Dionysiac / Bacchic Rites

"After them was a four-wheeled wagon fourteen cubits long, and eight cubits wide; and it was drawn by a hundred and eighty men; and in it was placed an image of Bacchus ten cubits high, pouring libati

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So when Scyles had been initiated into the Bacchic rite, some one of the Borysthenites scoffed at the Scythians: “You laugh at us, Scythians, because we play the Bacchant and the god possesses us; but

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When all the company requested and earnestly begged it of him; first of all (says he), the time and manner of the greatest and most holy solemnity of the Jews is exactly agreeable to the holy rites of

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The poets bear witness to such views as I have suggested. For instance, when Pindar, in the dithyramb which begins with these words,In earlier times there marched the lay of the dithyrambs long drawn

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"But now that we have gone over everything that was to be seen in the tent, we will proceed to the shows and processions exhibited. For it passed through the stadium which there is in the city. And fi

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Now then, it seems to me that Melampus son of Amytheon was not ignorant of but was familiar with this sacrifice. For Melampus was the one who taught the Greeks the name of Dionysus and the way of sacr

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The leading men among the Scythians followed him, and the Borysthenite brought them up secretly onto a tower; from which, when Scyles passed by with his company of worshippers, they saw him playing th

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The former passage, in which Homer speaks of the beautiful dancing-floors of Panopeus, I could not understand until I was taught by the women whom the Athenians call Thyiads. The Thyiads are Attic wom

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and I too give the story told about them. They say that Pentheus treated Dionysus despitefully, his crowning outrage being that he went to Cithaeron, to spy upon the women, and climbing up a tree behe

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Between the market-place and the Menius is an old theater and a shrine of Dionysus. The image is the work of Praxiteles. Of the gods the Eleans worship Dionysus with the greatest reverence, and they a

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Farther off from Melangeia, about seven stades distant from Mantineia, there is a well called the Well of the Meliasts. These Meliasts celebrate the orgies of Dionysus. Near the well is a hall of Dion

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In Crete, not only these rites, but in particular those sacred to Zeus, were performed along with orgiastic worship and with the kind of ministers who were in the service of Dionysus, I mean the Satyr

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They invented names appropriate to the flute, and to the noises made by castanets, cymbals, and drums, and to their acclamations and shouts of “ev-ah,” and stampings of the feet; and they also invente

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Also resembling these rites are the Cotytian and the Bendideian rites practiced among the Thracians, among whom the Orphic rites had their beginning. Now the Cotys who is worshipped among the Edonians

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The accounts which are more remotely related, however, to the present subject, but are wrongly, on account of the identity of the names, brought into the same connection by the historians—I mean those

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Semos the Delian says in his book about Pæans—The men who were called αὑτοκάβδαλοι used to wear crowns of ivy, and they would go through long poems slowly. But at a later time both they and their poem

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And Pratinas the Phliasian says, that when some hired flute-players and chorus-dancers were occupying the orchestra, some people were indignant because the flute-players did not play in tune to the ch

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They celebrate orgies, well worth seeing, in honor of Dionysus, but there is no entrance to the shrine, nor have they any image that can be seen. The people of Amphicleia say that this god is their pr

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For what reason was it forbidden the priest of Jupiter to touch ivy or to pass along a road overhung by a vine growing on a tree? Is this second question like the precepts: Do not eat seated on a stoo

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And on this account Plato, and even before his time the Pythagoreians, called philosophy music; and they say that the universe is constituted in accordance with harmony, assuming that every form of mu

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