visible garment. Whether Hesiodos uses phaidimos, one of his epithets for Dionysos, in this primary sense, or merely in the secondary sense of 'famous,' is of course doubtful; but it should be remembered that Phanes in the Orphik Theogony is identified with Dionysos, and this circumstance illustrates the exceedingly important kosmogonic aspect of the Dionysiak Myth. Phaidimos. occurs in Homeros as the name of the king of the Sidonians, who gave Menelaos the splendid bowl wrought by the Phoenician Hephaistos, and presented by the king of Sparte to Telemachos. Some subtle links of connection between East and West may be traced in these circumstances. That remarkable Thrakian symbolic religious mysticism subsequently known as Orphik, and afterwards overshadowed by the parasitic growth of NeoPlatonism, appears to have coalesced, perhaps in Kabirik Lemnos, past which the head and harp of Orpheus were carried in tradition to Lesbos early home of the lyric muse-with the Semitic religious element, chiefly represented by the world-colonising Phoenician. The Orphik Demiurge and the kosmogonic Phoenician divinity, known in Hellas as Dionysos, are one and the same. One is Phanes, the Spirit-of-the-Apparent the other is Phaidimos the Illustrious-apparent, a Sidonian or Phoenician hero. These Aryan names are really the same, as is the Semitic concept which they embody, namely, that of the Creator becoming apparent pantheistically in his works. Hence Dionysos is Phaidimos more truly than perhaps ever entered into the mind of the author of the Hesiodik Theogony who, nevertheless, had a wonderful, although shadowy apprehension of certain great root-truths, which gleam and pierce through all their cumbrous trappings and disguises.1 Subsection II.-Dionysos and Ariadne. 3 'Dionysos Chrysokomes [the Golden-haired] made the blonde-haired Ariadne, daughter of Minos, his blooming spouse, and for him Kronion [Zeus] made her immortal and ever-young.'2 Dionysos here appears in one of his solar aspects, Chrysokomes, the Golden-haired Sun, as the rival divinity the Aryan Apollon is Akersekomes, the Unshorn, undeprived of his far-reaching beams. Minos, the mighty king of Krete, whose name is man, the measurer or thinker, the Indian Manu,' and whom Homeros speaks of as 'possessed of awful wisdom,' 4 is the son of Zeus and Europe the daughter, either of Phoinix son of the Phoenician king Agenor, or of Agenor himself. He is thus of direct Phoenician descent, and his daughter Ariadne, whose name is perhaps Phoenician,5 forms by relationship a suitable bride for her Phoenician cousin Dionysos. His rival is the Aryan Theseus; who is defeated in the competition, and Dionysos confers immortality on his consort as on his mother. The root of the story is probably some contest or connection between the Phoenician powers of Krete and Naxos, and the Hellenik Attike. Pausanias speaks of Dionysos as having had a much superior force, and, so far as the god represents in the legend the Phoenician Navy, this was doubtless correct. Minos has been regarded as a solar hero because there is a tradition that he was slain in the West by a king of Sikelia. If all solar heroes, like their prototype, closed their careers in the West, their histories would present a gratifying consistency; but since heroes who travel from West to East, such as Achilleus, and die in Oriental regions, are equally supposed to be solar, it is evident that, let them die where they may, they cannot escape a solar character.1 The Episode of Dionysos and Ariadne formed one of the favourite subjects of ancient art, and is thus treated on a fresco discovered at Pompeii: Bacchus, after his arrival at Naxos, finds Ariadne sunk in a profound slumber. Her face is hid in the pillows; over her head stands Sleep, with outspread wings, and bearing in his left hand a torch reversed, a symbol common to him with his brother Death. A young faun lifts the sheet, or veil, in which Ariadne is enveloped, in an attitude expressive of surprise at her beauty, and looks earnestly at the god, as if to discover what impression it makes upon him. Bacchus, crowned with ivy and berries, clothed in a short tunic and flowing pallium, having on his legs rich buskins, and holding in his right hand the thyrsus bound with a fillet, appears to be approaching slowly, and cautiously, for fear he should awake the nymph.2 Seilenos and the Bakchik train follow. King, after having illustrated the custom of honouring a deceased friend by sculpturing his portrait in the character of a Bacchus,' remarks, from all this it is allowable to conjecture that the heads of Bacchus and Ariadne, in which the Roman glyptic art so conspicuously displayed itself, may not in every instance be ideal, but may often perpetuate the features of deceased friends.' 