The name of Dionysus is inscribed on two Mycenaean Linear B tablets found at Pylos and on one from Khania, on Crete (Hallager, Vlasakis, and Hallager 1992), but we have no idea what this god meant to the Mycenaean communities who worshiped him. We do not meet him again until his walk-on part in Homeric epic many centuries later. Here his major myths were so firmly established that a poet could allude briefly to a narrative in the Dionysiac repertory and assume with confidence that audiences would be familiar with its content.
Dionysus is already a complicated god in early epic. He is capable of revenge, his divine status is difficult to recognize, and he is associated with an ambiguous gift. When Odysseus notices Ariadne in the underworld, he says that it was the testimony of Dionysus that led Artemis to kill her ( Odyssey 11.321-325). We can assume that Dionysus was aggressive here, but the rest of the story is no longer available to us. In the Iliad Dionysus reacts to danger with fear (Iliad 6.128-42). When Lykourgos attacks him and his followers, Dionysus trembles in terror and leaps into the sea, where he is drawn to Thetis for comfort. Dionysus is linked with Thetis again in the last book of the Odyssey. When Agamemnon arrives in the underworld, he tells the dead Achilles how the Greeks at Troy placed his ashes in a golden amphora for burial, reminding him that the amphora, made by Hephaestus, had been a gift to his mother from Dionysus (Odyssey 24.73-5).
Official Dionysiac cult grew with the developing polis, and Dionysiac rituals were well integrated into local festival calendars of Greek cities at an early date (Samuel 1972:285, 283, 297). The month names Anthesterion, named for the Anthesteria,
And Lenaion, for the Lenaia, were common throughout the cities of the Cyclades, Ionia, and the Ionian colonies. Agrionos, named for the Agrionia (‘‘wild-like’’ rituals), was common in Doric areas, in Boeotia, and in Thessaly. Thuios (named for the Thuia, ‘‘raving women’’ rituals) was common in the Peloponnese and Thessaly. Dionysus moved north with Greek colonization. He was taken to Thasos from Paros, to Abdera from Teos, and to Olbia from Miletos. At both Teos and Abdera the Dionysiac rituals called Anthesteria constituted one of the three major festivals of the polis. At Olbia an inscription with a complete calendar of the months reproduces the Milesian calendar and confirms that both cities originally celebrated the same festivals. Herodotus makes it clear that the Bacchic rites practiced at Olbia were Greek rites imported from Miletos and despised by the local indigenous population (4.78). His information about solemn Bacchic rites, teletai, is confirmed by several recent finds at Olbia, among them a bronze mirror of the sixth century BC inscribed with a Dionysiac theophoric name together with the Bacchic ritual cry used by females, euai (Dubois 1996:143-6 no. 92). The evidence for Dionysus in Ionia is especially rich. In later periods Dionysiac inscriptions tend to be thickly clustered in the Greek cities along the Ionian coast and to thin out considerably as one proceeds inland. In the coastal cities inscriptions testify to public organization of his priesthoods as part of the city administration and public organization of his festivals as part of the regular festival calendar. Inland, where the institutions of the polis developed later, Dionysus is not always a polis divinity and rarely appears in public documents. His impact in inland areas is limited to private dedications, sepulchral texts, and the records generated by private organizations.
World History
