herself, in later legend the goddess of youth, is in earlier the divine Cup-bearer,' who hands man the wine of life-vigour and enjoyment. These statues can never be better described than in the words of Winkelmann : In the most beautiful statues, he always appears with delicate, round limbs, and the full expanded hips of the female sex, for according to the fable, he was brought up as a maiden. The type of Bacchus is a lovely boy, who is treading the boundaries of the spring-time of life and adolescence, in whom emotions of voluptuousness, like the tender shoots of a plant, are budding, and who, as if between sleeping and waking, half in a dream of exquisite delight, is beginning to collect and verify the pictures of his fancy.' Of one of these statues Müller remarks the very femininely formed torso is remarkably beautiful.' 4 It was the genius of Praxiteles, B.C. 360, amongst whose creations were the exquisite Aphrodite of Knidos and the renowned Eros of Thespiai, an infinite advance on the ancient statue of the god there which was only a rough stone, which chiefly delighted in delineating the androgynous softness of the two-natured Iakchos. The statues of the youthful Dionysos are comparatively numerous; amongst them is the marble group of Dionysos, Ampelos or the Vine personified, and tiger, now in the British Museum. Of this Payne Knight remarks, 'On one side is the Bacchus Diphues, or Creator, of both sexes, known by the effeminate mould of his limbs and countenance, and on the other, a tiger, leaping up, and devouring the grapes which spring from the body of the personified vine, the hands of which are employed in receiving another cluster from the Bacchus. This composition represents the vine between the creating and destroying 1 Il. iv. 2. 2 Vide inf. VIII. i. Thelymorphos. Apollod. iii. 4. 4 Ancient Art. 491. attributes of the god; the one giving it fruit, and the other devouring it when given. The tiger has a garland of ivy round his neck, to shew that the destroyer was co-essential with the creator, of whom ivy, as well as all other evergreens, was an emblem representing his perpetual youth and viridity.'1 Dionysos is also represented as enthroned and surrounded by his train, reclining, lying down, staggering as intoxicated, carried by Hermes to the Nymphs, when a child, and overcoming Pentheus, Lykourgos, the Tyrrhenian pirates, and the Indians; also handing grapes to the panther, pouring out wine from a karchesion or drinking cup, etc.; but these delineations require no special notice, as they do not additionally illustrate the concept of the god. The Itinerary of Pausanias shows that in his time a multitude of Bakchik statues existed all over continental Hellas: amongst them was a torch-bearing Iakchos at Athenai, the work of Praxiteles2; a statue in the Odeion or concert-hall there; a statue of Dionysos Eleuthereus the Liberator, yearly carried into a temple near the Akademeia, brought from Eleutherai,5 on the Boiotik border, and a place anciently included in Boiotia ; a wooden statue at Korinthos, covered with gold-leaf, except the face, which was painted with vermilion; near it a statue of Artemis Ephesia similarly adorned 6; a statue of ivory and gold in the god's temple at Sikyon, and near it statues of the Bakchai of white stone; a statue at Argos said to have been brought from Euboia; a bearded statue at Epidauros; 9 a wooden seated statue of Dionysos Soter, at Lerne; a statue of Hermes, carrying the infant Dionysos at Sparta; a bronze statue at Thebai, where 10 11 3 8 7 Ibid. ii. 7. 8 Ibid. 23. 9 Ibid. 30. 10 Ibid. 38. 5 Ibid. 38. • Ibid. ii. 2. BB was a tradition that when Semele was slain a piece of wood fell from heaven which was adorned with bronze and called Kadmeian Dionysos; the three Graces were often placed in the head of statues of the god; 2 a stone statue at Thelpouse in Arkadia, seven feet high, near similar statues of Demeter and Persephone; a statue near Megalopolis, with buskins, holding a cup and a thyrsos; 4 a statue at Phigaleia, the lower parts of which were concealed in laurel and ivy leaves, and the upper rubbed with vermilion and thus made to shine.'5 Legend told that, on the destruction of Troia the hero Eurypylos received as his share of the spoils a statue of Dionysos Aisymnetes, made by Hephaistos.6 Macrobius tells us that Dionysos, who is Liber, is represented as an infant, a youth, of middle age, and as an aged man.' 'By these were signified the four seasons of the year, the vine being dedicated to Sol, in whom they all exist.'8 These are the four faces of Iakchos the Time-king, the Baal of Manasseh, and the Hermes Tetrakephalos of Athenai. With them we may compare the Latin Janus Quadrifrons. 