![]() ![]() The Bacchae are followers of Dionysus who have come with him from Asia. The Maenads are the women of Thebes, possessed by Dionysus, who run through the wilderness of Cithaeron performing miracles through the power of the god. But that child was Dionysus, and he has returned now to establish himself as a god. Semele's sisters called the dead woman a liar, and they denied the divinity of Semele's baby the child, Semele's sisters assumed, must have died with Semele. He has also returned for revenge: when his mother Semele died in a blaze of lightning, Semele's sisters said that Zeus was punishing her for saying she had been his bride. He has been traveling in Asia, teaching his mysteries to mankind, and now he has returned to Thebes to initiate the land of his birth into the new religion. He is simultaneously an abstract force and an anthropomorphized deity. Teiresias warns Pentheus that Dionysus is god of wine, dance, revelry, wildness, and war he is also the god who mediates between the other gods and mankind. But he is of a dual nature, both foreign and Greek, child of both mortal and god, male but effeminate his nature therefore is part of our own. Eurpides uses him as the embodiment of all that we fear: the irrational, the savage, the exotic, the Other. Wine was only one of Dionysus' gifts to mankind he is also the god of excess, savagery, ecstasy. ![]() Dionysus should not be thought of as the merry god of wine this concept of him is part Roman, part Disney. ![]() ![]() Son of Zeus (king of the gods), and the mortal woman Semele. ![]()
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