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away in lands near the setting sun, where the Dionysiak cult has not yet penetrated. But the time has gone by when father Zeus had to avenge his adopted son, and all the savage Semitic element in the god's composition rushes to the front. The beautiful youth disappears, and Dionysos Agrionios, or the Savage,1 stands before us in wildbeast fury, as his ancient Boiotik worshippers saw him in his festival at Orchomenos.2 No longer Antheus the Blooming youth, he becomes Omestes the Raw-flesh-eating, and death and horror seize the ill-fated despisers, for in the words of Euripides, he is 'to men both most terrible and most mild.'s This is no myth of the power of wine Neither the god or his enemies are represented as being in any way influenced by the grape. The tale has the same moral as the legends of Lykourgos, Pentheus, Damaskos, and others,-death and ruin to the despisers and opponents of the new god, the son of Semele.

on man.

Subsection V.-The Youth of Dionysos.

In Homerik Hymn, xxiv., the poet sings how Dionysos Kissokomes, the Ivy-Chapleted, was nurtured by the Nymphs 5 in a cave in the dells of the mysterious Nysa, which only appears to vanish, like the oriental gardens of Irem; a myth connected with the tale of the Bakchik city of Libye which no one could find twice, and with inaccessible paradises and shadowy isles of delight in East and West. Ivy 'never-sere' is a fitting ornament for the

1 Vide inf. VIII. i. Agrionios.

2 Vide inf. VI. i. 2.

3 Bak. 861.

He

4 An imaginary personage very unnecessarily excogitated as the founder of the ancient city of Damesek. was said to have resisted the introduction of the vine, and to have been flayed alive by the god. The legend is a copy of others, late, and unimportant.

5 Cf. Ais. Dionysou Trophoi, Diod. Sik. v. 52.

6 As to the Mithraik cave and its solar connection, vide inf. XII. i. 4. 7 Strabo, vii. 3.

8 Vide Rev. S. B. Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, The Fortunate Isles; Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer, book i.; Washington Irving, Life of Columbus, Appendix.

Ever-Youth, who is numbered with the immortals,' as the after-chosen Matthias was among the Apostles. The wood resounds with the wild mirth of the growing deity Dionysos Dasyllios the Dweller-in-the-thickets, and the poet concludes with a prayer to him, as Polystaphylos the Richin-grape-clusters, that, as a source of joy, he would grant long and happy life to his votaries. Here the god is represented as having received immortality, and in his character of Kissokomes, his locks bound with the deathless ivy, as being himself a giver of life to his faithful worshippers.

Subsection VI.-General character of the Dionysos of the Homerik Hymns.

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As Aristoteles is the philosopher of the ancients, and Strabo the geographer, so is Homeros the poet, and to the poet is erroneously ascribed the composition of a vast number of ancient verses and hymns, the scattered productions of various rhapsodists and Orphiks, dating from the later heroic epoch down to the times of Kleisthenes. One fragment of a Hymn to Dionysos 1 celebrates him as Eiraphiotes the Thigh-sewn,2 and another as Gynaimanes the Erotic, the son of Semele, whom men call Thyone,' the Inspired. Nysa, or Nyse, his birthplace, is a lofty wood-crowned mountain, far from Phoinike, near the flowings of Aigyptos,' i.e. Neilos. Others,' says the Hymn-writer, falsely say that he was born in Thebai.' This testimony is true, and all these traditions point unanimously to some portion of the Semitic East as the real birthplace of the god, who lives in his cult far and wide over the Hellenik world. To ascertain the exact age of this or that particular myth is a difficulty frequently

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1 Apud Diod. Sik. iii. 66.
2 Vide VIII. i. Eiraphiotes.

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3 Cf. Od. xiv. 25; vide inf. VIII. i. Nysios.