6 די The remaining subjects of Dionysiak Statuary are the various associates of the god and members of his train, 'the good-for-nothing and wanton Satyroi,' Seilenoi, Mainades, Nymphs, and Pan and his Paniskoi. The natural life whose purest blossom we observe in Dionysos now appears in lower cycles.' 10 The Satyroi present powerful limbs, but not ennobled by gymnastics, snub 1 Paus. ix. 12. 2 Ibid. 35. Ibid. viii. 25. 4 Ibid. 31. Ibid. 39. Mr. King, after noticing that members of the Bakchik train were often depicted on the vermilion jasper, observes 'The last stone by its colour manifested a kindred nature to the rosy god, whose rustic figures, like the primitive idols, continued to the last to be besmeared with red-ochre, according to the ancient practice' (Antique Gems, 263). 22. • Vide inf. VIII. i. Aisymnetes. 7 Sat. i. 18. 8 Salmon, Polygraphice, 1685, iv. Hesiod. apud. Strabo, x. 3. 10 Müller, Anct. Art. 496. noses, ignoble countenances, pointed goat-like ears, bald foreheads, bristly hair, and sometimes a scanty tail.1 This description includes the Seilenoi or older Satyroi. In the satyrik drama the bearded, hair-covered figures were called Pappo, or Down-covered Seilenoi. As regards the equable Seilenos himself, Müller observes, Yet is this happy daemon, in a deeper mode of thinking which was unfolded especially by the Orphici, full of a wisdom to which all the restless bustle of mankind appears folly; the plastic art also represents him in nobler and grander forms as the fosterer and instructor of the young Dionysos."2 Of the female figures Ariadne is the protagonist; she is represented as beautiful, ivy-crowned, and frequently richly draped. Female Satyroi very rarely occur; and the Mainades have their serpents, flying garments, torn fawns and thyrsos staves as usual. The whole Dionysiak Cycle in art as elsewhere is of the earth earthy; from Dionysos downwards all the concepts are the links in a descending scale from the most refined voluptuousness to the grossest lust. But little innocent hilarity is found amid the maddened revel; but little rural freshness in the turbulent excitement. According to Müller, Nature overpowering the mind, and hurrying it out of the repose of a clear self-consciousness, lies at the basis of all Dionysian creations.' This is in a measure true; but yet is a very imperfect expression of the root-cause of these concepts. It is not so much Nature as human nature, the lower nature in man, which in the later developments of the Dionysiak Myth overpowers the higher and crushes down the aspirations towards infinite good, the grossest, i.e., most patent, instance of this overpowering occurring in the case of abuse of wine. 1 184. 6 Here may be noticed the Arkadian divinity Pan, who, Westropp, Handbook of Archaeol. 2 Ancient Art. 499. although originally as unconnected with .Dionysos as Hermes with the hermai, has been enrolled in the Bakchik train through accidental circumstances. The Panisks 'represent the secret pleasure and the dark horror of sylvan solitude. Here also there occurs, and that too in their native Arcadia, a human form which is only characterized as Pan by the shepherd's pipe, the pastoral crook, the disordered hair and also, perhaps, sprouting horns. This is the usual shape on coins and vase-paintings of the best period.' So that even in the case of Pan, a mere local genius of flocks and herds, not a divinity of Olympos, the anthropomorphic principle was so strong in the best period of Hellenik art that little budding horns, and perhaps not even these, formed the only unnatural feature in the figure of the rustic daemon. I have already endeavoured to point out that there is no real connection between Pan and Dionysos; but their points of apparent affinity and assimilation are chiefly the following: Each is a nature-god and a horned-god. It is the late Pan of the age of Praxiteles who appears fully horned, hook-nosed, and goat-legged. Each is a kosmogonic god; Dionysos is the animated universe, and through a false etymology Pan is made to represent the All, and consequently is thus addressed : Strong pastoral Pan, with suppliant voice I call, And all are parts of thee, O power divine. —(Orphik Hymn, XI. Taylor's Translation.) Pan, it will be observed, has nothing kosmogonic about him in origin; but the Orphiks fasten on the innocent country divinity all the dread, mystic and occult attributes and adjuncts of Dionysos, calling him the horned Zeus' 1 Ancient Art, 501. 2 Sup. IV. iii. 2. |