god,' and at Kyparissia was a fountain which sprang from the ground when Dionysos struck the place with the thyrsos.2

Connected with the Dionysiak cult were the two Naxian Festivals, called Ariadneia, both in honour of Ariadne, and representing her in that Janus-character which, as we have seen, constantly appears in Dionysos. One of these, in memory of her happiness, was lively and cheerful; the other, in memory of her woes, solemn and mournful. She was also said to have died at Amathousios in Kypros, where was a celebrated temple of Aphrodite, and was there called 'Aphrodite Ariadne,' circumstances illustrative of her Semitic character.3 The connection between Dionysos and Naxos has already been noticed.1

6

At Lesbos, special ceremonies were performed in honour of Dionysos Kephallen, or Of-the-head. A face made of olive wood was drawn up from the sea in the nets of the fishermen in Methymne: this appeared to bear some resemblance to the divine, but was foreign and not in accordance with Hellenik divinities. Wherefore the Methymnaians asked the Pythia, of which of the gods or heroes is the likeness; and she commanded them to revere Dionysos Kephallen. On this account the Methymnaians keep among them the carved head from the sea, and honour it with sacrifices and prayers.'5

In Sikelia was celebrated a nocturnal Dionysiak Festival called Agrypnis, Sleepless, because the votaries watched all night long. This is the Naxian cult of Dionysos Nyktelios, the Nightly, alluded to by Sophokles.

There was also a Dionysiak Festival called the Semeleia, already noticed.7

Other Festivals of the god were the Theoinia, to him

1 Paus. iv. 34.

2 Ibid. 36.

3 Plout. Theseus.

5 Paus. x. 19.

6 Hesych. in voc. Agrypnis.
Sup. III. i. 1.

4

Sup. II. i. 3.

as the Wine-god; the Neoinia, when the new wine was tasted; the Iobacheia, which appears to have formed part of the Eleusinian Ritual; the Haloa, or Festival of the Threshing-floor, a kind of Harvest Thanksgiving to Demeter and Dionysos, as bestowers of the autumnplenty;1 and the Ambrosia, which was celebrated in the month Lenaion in many parts of Hellas.2 Ambrosia, the principle of immortality, is in Homeros the food of the gods, and in later writers their drink. The Festival may have merely honoured Dionysos as the Wine-god, but it probably possessed a deeper significance, and his votaries would doubtless adore him as the principle and lord of vitality, Karpios, Antheus, and Erikepeios. There was also a grand yearly Dionysiak Festival with games in Ionia.3

4

Lastly, the annual Bakchik Festival at Parnassos, the connection between which place and Dionysos has been already referred to, must be noticed. 'I was not able to understand,' says Pausanias, on what account Homeros calls Panopeus,' an ancient town near the Boiotik frontier of Phokis, Kallichoros,5 until I was informed by those Attik women who are called Thyiades. The Thyiades are Attik women who roam wildly about at Parnassos yearly, and they and the Delphik women hold orgies to Dionysos; and it is customary for these Thyiades, along the road from Athenai and elsewhere, and among the Panopeans, to perform circling dances; and the appellation of Homeros for Panopeus seems to have reference to the choric dance of the Thyiades.'7 6 Kallichoros,' Famed-for-the-beautiful-dance, in the Homerik passage

1 It is, however, to be observed that halos also means the disk of the sun or moon, and the festival may have had a solar or lunar significance. Ais. Hept. epi The. 484, uses the term of the vast round shield of Hippomedon.

2 Schol. in Hes. Erg. kai Hem. 3 Strabo, xiv. 1.

4

Sup. IV. iii. 2.

5 Od. xi. 581.

6 Or 'circling.'
7 Paus. x. 4.

in question, has been considered merely an Epik form for kallichôros, having-beautiful-places, like eurychoros, 'spacious,' an Homerik epithet of great cities, for eurychôros. This may be so, but the term was not so understood by Pausanias, himself a profound student of Homeros, and the circumstance he mentions throws a singular light on the passage. There is nothing at all unnatural in the supposition that dances in honour of Apollon or Dionysos, or both, may have been celebrated along the road from Thebai, sufficiently early to be noticed by the author of the Odysseia. The sacred spring of Demeter at Eleusis was called Kallichoros,1 the Fount-of-the-beauteous-dance, and it is quite possible that the passage may contain a distinct Homerik allusion to the Dionysiak cult. The peaks of Parnassos are above the clouds, and on them the Thyiades rave to Dionysos and Apollon;' as Euripides says, 'You shall see Dionysos on the Delphik rocks bounding with torches upon the double-peaked hill top, brandishing and shaking the Bakchik branch, and mighty in Hellas.' 3

