With the end of term
approaching, this will be my weekly topic post. The next post after this will
be a small conclusion looking back at the course and my blog.
Yesterday’s lecture,
like the one we had on Zeus, was also about a specific deity; this time it was
Dionysos. I shall be injecting comparisons of Apollo into the discussion of
Dionysos. As Apollo is the god I've been looking at consistently throughout the
course, they parallel together quite nicely. Below I have added two pictures of
vases from ancient Greece, one showing Dionysos during an incident with pirates
and the other of Apollo playing his lyre. I chose the Dionysos image as it's
recognisable to me as it is used by Penguin Classics as the cover for their
version of the Homeric Hymns and it has been one of the defining images of Dionysos to me. The
Apollo image was chosen as it's one of the less "busy" images of him
from vases.
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| DIONYSOS & THE TYRRHENIAN PIRATES |
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| APOLLO |
Our lecture on
Dionysos started with a discussion of whether we thought Dionysos was a
marginalised god or not, what his spheres of influence were and if he had any
unity to him. A list was created:
- Madness
- Ecstasy
- Wine
- Partying
- Cults
- Festivals
- Theatre
- Catharsis
- Accessible to everyone
The catharsis point
makes the argument for Dionysos having a sense of unity, even though he had
influence over a number of things, they all have one thing in common; they're
all to with escaping the normal confines of society and letting loose and
having fun. Though there could be a darker side to it, as seen in
Euripides' Bacchae in which Dionysos inflicts ecstatic madness
on the women of Thebes as his cousin Pentheus had refused to worship him, poor
Pentheus (or not, it's his own fault) then gets ripped to pieces by the women
when he is caught spying on them, (they aren't aware it's him while they're
doing it).
After discussing
Dionysos as being possibly marginalised we briefly mentioned other marginalised
gods, such as Hekate and Herakles. Then went on to discuss the myth of Dionysos'
birth and how he was second born due to Zeus incinerating Semele and sewing
Dionysos into his thigh. The lecturer posed the question 'why wasn't Dionysos
incinerated as well?' with a follow up answer of maybe he was incinerated as
well and in some way blasted into immortality. I put forward the idea that,
similar to Herakles' immortal half going up to Olympus and his mortal half
burning on his funeral pyre, Zeus' true form incinerated not only Semele but
also Dionysos' mortal half, turning him from demi-god to god. My answer was
received rather well.
On one of the PowerPoint
slides, Dionysos is named as the 13th Olympian. On seeing this I remember a
small section of the 4th Percy Jackson and the Olympians book; The
Last Olympian. Percy is talking to Hestia and they discuss the power of
yielding:
'When Dionysos was made a god, I gave up
my throne for him. It was the only way to avoid a civil war among the gods.'
'It unbalanced the
council,' I remembered. 'Suddenly there were seven guys and five girls.'
Hestia shrugged. 'It
was the best solution, not a perfect one.'
Rick Riordan, Percy
Jackson and the Last Olympian, Page 93, 2009.
I mentioned this to the
lecturer and she encouraged me to include it in this blog, as Percy Jackson is
where my love for mythology started back in 2005, it's only right that I should
(nearly) end my 3rd year university myth related course with it too. But this
shows Riordan's take on the myth of Hestia and Dionysos and how they're
interchangeable as the 12th Olympian. He clearly sees Dionysos as the correct
one.
When looking at the
board with the list of Dionysos' spheres of influence on, I drew up a parallel
list in my head of Apollo's spheres of influence. One thing that I noticed was
that Apollo's are all representative of civilisation and proper-ness while
Dionysos, aside from theatre, has power of things more to do with the natural
world and pre-civilisation ideas. This made me think of the early schools of
comparative myth and how they would perceive Dionysos as representative of a
pre-colonial culture while Apollo would be post colonialism. While the ideas of
the early schools have all since been dismissed, this would imply that while
Dionysos is the youngest of the 12 (or 13?) Olympians and Apollo one of older
of the second generation Olympians, Dionysos (in some form) as a known god
would be older than Apollo. The reverse of what their in myth "age"
is given to us as. Burkert makes note of this point as well in his chapter on
Apollo by saying that 'the
impression remains that Apollo is not only a youthful god, but a young god for
the Greeks. There is no clear evidence for him in Linear B.' (Greek Religion, 1987:144).
Whereas in his section on Dionysos he points out that 'Dionysos is attested on Linear B tablets
from Pylos' (Greek Religion,
1987: 162). So it would seem that Dionysos was older than Apollo in the Greek
world.
Overall I have
enjoyed this module and glad that I've been able to study myth/Greek religion
in a variety of ways across all three years of university. I find the blogging
format an easier method of writing. My biggest problem would be using scholarly
or secondary sources as I'm discussing thoughts not creating an argument and
being less formal in tone, which meant that I couldn't quite find the right place
to put in a scholarly argument. However the lecturer was a great help in
advising me.
Secondary Source:
Burkert, W., Greek
Religion, 1987, Pages 144, 162
Riordan, R., Percy
Jackson and the Last Olympian, 2009, Page 93
Images:
