It was as a youth that Dionysus made the discovery with which he will always be associated. He found out how to make wine from grapes. It is possible that CHIRON the centaur taught him the trick; but another, more charming story relates it to the young god’s passionate love for a youth called AMPELOS.fn8 Dionysus was so besotted that he arranged all kinds of sporting contests between himself and Ampelos, always letting the youth win. This seems to have caused the boy to become rather spoiled, or at least reckless and foolhardy. Riding a wild bull one day he made the error of boasting that he rode his horned steer more skilfully than the goddess Selene rode her horned moon. Choosing a punishment straight from Hera’s vicious playbook, Selene sent a gadfly to sting the bull, which caused the maddened animal to throw and gore Ampelos.
Dionysus rushed to the dying youth’s mangled side, but he could not save him.fn9 Instead he caused the dead and twisted body to transform magically into a winding, writhing climbing plant, while the drops of blood solidified and swelled into luscious berries whose skin shone with the bloom and lustre the god had so admired. His lover had become a vine (which is still called ampelos in Greece to this day). From it Dionysus produced the first vintage and drank the first draught of wine. This witchcraft, as it were, of turning the blood of Ampelos into wine became the god’s gift to the world.
A combination of the intoxicating effects of his invention and the enmity of Hera – whose hatred of any bastard of Zeus’s, divine or otherwise, was always implacable – sent Dionysus mad for a while. To escape her curses, he spent the next few years travelling far and wide, spreading viticulture and the techniques of winemaking around the world.fn10 In Assyria he encountered the king and queen, STAPHYLOS and METHE, and their son BOTRYS. After a banquet in Dionysus’s honour Staphylus died of the first fatal hangover. As compensation, and in their honour, Dionysus named bunches of grapes staphylos, alcoholic liquid and drunkenness methe and the grape itself botrys.
Science has taken these names and immortalized them in a way that splendidly exemplifies the continuing relationship between Greek myth and our language. When nineteenth-century biologists looked down their microscopes and saw a bacterium with a tail, from which clusters of grape-like nodules sprouted, they called it Staphylococcus. ‘Methylated spirits’ and ‘methane’ take their names from Methe. Botrytis, the ‘noble rot’ that benignly affects grapes on the vine, lending premium dessert wines their incomparable (and shatteringly expensive) bouquet, owes its name to Botrys.
Throughout his adventures, the new god was accompanied not just by Silenus and his retinue of satyrs, but by an intense band of women followers too – the MAENADS.fn11
Dionysus was soon established as the god of wine, revelry, delirious intoxication, uninhibited dissipation and ‘the orgastic future’. The Romans called him by the name BACCHUS and worshipped him quite as devotedly as did the Greeks. He was to stand in a kind of polar opposition to Apollo – one representing the golden light of reason, harmonious music, lyric poetry and mathematics, the other embodying the darker energies of disorder, liberation, wild music, bloodlust, frenzy and unreason.
Of course the gods had living personalities and stories, and so they often strayed from such frozen symbolic identities. Apollo, as we shall see very soon, was himself capable of being bloody, crazed and cruel, while Dionysus could be more than just the embodiment of inebriation and debauchery. He was sometimes called ‘the Liberator’, a vegetal life-force whose licence could benevolently relieve and renew the world.fn12
Thirteen at Table
The vine leaf, the thyrsus – a staff topped with a pine cone – a chariot drawn by leopards or other exotic beasts, depraved attendants sporting roaring erections, jars flowing with wine – the Dionysiac Idea added much to the world. The importance of this new god was such that he simply had to be welcomed into Olympus. But there was already a full complement of twelve gods in residence and thirteen was, even then, looked on as an unlucky number. The gods scratched their chins and wondered what could be done. They wanted Dionysus – the truth was they liked him and the festive energy he brought to every gathering. And more than anything they liked the idea of wine being added to nectar, instead of fermented honey and plain fruit juice.
‘This comes at a perfect time,’ said Hestia, rising to her feet. ‘I feel more and more that I am needed down in the world to help people and their families and to be present in the temples that celebrate the virtues of hearth, home and hallway. Let young Bacchus take my place.’
There was an unconvincing murmur of protestation as Hestia stepped down, but she was insistent and the exchange was made to the delight of all the gods – save one. Hera regarded Dionysus as Zeus’s grossest insult to her. Apollo, Artemis and Athena were shameful enough as illegitimate additions to the dodecatheon, but that a bastard half-human god should be admitted to heaven offended her to the core. She vowed always to abstain from Dionysus’s poison drink and personally to shun the carousals with which he wrecked the peace and decorum of heaven.
When Aphrodite gave birth to a son by Dionysus, Hera cursed the baby, whose name was PRIAPUS, with ugliness and impotence and had it cast down from Olympus. Priapus became the god of male genitalia and phalluses; he was especially prized by the Romans as the minor deity of the major boner. But deflation and disappointment were his fate. He went about in a constant state of excitement which, on account of Hera’s curse, always failed him when he tried to do anything about it. This chronic and embarrassing problem made it natural that he should be for ever associated with alcohol, his father’s gift to the world that ever ‘provokes the desire but takes away the performance’.
Nonetheless, whether Hera liked it or not, Dionysus the Twice Born, the only god to have a mortal human parent, rose to take his place now as a full member of the finally fixed Olympian Twelve.
The Beautiful and the Damned
ANGRY GODDESSES
Actaeon
The Cadmean house was one of the most important dynasties of the Greek world. First Cadmus, as founder of Thebes and bringer of the alphabet, and then his family were all central in the making of Greece. But, like many of the great houses, there was a curse attached to it. The killing of the water dragon allowed the city to be built, but it cast the curse of Ares over it too. The Fates seldom allowed glory and triumph without the accompaniment of suffering and sorrow.
Cadmus’s daughter Autonoë had a son, Actaeon, by a minor god called ARISTAEUS, much venerated in Boeotia (he was sometimes referred to as ‘the Apollo of the fields’). Like many of the later heroes, Actaeon was tutored and trained by the great and wise centaur Chiron. He grew up to become a much admired huntsman and leader, renowned for his fearlessness in the chase and the skill and tender strength with which he handled his beloved hounds.