Such were the principal non-theatrical Festivals of Dionysos in Hellas, and their combined significance cannot be mistaken. They were in honour of no simple Wine-god, and represented no mere rustic merriment, but almost all exhibit more or less strongly a Semitic character, and thus harmonise with the portraiture of the son of Semele left us by the Theologers, the Lyric and Tragic Poets, and Herodotos. We will next view the god as he appears in other phases of the home life of his adopted country.

1 Hom. Hymn, eis Dem. 273; Paus. 38.

2 Paus. x. 32.1

3 Bak. 306-9.

Grote, when speaking of the Dionysiak ritual, strangely says, 'It deserves to be remarked that the Athenian women never practised these periodical mountain excursions, so common among the rest of the Greeks.' (Hist. of Greece, i. 30).

SECTION II.

DIONYSOS AT ELEUSIS.

Subsection 1.-The Legend of the Homerik Hymn.

Having noticed the more remarkable of the Dionysiak Festivals of ancient Hellas, we come next to the consideration of the place which the god occupies in the mystical Eleusinian cult of Demeter and Persephone, the Mother and the Daughter, its meaning and significance, and the causes which led to the union of the ritual of the three divinities. Let us first inspect the legend of the Two Goddesses, as presented with beautiful simplicity in the ancient Homerik Hymn. The rites of Eleusis have been the mystery of mysteries, and the crux of investigators, who, by various illogical suppositions, have infinitely added to the difficulties which necessarily beset the subject; but, be it remembered, that if we fairly grasp the meaning of the concepts, Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysos, we can have no serious difficulty in comprehending the character of their cults, considered either separately or in union. As the Christian religion stands revealed in its Founder, so the ritual of Eleusis is but an illustration of the nature of the Eleusinian divinities, for the supposition that the votaries there initiated in earlier times, whilst they were supposed to worship the powers of the place in reality adored something else, e.g. the one merely God, may be permanently set aside as being not only in itself intrinsically improbable, but also entirely unsupported by any real evidence.1 We may not be able

1 Vide the searching examination of Lobeck, Aglaophamus, in voc. Eleusinia. According to Payne Knight, the initiate was admitted into the inmost

T

recesses of the temple, and made acquainted with the first principles of religion, as the knowledge of the God of Nature, the first, the supreme, the

to see all that the Epopts saw, we may be ignorant of certain questions addressed to them, we may even doubt as to the meaning of the celebrated words of dismissal, Konx Om Pax; but as to the main gist and significance of the spectacle of Eleusis we need entertain no uncertainty whatever. It will be remembered that the Eleusinian Mysteries are only noticed here so far as is necessary to explain and illustrate the part which Dionysos bears in them.

At

The Homerik Hymn tells how Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, was gathering flowers with the daughters of Okeanos in the pleasant Nysian Meadow near the Ocean-stream, when the earth clave asunder, and Aïdes Polydegmon, the Many-receiving, bore her away in his chariot to the unseen Under-world; while she shrieked in vain to Zeus for aid. Her mother, Hekate, daughter of Perses, and Helios, heard her cry, and the latter told the sorrowing Demeter of the fate and destiny of her child, whom for nine long days she sought o'er land and sea with lighted torches in her hands. last the Goddess came to Eleusis, and being wearied, sat by the well, to which the fair daughters of Keleos came to draw water. They spoke kindly to her, and she went with them to their father's house, where she remained many days, and nursed his infant son Demophoon, and soothed her mind with the jests of Iambe. At last she revealed her divinity, and ordered the Eleusinians to build her a mighty temple near the well Kallichoros, promising to teach them secret sites. But the still-grieving Goddess sat down apart from the blessed gods, and restrained the

intellectual.' Creuzer and De Sacy thought that he beheld symbolic representations of the Kosmogony, origin of things, wanderings and purifications of the soul, destiny of the world and of man, the origin and progress of agriculture and the Hellen

ik civilization,' &c. This last feature
was doubtless brought forward, and
all the others may have been in later
times.

1 Vide inf. IX. viii.
2 Orgia.