Redefining Dionysos

Alberto Bernabé, Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal, Raquel Martín Hernández

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9783110300918
• eBook ISBN: 9783110301328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This book contributes to the understanding of Dionysos, the Greek god of wine, dancing, theatre and ecstasy, by putting together 30 studies of classical scholars. They combine the analysis of specific instances of particular dimensions of the god in cult, myth, literature and iconography, with general visions of Dionysos in antiquity and modern times. Only from the combination of different perspectives can we grasp the complex personality of Dionysos, and the forms of his presence in different cults, literary genres, and artistic forms, from Mycenaean times to late antiquity.

The ways in which Dionysos was experienced may vary in each author, each cult, and each genre in which this god is involved. Therefore, instead of offering a new all-encompassing theory that would immediately become partial, the book narrows the focus on specific aspects of the god. Redefinition does not mean finding (again) the essence of the god, but obtaining a more nuanced knowledge of the ways he was experienced and conceived in antiquity.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Walter F. Otto’s Dionysos (1933)
• Dionysos in the Mycenaean World
• The Term βάκχος and Dionysos Βάκχιος
• Apollo and Dionysos: Intersections
• ‘Rien pour Dionysos?’ Le dithyrambe comme forme poétique entre Apollon et Dionysos
• Redefining Dionysos in Athens from the Written Sources: The Lenaia, lacchos and Attic Women
• Gender Differentiation and Role Models in the Worship of Dionysos: The Thracian and Thessalian Pattern
• Dionysos versus Orpheus?
• Maenadic Ecstasy in Greece: Fact or Fiction?
• Maenadic Ecstasy in Rome: Fact or Fiction?
• Dioniso e i cani di Atteone in Eumelo di Corinto (Una nuova ipotesi su P. Oxy. xxx 2509 e Apollod. 3.4.4)
• Dionysos in the Homeric Hymns: the Olympian Portrait of the God
• Herodotus’ Egyptian Dionysos. A Comparative Perspective
• Dushara and Allāt alias Dionysos and Aphrodite in Herodotus 3.8
• The Sophoclean Dionysos
• Under the Spell of the Dionysian: Some Meta-tragic Aspects of the Xenos Attributes in Euripides’ Bacchae
• The Image of Dionysos in Euripides’ Bacchae: The God and his Epiphanies
• The Names of Dionysos in Euripides’ Bacchae and the Rhetorical Language of Teiresias
• Dionysos in Old Comedy. Staging of Experiments on Myth and Cult
• Dionysian Enthusiasm in Plato
• Les ‘Dionysoi’ de Patras: Le mythe et le culte de Dionysos dans la Periégèse de Pausanias
• Dionysos in Egypt? Epaphian Dionysos in the Orphic Hymns
• Dioniso tra polinomia ed enoteismo: il caso degli Inni Orfici
• Dionysos and Dionysism in the Third Book of Maccabees
• Parallels between Dionysos and Christ in Late Antiquity: Miraculous Healings in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca
• The Gifts of Dionysos
• The Symposiast Dionysos: A God like Ourselves
• Bacchus and Felines in Roman Iconography: Issues of Gender and Species
• An Augustan Trend towards Dionysos: Around the ‘Auditorium of Maecenas’
• Dionysos: One or Many?
• Contributors
• Analytic Index
• Index Fontium