Greek Boeotia Thebes

The ancient city of Thebes and the god Dionysos​

I, the son of Zeus, have come to this land of the Thebans-Dionysos, whom once Semele, Kadmos' daughter, bore, delivered by a lightning-bearing flame. And having taken a mortal form instead of a god's.. I have left the wealthy lands of the Lydians and Phrygians, the sun-parched plains of the Persians, and the Bactrian walls, and have passed over the wintry land of the Medes, and blessed Arabia, and all of Asia which lies along the coast of the salt sea with its beautifully-towered cities full of Hellenes and barbarians mingled together; and I have come to this Hellene city first, having already set those other lands to dance and established my mysteries there, so that I might be a deity manifest among men [ΕΥΡΙΠΙΔΗΣ - Euripides' Bacchae, 1-24].



Dionysos was an epiphanic god. Appearing in Thebes in the guise of a man, he comes to destroy the house of Kadmos in revenge for their rejection of his divinity. This forms the plot of Euripides' final play. Pentheus, king of Thebes and Dionysos's cousin becomes the main target for his violent rejection of the Dionysiac mysteries. Dionysos first drove the women out of Thebes in a divine frenzy - they lived on Mount Cithaeron in this state on occasion even tearing animals apart in a Bacchic sparagmos. Pentheus, alarmed at the spread of this foreign god tries to deploy soldiers only for them to be repelled. The tyrant increasingly becomes more violent throughout the play, only for the disguised Dionysus himself to manipulate Pentheus into dressing up as a woman and climbing a tree to spy for himself on the maenadic activities. The predictable result is his own gruesome sparagmos at the hands of his own mother and aunt before the triumphal establishment of the Dionysiac mysteries in Thebes. Nominative determinism indeed for Pentheus whose name is linguistically connected to penthos the Greek word for grief.



Dionysos clearly is no mere god of wine but represents something altogether a lot more sinister and hard to define. He embodies many paradoxes - he is a foreign eastern god whose came from India to, however, he was also born in Thebes the son of Semele [daughter of Kadmos]. He was uniquely 'twice born' from his mother when she was struck by lighting by Zeus and then from Zeus after being sewn up into his thigh. His connexion to mystery cult and Orphic religious practices makes him one of the most complex Greek divinities. His confused status of both man and god, his trial before Pentheus and his later death and resurrection even make him a close parallel to the figure of Jesus. Afterall Dionysos had a peculiarly syncretic afterlife in early Christianity with Bacchic imagery populating Christian art. The Christian author Nonnos, who wrote the Metabole [a paraphrase of John's gospel] also wrote a major epic poem, the Dionysiaca, about the pagan god in over 20,000 lines.



Dionysos remained, however, a distinctively Theban god, connected with the city through the very myth of his origin. One of the god's major cult centres was the sanctuary of Dionysos Lysios [the deliverer] in the city around the mythical tomb of Semele, where Dionysos delivers the prologue in Eurpides' play.