Why the Greeks Thought Wine Deserved a God
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Would you turn the other cheek? Not that cheek. Discover the last and most unusual of the Olympian gods.
Dionysus was the god of wine, regeneration, fertility, ritual madness, ecstasy, theatre, and pleasure, among others. In certain times and places, or among certain people, he was the most important god—more important, even, than Zeus. Owing to his hold on the imagination, there is much mythical material surrounding him.
Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, one of the four daughters of Cadmus. When Semele was pregnant with Dionysus, a jealous Hera persuaded her to ask Zeus to reveal himself to her ‘as he does to his wife’. Zeus reluctantly obliged, leading Semele to die from one of his thunderbolts. Zeus succeeded in saving his son from her womb, and stitched him into his thigh (probably a euphemism for his testicle)—whence the Dionysian epithet dimētōr, ‘of two mothers’, ‘twice-born’.
Following this second birth, Hermes placed Dionysus into the care of his aunt Ino and her husband Athamas, asking them to bring him up as a girl. Even in this guise, Hera recognised him and inflicted madness upon Ino and Athamas, who killed their children before killing themselves. To protect him, Zeus turned Dionysus into a kid, which Hermes spirited to the satyr Silenus and the mænads of Mount Nysa. Silenus became his tutor, and the centaur Chiron completed his education.
After the young Dionysus discovered the magical vine, Hera drove him mad. He roamed the world to escape from her while teaching mortals the secrets of winemaking. He travelled to Egypt and Syria, and even led a campaign into India. According to the historian Diodorus Siculus (d. 30 BCE), Dionysus taught all the known world how to make wine—except for Britain and Æthiopia. In Phrygia, he met the mother goddess Cybele, who taught him the mysteries and, by channelling it, cured him of his madness. He then established his cult and rites, inspired by those of Cybele.
While in Phrygia, Silenus wandered off drunk and was carried to King Midas. When Dionysus came to collect him, he offered Midas any wish. Midas asked for the power to turn whatever he touched into gold. Before dinner, he had turned every bush in his famed rose garden to gold. But he was horrified when his food and wine also turned to gold. His daughter tried to comfort him, but she too suffered the same fate. When Midas begged to be rescued, Dionysus told him to bathe in the River Pactolus, the golden sands of which later became the source of Croesus’ fabulous wealth.
Dionysus returned to Greece in a triumphal procession of satyrs and mænads. However, his wild and alien cult met with resistance. In Thrace, King Lycurgus captured his followers and drove Dionysus into the sea. Dionysus visited madness on Lycurgus—leading him to kill his wife and son and chop off his own legs in the belief that they were vines.
In his own city of Thebes, Dionysus was opposed by his cousin Pentheus, the son of Agave. The seer Tiresias urged Pentheus to embrace Dionysus, warning him, ‘Your blood [will be] poured out and defile the woods and your mother and sisters…’ But Pentheus forbade his worship, after which the women of Thebes lost their minds and left their homes to cavort in a frenzy on Mount Cithæron. Pentheus hid in a tree to spy on them, but the daughters of Cadmus found him and tore him apart from limb to limb. Agave tore off his head, put it on a pike, and took it to Cadmus—before realising what she had done.
Some time later, Dionysus chartered a ship manned by Tyrrhenian mercenaries. Believing him to be the son of a rich man, they sailed towards Asia with the intention of ransoming him. When they bound him to the mast, the bonds simply fell away. The helmsman Acoetes warned that this was no ordinary man, but the captain failed to change course. Dionysus filled the vessel with ivy and flute song, leading the mercenaries to lose their minds and leap into the sea. He then turned them into dolphins, sparing only Acoetes, who bore witness to his divinity.
On Naxos, Dionysus found Ariadne, who had been abandoned there by Theseus. Dionysus had countless lovers, both male and female, but married only Ariadne, giving her a crown and fixing it into the heavens as the constellation Corona. He then travelled to Hades to bring back his mother Semele, and all three ascended to Olympus.
The Meaning of Dionysus
Dionysus’ origins are shrouded in the mists of time, and it may be that he is a composite of a number of similar gods from far-flung times and places. His name is first attested on tablets recovered from Mycenæan Pylos, although its etymology is uncertain. The Greeks had many other names or epithets for him, including Androgynos, Bromios [Thunderer], Eleuthereus [Liberator], and Tauros [Bull].
Whatever his origins, Dionysus came to symbolise the impulsive, the chaotic, and everything that escapes human reason and control—and, by extension, nature and its vitality. Like nature, he is both creation and destruction, representing on the one hand growth and fertility and on the other wine and dissolution. He dissolves the boundaries between reason and instinct, civilisation and nature, life and death, the human and the divine. As twice-born and returned from Hades, he crosses and re-crosses the boundary between life and death. He reminds us, as does the hero, that life is at its fullest in the jaws of death.
