Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

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.