consisting of the daughters of Danaos the Egyptian, exclaim, 'But if not [i.e. if they did not escape from their persecutors], a blackened sunburnt race1 to Zagreus2 the many-guest-receiving Zeus of the dead we will go.'s The epithet Zagreus has been interpreted 'Mighty Hunter,' as if from za, intensive, and agreus the hunter, an epithet of Apollon, Pan, and several other divinities; but from the context the poet seems to have understood it as derived from zogreo, to take alive, He-that-makesnumerous-captives, i.e. the Dead, called euphemistically the Majority. We have already, in a surviving line of the Epigonoi, caught a glimpse of Zagreus highest of all gods,' the chthonian Dionysos, and shall have occasion again to refer to him when speaking of some special phases of the god.

In the Hepta epi Thêbas the messenger tells Eteokles that Hippomedon 'raves (Baxxa) for fight like a Thyiad,'7 i.e. a Rager, a term technically applied to a Bakchante.8 Such are the slight Dionysiak allusions in the extant Plays of Aischylos; and if we knew nothing further about his writings, and placed confidence in that broken reed the argument from silence,' we should undoubtedly conclude that Dionysos was a divinity about whose legendary history Aischylos was either comparatively ignorant or indifferent.

Subsection II.-The Lykourgeia.

But it would have been strange if the citizen of Eleusis, whose father, moreover, was personally connected with the cult of Demeter, the great goddess and associate

of Dionysos, and who himself also is said to have been initiated into the mysteries of the goddess which he was accused of having divulged,1 had not treated the Dionysiak Cycle more copiously than appears from his surviving Plays; and accordingly we find that the history of Dionysos was one of his favourite themes. For, not to take into account the numerous Dionysiak allusions which many of the lost Plays must have doubtless contained, both the great opponents of the god, Lykourgos and Pentheus, were honoured by the Poet with trilogies. The trilogy forming the Lykourgeia consisted of the Edonoi, the Bassarides, and the Neaniskoi, with the Lykourgos as a satyric afterpiece, the whole forming a tetralogy. The Edonoi appears to have contained an account of the arrival of Dionysos in Thrake, the victory of Lykourgos over his train, and the captivity of the god. Strabo, in his remarks on the Kouretes,2 has preserved three Fragments of the Play. The first alludes to 'the revered Kotys, who dwells among the Edonoi.' The Thrakian Kotys, 'dark-veil'd Cotytto, to whom the secret flame of midnight torches burns,' and whose worship was introduced at Athenai and Korinthos in comparatively late times, like the Attik Konisalos, and similar concepts, represents the life-vigour of Dionysos Dendrites, Karpios, or Phleon, running wild in the form of personal licentiousness, a still further development of the coarse idea of Priapos.5 The second Fragment introduces the Bakchai with their bombykes or booming flutes, and hollow bronze-bound kettledrums, fit instruments for the cult of Dionysos Bromios; and the third graphically describes their effect: The burst of music is poured forth, terror-striking sounds

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imitating the bellowing of bulls blare in concert from unseen recesses, and the echo of the drum is borne along like terrific subterranean thunder.' In this very Aischylian passage the Chorus are represented as mimicking the bellowing of bulls, and it would seem that at times the Bakchik votaries imitated bulls in their attire also,1 like the Bullards or Bull-baiters of modern times.2 The cult of Dionysos Taurokerôs appears persistently throughout the investigation.

