Mysteries, the Afterlife, and Later Reception

Despite the crackdown, Bacchic religion did not disappear; regulated and private forms of the mysteries continued for centuries, and by the later empire Bacchic initiation was again widespread and respectable. Its imagery of the vine, the wine, and the triumphant return of life spoke of hope beyond death, and Bacchic scenes crowd the sarcophagi of the Roman well-to-do, while the famous frescoes of the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii seem to depict stages of an initiation. This funerary and hopeful dimension helped make the god's imagery available to later ages, and Bacchus became a favourite of Renaissance and Baroque art, standing at once for the pleasures of wine and for deeper themes of ecstasy, death, and renewal. In the modern imagination the bacchanal survives as a byword for uninhibited revelry, a faint and secularised echo of a cult the Roman Senate had once thought worth crushing.