Dionysus and Rome

Religion and Literature

Fiachra Mac Góráin

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110672312
• Subtopic: History of Religion
• Index: Literature

While most work on Dionysus is based on Greek sources, this collection of essays examines the god's Roman and Italian manifestations.
Nine contributions address Bacchus' appearance at the crossroads of Greek and Roman cultures, tracing continuities and differences between literary and archaeological sources for the god. The essays offer coverage of Dionysus in Roman art, Italian epigraphy; Latin poetry including epic, drama and elegy; and prose, including historiography, rhetorical and Christian discourse.
The introduction offers an overview of the presence of Dionysus in Italy from the archaic to the imperial periods, identifying the main scholarly trends, with treatment of key Dionysian episodes in Roman history and literature. Individual chapters address the reception of Euripides' Bacchae across Greek and Roman literature from Athens to Byzantium; Dionysus in Roman art of the archaic and Augustan periods; the god's relationship with Fufluns and Liber in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE; Dionysian associations; Bacchus in Cicero; Ovid's Tristia 5.3; Bacchus in the writings of Christian Latin writers.
The collection sheds light on a relatively understudied aspect of Dionysus, and will stimulate further research in this area.

Index of inscriptions and visual artefacts

• Inscriptions
• CIE 10985 1
• CIE 11073 1
• CIE 11101 1
• CIE 11110 1
• CIE 8079 1
• CIL 12.561 = ILLRP 1197= ILS 8562 1
• CIL 12.563 1
• CIL 6.1285 1
• CIL 12 2.581 = ILLRP 511 = ILS 18 (SC de Bacchanalibus) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
• CSE DDR 1, 5 1
• CSE Italia 1, I, 10 1
• CSE Italia 6, 83 = CIL 12 2498 1
• IGUR I 160 1, 2
• SEG 4.92 1
• SIG3 648B 1, 2
• Visual artefacts
• Apulian phiale (BM F133) 1
• Ara Pacis Augustae 1, 2
• BCM Athens 376 1
• Berlin, Charlottenburg, inv. Misc. 6239 1
• Cista Ficoroni 1, 2
• Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, inv. HIN 26 1
• Lanuvium, Museo Civico, fresco fragment 1, 2
• Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, inv. 100019 1
• Pompeii, House of the Centaur (VI.9.3–5) 1
• Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries 1, 2, 3, 4
• Rome, Musei Capitolini, Antiquarium Comunale, statue fragments 1, 2
• Rome, Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, inv. 24787 1
• Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano, inv. 1037, 1071, 1072 1, 2
• Rome, Museo Palatino, inv. 601 and 614 1
• Rome, Villa della Farnesina 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
• Rome, Villa Doria Pamphili 1, 2
• Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum, inv. 18.832 1

Endnotes

1 Seaford 2006, 3. In this Introduction I develop some material from Mac Góráin 2017.

2 Rohde 1950 [1890–94], 282–303, esp. 287–8; Nilsson 1925 [1922], 194 and 208–9; Cumont [1929] 2006, 315–16; Wilamowitz 1931–2, II.74; Otto 1965 [1933], 202–8. Nietzsche popularized this view, but it had been expressed pointedly before him, and in more historical terms; see Creuzer 1820, 3.156.

3 See Eliade 1978, 359.

4 The title of one of the essays in Detienne 1986, not present in the English translation, Detienne 1989. The idea is already in the eastward-looking Cumont [1929] 2006, 317; see also Wyler 2011.

5 Dodds 1960, xii.

6 McGinty 1978; Frank 1982; Henrichs 1984; Emmerling-Skala 1994; Detienne 2001; Baeumer 2006; Konaris 2011; Mariño Sánchez 2014; Morel 2015; Bohrer 2015.

7 On Horace’s Bacchic poetics, see Schiesaro 2009.

8 Parker 2017, 1.

9 Feeney 1998. Following Feeney, see Barchiesi, Rüpke and Stephens 2004; Bendlin and Rüpke 2009; Rüpke and Spickermann 2010, and the essays which follow in that volume of ARG.

10 On this general phenomenon see Veyne 2005.

11 For a brief and useful overview of Dionysus/Liber in Rome and Italy see Isler-Kerényi 2010. For some local Italic evidence see Casadio 1994a, organized by region, as are his works on Dionysus in the Greek world, Casadio 1994b and 1999. See also the doctoral dissertations of Niafas 1998 and Serignolli 2017.

12 Ivanov [1923] 2012; Otto [1933] 1965; Kerényi 1976; Daraki 1985.

13 Jeanmaire 1951, 453–82.

14 Bruhl 1953; Boyd 1955.

15 Nilsson 1957; see also Matz 1963; for Dionysian mysteries in the Roman era see recently Bremmer 2014, 100–9.

16 Pailler 1998 and 1995.

17 Musiał 2009, with summary in French at 277–79.

18 Cazanove 1986.

19 Berti and Gasparri 1989; Berti 1991.

20 Carpenter and Faraone 1993; the exception is Bonfante 1993 on Fufluns.

21 Schlesier 2011; see in particular Burkert 2011; Carpenter 2011; Fuhrer 2011; Heinemann 2011; and Sabetai 2011.

22 Bernabé et al. 2013; see in particular Alonso Fernández 2013; Cabrera 2013; Hernández de la Fuente 2013; Meilán Jácome 2013; Wyler 2013a.

23 SEG 4.92; see Pailler 1995, 111–26; Casadio 2009.

24 See Graf and Johnston 2013.

25 Osteria dell’Osa, tomb 482; see Peruzzi 1992, 465; Wiseman 2004, 13–14; contra Colonna 2004, 481–83; Wilson 2009, 550; see also Boffa 2015. The ‘Ceres inscription’ (CIE 8079), from a fragmentary pot found at Civita Castellana in Viterbo, may allude to Dionysus via a mention of wine or the ritual cry (even if the reading ‘Loufir’ is now discredited); see Radke 1965, 180; Joseph and Klein 1981; Cazanove 1991; Bakkum 2009, 398. On both these examples see Watkins 1995.

26 See Feeney 1998, 2–8 for scholarly paradigms in the study of Roman as against Greek religion.

27 Fowler 1911, 255; Wissowa 1912, 297–304 (with further literature, on the subject as then constituted; Schur 1926; Al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction. Dionysus in Rome: accommodation and resistance
• The ancient reception of Euripides’ Bacchae from Athens to Byzantium
• Images of Dionysus in Rome: the archaic and Augustan periods
• Liber, Fufluns and the others: rethinking Dionysus in Italy between the fifth and the third centuries BCE
• Dionysian associations and the Bacchanalian affair
• Dionysus / Bacchus / Liber in Cicero
• Bacchus and the exiled Ovid (Tristia 5.3)
• Alius furor. Statius’ Thebaid and the metamorphoses of Bacchus
• The shadow of Bacchus:Liber and Dionysus in Christian Latin literature (2nd–4th centuries)
• Index rerum et nominum
• Index locorum
• Index of inscriptions and visual artefacts