Dionysiac ritual is a ritual of performance where worshipers play the parts of characters in Dionysiac narratives, whether the scene is set outdoors in the countryside or in the heart of the city. Dionysus himself is impresario. He energizes the set, animates the costumes, and inspires the action. As Diodorus says, the women who served Dionysus imitated the raving women who accompanied Dionysus in the ancient stories (4.3.3). Official groups, like the Thuiades at Delphi and Olympia, the Athenian women who joined the Thuiades at Delphi to dance on Parnassus (Pausanias 10.4.2), or the Agriades in the Peloponnese, performed ritual dances that imitated the wild dancing of their imaginary counterparts. They carried the thursos and wore the costumes of the mainades: the long, light, pleated khiton or the long-sleeved pleated versions with elbow sleeves that covered the hands, the nebris (fawn skin), the pardelee, (leopard skin), and in Thrace, the bassara, a costume made of fox skins. They knew the music and they memorized the correct, stylized motions of the dance.
At Sicyon sacred paraphernalia were kept in the kosmoetoerion, a dressing room in a sanctuary of Dionysus near the theater. Stone statues of Dionysus and Bakkhai stood outside the nearby temple of Dionysus for all to see. Special images were kept hidden in a place not to be revealed. One night in the year these images were brought from the kosmeterion to the temple in a procession lit by torches and accompanied by the singing of hymns (Pausanias 2.7.5-6). Ritual paraphernalia and costumes stored in the kosmeterion would have been used to equip and clothe those eligible to perform the Dionysiac ritual.
Dionysus himself could be represented by his costume (usually a khiten and himation) together with his mask or even by his mask alone. On red-figure pottery women celebrate wine under an image of Dionysus that is simply a figured garment wrapped around a pole capped with a mask facing the viewer (Peirce 1998:80-4). The same word, proscpon, meant both ‘‘face’’ and ‘‘mask,’’ and the face of Dionysus was powerful in itself (Frontisi-Ducroux 1991:66-85; 189-201; Henrichs 1993:36-9). At Corinth two wooden statues (xoana; Pausanias 2.4.7) had faces painted red and bodies covered in gold. These two statues represented a double Dionysus: Bakkheios, ‘‘Raving with Bacchic mania’ and Lusios, ‘‘Releaser.’’ At Megara there was a wooden statue of Dionysus covered up except for its face (Pausanias 1.43.5), and when fishermen at Methymna hauled up from the sea a mask of Dionysus made of olive wood, the Delphic oracle advised the people to worship Dionysus as a proseopon (Pausanias 10.19.3).
Dionysus is a god who plays many roles, and he can change his appearance at will. As god of the theater, he is associated with the process of transition actors undergo when taking on a new role, because the actor puts on a new identity with each new mask (Bassi 1998:192-244; Henrichs 1993:38 n.66). In Aristophanes’ Thesmophor-iazusae the playwright Agathon says that to write successful tragedies, the dramatist must identify with his characters. To write about women, a writer should wear a woman’s clothing and experience a woman’s habits (148-52). Dionysus had the power to change from one identity to another, and such transitions were also part of the Bacchic experience for his worshipers, both actors and spectators. Dionysus himself, who received the dedications of prizewinners, was part of the theatrical process of mimesis. The giant phallos displayed in the theater before the dramas began prepared the site for spectators to view the plays (Cole 1993a:29-34).
World History
