An early spring month Agrionios and a corresponding festival called Agr(i)ania/Agr(i)onia are well attested among the Dorian Greeks and in Boiotia. The name seems to be related to the adjective agrios “wild, savage,” and the myths and rituals associated with this festival involve women who run wild under the influence of Dionysos. What distinguishes the Agriania from other mainadic traditions is the role played by men, who oppose and check the women’s ravings, yet are themselves led by the priest of Dionysos or his surrogate. At Boiotian Orchomenos, the three daughters of Minyas were driven mad when they refused to participate in Dionysiac dances. Tearing apart an infant in their care, they dashed outdoors, only to be chased away as murderers. During the Agrionia, women said to be descended from the Minyads were pursued by a sword-wielding priest of Dionysos who was empowered to kill any woman he caught. Yet if this power was ever more than symbolic, it had lapsed by Plutarch’s day (Quaest. Graec. 299c-300a), when the priest Zoilos actually killed a woman and his family was deprived of the priesthood as a result.
At Argos, we are told, the Agriania was held to honor Iphinoe, another victim of the Dionysiac pursuit. According to Hesiod (fr. 131 M-W), the three daughters of Proitos refused to join Dionysos’ worship and fell into a murderous frenzy, soon joined by the other women and girls of the city. With the strongest youths of the city, the Dionysiac prophet Melampous pursued the women to Sikyon, where Iphinoe met her fate (a fourth-century inscription marking her tomb in the agora has been excavated). Other versions tell how Melampous cured the women of their madness and purified them, marrying one of the surviving daughters and succeeding to the kingship.28 Thus the Agriania, performed on a biennial basis like other mainadic rituals, enacted a dissolution of social order and gender norms followed by a return to stability. The ritual segregation of men and women, not unusual in itself, was escalated into an overt opposition between raving women and pursuing men. The earliest attested version is the Homeric story (II. 6.130-40) of Thracian Lykourgos, who drove the nurses of raving Dionysos over the sacred plain of Nysa, striking them with an ox-goad while the god himself leapt fearfully into the sea and was received in the bosom of Thetis. King Perseus of Argos carried out a similar pursuit, killing the mainadic Haliai (Sea Women), but ultimately honoring their tombs and founding a temple of Dionysos. These myths probably arose from pursuit rituals like those attested for the Agrionia.29
World History