3 1 For illustrations of the Phoenician character of Minos, vide Juv. Mun. 119 et seq., and for the early history and non-Aryan character of Krete, vide Poseidon, secs. xxx. 6 xxxiv. Mr. 2 Dyer, Ruins of Pompeii, 80-1; Adams, Buried Cities of Campania, 211-2. 3 Antique Gems, i. 218, 265. Subsection III.-Grapes, the gift of Dionysos. The remaining allusion to Dionysos in the Hesiodik Poems states that he gave grapes to men, a source of joy and grief.' This passage excellently illustrates the twofaced character of Dionysos Theoinos, the Wine-god.2 In one aspect he is Luaios, the Deliverer-from-care; in the other he is Psychodaiktes, Destroyer-of-the-soul, frantic, and raging. The rustic author of the Shield of Herakles gives quite an Aryan aspect of the god, just as an Attik husbandman of the age of Perikles might have done, accustomed to connect him only with the rural Dionysia and the sports of the Askoliasmos or Leaping-on-the-wine-skin; and had we nothing more about the god than such a passage as this, we should unhesitatingly ascribe to him an Aryan origin. But even the Hesiodik allusions to Dionysos, brief as they are, would fully warrant us in regarding him as a foreign importation. In the time of Hesiodos the contests with Lykourgos and Pentheus were things of the past, and the son of Semele was universally acknowledged as a member of the Aryan Pantheon. Subsection IV.-Eikon of the Hesiodik Dionysos. The Hesiodik Dionysos appears as the son of Zeus, and Semele daughter of Kadmos the Oriental, and as the husband of Ariadne, daughter of the Phoenician Minos. His wife and mother are both deified, or received into the Aryan Pantheon, through his agency; and he is the giver of the grape to mortals, inasmuch as he is Chrysokomes, the Golden-haired Sun, whose beams cause the earth to yield her increase. He is thus foreign in connection and kosmogonico-solar in character. 1 Aspis Herak, 400. 2 Cf. sup. sec. i. 2. SECTION III. THE ORPHIK DIONYSOS. Subsection I-Thrake and Orphik Mysticism. Down to the time of the Peloponnesian War Thrake extended on the eastern side of the Bosphoros, as far as Herakleia, on the coast of the Euxine, and this country, at once European and Asiatic, appears in legendary history as the home of a peculiar school of mythical poetry and religious symbolism. Orpheus, one of the three Theologers or Writers on the Nature of Divinity (Homeros and Hesiodos being the other two), Mousaios the Muse personified in the poet, said to be a son of Orpheus or of Eumolpos, and reputed author of various poems connected with the cult of the Eleusinian Demeter; Eumolpos, the Good-singer, founder of the Eleusinian Mysteries and first high priest of Demeter and Dionysos; Linos, or Song personified, either plaintive as the Dirge, or lively, all these, and many other similar personages, appear in tradition as either actually Thrakian, or else in some way linked with Thrake. The Asiatic connection of Thrake is illustrated in the Homerik Poems where the Eastern Thrakians appear in the Catalogue among the Troian allies; 1 and the Western Thrakians, who subsequently arrive with Rhesos, their king, in like manner join the Troian array.2 The antagonism between the Thrakian and the Ionik schools of poetry is seen in the allusion to the fate of the Thrakian bard Thamyris, who, with the arrogance of Marsyas and Linos, both of whom challenged Apollon to musical contests, boasted that he could conquer even the Muses in song, on which they struck him with blindness, 21. x. 434; Eur. Rhesos. 1 N. ii. 844. |