4

Another Fragment alludes to the 'Edonian faun-skins,' the peculiar garb of the Bakchai. It will be remembered that an important part of the mystic Orphik dress of the votary of the kosmogonic Dionysos was 'the all-variegated skin of a wild faun much spotted, a representation of the wondrously-wrought stars and of the vault of heaven.'3 With this agrees the statement of Diodoros that Dionysos is represented as clothed in a faun-skin on account of the stars. Strabo observes that the Orphik ceremonies had their origin among the Thrakians, and, on the strength of their resemblance to the Phrygian ritual, conjectures that the Phrygians were a Thrakian colony, and adds, ' From the song, the rhythm, and the instruments, all Thrakian music is supposed to be Asiatic.' The Edonian worship, says Niebuhr, 'is in a certain sense Thrakian, especially in regard to women, and existed by the side of the Phrygian.' This common character necessitates a common origin. Phrygians and Thrakians alike belonged to the Aryan family of nations; but their cult is by no means purely Aryan, each of them having been brought into contact with both the Turanian and Semitic elements. Nor can the conjecture of Strabo that the settlement of

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1 Cf. Eur. Bak. 922.

2 Vide an interesting account of the Bullards of Stamford with their ' uncouth and antic dresses 'in Timbs' Abbeys, Castles, and Ancient Halls of England and Wales, i. 380 et seq.

3 Sup. II. iii. 3.

4 Diod. i. 11.

Cf. Eur. Bak. 1168, 'O Asiatic Bakchai.'

6 Lectures on Ethnography, i. 288.

the Phrygians was the result of an emigration from West to East be allowed; but, on the contrary, the Bryges or Phryges who inhabited Thrake and bordered on Makedonia, must be regarded as colonists of the Phrygians, the stream of Indo-European colonisation having set westward from Armenia into Phrygia, and from Phrygia across the straits into Europe.'1

The Bassarides appears to have contained an account of the escape of Dionysos and his companions from their bonds, the madness of Lykourgos, and his slaughter of his son Dryas. The Bassarides themselves are the Chorus of Bakchai, dressed in fox-skin tunics. Bassara, a Thrakian word, but Semitic in origin, is equivalent to the Hellenik alopex, fox. The Play also perhaps contained the punishment of Lykourgos. According to Homeros, the gods took away his life;2 according to Sophokles, he was imprisoned alive in the rocks, where the dreadful strength of madness is ever ebbing away.' He discovered that in his madness he had touched a god with jeering words, for he would have put a stop to the inspired women and the flame of Euios, and he angered the layliving Muses.' The Neaniskoi or Youths, forms the third Play of the trilogy, and seems to have recounted the founding of the cult of Lykourgos in connection with that of Dionysos, and perhaps the fate of the former. The Neaniskoi or Chorus of Youths probably represented the Mystics, or those initiated in the rites of the god,5 a cyclic Dionysiak Chorus such as in early historic times danced around the altar of Zeus to the sound of Phrygian flutes and orgiastic music. Ploutarchos has preserved a Fragment apparently chanted by the Chorus in celebration of the joint rites of Dionysos and Lykourgos, 'It is fitting

that the mixt-sounding dithyramb familiar to Dionysos should accompany.'1

Subsection III.-Other Dionysiak Allusions in the
Apospasmatia.

In the Kabeiroi, almost every line of which is lost, and which formed one in the trilogy of the Iasoneia, the poet appears, from a passage in Athenaios, to have recounted the revelry of the Argonautai in Lemnos,2 where, according to the myth, they arrived on their outward voyage shortly after the Lemnian women had murdered the males on the island. Orgies seem to have been described as having been performed in honour of Dionysos and the Kabeiroi. The same episode was treated in the Lemniai of Sophokles, and the loss of both Plays is much to be regretted, as they would certainly have afforded important illustration of the Semitic character of Dionysos the associate of the Kabeiroi, most mysterious personages of undoubted Semitic extraction,+ and appropriately found as the presiding daemons of Lemnos, an isle sacred to the Semitic Hephaistos,5 and a Phoenician colony.

The story of Pentheus was treated by the Poet in a trilogy, consisting of the Semele, Pentheus, and Xantriai or 'wool-carders.'6 Of these Plays almost every line has perished, but in the latter the goddess Lussa was introduced stimulating the Bacchae, and creating in them spasmodic excitement from head to foot.'s Lussa, Attik Lutta, is a personification of phrensy.9 Another Play,

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Dionysou Trophoi, the nurses of Dionysos,' of which