Dionysus: Born Twice, Staged Forever

In the front row of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, on the south slope of the Acropolis, stands a marble armchair inscribed for the priest of Dionysus Eleuthereus. It is the best seat in the house, and it belonged to a clergyman. Every tragedy, comedy and satyr play staged at the great Athenian festivals was performed in honour of this god, which raises a fair question: what does the god of wine have to do with Oedipus? The Greeks asked it too. When a play strayed too far from his stories, a proverb grumbled that it had ‘nothing to do with Dionysus’. The answer lies in what kind of god he was, starting with how he was born.

Twice born

His mother was Semele, a daughter of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, and a mortal. Zeus loved her; Hera, as usual, found out. In Ovid’s version Hera disguises herself as Semele’s old nurse and plants a doubt: how can the girl be sure her lover is really Zeus? Ask him, the nurse suggests, to come to you as he comes to his wife. Semele makes Zeus promise to grant any wish, and he swears by the Styx before he hears it. Bound by the oath, he arrives in his true form, armed with lightning, and Semele burns. The unborn child is rescued and sewn into Zeus’s own thigh, from which Dionysus is born a second time, at full term.

Euripides pushes the image further in the Bacchae, where Zeus calls to the infant to enter his male womb. Hesiod, centuries earlier, put the outcome more simply in the Theogony: a mortal woman bore Zeus an immortal son, and now both of them are gods. Later sources tell how Dionysus went down to the underworld to fetch his mother up. There was also a darker birth story, told in Orphic circles, in which an earlier Dionysus, son of Persephone, was torn apart by the Titans and made again from his rescued heart.

The myths insist that Dionysus is a newcomer, a god who arrives from the east and must fight for recognition. The evidence disagrees. His name appears, as di-wo-nu-so, on Linear B tablets from the Mycenaean palace at Pylos, written in the thirteenth century BCE. The ‘new’ god was already very old. Being an arrival, it seems, was not his history but his character.

The god who must be let in

Homer mostly keeps Dionysus offstage, but tells one revealing story in the Iliad. King Lycurgus chased the young god’s nurses down the slopes of Nysa with an ox-goad, and Dionysus fled in terror into the sea, where Thetis took him in. The gods were angry, and Zeus struck Lycurgus blind; he did not live long after. The Homeric Hymn to Dionysus has pirates seize a handsome young man from a headland, only for sweet wine to stream through the ship, a vine to climb the mast and their captive to become a lion. The sailors leap overboard and turn into dolphins. Exekias painted the scene’s aftermath on a celebrated cup now in Munich: the god reclining in a ship whose mast sprouts grapes, dolphins circling below.

The pattern repeats: Dionysus arrives, someone refuses him, and the refusal ends badly. Wine is the obvious emblem of a gift that has to be handled correctly. Greeks mixed it with water and drank by rules at the symposium; drinking it neat was something they attributed to wild northerners. The same liquid that loosened tongues and eased grief could unmake a person. Dionysus was never simply the god of a good time. He was the god of the line between self-command and losing yourself, and of what happens to anyone who pretends that line does not exist.

The Bacchae, or how to stage a god

Euripides wrote the Bacchae near the end of his life, and it was produced in Athens after his death, winning first prize, probably in 405 BCE. It is the only surviving tragedy in which Dionysus is the leading character, and it opens with the god speaking straight to the audience:

I have come to this land of the Thebans, I, the son of Zeus, Dionysus, whom Semele, Cadmus’ daughter, once bore, brought to birth by the lightning’s fire.

Euripides, Bacchae (our rendering)

He has come in disguise, as a soft-haired stranger from Lydia, because Thebes – his mother’s own city – denies that he is a god. Its young king, Pentheus, locks the stranger up and vows to crush the women who have run off to Mount Cithaeron as maenads. The god walks free, then does something more frightening than escape: he persuades Pentheus to go and watch. Dressed as a woman, the king is led to the mountain, spotted in a fir tree and torn apart by the women, led by his own mother, Agave, who carries his head home believing it to be a lion’s.

The play is a ruthless study of spectatorship. Pentheus wants to see the rites without taking part, and he is punished by becoming the show. An audience sitting in the god’s own theatre, watching a man destroyed for watching, could hardly miss the point.

Why the theatre belongs to him

The main Athenian drama festival, the City Dionysia, was held in the month of Elaphebolion, roughly our March–April. It began by re-enacting the god’s arrival: his statue, Dionysus Eleuthereus, was carried in procession into the city, recalling the cult’s legendary transfer from Eleutherae on the border with Boeotia. Over the following days three tragedians each presented three tragedies and a satyr play, and comic poets competed too. A smaller winter festival, the Lenaia, also put on plays.

Aristotle, in the Poetics, says that tragedy grew out of improvisations by those who led the dithyramb, a choral song for Dionysus, and comedy out of the phallic songs of his processions. Modern scholars argue about how literally to take him. What is clearer is the shared logic. Dionysus was the god of the mask – some vase-paintings show him worshipped as a mask hung on a post – and of the moment when a person stops being themselves. Actors in masks, a chorus singing as Theban women or Persian elders, an audience lending its belief: theatre was a controlled version of the ecstasy his worshippers sought on the mountain.

The god after the curtain

Dionysus never settled down. Hesiod already gives him a wife, Ariadne, daughter of Minos of Crete – the princess whom later poets have Theseus abandon on Naxos – and says Zeus made her deathless and ageless for his sake. At Eleusis the festival god Iacchus was sometimes identified with him, which tied him to Demeter’s Mysteries. In the Homeric Hymn to Pan he is the god most delighted by the goat-footed baby Pan, and the two shared a wild entourage of satyrs and nymphs.

In 1872 Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy made ‘the Dionysian’ a byword for ecstatic, boundary-dissolving energy, set against Apollonian order, and the pairing has never quite left criticism since. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History turned a student attempt at a bacchic rite into the opening move of a murder plot. The Bacchae itself keeps returning to modern stages, because its question has not gone away: what happens to a city that refuses to make room for the irrational? Every summer festival with a wine tent beside a stage is, whether it knows it or not, keeping two of his appointments at once.