity of Roman worship, ii. 202 sq.;
on the Etruscans, ii. 287 n. 4;
on Tarquin the Proud, ii. 291 n. 2
Dionysus, vii. ”

“ The Great Dionysiak Myth (1877–1878) by R. Brown contains a wealth of material, but is weak in scholarship. For a striking survival of Dionysiac rites in Thrace (Bizye) , see Dawkins, in J.H.S. (1906) , p. ”

“ The disguise of the ancient god is thin indeed. His name is changed by an iota, but his character not a jot. S. Dionysius is god of the vine, and even retains his predecessor’s connexion with Naxos. It is perhaps noteworthy too that in Athens the road which skirts the south side of the Acropolis and the theatre of Dionysus is now called the street of S. Dionysius the Areopagite. I was once corrected by a Greek of average education for speaking of the theatre of Dionysus instead of ascribing it to his saintly namesake. ”

“ The other Olympians are above sorrow. Dionysus, like a strenuous mortal hero, like Hercules or Perseus, has his alternations of joy and sorrow, of struggle and hard-won triumph. It is out of the sorrows of Dionysus, then,—of Dionysus in winter—that all Greek tragedy grows; out of the song of the sorrows of Dionysus, sung at his winter feast by the chorus of satyrs, singers clad in goat-skins, in memory of his rural life, one and another of whom, from time to time, steps out of the company to emphasise and develope this or that circumstance of the story ”

“ Dionysius was a warm patron of literature, and was anxious to gain distinction by his literary compositions. In the midst of his political and military cares he devoted himself assiduously to poetry, and not only caused his poems to be publicly recited at the Olympic games, but repeatedly contended for the prize of tragedy at Athens. In accordance with the same spirit we find him seeking the society of men distinguished in literature and philosophy. Plato, who visited Sicily about the year 389 from a curiosity to see Mount AEtna, was introduced to Dionysius by Dion. ”

“ From the smile of this Dionysus sprang the Olympian gods, from his tears sprang man. In his existence as a dismembered god, Dionysus has the dual nature of a cruel barbarised demon, and a mild pacific ruler. But the hope of the epopts looked for a new birth of Dionysus, which we have now to conceive of in anticipation as the end of individuation: it was for this coming third Dionysus that the stormy jubilation-hymns of the epopts resounded. ”

“ Such, that after prevailing with Dionysius, they caused him to drive out Dion, and threw myself into a state of terror. But, that I may bring to a close not a few events which occurred in a short time, Dion, departing from Peloponnesus and Athens, admonished Dionysius indeed. Since then (Dion) had liberated and twice restored the town to the citizens, the Syracusans were affected in the same manner towards him, as Dionysius had been, when he endeavoured by educating and bringing him up to make him thus a worthy partner of his power through the whole of life. ”

“ But farther from this account of Dionysus, we may perceive the truth of Plato’s observation, “that the design of the Mysteries is to lead us back to the perfection from which, as our beginning, we first made our descent.” For in this perfection Dionysus himself subsists, establishing perfect souls in the throne of his father; that is, in the integrity of a life according to Jupiter. So that he who is perfect necessarily resides with the gods, according to the design of those deities, who are the sources of consummate perfection to the soul. ”

“ After this Dionysius endeavoured to hunt down Heracleides. Theodotes, however, sent messengers to him, and exhorted him to fly. But Dionysius sent Tisias and the soldiers with light shields, and ordered them to pursue him. Heracleides, however, as it is said, anticipated them, and escaped in the small part of a day into the dominions of the Carthaginians. Hereupon the old plot for his not giving up the property of Dion seemed to Dionysius to offer a plausible pretext of enmity against myself. ”

“ Dionysius answered: “It is not a fact that all men worship all gods, for each worships certain whom he believes in. So with us, we worship and adore the One God, the Creator of all things, who has entrusted the Empire also to the most religious Emperors, Valerian and Gallienus; and to Him we pray [55] without ceasing for their Empire that it may abide unshaken.” Æmilian the Prefect said, “But who prevents you from worshipping him also, if he be god, with the natural gods? for you were ordered to worship gods and those which all know.” Dionysius answered: “We worship none other but Him.” ”

“ When Dionysus returned to Greece from his Eastern expedition, he encountered great opposition from Lycurgus, king of Thrace, and Pentheus, king of Thebes. The former, highly disapproving of the wild revels which attended the worship of the wine-god, drove away his attendants, the nymphs of Nysa, from that sacred mountain, and so effectually intimidated Dionysus, that he precipitated himself into the sea, where he was received into the arms of the ocean-nymph, Thetis. But the impious king bitterly expiated his sacrilegious conduct. ”

“ Entreat no more; the soul of Dionysius
Is ever wakeful; rent with all the pangs
That wait on conscious guilt.
Mel. But when dun night——
Phil. Alas! it cannot be: but mark my words.
Let Greece urge on her general assault.
Despatch some friend, who may o'erleap the walls,
And tell Timoleon, the good old Evander
Has liv'd three days, by Dionysius' order,
Lock'd up from ev'ry sustenance of nature,
And life, now wearied out, almost expires.
Mel. If any spark of virtue dwell within thee,
Lead me, Philotas, lead me to his prison.
Phil. The tyrant's jealous care hath mov'd him thence. ”