Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [101]
Dionysus was also at the center of Greek drama, which had its roots in religious celebrations that incorporated song and dance. By the sixth century BCE, the rural celebration of Dionysus as an agricultural god who had brought farming, winemaking, and herding techniques to mankind was transformed in Athens into the Dionysia, a festival in which dancing choruses competed for prizes. At some point, a poet introduced the concept of a masked actor interacting with the chorus.
The playwright Aeschylus (525–456 BCE) took this idea further by adding two actors, each playing different parts. This soon evolved into full-scale plays featuring many actors and a chorus, allowing for more complex plots. Following the defeat of the Persians in 479 BCE, Athens emerged as the Greek superpower, and the annual drama festival, or Dionysia, became both a celebration and a spectacle, lasting four or five days. Thousands of Athenians watched plays in an enormous outdoor theater that could seat 17,000 spectators. At the end of the festival, prizes were awarded to the tragedians. The word “tragedy” comes from the Greek word tragos, meaning “goat,” the sacred symbolic animal of Dionysus. Much of the lore of Dionysus is based on The Bacchae (c. 407 BCE), a play by Euripides (c. 480–406 BCE), one of the three great writers of Greek tragedy. In The Bacchae, he writes,
Mankind…possesses two supreme blessings. First of these is the goddess Demeter, or Earth—whichever name you choose to call her by. It was she who gave to man his nourishment of grain. But after her there came the son of Semele, who matched her present by inventing liquid wine as his gift to man. For filled with that good gift, suffering mankind forgets its grief; from it comes sleep, with it oblivion of the troubles of the day. There is no other medicine for misery.
The other significant role of Dionysus is as a resurrected god. In one legend, Dionysus is ripped into seven parts by the Titans at Hera’s request. They throw the parts into a cauldron, cook them, and eat them. But Dionysus is immortal and returns to life—though the exact method of his resurrection is unclear. His return from death connects Dionysus to the earlier resurrection gods, such as the Egyptian Osiris, as well as early Christian worship when it eventually spread to Greece.
Hades (Pluto) Son of Cronus and Rhea, the ruler of the underworld, Hades did not live on Mount Olympus, and he is not usually counted among the twelve Olympians. But he shared in ruling the universe with his two brothers, Zeus and Poseidon. His name, which originally meant “invisible” or “unseen,” was considered unlucky, and the Greeks often referred to him instead as Pluton (“the rich one”) or by other honorific names.
Although a grim figure, Hades is not considered evil, and his underworld realm, also called Hades, is not a hellish place, but a kingdom where Hades administers justice. Nor is he actually death, which the Greeks personified in the god Thanatos, a child of the goddess of night. The Greeks believed that the dead arrived in the underworld domain after being brought by Hermes to the banks of the River Styx (which meant “hateful”). The arrivals were expected to give the boatman, Charon, a coin to ferry them across the river—ancient Greeks buried their dead with a coin in their mouth as payment to Charon. Those who did not receive proper funeral rites were forced to wander along the riverbank for one hundred years before obtaining passage from Charon. The entrance to the underworld was guarded by the terrible three-headed dog Cerberus, who wagged his tail to welcome new arrivals but devoured those who tried to leave and return