amounting to impossibility, but be it remembered that the most familiar version of a legend, Homerik or otherwise, is not necessarily the oldest; and that legends do not originate at that point in history when we first meet with them, but have almost invariably been in existence previously, possibly for centuries. Tales have often been classed amongst late inventions or introductions, as being supposed to be contrary to the spirit or knowledge of more primitive ages, when in reality our acquaintance with such earlier times is probably insufficient to enable us to judge whether this or that particular assumption or idea is in harmony with them or not. Thus without being dogmatic about dates, like the writers who once informed us that Troia was taken June 22, B.C. 1184, we may safely consider some of these Homerik Fragments as of very high antiquity, and as embodying conceptions necessarily older than themselves; for the real poet, whether a writer of hymns or drinking-songs, never arbitrarily invents, but takes some portion of existing truth or fact, and moulds it into a new and distinct shape of beauty or power. Thus when we find Diodoros alluding to the Bakchik Hymns of Eumolpos the Thrakian, a contemporary in mythic history with Erektheus of Athenai, also said to have been the founder of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and priest of Demeter and Dionysos, and quoting the line, Dionysos, with face of flame, glitters like a star with his rays,' although we are not in the least bound to recognize the existence of a particular Eumolpos, yet that there was an ancient Good-singer we need not doubt; nor does it necessitate any violent effort of imagination to believe that some few fragments of his muse may have been preserved to us. Dionysos Pyropos, or the Fiery-eyed, who

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Flings

From each plumed arc, pale glitterings
And fiery flakes,

widely differs from an Hellenik concept, as will probably be acknowledged; but this fact by no means necessarily implies the late date of the idea, as belonging to the time when Hellas was invaded by a vast wave of Oriental cults, that passing over it broke upon Imperial Rome beyond. The early, not to say the prehistoric, connection between East and West is becoming ever more apparent, as patient research slowly unveils the buried annals of Kam,1 and Phoenicia, of Assur and Bab-ilu; 2 and, as it were, unearths from the recesses of immemorial tombs ever-burning lamps whose rays, like those from Dionysos Pyropos, cast new light and meaning on the course of Hellenik history. Let the Agnostics, for whom ante-Olympiak time in Hellas is but a blank and void, Tohu-and-Bohu, be content to accept the curtain as the picture, and to pass by miracle at a bound from legend to history in the wonderful year B.c. 776.3 But let not their want of faith on the one hand, or the vast credulity of former enquirers on the other, deter the student of the Earlier Time from the quiet pursuit of his researches; it being his duty, as Bunsen well says, 'to throw out piquets into the empire of history which is to be conquered, as far as his means will permit.' It is unnecessary to allude further to the ancient Hymn Fragments; they all tell us, either directly or by implication, that Dionysos was not originally born in the Boiotian

1 Egypt. 'Called in the hieroglyphics Kam, or the Black, from the colour of the alluvial mud of the Nile. To the Hebrews it was known as Mitsraim, or the Two Mitsrs, an appellation found also in the Assyrian as Musr, and the Persian as Mudraya; but the Greeks called it Aiguptos, a word of uncertain derivation retained at the present day as Egypt.' (Birch, Egypt from the Earliest Times, Introduction, i.)

2 Babylon, i.e. Gate of God.

Even this magical date is some

what doubtful. Vide The Olympiads in connection with the Golden Age of Greece; W. R. A. Boyle, in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, ii. 289–300. Well, says Mr. H. Spencer, The assumption that any decided division can be made between legend and history is untenable. To suppose that at a certain stage we pass suddenly from the mythical to the historical, is absurd' (The Principles of Sociology, No. 40, Appendix).

Thebai, though the city of Kadmos was his Hellenik birthplace; or, in other words, that his cult reached it from the Outer-world. The god is thus, in another sense, Dimetor, Bimater, Son-of-two-mothers.

Subsection VII.-Dionysos and the Kyklik Poems.

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The Ilias and the Odysseia are the sole standing columns of the great temple of the Epik Cycle, and around their bases lie a few fragments of their once companions, deemed by some to have been of almost as fine a workmanship as the two survivors, though I doubt not but that these were the two middle pillars upon which the house stood,' and that their preservation is an instance of the 'survival of the fittest.' This great Cycle contained a history of the world from the marriage of Heaven and Earth down to the death of Odysseus by the unwitting hand of his son Telegonos, and treated at length of the Wars of the Titanes, of Thebai, and of Troia. Three at least of the Epik poems, the Oidipodeia, the Thebais, and the Epigonoi, were devoted to the history of the Kadmeis, and one of the very few surviving lines of the later work speaks of

Venerable Earth, and Zagreus highest of all gods.

A glimpse such as this enables us to imagine to some extent what has been lost, and how much easier it would have been to trace the progress of an obscure and shadowy divinity like Dionysos, did we possess the complete works of the Epik poets, of Pindaros, Anakreon, Aischylos, Sophokles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and others, instead of only a comparatively small portion of them, not to mention numbers of interesting, perhaps admirable, writers whose every line has perished. Mr. Grote, when speaking of the writings of the Ancient World, truly says,

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