Dionysus

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.

At Delphi, the sanctuary most associated with Apollo's cool, ordered oracle, ancient sources describe Dionysus taking possession of the shrine for the three winter months while Apollo was said to be away among the Hyperboreans, so that the same temple hosted both gods in strict seasonal alternation. The arrangement is usually read as Delphic religion's own acknowledgment that order and ecstasy were not rivals to be kept apart but complementary powers that even Apollo's sanctuary needed to hold together.

Archaeology gives the mystery cult a material trace the myths alone do not: thin gold leaf tablets, folded and buried with initiates from the fourth century BCE onward at sites across southern Italy, Crete and Thessaly, inscribed with instructions for the soul in the underworld, what to say to the guardians at the spring of memory, what to expect after death. They are the closest thing to a script for the Dionysiac afterlife promised to initiates. In 1872 Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy made the ancient contrast between Dionysus and Apollo into a general theory of art and culture, Apolline order against Dionysian excess, a framework that owes as much to nineteenth-century philosophy as to the ancient evidence but has shaped how Dionysus is discussed ever since.