![]() ![]() "When the baby was fully formed he was 'born' again - taken from his father's thigh - thus, 'twice-born,'" Martin says. However, Zeus not wanting to lose his semi-divine son, snatched Dionysus from her womb - he was a real 'preemie' - and completed the growth process by sewing the baby Dionysus into his own thigh. ![]() "So Semele begged Zeus to come to her showing himself as he really was - and he did, in the form of a lightning bolt. "Hera, always jealous of his many affairs, visited Semele in disguise and convinced her to put Zeus to the test (implying that her lover was really just an ordinary man in disguise - the same motif as later crops up in this story)," Martin says. Just one problem: Zeus was married to someone else besides Semele, and her name was Hera. So Pentheus and the Theban are punished for having resisted the idea that the local boy was really a powerful god."ĭionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, a daughter of Cadmus, the king of Thebes. They tear him limb from limb and his mother in a Dionysus-induced madness carries his head off, thinking she has slain a lion. All of a sudden, he is caught - the women are driven to a frenzy, and they turn from tearing apart small animals to actually hunting Pentheus. But at the same time he's fascinated by the new worship and spies on the ecstatic women as they celebrate the god, dancing and drinking up on the mountain. He thinks the stranger is up to no good, seducing women. In the drama, the young king of Thebes (named Pentheus) in Greece feels threatened by a mysterious visitor - Dionysus in disguise - who has come back to his own birthplace. ![]() The Athenian dramatist Euripides wrote the most compelling depiction, a tragic play produced in the late 5th century B.C.E. "The scariest stories are about what happens to people who resist Dionysus and his ecstatic bands of worshippers - usually female, called Bacchae or Bacchants, after one of his many names, Bacchus - when they come to town spreading the god's special ritual practices. There's also the "terror side" of Dionysus. Of course, that's probably primarily due to his connection with wine and its effects, from the very first mild and pleasant buzz it gives you to the wretched morning-afters when you have too much." He seems to come from outside and to invade the consciousness. "He has the power to transport his worshippers into ecstasy, and to drive his opponents mad. Martin, Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek professor in classics at Stanford University, says via email. Second of all, welcome - let's find out why the god of fertility and wine has inspired artists (including the most famous current boy band in the world) to sing his praises. If a Google search for "Dionysus" brought you here rather than to information on the hit song from South Korean K-Pop megastars BTS, first of all, apologies. Dionysus enthroned between a bacchant and a faun in a 1924 fresco by Antonio Maria Morera in the Great Hall of the Enological School, Conegliano, Veneto, Italy. ![]()
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