once grim and smiling, 'Dionysos, son of Zeus, a god at once most terrible and most gentle to mortals,'1 we shall see developed throughout his career; its closer consideration belongs to another stage of the enquiry. With reference to the introduction of the Dionysiak cult into Hellas, Mr. Gladstone well remarks: We cannot, perhaps, treat the Dionusos of Homer as the discoverer of wine, and father of its use, in Greece; for it is universal and familiar, while he appears to be but local and as yet strange. The novel feature, which connects itself with his name, seems to be the use of wine by women; and the effect produced, in an extraordinary and furious excitement, which might well justify not only jealousy, but even forcible resistance to demoralising orgies. It seems, then, as if this usage was introduced by immigrants of a race comparatively wealthy and luxurious, and was resisted by, or on behalf of, the older and simpler population.'2 Professor Mayor, commenting on Od. ix. 197, where allusion is made to the skin of excellent wine given to Odysseus by Maron, priest of Apollon, remarks: Neither here, nor in the vineyard of Alkinoös, nor in the vintage scene on the Shield of Achilleus, do we find Dionysos; hence he cannot have been the god of wine to Homer.'s I think it will clearly appear that this inference is amply justified. There is one more incident in the description of the Homerik Dionysos which is not without a special significance. The poet never admits him to that wide. heaven, the peculiar home and abode of Zeus Hypsistos,1

1 Eur. Bak. 860.

2 Juv. Mun. 319.

3 The Narrative of Odysseus, i.

108.

I have endeavoured to show (Poseidon, xxix.) that the customary Homerik formula for the Aryan divinities is the gods who possess the wide heaven." Mr. Gladstone (Juv. Mun. 318) quotes Nagelsbach

to the effect that Homeros places neither Dionysos or Demeter in Olympos by any distinct declaration. As Demeter is unquestionably an Aryan divinity, this must seem an exception to the principle above suggested. Even if it be an exception, the reason of it is not far to seek, as it would seem to us to be a strange clashing of ideas to place Earth in

that clear blue aether which is far removed from the career and independent of the sway, alike of the terrestrial Dionysos and of the chthonian Zagreus, whose lurid torches, though for a time they may obscure, can never vie with, the pure beauty of its incorruptible stars.1

SECTION II.

THE DIONYSOS OF HESIODOS.

Subsection I.-Dionysos, son of Semele.

To Zeus,' says the poet of Askra,2 Semele, daughter of Kadmos, bore a famous son Dionysos, the Muchcheering, an immortal though she was mortal. But now both are deities.' The Hesiodik account is thus in perfect accord with the Homerik; Dionysos is a Kadmeion, i.e. a Son of the East. The primary meaning of the word phaidmos, famous,' is that which is brought to light or made to appear, and hence that which strikes the eye remarkably. Some of its fellow words are phaino, ‘to bring to light;' phane, a torch,' i.e. that-which-bringsthings-to-light; and Phanes, the Apparent-one, the Orphık Demiurge, who has made, and in making has brought to light, all created things which form his 'living

4

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 Menclaos 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.

6

'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,' 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. Mr. 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.'"

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.

xxxiv.

2 Dyer, Ruins of Pompeii, 80-1; Adams, Buried Cities of Campania, 211-2.

3 Antique Gems, i. 218, 265.