On the island of Keos some 40 km from the Attic coast, archaeologists have uncovered the earliest known Dionysos sanctuary. The Cycladic people who occupied the site of Ayia Irini in the Bronze Age built a temple and filled it with large-scale terracotta sculptures of women wearing typical Minoan dress. The statues, produced in large numbers, do not represent the resident deity. Instead, they were placed in the sanctuary for some unknown reason, perhaps as perpetual witnesses of the god’s epiphany or as pleasing gifts from worshipers. Eventually the temple collapsed and the town was deserted in the twelfth century. Around 750, votives began to accumulate in the innermost room of the same sacred building the Bronze Age inhabitants had used. The focus of this cult was a terracotta head that originally belonged to one of the Minoan-type statues in the sanctuary, many of which were buried at the site. The new occupants dug up this object or received it as an heirloom, and set it up on the floor of the temple in a specially made ring base, where the excavators found it in situ. With the head were found Geometric kantharoi, the characteristic wine cups of Dionysos; that he was the god of the sanctuary by the end of the sixth century is confirmed by a vase graffito. It has been suggested that the shrine originally belonged to a Minoan goddess, but it is also possible that a Bronze Age Dionysos was the occupant, surrounded by groups of dancing women just as he was in historical times. On the other hand, despite the unusual degree of continuity in the use of the temple at Ayia Irini, the cultic focus on the terracotta head shows that its original function was not well understood. Dionysos was apparently worshiped at Ayia Irini in the Geometric period, but how much earlier remains an open question.6
The Cyclades were famous for their wines, and Naxos in particular was considered sacred to Dionysos from at least the seventh century. The first
Coins minted there, c. 600, displayed the kantharos, and other emblems of the god followed. The island was the source of a cycle of Dionysiac myths, including tales of the god’s birth and nurture by nymphs, and his meeting with Ariadne.7 Unfortunately, we know little of the cults there. According to Plutarch (Vit. Thes. 20), there were two festivals of two Ariadnes, one a joyful occasion celebrating the bride of Dionysos, and the other a time of sorrow with sacrifices for the dead heroine (Ariadne was also honored as a heroine in Argos and Amathous). The Naxians possessed a pair of sacred masks, objects that signaled the god’s presence and served as cult images. One, made of grapevine wood, was known as Bakcheus, and the other, of wood from the fig, was Meilichios, the mild or sweet. The combination of an important god and a secondary female cult figure (Dionysos and Ariadne) is consistent with the finds from the recently excavated sanctuary at Hyria on Naxos, where a temple stood from Geometric times over the remains of a Mycenaean cult site. Later structures at the site included an Archaic dining room and a successor temple. The rich and varied votive gifts included some types, like terracotta female busts, that were typically offered to female deities.8
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