Much of his mythology is about establishing himself as a god, suggesting that he may in part be rooted in a historical figure. Although the Greeks, especially Greek men, resisted his alien and anarchic cult, he rose to become one of the principal Olympian gods.
Dionysus was the last of the twelve Olympian gods to arrive, and the only one with a mortal parent—embodying, like wine itself, the duality between the human and the divine.
He rode in a chariot drawn by big cats and accompanied by an ecstatic retinue, or thíasos, of erect satyrs and frenzied mænads. Under the influence of the god and his wine, satyrs and mænads tore apart sacrificial animals and ate them raw. The Greeks honoured Dionysus in several annual festivals, including the City Dionysia, which became the premier competition for playwrights in Athens. The thíasos, especially the triumphal procession on Dionysus’ return to Greece, served as a model for later Dionysian processions and, according to Pliny the Elder, even the Roman Triumph.
Dionysus appears in early Greek art as a bearded man, but later evolves into an alluring and androgynous youth. His attributes include the thyrsus, a fennel staff tipped with a pinecone; the kantharos, a drinking cup with high handles; the vine and ivy; the snake; and the bull.
For Sigmund Freud, Dionysus and his thíasos symbolised the id, the deep, primitive, and instinctual part of the mind. Freud requested that his ashes be preserved in an Ancient Greek krater painted with Dionysian scenes—where they remain to this day.
To Dionysus, the most important individual in his train was Silenus, the wisest and, not coincidentally, the most drunken of his followers. The Midas myth has become famous the world over and is a powerful way of making the point that the true wealth of life resides in life itself. Assuming we have a modest amount, it is not generally a lack of funds but a lack of soul, or lack of love, that keeps us from living.
Silenus is also associated with the bleak teaching that the best thing for human beings is never to have been born, and the next best to die as soon as possible. Plato alludes to this ‘Wisdom of Silenus’ but thinks it dangerous and refrains from spelling it out too clearly. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades compares Socrates to Silenus for being ugly outside but beautiful inside.
In his earliest work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche popularised a dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian stands for light, reason, order, and individuation, whereas the Dionysian is all about darkness, irrationality, chaos, and dissociation. The Dionysian impulse, similar to Freud’s concept of the id or Jung’s concept of the shadow, is a primal force that demands to be acknowledged and integrated.
Dionysus himself lost his mind until he mastered the mysteries, after which he became a model of sanity or even hypersanity and established his cult. If too much of the Dionysian is destructive, too much of the Apollonian is stultifying, whereas a balance of the two unleashes the best of both.
Nietzsche argued that the Ancient Greeks achieved that rare balance of the Apollonian and Dionysian, notably in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, which, by providing a paradigm of existential suffering, enabled people to experience a profound sense of release and escape. But owing to the influence of rationalists such as Socrates and Plato, the Apollonian took over, and European culture came to lack passion and vitality.
The dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus is, however, a modern one. The Greeks, if anything, tended to assimilate them: Like Apollo, Dionysus was said to have the gift of prophecy, and even to inhabit the Temple of Apollo at Delphi during Apollo’s winter absence.
The Dionysian Mysteries were related to the Orphic and Osirian Mysteries. Orphics held the ‘first Dionysus’, or Zagreus, to have been torn apart and eaten by the Titans before being reborn through Semele. They worshipped Dionysus as a chthonic aspect of Zeus and connected him with the reincarnation and immortality which they sought for themselves.
Dionysus also has much in common with Jesus Christ: a divine father, a mortal mother, and a rebirth or resurrection. Both carried a revolutionary message of salvation, sought to establish a following on earth before ascending to heaven, and roamed about performing miracles. Still today, followers of Jesus ritually eat his flesh and drink his blood in the bread and wine of the eucharist.
Of course, Dionysus was never likely to turn the other cheek—or, at least, not that cheek—but he was, unusually among the Olympian gods, a good friend to humankind.
If Prometheus gave us fire, Dionysus gave us wine, the inner fire which frees the mind and dissolves the ego along with all of its problems. Wine brings us together, helps us be together, and be inventive together, as in the Greek symposia and Roman convivia, in which measured drinking could lead to expansive elation and creative association and the voicing of disruptive ideas and perspectives.
It can be no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.
Life without wine would be a pale shadow of itself. I raise my glass to Dionysus.
Continue Exploring
If you enjoyed this article, you might look into The Meaning of Myth, which contains the full chapter on Dionysus, and The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting, on the appreciation, psychology, and philosophy of wine.
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