The Twice-Born God of the Vine

For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars including Erwin Rohde argued that Dionysus was a comparatively late arrival in Greek religion, an import from Thrace or Phrygia grafted onto an older Olympian system. The decipherment of Linear B overturned that picture: tablets from Pylos and Chania, written in a form of Greek roughly contemporary with the Bronze Age Mycenaean palaces, record his name among offerings, showing that Dionysus was already worshipped in mainland Greece and Crete many centuries before Homer, as old as any other Greek god for whom written evidence survives.

His image changed sharply over that long history. Archaic vase painters showed him as a mature, bearded, heavily draped figure, closer in bearing to Zeus or Poseidon than to a wild ecstatic; only from the later fifth century BCE onward does Greek art increasingly give him the youthful, sometimes androgynous, unbearded form entwined with vine and panther that later ages took as his default appearance. That shift in image tracks a real shift in what the god was thought to represent, from a settled, honoured Olympian toward the destabilising, boundary-dissolving figure of tragedy and mystery cult.