Ancient Greek god. He chiefly represents the unreasoning, irresistible life-force. His worship probably came into Greece from both Thrace and Phrygia. Among Homer’s Olympians he is a newcomer, seldom mentioned; only one passage in the Iliad (vi.132–6) has any substance. During the 6th century bce, this Hellenized Thraco-Phrygian deity appropriated the characteristics of Zagreus, a non-Olympian Zeus figure worshipped in Crete, and came under the refining influences of Orphic doctrine (see Orpheus), receiving a place of honour at Delphi in the religion of Apollo. Although the syncretistic relationship to Zagreus suggests a measure of identity with Zeus (see Euripides: Nauck, frag.475), Dionysus was generally taken to be his son, born to Semele.
The mythic tradition concerning his birth, the one circumstantial Homeric reference and the three Homeric hymns to Dionysus (i, vii and xxvi) foreshadow later references in associating strangeness, violence and madness with him. They do not, however, link him with music; this link was given special prominence in modern thought by Nietzsche's assertion in The Birth of Tragedy that plastic art is the province of Apollo and music that of Dionysus. This has distorted the true picture: on the one hand, Apollo cannot be dissociated from music, and, on the other, the Attic festivals of Dionysus accorded only secondary – though real – importance to choral and instrumental performance (e.g. that of the Dithyramb).
The actual relationship between these two deities was complex, as one detailed example may show. Since the Hellenic age, the symbolic distinction – real or supposed – between the Apollonian lyre or kithara and the Dionysiac aulos has influenced the interpretation of Greek culture. The aulos was undeniably the instrument of Dionysus's followers and worshippers, yet in Greek art and literature the god himself is never represented playing it. The 7th-century poet Alcman, however, stated that Apollo was an aulos player (Edmonds, frag.83); this is an apparent transference to Apollo of a Dionysiac attribute. Eventually Plato (Laws, ii, 672c8–d3) was to link the two: he maintained that musical consciousness was given to men ‘by the Muses, Apollo and Dionysus’. He nevertheless sought to banish the aulos from the god's liturgy (Republic, iii, 399d2–e3). At Athens, such worship had become a quiet and decorous affair; hence Plato tolerated the Phrygian mode (Republic, iii, 399a3–c4), although it was pre-eminently an aulos mode just as the Dorian was a kithara mode (Aristotle, Politics, viii, 1342b1–3). These affinities were an important aspect of the relationship between Apollo and Dionysus. For Aristotle (Politics, viii, 1341a18–1342b5), the festivals of Dionysus, with their emphasis upon drama, were apparently the only proper occasions for the ‘exciting’ music of the aulos.
Greek vase painters occasionally showed Dionysus, and often his followers, with the Barbitos (see Alcaeus). The aulos, already discussed, was still more closely associated with the satyrs and maenads who attended him. Clappers (crotala), cymbals and double-headed drums originally had particular connections with his cult. Euripides used the actual metre of Dionysiac cult-hymns in the Bacchae when the maenads sing of their ecstasy, recalling the drums' deep rumble (156) and the clear tones of the aulos (127–8). All these instruments, together with the syrinx, are mentioned by later writers in descriptions of Dionysus's power (e.g. Ovid, Metamorphoses, iv.391–3, and Nonnus, Dionysiaca, xx.327–32; xxiv.151–4). The rhombos, or bullroarer, often associated with the rites of Cybele, is a Dionysiac instrument in Euripides' Helen (1362–3).
The altar of Dionysus at Olympia was placed with that of the Muses (Pausanias, v.14.x); an inscription from Naxos even gives him Apollo's epithet ‘Mousagetēs’, ‘leader of the Muses’. In Italy, where he was worshipped as Bacchus, music continued to have an important place in his liturgy (Livy, xxxix.8.5–6; Catullus, lxiv.261–4; and Ovid, Metamorphoses, xi.15–18 are representative sources). Roman artists frequently took for their subjects satyrs and maenads, in many instances holding or playing an instrument; the god himself rarely appears. Only upon Greek soil could his cult truly flourish, and it is by virtue of the religious sensibility and musical culture of Greece that we must reckon with Dionysus.
W.F. Otto: Dionysos: Mythos und Kultus (Frankfurt, 1933/R; Eng. trans., 1965)
W.K.C. Guthrie: Orpheus and Greek Religion (London, 1935, 2/1952/R), 110–18
M. Wegner: Das Musikleben der Griechen (Berlin, 1949), 19–22
W.K.C. Guthrie: The Greeks and their Gods (London, 1950, 2/1954/R), 145–82, 199–202
E.R. Dodds: The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951)
H. Jeanmaire: Dionysos: histoire du culte de Bacchus (Paris, 1951, 2/1970)
G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967), 53–66, 530–33
W. Burkert: Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche (Stuttgart, 1977; Eng. trans., 1985)
M. Maas and J.M. Snyder: Stringed Instruments of Ancient Greece (New Haven, CT, 1989)
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN