311453

Department of the Classics, Harvard University
Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence: The Modern View of Dionysus from Nietzsche to Girard
Author(s): Albert Henrichs
Source: Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 88 (1984), pp. 205-240
Published by: Department of the Classics, Harvard University
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LOSSOF SELF, SUFFERING,VIOLENCE:

THE MODERN VIEW OF DIONYSUS
FROM NIETZSCHETO GIRARD
ALBERT
HENRICHS
HO is Dionysus? Different answers have been attempted at
W different
times, from antiquity to the present day. For the
Greeks and Romans, Dionysus was essentially the god of wine and
vitality; of ritual madness; of the mask and the theater; and of a
happyafterlife. These were his four majorprovinces, in which he was
firmly established by the fifth century B.C.and which he never gave
up. Not confined to any single province, he moved freely among all
four. His principalroles are often interrelated,in religionas well as in
art and literature. From a historical point of view, Dionysus must
thus be seen, like any other Greek god, as a composite figure who
acquirednew aspects in the course of time, which in turn modifiedhis
previous identities and the overall conception of him. Throughout
antiquity, as long as Dionysus was a living part of an ever changing
culture, he too was subject to continuous differentiationand change.
This process came to an end with the end of paganism;but enough of
Dionysus survived, especially in Greek and Latin literature,to revive
interest in him, if not actual belief. Out of the ashes of antiquityrose
the Renaissance Dionysus, who was eventually replaced by the
Dionysus of the Romantic period. A little over a hundred years ago,
the conception of the modern Dionysus was born in reaction to his
various predecessors,and in conscious departurefrom them. It is the
purpose of this article to follow the formation of the modern concept
of Dionysus before and after 1872 by giving a general outline of it,
with emphasis on a few crucialturningpoints.'
Majordevelopments in scholarshipas well as in other areas of intellectual history tend to have beginnings and ends that can usually be
identified and that are precededand followed by periods of transition.
1Apartfrom minor revisions and the additionof footnotes, this essay reproduces the text of a Hulley Lecture delivered at the University of Colorado,
under the auspicesof the Departmentof Classics, the CulturalProgramsCommittee, and the GraduateSchool Committee on the Arts and Humanitieson
April 28, 1983. I am gratefulto my colleaguesat Boulderfor their encouragement to publish this article, which owes its existence to their kind invitation.
An abbreviatedversion was presented at Princeton University on November
29, 1983, as an EberhardL. Faber MemorialLecture under the auspicesof the
Councilof the Humanitiesand the Departmentof Classics.
206
Albert Henrichs
What I shall argue here, even at the risk of being too schematic, is
that the modern study of Dionysus began in 1872, with the publication of Nietzsche's Die Geburtder Trag6dieaus dem Geisteder Musik
and of two articles on maenadismby Adolf Rapp, an obscure professor at the Karls-Gymnasiumin Stuttgart;2that this phase ended, for
all practicalpurposes, in 1972 when Ren6 Girard in La violenceet le
sacre carried the modern concept of Dionysus to its logical extreme;
and that the two transition periods are German Romanticism, which
preparedthe way for Nietzsche's Dionysus, and French structuralism,
which may well contain some of the seeds for the Dionysus of the
future. I hope I am not promising too much. Not all the ground I
intend to cover has been gone over before. It is true that the important role which the Romantic Dionysus played in shaping Nietzsche's
Dionysus is now widely recognized, by Germanists as well as classicists. Less acknowledgedeven today is the importanceof Nietzsche's
first book for the formation of the two principal approaches to
Dionysus which held the field until very recently, the psychological
and the anthropologicalapproach. No attention has yet been paid, as
far as I know, to the fatal blow dealt by Girard's thoughts on
Dionysus to the post-Nietzscheanway of looking at the god. Nor has
Girard's own definition of Dionysus as "the god of violence" been
called into question, despite its extreme one-sidedness and despite the
dubious status it assigns to the concept of mob violence in connection
with Dionysus and his religion. The structuralistDionysus, as we
shall see, is a mixed blessing but a step in the right direction. If
appliedproperly,the structuralistmethod, with its binaryfocus on two
opposite aspects of a single entity, can conceivablydo more justice to
the complexity and polymorphousnature of Dionysus than most other
approachestried during the past 100 years.
The dominant themes in the modern reception of Dionysus can be
summarizedas loss of self, suffering, and violence. They make their
first combined appearancein GT, but Nietzsche does not treat them
with equal emphasis. After Nietzsche they have surfaced time and
again in different combinationsand under different names. It is fair
to say that they have left their mark on every major treatment of
2A. Rapp, "Die Manadeim griechischenCultus, in der Kunst und Poesie,"
Rhein.Mus. 27 (1872) 1-22, 562-611. Rappis also the authorof the articleon
maenads in W. H. Roscher, ed., Lexicon der griechischen und riimischenMytholo-
gie II.2 (Leipzig 1894-97) cols. 2243-2283. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragoideie
(GT) as well as some of his other works will be quoted after Nietzsche,Werke,
Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGW),
ed. G.
Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin
1967-).
Loss of Self Suffering,Violence
207
Dionysus, in scholarshipas well as in literature. Loss of self, as usually understood in this connection, implies that the ancient followers
of Dionysus lost their individual identity by being incorporatedin a
larger religious group and by identifying themselves with the god.
Suffering and violence are clearly two sides of the same coin. They
refer either to the death suffered by Dionysus himself in one particular Greek myth; or to the suffering and destruction which the god
visits upon his mythical opponents; or, in a more general way, to the
violence which worshipers of Dionysus are said to have inflicted on
each other in certainmyths or cults.
It would hardly be difficult to multiply the names of scholars and
writerswho followed in the footsteps of Nietzsche, consciouslyor not,
by centering their treatments of Dionysus around one or several of
these themes. I will mention only some of the more conspicuousand
memorableinstances. They show that each theme can be presentedin
a positive as well as a negative light, depending on the interpreter's
own viewpoint. Loss of self as a positive religiousexperienceoccupies
a prominent place in the psychologicalapproachto Dionysiac religion,
which owes its popularityto the tremendous influence and superior
scholarship of Erwin Rohde and Eric Robertson Dodds and which
claims that the individualconsciousness of the worshipersof Dionysus
became totally submerged in the group consciousness.3In a different
culturalclimate, the Dionysiac group acquiredmore negative and secular connotations in the late 1960s, when the PerformanceGroup in
New York produced Richard Schechner's controversialadaptationof
Euripides' Bacchae under the explicit title Dionysus in 69.4 The
suffering of Dionysus was a majorinterest of the Cambridgeschool, a
small circle of historians of Greek religion at the turn of the century
who transformed Greek myth and tragedy into a blood-drenched
hunting ground for cannibals and ritual murderers and who saw a
human substitute for the dying Dionysus in each tragic hero on the
Attic stage.5 On a more sublime level, Dionysus became a symbol of
30n Rohdeand Doddssee below,sectionIV;on the drasticredefinition
of
'Dionysian'psychologyafterNietzsche,in the wakeof StefanGeorgeandhis
'Kreis,'of Freud,and of Jung, see M. L. Baeumer,"ZurPsychologiedes
Dionysischen in der Literaturwissenschaft," in Psychologie in der Literaturwissenschaft. Ein Kolloquium (Heidelberg 1971) 79-111.
4R. Schechner, ed., Dionysus in 69: The Performance Group (New York
1970); St. Brecht, The DramaReview13 (1969) 156-169; B. Knox, Wordand
Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater (Baltimore 1979) 6, 71; L. Feder, Madness
in Literature(Princeton1980) 243f.
50n GilbertMurraysee below, n. 35; Jane Harrisonand JamesGeorge
208
Albert Henrichs
existential suffering and of escape from it in Hugo von

Hofmannsthal's Ariadneauf Naxos (1912), set to music by Richard
Strauss in 1916.6 In the crudest of all modern articulations of
Dionysus, the god is often seen as the divine champion of unmitigated physical violence that takes the form of sex and aggressionor,
in Nietzsche's more inspiredphrase, of "the horriblemixture of sensuality and cruelty," which he regardedas "the real 'witches' brew.'"
As usual, Nietzsche does not quote his sources, but he must have
been thinking of Livy's account of the Roman Bacchanaliaof 186 B.C.
and perhaps even more of the orgy-like spirit that pervades Goethe's
"Walpurgisnacht."7Thomas Mann used the sexual and violent
aspects of the modern Dionysus to characterizeAschenbach's selfdestruction in Der Tod in Venedig(1912), with direct recourse to
Rohde rather than Nietzsche or Goethe.8 More recently, the extreme
violence of certain Dionysiac myths has been endowed with major
Frazer, one of her mentors, are discussed in section IV; on Frazer as well as
the so-called Cambridgeschool (which includes A. B. Cook and F. M. Cornford besides Harrisonand Murray), see F. M. Turner, The GreekHeritagein
Victorian
Britain(New Haven 1981) 116-134.
6D. G. Daviau and G. J. Buelow, The "Ariadneauf Naxos" of Hugo vonHofmannsthaland RichardStrauss.Universityof North CarolinaStudies in the Germanic Languagesand Literatures80 (ChapelHill 1975).
7Accordingto Nietzsche, "jener scheussliche Hexentrankaus Wollust und
Grausamkeit" (GT 2, KGW III.1, 29.3-4, and in almost identical words,
28.8-10) had poisoned the Dionysianfestivals of Babylonand Rome (cf. Livy
39.8.5-8, 39.13.10-11) but had remainedineffective in Greece (below, n. 40).
Nietzsche's "Hexentrank" recalls Goethe's Faust 2336ff., esp. 2367 (a scene
called "Hexenkuiche"), whereas "Wollust und Grausamkeit" are the key
themes in 3835ff. (the so-called "Walpurgisnacht").Very typicalof its time
and still worth reading is the brief comparativestudy of ecstatic cults that a
Philadelphiawoman of letters, ElizabethRobins (1855-1936), publishedunder
the telling but misleadingtitle "Maenadismin Religion" in TheAtlanticMonthly
52 (October 1883) 487-497 and in which much attention is given to the
"frenzy of crueltyand sensuality" (pp. 487 and 493).
8Cf. Feder (above, n. 4) 213-240 esp. 226-230. Numerous strikingdetails
in Mann's descriptionof Aschenbach'sorgiasticdream, which epitomizes his
self-destructionand foreshadowshis imminent death, are derived from Erwin
Rohde'sfictitiousaccountof the wild worshipersof the ThracianDionysus
(below, n. 43). On Mann's pencil-markedcopy of Psyche see H. Lehnert,

"Thomas Mann's EarlyInterest in Myth and Erwin Rohde's Psyche,"Publications of the ModernLanguageAssociation79 (1964) 297-304. Mannwent much
beyond Rohde by adding, interalia, referencesto blood drinkingand to sexual
intercourse. Compare Hans Castorp's vision in chap. 6 of Der Zauberberg
(1924) where two witches, not maenads, tear a child and eat it raw (inspiredby
Horace, Epode5, and Lucan6.706ff.?).
Violence
Loss of
Self, Suffering,
209
social significance by Walter Burkertas well as by Girard. Burkert's

Homo Necans (whose title recalls a more optimistic assessment of
Homo sapiens, Huizinga's Homo Ludens) and Girard's Violenceand
the Sacred were both published in 1972; both authors interpret the
emphasis on violence and ritual murder in some of Dionysus' myths
and cults as a beneficial religious mechanism that helped preserve
social stability through simulation of temporaryviolence and its ritual
resolution.9
In the relativelyshort span of one century, between 1872 and 1972,
the ancient god of wine and escape from everyday reality has become
a god of death and violence and a symbol for the human condition in
its most tortured moments. The debate is far from over and has
grown more intense in recent years. Little agreement has been
reached, except on one cardinalpoint. Virtually everybody who has
an informed opinion on the subject seems to concede that a balanced
and unified view of Dionysus and his place in history is not only
difficult to achieve but is essentially incompatiblewith the complexity
of the god and with his disparate manifestations. Dionysus invites
controversybecause he lacks a clear-cutidentity. Paradoxically,then,
the one point on which most students of Dionysus agree is that the
only adequate way of dealing with the god's conflictingidentities is to
disagreeabout him. In short, Dionysus defies definition.
I. THEEXTENTOFTHECONTROVERSY:
LIFEVERSUSDEATH
Nothing illustrates the extremes which mark the perimeter of the

modern debate over Dionysus more sharplythan a glance at the titles
of two recent books. They approachDionysus in such an antithetical
fashion and arrive at such incompatibleconclusions that it is hard to
believe they are about the same god.
In 1976, three years after the death of KarlKer6nyi,his longest and
most ambitious work was published simultaneously in German and
English versions under the revealingtitle Dionysos:ArchetypalImageof
IndestructibleLife.10In his last book, Ker6nyi traces the history of
90n Burkertand Girardsee below, end of section IV.
o1TheoriginalGerman version appearedin the same year: Dionysos,Urbild
des unzerst6rbaren
Lebens(Munich 1976). Four lectures on Dionysus delivered
by Ker6nyiat the Universityof Oslo were subtitled"Das archetypischeBild des
unzerstorbarenLebens" (see his prefaceto DerfritheDionysos[Oslo 19611).
210
Albert Henrichs
Dionysus from the Bronze Age to the end of antiquityand interprets

it along Jungian lines as an archetypalexpression of the universal
human experience of biological life as such and without attributes,
infinite and self-perpetuating. According to Ker6nyi, death does not
enter into the realm of Dionysus except as the terminationof a particular finite life that reaffirmsthe continuation of all life. The Greeks,
he argues, expressed their vitalistic experience visually through the
naturalsymbolism of wine and the phallus, the one a staple food and
the other an organ of reproduction. In Ker6nyi's interpretationof
Dionysus, the god stands for the supremacyof life understoodas nondeath, while death itself is assigned a very subordinaterole as a mere
transitionfrom one form of life to another. It is typicalfor the direction of Kerenyi's thought that he has much to say on the Dionysiac
experience of life but next to nothing on its relation to death.
Dionysus is portrayedthroughout as the god of exuberant life who
ignores death and who is unaffectedby it.
In 1977 Marcel Detienne publisheda startlingcollection of structuralist essays entitled Dionysos mis a mort.1 Nomen est omen.
Bloodshed, murder, cannibalismand the eating of raw flesh are the
principalthemes in Detienne's treatment of Dionysus. The god who
emerges from the author's clever manipulation is the diametrical
opposite of what he was for Ker6nyi. Detienne's Dionysus does not
stand for the preservationof life and has no connection with wine or
the phallus. On the contrary, according to Detienne the religion of
Dionysus annihilates the demarcation that separates man from the
beasts, and constitutes a downwarddeviation from the normal patterns of life. Dionysus' followers turned the regularpracticeof Greek
animal sacrifice on its head when they tore apart animals or human
beings and devoured their raw flesh. Their rituals undermined the
social order of the Greek city-state from within and posed a threat to
its stability. Dionysus is exposed as the archvillain among Greek
gods. Detienne achieves this remarkabletransformationof Dionysus
by ignoring the difference between myth and cult. He treats myth as
if it were a historicalrecord, and he takes virtuallyno account of the
attested practiceof Dionysiac religion, which is very differentfrom its
presentation in myth.12 His case rests primarily on two types of
trans.Dionysos
Slain(Baltimore
1979). Chaps.3 and4 aredevoted
"lEnglish
to "theDionysiacmovement."
12Dionysosmis a mort 149-153 (English trans. 62-64) and 199-202
(= 89-91). The cult of Dionysus as a wine-god is ignored throughout, and
maenadismis treatedprimarily
on the basisof the mythological
record.Only
one maenadicinscriptionis mentioned (199f. = 90), but the suggestionthat the
Loss of Self, Suffering,Violence
211
Dionysiac myth, which portraythe god as the instigatoras well as the

victim of violence. In the first type, which underlies the Bacchaeof
Euripides,opponents of Dionysus are torn apartby mad women acting
under the spell of the god. In some versions, the flesh of the victims
is eaten by the maenads.13In the other myth, the god himself under
the name of Dionysus Zagreus is torn apart by the Titans, who partake of his flesh.14The remains of Dionysus are then restored to new
life by other gods. These two myths are usually considered to be
unrelated, except for their connection with Dionysus and the motif of
ritual dismemberment followed by cannibalism. Detienne argues, in
the most ingenious twist of his thesis, that the isolated Orphicmyth
which makes Dionysus the victim of aggression is a deliberateinversion of, and protest against, the prevailingmyths, in which Dionysus'
opponents fall victim to the god's own violence.
This is not the place for a critical assessment of Ker6nyi's or
Detienne's views of Dionysus, which are more widely discussed and
appreciatedoutside the classical establishment than within. Whereas
Detienne's book is far more intelligentand intelligiblethan Ker6nyi's,
it distorts the Greek Dionysus and his various functions in Greek
society beyond recognition. Like other structuralists, Detienne is
preoccupiedwith Dionysiac sacrifice as a function of the food code.
He selects from the many types of Dionysiac sacrificesonly the one
that suits his purposes because it is the most savage, namely,
maenadic sacrifice in its mythical form. Other sacrifices or other
major provinces of Dionysus, such as wine or the theater, never enter
should refer to a "mouthfulof
notoriouslyobscure phrase
tL3ahadv
raw meat" reflects the cbo4o0aytov
bias of Detienne's approach. On maenadism
as practicedand on the Milesian inscriptionin question, see now Henrichs,
HSCP 82 (1978) 121-160, esp. 148ff. and "ChangingDionysiac Identities" in
B. F. Meyer and E. P. Sanders, eds., Jewish and Christian Self-Definition III:
Self-Definition in the Graeco-Roman World (London 1982 and Philadelphia 1983)
137-160 and 213-236, esp. 143ff. and 220 n. 65. J. N. Bremmer, "Greek
MaenadismReconsidered," ZPE 1984 (forthcoming)takes a fresh look at the
problem.
13Plut.Qu. Gr. 38, 299E (Minyads); [Apollod.] Bibl. 3.5.2 (Proetids); PorphyryDe abst. 2.8 (Thracianmaenadsof old). Euripidesallowedno more than
a subtle hint at maenadiccannibalism(Ba. 1184 and 1241-1247); cf. C. Segal,
Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides'Bacchae (Princeton 1982) 188 n. 46.
140n Dionysus Zagreussee W. Fauth, "Zagreus,"RE 9A (1967) 2221-2283;
A. Henrichs, Die Phoinikika des Lollianos: Fragmente eines neuen griechischen
Romans.PapyrologischeTexte und Abhandlungen14 (Bonn 1972) 56-73; Deti-
enne, Dionysos mis a' mort chap. 4; W. Burkert, Griechische Religion der
archaischen und klassischen Epoche (Stuttgart 1977) 442f. Below, nn. 33-35.
212
AlbertHenrichs
into the purview of Detienne's study or into his picture of Greek

society. If they did, they would unhinge the neat balanceof his symmetrical system of opposite ways of life beyond repair. Ker6nyi on
the other hand covers all aspects of Dionysus and conveys an
infinitely more accurate and authentic picture of the Greek god,
despite the muddled thinking that mars much of his book. There can
be no doubt that the Greeks considered Dionysus above all the wine
god and that the idea of life in all its naturalmanifestationswas, on
the whole, much more prominent in the Greek conception of the god
than his occasionalconnection with death.
The two books by Ker6nyi and Detienne, with their conflicting
interpretations,are symptomaticof Dionysus' complexity and of the
extreme polarities associated with him. Dionysus can be seen either
as an embodiment of life or as an agent of death and destruction,
depending on how antiquity perceived him in the given context of a
particularmyth or ritual. These two aspects are often referred to as
the god's "light" and "dark" side. The Greeks themselves tended to
regard Dionysus' two sides as closely connected and inseparable, a
tendency that finds its parallel in the case of other deities such as
Artemis or the Erinyes/Eumenides, whose myths and rituals, like
those of Dionysus, reflected the biological life cycle with its alternations from birth to death. In the post-antiquereception of Dionysus
since the Renaissance, however, his two complementaryaspects have
generally lost their connection, and one side is usually overemphasized at the expense of the other, as for instance by Ker6nyi or
Detienne. From the Renaissance until about 1800, the life aspect of
Dionysus was the dominant feature. The Romantic reaction
rediscoveredthe death aspect, through direct recourse to Greek literature rather than Latin. In the 1870s, both Nietzsche and Walter
Pater, the eminent Victorian critic, realized that the two sides of
Dionysus requiredequal attention. In the end the modern intellectual
obsession with death and violence prevailed and cast a deep shadow
on the "light" side of Dionysus. Before we can focus on Nietzsche,
we must first consider the pre-Romantic Dionysus as well as the
Romantic turnabout.
II. ANTECEDENTSOF THE MODERN DIONYSUS
For better emphasis, we shall go back to the history of Dionysus in

late antiquity. After the rise of Christianity,Dionysus had emergedas
the leading pagan antagonist of Christ. Dionysus and Christ had
much in common. Both had conquered death, both obscured the
213
distinction between blood and wine, and both promisedtheir followers

salvation after death. Long after the final victory of Christianity,familiar Dionysiac motifs such as vines, drinking cups, peacocks, and
even Erotes continued to appearfrequently on Christianmosaics and
sarcophagi,which projecteda vision of a luscious paradisethat owed
more to the world of Dionysus than to the Bible.'"At the very end of
antiquity, Dionysus stood his ground and became the last stronghold
of pagan beliefs. As late as A.D.692, at the Trullian Synod in Constantinople, the church fathers still found it necessary to warn their
flock that Dionysiac dances and initiations were forbidden; that men
must not dress like women nor women like men for ritual purposes;
that Dionysiac masks were no longer acceptable;and that the name of
that abominablegod, Dionysus, was not to be invoked duringthe vintage.'6 This remarkablycomplete catalogue of traditional Dionysiac
activities, including theatrical impersonations, transvestism, and the
worship of the wine god, is antiquity's last word on Dionysus. It is
almost as if Dionysus had made one final and massive effort to leave
a lasting imprint on a changingworld and to bequeaththe bulk of his
paganblessings to Christianity.
After that the god went into hiding, in the Greek east as well as the
Latin west. His pictures vanished, his looks were forgotten. Under
his Latinized name, Bacchus, he survived the Middle Ages, a mere
shadow of his former self. As a metonymy for wine rather than the
god of wine, he still had his followers, in the privacyof the monk's
cell as well as in the visceral verse of the Archpoet or the Carmina
Burana. Reduced to a bloodless figure of pagan mythology, he was
now at the mercy of unsympatheticexegetes such as the author of the
OvideMoralise,who used the method of allegoricalinterpretationto
reconcile the god's myths and epithets with their Christian faith.
They chose to understand Bacchus either as the Antichrist or as a
prefigurationof Christ, accordingto their different lights. Pentheus,
however, was usually seen as the typical vir religiosuspreachingthe
gospel of temperance. Dionysiac myth had come full circle, and
Dionysus had been lost in the process.'7
'SK. M. D. Dunbabin, TheMosaicsof RomanNorthAfrica:Studiesin Iconographyand Patronage(Oxford 1978) 173-195.
16TrullanumII, can. 62; for the Greek text see HSCP82 (1978) 158 n. 117,
after J. D. Mansi, Sacrorumconciliorumnova et amplissimacollectio,XI (1765)
col. 972.
17Theliteraryportrayalof Bacchusin the Middle Ages, the Renaissance,and
the seventeenth century has been studied, with exclusive emphasis on Rezeptionsgeschichte,
by J. D. P. Warnersand L. Ph. Rank, Bacchus.I: Zijn levenver-
214
AlbertHenrichs
The tide of man's aspirationsturned again, and Dionysus eventually returned in triumph. The Renaissance revived the pagan gods
and reinstated Dionysus as the divine embodiment of a luxurious
lifestyle, of closeness to nature, and of uninhibited enjoyment of the
senses, with direct reference to antiquity. Roman poets, Ovid in particular, provided ready-mademodels, such as Dionysus and Ariadne
or Bacchus and Silenus, to be imitated in the Carnival Songs of
Lorenzo de' Medici and in the Dionysiac landscapes of a Piero di
Cosimo and a Titian.'8 Scores of writers and painters produced a
splendid display of Dionysiac images and gave vivid emphasis to
Dionysus as a creature of flesh and blood, sensually appealing,larger
than life and superior to man, but always tangible and within reach.
The Renaissance Dionysus was genuine but superficial,an authentic
replica of the Greek god as seen through Roman eyes. While the
body of Dionysus was put on exhibit, his soul remained hidden, until
the Romanticistsdiscoveredit more than two hundredyears later.
During the long period of transitionfrom the late sixteenth to the
eighteenth century, Dionysus was, if anything, too much in evidence.
As had happenedonce before, in late antiquity,people's perceptionof
Dionysus became dull from too much repetitionof hackneyedthemes,
both in literatureand art. There was a surplus of triumphs, Bacchanals, and pastorals,with the result that Dionysus was nearlyousted by
his own circle of maenadsand satyrs. The god and his entourageonce
teld en verklaarddoor dichters, mythografenen geleerden. II: Lyrisch leesboek over
de god Bacchus, met aantekeningen en vertaligen; tevens een illustratie van het
translatio-imitatio-aemulatio-principe. Utrechtse Publikaties voor Algemene
Literatuurwetenschap12-13
(Amsterdam 1968-1971).
I know of no
treatmentof the receptionof Dionysus/Bacchus

in the literature
comprehensive
and art of the Middle Ages or, for that matter, of any period between 500 and
1800. On Orpheus and Pan, two figures connected with Dionysus, see J. B.
Friedman, Orpheusin theMiddleAges (Cambridge,Mass. 1970); J. Warden,ed.,
Orpheus: The Metamorphoses of a Myth (Toronto 1982); P. Merivale, Pan the
Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (Cambridge, Mass. 1969).
18J. A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature I (London 1881)
387-399; H. R. Williamson,LorenzotheMagnificent(London 1974) 254-258; C.

Houser, ed., Dionysos and His Circle: Ancient through Modern (Fogg Art
Museum, HarvardUniversity, 1979) 62-64 (with select bibliographyon Piero

di Cosimo [1461-1521]; add E. Panofsky, Studiesin Iconology[Oxford 1939;
New York 1962] 33-67). As for Titian, I am thinkingof his "Bacchanalof the
Andrians" (c. 1525; Madrid,Prado), which was inspiredby PhilostratosImag.
1.25 and "The Triumphof Bacchusand Ariadne" (London, NationalGallery),
which combines the Dionysiac themes of Ovid Ars 1.527-564 and Cat.
64.251-264.
215
again became heavy and inflated, as in the paintings of Rubens or

Poussin.19OccasionallyDionysus himself would grow sick from surfeit, as in Caravaggio'sbaroque Bacchuses, which combine luscious
morbidity with homoeroticism.20Much of the large-scale attention
which Dionysus received from the late 1500s to the late 1700s fails to
inspire, or to reveal fresh aspects of the god. Its most conspicuous
merit was to preserve and to enlarge the Renaissance image of
Dionysus.
The crossing of thresholds in intellectual history is often accompanied by an intense sense of crisis or loss. The Greek gods were
instrumentalin fostering such a creative crisis in the last two decades
of the eighteenth century, a period of transition. Just moments earlier, or so it seems in retrospect, Winckelmannhad led the study of
antiquity to another triumph through his discovery of Greek art and
its innate spirit. He defined that spirit as one of "noble simplicityand
quiet greatness," words that have since all but lost their meaning. He
found his ideal of masculine beauty embodied in statues of Apollo,
whom he contrastedwith the more effeminate Dionysus.21To save his
aesthetic construct, Winckelmannhad to ignore anything Greek that
fell short of his absolute standard,which was more than the next generation of philhellenes was willing to give up. Within decades, the
19P.P. Rubens (1577-1640): "Bacchanalwith the SleepingAriadne" (Stockholm, National Museum) and "Bacchanal"(Florence, Uffizi); Nicolas Poussin
(1594-1665): "Bacchanal"(Madrid,Prado), "Triumphof Dionysus" (Kansas
City, Missouri,Nelson Gallery), "Nursingof Bacchus"(London, NationalGallery), "The Infant BacchusEntrustedto the Nymphs" (Fogg Art Museum;cf.
Houser [precedingnote] 68-70).
20Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610): "Self-Portrait as
Bacchus" or "Bacchino Malato" (Rome, Galleria Borghese) and "Bacchus"
(Florence, Uffizi). Both works have been assignedto the painter'searly to mid
twenties. Cf. H. Hibbert, Caravaggio(New York 1983) 19-22, 39-43, 270-272,
and 282-283.
210n Winckelmann'sexplicitlyhomoeroticcharacterizationof Bacchus ("ein
schoner Knabe . . . bei welchem die Regung der Wollust wie die zarte Spitze
einer Pflanze zu keimen anfaingt")as the aesthetic antipode of Apollo see
M. L. Baeumer, "WinckelmannsFormulierungder klassischen Sch6nheit,"
Monatshefte fuir deutschen Unterricht, deutsche Sprache und Literatur 65 (1973)
61-75 and "Simplicityand Grandeur:Winckelmann,French Classicism, and
Jefferson," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 7 (1978) 63-78, as well as
Baeumer (1976) 167f. and (1977) 134f. (below, n. 37). On Winckelmann,

Goethe and "die Antike" see H. Lloyd-Jones'introductionto the new edition
of Humphry Trevelyan's Goetheand the Greeks (Cambridge 1941, reissued
1981) = Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth
and Twentieth
Centuries(London 1982;Baltimore1983) 32-60.
216
AlbertHenrichs
pre-Romantic reaction set in, and Herder reinstated Dionysus, no

longer as a god in human form but as a new symbol of poetic inspiration and of a state of "animal-like sensuality" which would lead to
deeper insights.22The new Dionysus lacked concrete content as well
as form. He was a productof the imagination,made of the stuff that
dreams are made of, ever ready to accommodate the aspirationsof
different dreamers. The Greeks and their gods, so sharplydelineated
by Winckelmann, seemed suddenly more distant and more awesome
than ever before.
The case of Holderlin is admittedlyuntypical,but it sharpens one's
eye for the Romantic renovation. As a translator of Pindar and
Sophocles he was imbued with their religious spiritand was more familiar with the Greek gods than most of his contemporaries,including
Goethe and Schiller. The Greek gods were as real for Holderlin as
they had been for the Greeks themselves. It is this empathy with the
Greeks arid their beliefs which sets Holderlinapartfrom the followers
of Winckelmann. Goethe, for instance, adopted the Greek pantheon
mostly as a mere paradigmof an ideal life distinguishedby closeness
to nature and removed from worldly concerns. In a similar vein,
Schiller in "Die Gotter Griechenlands" (1788) deplored their disappearancein eloquent verse but without deep engagement. He looked
back to Greek antiquity as if it were a distant paradise, highly desirable but irretrievablylost. His feeling of loss was sincere, but it did
not drive him into an existential crisis, as it would Holderlin. In
Holderlin's late poetry, written between 1800 and 1806, when his prophetic sense was at its keenest, we are shown a bold vision of a new
Germany, indeed of a new earth, in which the Greek past has merged
with the Christian present, while the mission of the Greek gods
becomes interchangeablewith that of Christ. Holderlin was particularly attractedto Dionysus, and he used Dionysiac imagery to powerful effect in order to express his own vocation as a poet and to add a
Greek dimension to contemporaryconcerns.23Dionysus is envisaged
as the precursorof Christ and, in one instance, even as his brother, a
remarkablesynthesis, which has received much attention in recent
decades.24The conceptual link that connects the wine god with the
22Fordetailssee Baeumer (1976) 169f. and (1977) 135f. (below, n. 37).
23M. L. Baeumer, "Dionysos und das Dionysische bei Holderlin,"
Hilderlin-Jahrbuch 18 (1973-74) 97-118.
24Theidentification
of DionysuswithChristis most explicitin "Brodund
Wein" (1800-1801) and "Der Einzige" (1801-1803). In "Der Einzige,"

Christ is addressedas brother not only of Heraclesbut also of Dionysus. Cf.
W. Michel, Das Leben Friedrich Hilderlins (1940, repr. Darmstadt 1963) 473;
217
Crucified, according to Holderlin, lies not in their suffering, as

Nietzsche seemed to think in his darkesthours, but in their generosity
towardman. When Dionysus and Christ left the earth, they bestowed
upon mankindthe gift of breadand wine, as a permanentreminderof
their former presence and as an implicit promise that they would
eventually return.25The eucharist and the resurrectionare thus seen
through pagan and pantheistic eyes. Since the end of antiquity,
nobody had taken Dionysus as a wine god as seriously as Holderlin,
and nobody would do so again after him. He adopted a fundamental
concept of Greek religion when he thought of Dionysus as a benefactor in connection with the god's presence among men. Demeter
comes to mind, next to Dionysus, and the familiarmyths which tell of
their arrival in Eleusis, Icaria, and other places and of their gifts of
bread and wine.26Holderlinfollowed the Greeks even farther. In the
most complex poem from his late period, entitled "Patmos," he
makes the point that the gods, by revealing themselves, have made
their distance and difference from man all the more apparent.27Their
periodic nearness makes them not only difficult to grasp but
dangerous as well. Again Holderlin was thinking along distinctly
Greek lines when he perceived the gods as being simultaneouslynear
as well as far, both a blessing and a threat.
Holderlin did not resolve the dilemma, yet he brought it into the
open with an unmatchedintensity. Disagreementcontinued about the
appropriatelocus of the Olympiangods, or of divinity as such. From
the lofty point of view of German classicism, the Greek gods belonged
in a different world far above that of man, or on a notional Parnassus.
For Holderlin, on the other hand, Dionysus continued to be a powerful presence outside man. In either case, divinity occupied a space of
R. Guardini, Holderlin. Weltbildund Frommigkeit(2nd ed., Munich 1955)
239-249; E. Staigerin A. Kelletat,ed., HOlderlin.Beitragezu seinem Verstdindnis
in unseremJahrhundert
(Tubingen 1961) 326-332; H. Hatfield, AestheticPaganism in German Literaturefrom Winckelmannto the Death of Goethe (Cambridge,
Mass. 1964) 142-165; Baeumer1973-74 (precedingnote) 102f., 107ff.

25"Brodund Wein," st. 8.
26Ker6nyi,
Dionysos(above,n. 10) 129-188(Englished.), 115-157(German
ed.) on "The Myths of Arrival." On Johann Georg Hamann's (1730-88)

extremely influential interpretationof Demeter and Dionysus as symbols of,
see M. L.
respectively,the 'senses' (Sinne) and the 'passions' (Leidenschaften)
Baeumer in B. Gajek, ed., Johann Georg Hamann. Acta des Internationalen

Hamann-Colloquiums in Liineburg 1976 (Frankfurt a. M. 1979) 117-134.
27Cf. W. Binder, "Holderlins Patmos-Hymne," HOlderlin-Jahrbuch 15
(1967-68) 92-127; K. Stierle, "Dichtung und Auftrag: Holderlins Patmos-
Hymne," Holderlin-Jahrbuch22 (1980-81) 47-68.
218
AlbertHenrichs
its own, above humankind or at any rate apart from it. The choice
between these two options was highly uncomfortable. For the vast
majorityof intelligent men of the period, distant Greek gods, who had
at best an aesthetic effect, were as unacceptableas gods who, though
closer to man, posed a threat to his own existence. Dionysus became
the catalyst in the process of reorientation, which was already under
way while Holderlinwas writinghis last lucid poems.
The Romantic reaction took place during the first three decades of
the nineteenth century. It was a massive intellectual effort that
involved not only poets but also philosophersand mythologists.28The
poets were looking for new sources of inspiration;philosopherslike
Schelling developed an idealistic "Dionysiology" (Schelling's term) to
determine man's relationshipto the absolute spirit; and mythologists
like Creuzer introduceda new historicaldimension of sorts by tracing
the Dionysiac and Orphicmysteries back to supposed origins in Indian
and Egyptianthought. The Romanticistsas a whole left both Winckelmann and Holderlin behind when they removed Dionysus from the
external space he had occupied since the Renaissance and relocated
him in a newly found inner space, that of man's own self. By internalizing the god and his realm for the first time in history, they
stripped him of his traditionalidentity as a wine god in human shape
and turned him into an abstract concept. Dionysus became the
"Dionysian," and the god of wine became a metaphorfor a sustained
state of higher intoxication. The Romantic Dionysus epitomizes some
of the most cherished aspirationsof the Romanticists:their preoccupation with nature projectedonto a cosmic plane; their desire for unlimited realization of their innermost creative powers; and finally, their
longing for death and self-destruction as a means of escape into a
more universal life. In the Romanticexperience, life and death maintained a very delicate balance, and Dionysus was the name for the
scale that kept them constantlyin suspense.
The Romantic Dionysus was essentially a product of German
"Geist," and as such he has been much studied in recent years.29But
one of the most powerful evocations of this Dionysus and his full28Seethe full dossier on the RomanticDionysus assembled by M. L. Baeumer in a whole series of essentialarticles(below, nn. 29 and 37).
29M. L. Baeumer, "Die romantischeEpiphaniedes Dionysos," Monatshefte
fur deutschen Unterricht, deutsche Sprache und Literatur 57 (1965) 225-226 and
"Die zeitgeschichtlicheFunktion des dionysischenTopos in der romantischen

Dichtung," in Gestaltungsgeschichteund Gesellschaftsgeschichte;literatur-, kunstund musikwissenschaftliche Studien. In Zusammenarbeit mit Kiate Hamburger
herausgegeben von Helmut Kreuzer (Stuttgart 1969) 265-283; below, n. 37.
219
fledged ambivalence seems to have escaped the notice of Germanists

and classicists alike. It can be found in Shelley's "Adonais" of 1821,
an elegy on the death of John Keats.30Shelley, who was in poor
health at the time, imagines himself present as a poet-mourner at
Keats's funeral in the companyof Byronand of the Irish poet Thomas
Moore. What makes Shelley special is his Dionysiac dress and state of
mind. He presents himself as Dionysus incarnate, thyrsus in hand
and a wreath of flowers around his head. But the poet's transformation goes much deeper. He shares the ambiguities of the god, and
much like the Romantic Dionysus, Shelley himself is torn between
strength and weakness, between life and death. A few quotations
from two successive stanzas illustrate this fragile condition: he first
describes himself as "one frail Form, a phantom among men"; a
moment later he is "a pardlikeSpirit, beautifuland swift," words that
evoke Ovid's Bacchus;and in the ultimate equivocation, he calls himself "a Power girt round with weakness." Shelley does not even mention Dionysus by name. The poet has effaced the god, and Dionysus is
a mere projectionof the poet's own divided and suffering self. Ironically, Shelley himself was to die in the following year.
ANDTHEDEATHOFDIONYSUS
III. THEBIRTHOF TRAGEDY
This is the Dionysus which Nietzsche inherited, a dying god who

acquirednew and lasting strength even in his moment of death. If art
history is a true mirrorof public consciousness, it may be adduced to
confirm the demise of Dionysus as a god. Although exact numbers
are not available, my impression is that the figure of Dionysus has
been significantlyless prominent in both painting and sculpturesince
the middle of the previous century than it had been before. To convey a particularDionysiac mood visually, many artists have made
increasinguse of members of Dionysus' entourage as convenient and
more attractivesubstitutes for the god. I am thinking, for instance, of
Watts and Alma-Tademain VictorianEngland, of Bocklin on the continent, and of Picasso in more recent times, all of whom vastly preferred maenads, fauns, Pans and Ariadnes to Dionysus. In any case,
30"Adonais,"sts. 31-34. The Dionysiacreferenceas such is self-evident
and has been recognized,if only dimly,in Shelleyancriticism.Cf. C. Baker,
Shelley's Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (New York 1948) 245-246; curiously, D. Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cam-
bridge, Mass. 1937, 1965) 134, 167-168, 522-523 fails to acknowledge the
Dionysiacimagery.
220
AlbertHenrichs
the Romantic rearticulationof Dionysus was heard by Nietzsche loud

and clear, and he adopted it by stretching it to its very limits. It is
hardly surprising,therefore, that a decade after the publicationof GT
Nietzsche echoed Heinrich Heine and declaredthat all gods are dead,
Dionysus included,31nor that during his mental breakdownin January
of 1889 he signed several of the provocative "mad notes" which he
sent to friends, not with his real name but with such strikingaliases as
"Dionysos" and "the Crucified." In one particularlyrevealing
instance, he first signed his name as "Nietzsche Caesar" and then
corrected it to "Nietzsche Dionysos.'"32The pattern is familiar and
repeats the Romantic tendency. Dethroned gods are again appropriated as extensions of the self to express one's own situation or
feelings. In Nietzsche's case, Dionysus and Christ are existential surrogates of the notorious "Ibermensch," who is prominent in
Nietzsche's later works and is already foreshadowed by the "Dionysian man" or "the true human being" of GT, that is to say, the man
who has experienced the suffering of the human condition and who
overcomes it by embracingit.
Nietzsche's most conspicuous borrowingsfrom the Romantic tradition are the antithesis of Apollo and Dionysus, which was commonplace in the early nineteenth century, and the myth of the suffering
Dionysus or Dionysus Zagreus. Nietzsche's own interpretationof the
Apollonian and Dionysian, or art and life, has been so often discussed
and criticized that we may safely ignore its Apollonian component,
which is the more vulnerable part of Nietzsche's argument, and concentrate our efforts on Dionysus.33The myth of Dionysus Zagreus
31Diefr6hlicheWissenschaft(1882) 108 and 125 ("Gott ist tot"); Also sprach
Zarathustra
(1883),at the veryend of part1 ("TotsindalleGotter:nunwollen
wir, dass der Ubermensch lebe"). Cf. Nietzsche's earlier interpretation,in a

fragmentdating from spring 1870, of the Aeolic Z6vvvfoq(sic) or Dionysus as
"'der todte Zeus' oder 'der todtende Zeus' " (KGWIII.3, 82 fr. 3[82]). On
Heine see H. Hatfield, ClashingMythsin GermanLiterature:
FromHeine to Rilke
(Cambridge,Mass. 1974) 12-42; on Nietzsche's adaptationof the dictum "the
great Pan is dead" (Plut. Def orac. 17, 419C) see Vogel (followingnote) 329.
32E.F. Podach,NietzschesZusammenbruch
(Heidelberg1930) 57-58; M.
Vogel, Apollinischund Dionysisch.Geschichteeines genialenIrrtums.Studien zur
des 19.Jahrhunderts
6 (Regensburg
1966)320-321,325-327,
Musikgeschichte
with plate 60 (reproductionof the "mad note," written from Turin, Italy, on
January 1, 1889, addressed to the French poet Catulle Mend6s, to whom
Nietzsche had dedicated his Dionysos-Dithyramben[1888], and signed
"Nietzsche Caesar [deleted] Dionysos"); H. Diuble-Rohde, Nietzsche-Studien
5
(1976) 340 and 354 (Nietzsche's last note to E. Rohde); C. P. Janz, Friedrich
NietzscheBiographie(Munich 1978-79, paperbacked. 1981) III 26-33.
Loss of
Violence
Self, Suffering,
221
and its various interpretations before and after Nietzsche have

received little attention. The name of Dionysus Zagreus is omitted
from the index of the first book-length study of GT by Silk and Stern,
published in 1981, although his myth is briefly discussed.34No complete version of the myth exists, but the story basicallyruns like this.
Dionysus Zagreusis the productof an incestuous union between Zeus
and Persephone. While still a child he was killed by the wicked
Titans, who dismemberedhim, cooked or roasted his flesh, and ate it.
The Titans were killed by Zeus's lightning bolts, but Zagreus was
restored to a new life, either because his heart had been saved or
because his limbs were put together again. From the ashes of the
Titans the first men were born. This is, in essence, the sequence of
events which constitutes the Zagreusmyth. There is reason to believe
that Plato alludes to the dismemberment and to the origin of man
from the Titans. If so, he is far from explicit. The first direct attestations of the myth occur in early Hellenistic authors, and a steady
stream of references continues well into late antiquitywhen the Neoplatonists interpretedthe myth as a symbol of man's divine origin and
of the dispersionof the divine element throughoutthe materialworld.
The Neoplatonic interpretationwas revived in the Platonic Academy
of fifteenth-centuryFlorence and was a model of sanity comparedto
the extremely fantastic explanations that became fashionable in the
early nineteenth century. This is the state of affairs Nietzsche inherited.
What attractedNietzsche to the Zagreus myth was its emphasis on
divine suffering and on death as the beginning of another life. The
fact that the god in question was an obscure form of Dionysus provided Nietzsche with the excuse he needed for connecting the myth
with the Greek theater and its tragic hero, a connection that had not
antithesissee Vogel (preceding
330n the historyof the Apollo-Dionysus
note) passim;also Silk and Stern (followingnote) 166-185 and 209-216.
When Nietzscheappropriated
the conceptof "der leidendeDionysusder
Mysterien"(GT 10; below,n. 35) as an existentialsymbol,he continuedan
intellectual
trendwhichhad begunwiththe Neoplatonists
and hadculminated
in Georg FriedrichCreuzer's SymbolikundMythologiederalten V61ker
(1810-12,
followedby severalsubsequenteditions;see Baeumer[below,n. 37][1976]

[18891X 4) ridiculed
179-181, [1977] 140-145). Nietzsche (G6tzen-Diimmerung
Chr. A. Lobeck'sAglaophamus
(1829)and its extremelyrationalistic
attitude
towardGreekmysticism,including
the Zagreusmyth.
34M.S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzscheon Tragedy(Cambridge1981) 72 and
175-180. The Zagreusmythis the cornerstoneof GT,and one wonderswhy

Silk and Sternhave treatedit so lightly(an omissionthat does not seem to
troubletheirreviewers).Above,n. 14.
222
AlbertHenrichs
been made in antiquitybut that was later adopted by Gilbert Murray.35

The concept of suffering was important to Nietzsche because it
correspondedto a basic premise of Schopenhauer'spessimisticworldview which Nietzsche had made his own. Schopenhauerassumed that
a driving force, which he called the "will to life," activates the visible
world and motivates man. That will can never be satisfied. Man is
doomed to a life of continuous mental suffering because of his dissatisfaction at the infinite purposelessness of his existence. There is
only one escape: to surrender one's own individuality through
identificationwith some other form of existence, an act that amounts
to a negation of the will to life.
This is heavy stuff, which has nothing in common with Attic
tragedy or the Zagreus myth. Yet Nietzsche managed to connect all
three entities in a single aesthetic theory which claims that true art
must be a mirrorof the true and painful realityof life. Greek tragedy
accordingto Nietzsche is the truest art form because the destruction
of the tragic hero is the paradigm of existential suffering. The
Zagreus myth is the archetypaltragic plot, and Zagreus the prototype
of each tragic hero, for the following reason.36Dionysus Zagreus
represents "nature" as the "primal unity" which is the ultimate
source of all existence, and his dismembermenttypifiesthe division of
this primordial oneness into individuals. Nietzsche interprets the
rebirth of the god as the end of individuationand as man's fusion
with the primalunity. That fusion is reenacted in the satyr chorus of
Greek tragedy. The Greeks who watched tragic performances
identified themselves with the chorus as well as with the fate of the
tragic hero. In doing so, they experienced the temporaryannihilation
of their individualidentities, which became submerged in the identity
35GT10. Gilbert Murray(1866-1957) publishedhis theory "of the formation of dramaout of ritual"as an excursus to Harrison's Themis(below, n. 62)
341-363; he mentions Zagreus (346) but not Nietzsche. Murray'stheory was
refuted by A. W. Pickard-Cambridge,
Dithyramb,Tragedyand Comedy(Oxford
1927) 185-208 but reinstatedin a revised form in T. B. L. Webster'smisguided
second edition of Pickard-Cambridge's
book (Oxford 1962). Cf. Silk and Stern
(precedingnote) 142-150 and Lloyd-Jones,Bloodfor the Ghosts(above, n. 21)
195-214, esp. 202f. No Greek evidence for the notion of a sufferingDionysus
exists outside the myth of Dionysus Zagreus (Herod. 5.67.5 is not relevant),
whose fate is described as 7r6r0r by Plut. Es. carn. 1.7, 996C, as idir-r0taby
Plut. E ap. Delph. 9, 389A (paraphrasedby Nietzsche, GT 10, KGW III.1,
68.14-18), and as 7raO-4;para
by Paus. 8.37.5 (cf. Dion. Hal. A.R. 2.19.2
ALov'ro-ov r&a0q,;comparison with Plut. E ap. Delph. 9, 389A shows that
Dionysius of Halicarnassuswas thinkingof the Zagreusmyth).

36GT7-10.
223
of the group. Greek tragedy is thus an artistic representationof the

true realityof existence.
My summary of Nietzsche's aesthetic theory is a simplifiedversion
which pays no attention to the mitigating role of the Apollonian or
visual side of art, let alone to Dionysian music. Our concern is with
Dionysus, not Apollo. Nietzsche's interpretation of the suffering
Dionysus is highly originaland preparedthe way for existentialism. It
also provided essential impulses for the study of Dionysus in subsequent scholarship.
ANDANTHROPOLOGY
IV. DIONYSIAC
PSYCHOLOGY
The full extent of Nietzsche's debt to the Romantic conception of
Dionysus has been demonstrated only recently in a series of
well-documented articles by the Germanist Max L. Baeumer of the
University of Wisconsin.37No less important than Nietzsche's own
indebtedness to the Romantic tradition is the hidden influence he
himself exerted, for better or worse, on the study of Greek religion
and its darkeraspects. That influence is not generallyrecognized. In
reconciling the Romantic vision of Dionysus with his own aesthetic
interests, Nietzsche filled the inherited mold with a new spirit and
made it more palatableto the post-Romantic,modern mind. His pivotal place in the modern study of Greek religion in general and
Dionysus in particularis beyond question. It was through the direct
mediation of Nietzsche and his GT that such essentially Romantic
notions as the antithesis between "light" and "dark" divinities and
the identificationof the self with the divine principle or with some
other universal entity reached the mainstreamof modern scholarship
37M.L. Baeumer, "Nietzsche and the Traditionof the Dionysian," in J. C.
O'Flaherty,T. F. Sellner, and R. M. Helm, eds., Studiesin Nietzscheand the
Classical Tradition.Univ. of North Carolina Studies in Germanic Languages
and Literatures85 (Chapel Hill 1976, repr. 1979) 165-189; "Das moderne
Phanomen des Dionysischen und seine 'Entdeckung' durch Nietzsche,"
6 (1977) 123-153; "Dialektikund zeitgeschichtlicheFunktion
Nietzsche-Studien
des literarischenTopos," in M. L. Baeumer, ed., Toposforschung.
Wege der
Forschung 395 (Darmstadt 1973) 299-348; "Ujbergangund dialektischer
Wechsel von Topos, Motiv und Stoff, dargestelltam griechischenDionysos,"
in Elemente der Literatur. Beitriagezur Stoff-, Motiv- und Themenforschung. In Verbindung mit Herbert A. Frenzel herausgegeben von Adam J. Bisanz und Raymond
Trousson(Stuttgart1980) 25-44 esp. 32-36. On a particularlyinterestingconnection, see E. Behler, "Die Auffassung des Dionysischen durch die Bruder
12 (1983) 335-354.
Schlegel und FriedrichNietzsche," Nietzsche-Studien
224
Albert Henrichs
on Dionysus. The three most prominentnames in the modern study

of Dionysus are ErwinRohde (1845-98), Jane Harrison(1850-1928),
and Eric R. Dodds (1893-1979). I am inclined to add WalterF. Otto
(1874-1958), whose approach was different and who will be considered later. All four scholars were familiarwith Nietzsche's concept
of Dionysus and the Dionysian, and his influence can be clearly discerned in their work, although it took a separate direction in each
case. Whether they are awareof it or not, many students of Dionysus
still operate with conceptual categories which owe their currency to
Nietzsche. Here as elsewhere, Nietzsche's influence on the course of
classical studies has been the greater the more often his ideas have
passed through the filter of more scrupulousand accreditedintermediaries. In undiluted form, Nietzsche has always been, and still is,
unacceptable to most classical scholars, for understandablereasons.
Nietzsche himself never intended GT to be a work of scholarship.
One of the most fundamentalprinciplesof GTis the notion that the
"Dionysian" is at the same time a psychologicalas well as a collective
experience.38This influential insight fortunately escaped the severe
criticism with which the classical profession reacted to Nietzsche's
book. The concept of collective ecstasy survived the condemnationof
GT because Nietzsche's former friend Erwin Rohde gave it respectability in the second volume of his masterpiecePsyche,which was first
published in 1894, more than two decades after GT.39Rohde detached
38ForinstanceGTI (KGWIII.1,25f.), a memorablepassagecloselyechoed
(via Gernet; below, n. 46) by J.-P. Vernant, Mythe et penskechez les Grecs.
Etudes de psychologie historique (Paris 1965) 268-270 (= II 80f. of the reissue,
Paris 1981). Typicaldescriptionsof Dionysiacreligionsuch as "la surexcitation

collective" (L. Gernet in L. Gernet and A. Boulanger,Le geniegrecdansla religion [Paris 1932] 126, cf. 118), "extase collective" (L. Gernet, REG 66 [1953]
377ff. = Anthropologie de la Gr&ceantique [Paris 1982] 107, cf. 85 and 106),
"fr6n6sie collective" (A. Bruhl, LiberPater [Paris 1953] 6; Vernant, Mytheet

penske270 = II 82) or "group emotion" (R. P. Winnington-Ingram,Euripides
and Dionysus: An Interpretationof the Bacchae [Cambridge 1948] 155) owe their
wide currencyto Durkheim and to Harrison'sDurkheimianreinterpretationof

Nietzsche's and Rohde's conception of the Dionysiac experience (below, nn.
71-72). On ecstatic cults and their psychology from a comparativepoint of
view, see P. de F61ice, Foules en delire, extases collectives. Essai sur quelques
formes infirieures de la mystique (Paris 1947), who confines himself to the Cretan
Dionysus, and I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: An AnthropologicalStudy of Spirit
Possessionand Shamanism(Penguin Books 1971), who reproducesa dancing

maenad from the wall paintingin the Villa of the Mysteriesat Pompeiion the
cover of his book but does not do justice to Dionysus.
39E. Rohde, Psyche, Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaubeder Griechen (2nd
ed., Freiburg 1898) II 1-136 (English trans. London 1925, 253-361). On
Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence
225
the concept of group ecstasy from Nietzsche's false theory of the origins of tragedy and of its assumed effect on the audience and put it
squarelywhere it belongs, in the context of Dionysiac cult and ritual,
which Rohde derived from Thrace. Nietzsche himself in GT had
given but rare hints that Dionysus had ever existed outside the Attic
theater, although he took care to differentiate between Greek and
non-Greek festivals of Dionysus. The "barbarian" worshipers of
Dionysus indulged in "extravagant sexual licentiousness," whereas
the Greeks never debased the true Dionysian spirit.40Nietzsche's
differentiationwas hardly more than a passing remark. Yet Rohde
made it a cornerstone of his treatment of Dionysus. Unlike
Nietzsche, Rohde had studied the British anthropologistEdward B.
Tylor (1832-1917) and adopted his comparativemethod, which was
designed to establish the characterof so-called primitivereligionswith
the help of ethnographicalparallels.41Under Tylor's influence, Rohde
conceived the theory of Dionysus as a non-Greek, Thracian god,
whose wild rituals encouragedacts of violence among his worshipers
and removed their inhibitions. Rohde's thesis of the foreign god
saved the reputation of the Greeks and appealed to three successive
generations of scholars ranging from Wilamowitz to Nilsson and
Dodds until it was eventually disproved by the discovery of Linear-B
tablets containing the name of Dionysus in Greek and antedating
Rohde's Thracian import by half a millennium.42 Rohde's vivid
descriptionof the imaginaryThracianworship has been echoed in virtually every account of Dionysiac rites from Thomas Mann to the
Oxford Classical Dictionary.43More important, Rohde provided a
Nietzsche's Dionysian psychologyand its reinterpretationby Rohde see most
recentlyFeder, Madnessin Literature(above, n. 4) 204-213 and 226f.
40GT2; cf. Die dionysischeWeltanschauung
(1870) 1 and 2 (KGW111.2,50f.
and 54f.) = Die Geburtdes tragischenGedankens(December 1870; KGWIII.2,
78f. and 83), where Nietzsche makes the same distinctionand derives Dionysus
("der neue Ank6mmling") from Asia Minor ratherthan Thrace.Above, n. 7.
410n Rohde's debt to Tylor see P. McGinty, Interpretation
and Dionysos:
Methodin the Studyof a God (The Hague 1978) 47-49. Tylor's name is missing
from the index to Rohde's Psyche(in both the German and the Englisheds.),
and even McGintyfails to collect Rohde's actualreferencesto Tylor's Primitive
Culture(1871), which are as follows: Psyche(above, n. 39) I 17 n. 1 (= English
trans., 45 n. 14), 23.1 (47.25), 45.1 (50.58), 160.4 (143.34), 239.1 (199.99),
257.1 (208.136), 307.3 (245.9); II 25.2 (277.56), 33.1 (281.73), 134.3 (361.81).
42J. Chadwick, The MycenaeanWorld(Cambridge 1976) 99-100; Burkert,
Griechische
Religion(above, n. 14) 252-253.
43psyche(above, n. 39) II 8-18 (English trans. 257-259). On Thomas
Mann's Tod in Venedigsee above, n. 8; M. P. Nilsson and H. J. Rose in The
226
AlbertHenrichs
pseudo-scientificrationalefor Nietzsche's vague idea of "the psychology of the Dionysian state" or "the psychology of orgiasm."44
Induced by drugs such as hashish, the followers of Dionysus would
intensify their emotions until they reacheda state of self-forgetfulness
that culminated in their achieving unity with the god.45The Romantic
notion of the loss of self and Nietzsche's concept of the "shatteringof
the individual"46reappearin Rohde as a psychologicalchain reaction
which assumes that group ecstasy is a means of ultimate identification
with Dionysus. In Rohde's view, Dionysus and his individual worshipers become virtually interchangeablethrough the experience of
the group. Even the dismemberment of Dionysus Zagreus was,
accordingto Rohde, originallyan aetiologicalexplanationof the Thracian ritual, in the course of which a bull was torn to pieces as an
incarnationof Dionysus.47
Nietzsche's GT is nowhere mentioned in Psyche, a momentous
silence that has received much attention. We know that Rohde had
personal reasons to suppress any reference to GT or to the controversy which had surrounded its publicationand in which he himself
Oxford Classical Dictionary (2nd ed., Oxford 1970) 352.
44Thesetwo terms occuronly in Gotzen-Diimmerung

(1889) X 4-5.
45PsycheII 16-20 (Englishtrans.259-260).
46GT 8 ("Zerbrechendes Individuums"), 4 (below, n. 62), and 21 ("die
dionysische Losung von den Fesseln des Individuums");in a fragmentwritten
in winter 1869/70 or spring 1870 one reads (KGWIII.3, 72 fr. 3 [43]): "Weinverehrungd. h. Verehrungdes Narcotismus. Dieser ist ein idealistischesPrincip, ein Weg zur Vernichtung des Individuums." Cf. GT 1 (KGW III.1,
25.29f.) "jetzt zerbrechenalle die starren,feindseligenAbgrenzungen,"echoed
by L. Gernet in Gernet and Boulanger (above, n. 38) 113 ("cette folie fait
tomber les barrieresdu moi, replongel'individuen pleine nature, le fait communiqueravec la vie v6g6taleet animale"); Winnington-Ingram(above, n. 38)
155 ("the limitationsof self are laid aside and the dancerfeels at one with the
god, with her fellows and with all nature").
47PsycheII 118 (Englishtrans. 341). By equatingOrpheus,the victim of the
maenads and "priest" of Dionysus, with the god himself and by interpreting
Orpheus' suffering as a reenactmentof the sufferingof Dionysus Zagreus (II
118 n. 2, English trans. 353 n. 35), Rohde establisheda disastrousprecedent
which helped to inspire not only Murray'stheory (above, n. 35) but also the
related theory of Pentheus as a double of the god, as well as Dodds's notion of
the "male celebrant"who is identicalwith Dionysus (on which see Henrichsin
H. D. Evjen, ed., Mnemai: Classical Studies in Memory of Karl K. Hulley [Scholars Press 1984]). G. F. Else, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy
(Cambridge,Mass. 1965) 9-10 and 30, while exaggeratingthe influenceof GT

on such theories, completelyignoredthe crucialrole of Rohde's Psyche.
227
had taken such an active part on Nietzsche's behalf.48The very

absence of such a reference amounts to a silent and uncomfortable
admission of the fallen friend's crucialrole. In the form which it had
been given by Rohde, the concept of Dionysiac psychologyand group
ecstasy reached Dodds, who incorporatedit in his Sather Lectures of
1949, which were published two years later under the title The Greeks
and the Irrationalto become one of the most influentialpostwarbooks
in classical scholarship. Thanks to Dodds, words like "maenadism"
or "possession" and phrases such as "Dionysiac psychology"or "collective hysteria" have become household words in the classical vocabulary.Dodds speaks of "a mergingof the individualconsciousness in
a group consciousness."49Despite the post-Freudianring of Dodds's
terminology, Nietzsche and Rohde continue to lurk behind the
modern disguise. It has been justly remarkedthat the new movement
in classical studies, which began in the Romantic period and which
received fresh impetus from Nietzsche and Rohde, appearsin retrosNietzsche's name
pect to culminate in The Greeksand the Irrational.50
480n Nietzscheand Rohde see W. M. CalderIII, "The Wilamowitz-
Nietzsche Struggle:New Documents and a Reappraisal,"Nietzsche-Studien

12
(1983)-214-254 esp. 238ff. Rohde ignored the existence of GT throughouthis
treatmentof Dionysus. He did approve (PsycheII 200 n. 4, English trans. 439
n. 10), however, of Nietzsche's claim (Rhein. Mus. 28 [1873] 211ff. = KGW
II.1, 288ff.) that the transmittedtext of the hexametricalmaxim known as the
et Hes. 6 line 78; Alcidamasap. Stob. 4.52.22)
wisdom of Silenus (Cert. Hornm.
was "old and authentic." Nietzsche's dating was confirmedby the publication
of P. Petrie1.25 = P. Lit. Lond. 191 in 1891, two years after he had lost his
sanity. Initiated by Nietzsche, the debate over the relationshipbetween the
anonymous Certamenand Alcidamas' Museumgained fresh momentum with
the publicationof P. Mich. inv. 2754 in 1925, a quarter of a century after
Nietzsche's death, and continues unabated. Cf. E. Vogt, "Nietzsche und der
WettkampfHomers," Antikeund Abendland11 (1962) 103-113, and K. Heldmit Hesiod.Hypomnemata75
mann, Die NiederlageHomersim Dichterwettstreit
(Gottingen 1982), with full bibliography. Heldmann, who argues against
Nietzsche, should not have the last word. He misrepresentsthe evidence of
the two papyri (on pp. 13, 17, and 35-36) in the interest of his own thesis,
which makes Panides (who is the principaljudge in the contest of the Certamen) an invention of the imperialperiod (against the Flinders Petrie papyrus,
writtenin the third centuryB.C.)and which minimizesthe connectionsbetween
Alcidamasand the extant Certamen(againstthe Michiganpapyrus).
49Dodds'sintroductionto his commentaryon the Bacchae(2nd ed., Oxford
1960) xx (above quotation), xi n. 2 ("Dionysiac psychology"),xvi ("mass hysteria"); TheGreeksand the Irrational(Berkeley1951) 76 ("collective hysteria")
and 274 ("clinicaldescriptionof possessive hysteria").
50Lloyd-Jonesin Studiesin Nietzsche(above, n. 37) 9 = Bloodfor the Ghosts
(above, n. 21) 175.
228
Albert Henrichs
occurs once in Dodds's book and in connection with a minor point.5'

Almost thirty years later, however, Dodds revealed in his autobiography that he had read Nietzsche extensively as a young man.52In
Dodds's case, then, familiarity with Nietzsche is explicitly acknowledged. It must be kept in mind that Dodds read Nietzsche
through the spectacles not only of Rohde but also of Jane Harrison,
who lavished high praiseon GT in both of her majorworks.53The fact
remains nevertheless that Dodds had read Nietzsche during the most
formative years of his life and that he defended him against false
charges in his commentaryon Plato's Gorgias.54
In the spring of 1875 Nietzsche wrote that the ancient Greeks were
less humane than Indians or Chinese.55 He never published his
remark, nor did he explain what he meant. He was alwaystoo tactful
and reserved to go into indelicate details. Although he was deeply
fascinated by the "dark" or chthonian side of Greek religion, he
never dwells on the grossness and violence of so many Greek myths.
He says "sexual symbol" when he means "phallus"56and uses the
word "sacrifice" almost without exception in a metaphoricalsense.57
In his paraphraseof the Zagreus myth, he omits any reference to the
cannibalismof the Titans.58The maenads and their wild behavior in
51The Greeks and the Irrational68, on "the impressive antithesis which
Rohde'sfriendNietzschehad drawnbetweenthe 'rational'religionof Apollo
and the 'irrational'religion of Dionysus." Dodds disagrees with Rohde's use

of Nietzsche's antithesis, but a few pages later Dodds himself seems to lapse
into the Nietzschean pattern when he says "Apollo promised security" and
"Dionysus offered freedom."
(Oxford 1977) 19-20 ("His writings
52MissingPersons: An Autobiography
were to haunt me and influence my behaviour over the next ten years of my
life.") and 180-181 (on his Sather Lecturesand the reasons for the success of
TheGreeksand theIrrational).
n. 62.
53Below,
54Plato,Gorgias(Oxford 1959) 390-391.
90 fr. 3[4] (1875,"WirPhilologen").

55KGWIV.1,
56Gftzen-Diimmerung
X 4.
57The literal sense is found more frequentlyin fragmentswritten between
1872 and 1874 than in his publishedworks. See for instance KGW III.4, 64
("Empedokles und die Opfer"), 104 ("Empedokles gegen das Thieropfer"),
134 ("Mysterien,Opfer") and 425 ("Odysseusopferte, um die Schatten-Lasst
uns dem Geiste Schopenhauersein ihnlichesOpfer bringen, indem wir sagen:
Philosophiaacademicadelenda est," with a characteristicshift from the literal
to the metaphoricalmeaning). The very last sentence of GT is similarlyambiguous ("jetzt aber folge mir zur Trag6dieund opfere mit mir im Tempel beider
Gottheiten" [i.e., Apollo and Dionysus]).
58GT10.
229
Greek myth had no place in his concept of the Dionysian. Only three
references to them can be found in GT, all of them ornamental.59 The
Bacchae of Euripides is discussed on a single page, while the
dismemberment of Pentheus is never mentioned, despite its relevance
for Nietzsche's thesis.60 The Bacchae required special caution because
its author was Euripides, who knew nothing about the Dionysian
according to Nietzsche.61 Yet it is quite clear that Nietzsche himself
had no serious interest in Greek myth, let alone in religion as practiced.
The scholar who filled in the blank spaces in Nietzsche's and even
Rohde's portrayals of Dionysiac religion was Jane Harrison of the
Cambridge school, who acknowledged her debt to Nietzsche more
than once.62 Learned and provocative, she reconstructed the most
primitive stages of Greek religion as she saw them from the traces
they had left in later tradition. The most savage Dionysiac myths led
her to alleged earlier rituals which she perceived as even more savage.
It was Harrison who coined the famous phrase that "myth is ritual
misunderstood."63 She added an extremely influential facet to
Rohde's picture of primitive Dionysiac cult when she applied William
Robertson Smith's theory of sacramental sacrifice to Dionysiac myth
and interpreted the omophagy of the maenads as a sacramental meal
59GT5 (where Nietzsche has the maenads of Ba. 680ff. take a nap "in der
Mittagssonne,"a curious error that Wilamowitzbelaboredin his Zukunftsphilologie [Berlin 1872] 19 n. 18); 8 (mountain-dancing)and 12 (Socratesas "the
new Orpheus" who is destined "von den Mainaden des athenischen
Gerichtshofes zerrissen zu werden"). In two of Nietzsche's earlier essays,
which were written in preparationof GT, the pastoral part of the first
messenger speech (Ba. 677-713) is paraphrased(KGW 111.2,50f.) or, in the
other case, translatedverbatim (KGWIII.2, 78f.).
60GT 12.
61GT 11-13.
to the Studyof GreekReligion(Cambridge1903, 3rd ed. 1922)

62Prolegomena
445 n. 4, where Harrisonquotes with approvalGT 4 ("Das Individuum,mit
allen seinen Grenzen und Maassen, ging hier in der Selbstvergessenheitder
dionysischen Zustande unter und vergass die apollinischen Satzungen"; cf.
above, n. 46); Themis:A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (Cambridge
1912, 2nd ed. 1927) viii ("disciple as I am in this matter of Nietzsche," in

reference to the division of Greek gods into daimonesand Olympians)and 476
(on the difference between Apollo and Dionysus, "which was long ago, with
the instinctof genius, divined by Nietzsche," followed by excerpts from GT 1,
9, and 16). On Harrison see McGinty (above, n. 41) 71-103 and 207-222;
Turner (above, n. 5) 122-128.
63Mythologyand Monuments of Ancient Athens (London 1890) iii and xxxiii; in
Themis331 myth is seen more positively as "the plot of the 8poAbEvov'
230
Albert Henrichs
in which the god himself was torn and eaten in the shape of a bull or
goat.64 Frazer had anticipated her in the earlier editions of his Golden
Bough,65 but she provided the gory detail and enthusiastic presentation
for which Frazer had neither the inclination nor the talent. Unlike
Frazer, Harrison implied that the maenadic meal in which divinity was
consumed in its raw state was not very different from the Christian
eucharist, except that it was more primitive.66 Dodds adopted the
sacramental theory in his commentary on the Bacchae.67
In her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Nietzsche
is quoted with approval for defining Dionysus as the god of "limitless
excess" in contrast with Apollo.68 Although she considered blood
much more powerful than wine, she devoted a whole section of her
book to intoxicating drinks and almost succeeded in turning Dionysus
into the god of beer.69 With the first publication of Themis in 1912,
Harrison had moved in a new direction. Nietzsche is still praised as
the genius who discovered the difference between Olympian and
chthonian gods, the two sides of Greek religion.70 The quotation from
478-491.
64Prolegomena
65j. G. Frazer, The GoldenBough:A Studyin Comparative
Religion(1st ed.,
London 1890) I 327 and II 43; (2nd ed., London 1900) II 365-366; 3rd ed., pt.
V.1, Spiritsof the Corn and the Wild(London 1912, and later reprints) 17-18
("the worshippersof Dionysus believed themselves to be killing the god, eating his flesh, and drinkinghis blood," with an implicitallusion to John 6.56)
and 23 ( = 2nd ed., II 167), where the absurdityof Frazer'stheory fully reveals
itself ("Thus we have the strange spectacle of a god [i.e., Dionysus in goat
form] sacrificedto himself on the ground that he is his own enemy. And as
the deity is supposed to partakeof the victim offered to him, it follows that,
when the victim is the god's old self, the god eats of his own flesh. Hence the
goat-god Dionysus is representedas eating raw goat's blood [Eur. Ba. 138f.];
and the bull-god Dionysus is called 'eater of bulls' [schol. Aristoph. Frogs
3571."). For more details on the sacramentaltheory in modern scholarship,
see Henrichs, "Changing Dionysiac Identities" (above, n. 12) 159-160 and
234-235 nn. 207-222.
66Prolegomena452-453 and 487.
671ntroductionxviif. = The Greeksand the Irrational277. It is ironic that

Dodds should advise the readersof his commentaryon the Bacchae(above, n.
49) to use Harrison'sProlegomena
"with caution" (xif. n. 2) while expressinga
debt to "Gruppe'sview" of sacramentalomophagy (Irrational277), which was
itself inspiredby the Cambridgeschool.
68Above, n. 62.
69Prolegomena
413-424, with much emphasison the ThracianDionysus, due
to Rohde's theory of the "foreign," i.e., Thracian,god. Harrisonwithdrew
Dionysus the beer god in a footnote to the thirdedition (453 n. 1).
70Themis476-477 (above, n. 62).
231
GT is followed immediately by another from Emile Durkheim and

Marcel Mauss. Between Prolegomenaand Themis,French sociology
had aroused her interest in social institutions, and total identification
with the deity was replacedby total identificationwith the group, and
religious ecstasy with "collective emotion."71In a sense Harrisonhad
abandoned the mysticism of Rohde and had returned, via sociology,
to the Nietzschean concept of submergence of the individual in the.
Dionysiac collective of the satyr chorus. Dionysiac myth and ritual
are reinterpreted in the new light. Omophagy is now seen as the
constitutive act of a totemistic organizationwhich established "groupunity."72 The Zagreus myth is no longer the explanation for a sacramental meal but a blueprintfor an initiation of a tribalgroup.73What
is distinctlylacking in Harrison'sreconstructionof primitiveGreece is
a concrete chronologicalframework. The postulatedorigins remain by
definition distant, but we are never told exactly how distant. Yet
Harrisonoften tries to compensate for her lack of historicalconcreteness by makingcertain assumptionsabout human behaviorin general,
which provide a theoretical model for the way in which the Greeks
ought to have behaved. This is what makes her comparativemethod
superficially appealing-it reduces the distance between the Greeks
and the modern interpreter. At the same time it tends to have a leveling effect, which blurs the genuine difference between the Greeks
and other people, including ourselves, a difference strongly felt by
Nietzsche. Harrison in Themis initiated the systematic quest for
universal patterns of religious experience that arguablyshaped many
Greek myths and rituals, and she turned to other disciplinesfor a general explanation and for theoreticalguidance. A more recent and circumspect applicationof a similar method can be found in Burkert's
Homo Necans, which traces Greek sacrifice and the mental attitudes
that generated it to their distant origins in the hunting societies of
palaeolithicman.74
711am echoingTurner(above,n. 5) 126. The Durkheimian
conceptof "collective emotion" is dominant throughout Themis(see especiallyxiii, xv, 45-49
and 123).
72Themisxv-xvi and 118-157 ("group-unity"occurs on p. 125). The sacramental theory, so eloquentlychampionedin Prolegomena,
is casuallyrejectedon
p. 119. In her last book on Greek religion, Harrisonunderstoodthe Dionysiac
thiasus as a "tribal-group" which undergoes a rite de passage (Epilegomena to the

Study of Greek Religion [Cambridge 1921] 17-18).
73Themis 13-27.
74Homo Necans: Interpretationenaligriechischer Opferriten und Mythen. RGVV
32 (Berlin 1972, English trans. 1983). Burkert'swork is informed by a much
232
Albert Henrichs
In contrast with both Nietzsche and Rohde, Harrison was deeply

interested in Dionysus as a god, or put differently,as a distinct divinity with personal characteristics. Dionysus seems to have been her
favorite Greek god. She was attracted by his wild, non-Olympian
sides, which made him a natural target for her approach. She liked
his maenads equallywell, whom she perceivedas ritual mothers.75She
hailed his close connection with trees, plants, and animals as a
"return to nature" and as an emotional escape from the restraints
imposed by reason.76It was in this spirit that she approachedthe Bacchae of Euripides. The curiosity with which she looked at the Greek
maenads is reminiscent of the intimate portrayalsof Victorian Bacchants in Alma-Tadema's historical paintings. Although ritual
violence is a prominent theme throughout Harrison's work, in her
interpretationit always serves a higher purpose. Blood is spilled for
good reasons, to save the community, to become one with deity, and
so on. Here, too, Harrison'streatmentof ritual violence foreshadows
more recent trends, which culminatein Girard'sLa violenceet le sacr,.
Like Burkert's Homo Necans, which appeared in the same year,
Girard'sbook is a study of human aggressionin the limited context of
myth and ritual.77The spontaneous slaughterof human victims in the
distant past is seen as the originalact from which all religion springs.
Religion is the institutionalization of violence by containment.
Violence that occurs in times of calculated "sacrificial crisis" is
"good" violence because the ritual victim dies for a beneficial
purpose-to make his fellow men more civilized by deflecting their
desire to kill each other. Selective, controlled violence directed
against "surrogate victims" or scapegoats prevents large-scale
bloodshed. Within this general conceptual framework,Girard offers
the most violent interpretationof Euripides' Bacchaeever attempted,
keenerhistoricalsensethanHarrison's,but he too is moreinterestedin overGreekarticularidingaspectsof the humanconditionthanin theirspecifically
tion (p. 5 of the preface:"es ist nicht so sehr die Eigenartdes Griechischen,die
dabei wichtig ist . .
der anthropologische Aspekt iuberwiegt den humani-
stischen.").
75Prolegomena
388-403; Themis39 and 423 (maenads as "mothers" and
"nurses of the holy child").
444-446. In a letter to Gilbert Murray, Harrison hailed a
76Prolegomena
fawn-rendingDionysus on a red-figurestamnos in the BritishMuseum as "this
splendid savage" (J. Stewart, Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portraitfrom Letters [London 1959] 45; cf. Prolegomena 450).
77La violence et le sacre (Paris 1972), English trans. Violence and the Sacred
(Baltimore1977) chap. 5 (on the Bacchae).
Loss of Self Suffering, Violence
233
with disastrous consequences for Dionysus. The mythical plot of the

Bacchaeis taken at face value and read as if it were a social document.
Girard is not interested in either the Greeks or Dionysus but in
universal patterns of religious behavior. Whereas Harrison and
Burkert borrowed from other disciplines to illuminate the Greek
material, Girardabuses a single piece of Greek evidence to prove his
theoreticalpoint. Pentheus is the typicalvictim of collective violence;
his murder is the "culminationand resolution of the sacrificialcrisis";
and Dionysus is the "god of violence."'78Girard does not write for
classical readers and must not be held to their standards, but too
much is ignored that is importantfor a proper understandingof the
Bacchaeas a productof Euripidesand Greek society: for instance, the
nonviolent aspects of Dionysiac cult echoed in other passages of the
Bacchae79or the function of stories about human sacrifice in Greek
culture.80For no good reason, Girard regardsDionysus the wine god
as a "later" palliationof the "god of violence."81Although he criticizes Frazer and does not mention Jane Harrison, his own method
exemplifies the major interests of the anthropologicalschool: their
78Girard
(Englishtrans.)119-142,esp. 126-130.
79Girard
ignoresthe parodosand other choralodes wherethe Dionysiac
as wellas the end of the firstmessenger
moodis one of peaceandtranquility,
speech (Ba. 765-768), which describesthe maenads' return to normalcy(even

though an eventual restorationof order is implicitin Girard'sconcept of the
"sacrificialcrisis"). He also ignores Dionysiaccult, includingmaenadism.
80Girard's evolutionist theory of "double substitution" (English trans.
101-103) aims to establish the priorityof human sacrificeover animalsacrifice.
In keeping with his theoreticalstartingpoint (i.e., the ritual killingof a human
"surrogatevictim" in the distant past), he assumes that human sacrificewas
still practicedin fifth-centuryAthens and that "the practicewas perpetuatedin
the form of the pharmakos"(9; cf. 94-98, 109). Both assumptionsare mistaken; see A. Henrichs, "Human Sacrificein Greek Religion:Three Case StuEntredies," in J. Rudhardtand 0. Reverdin, eds., Le sacrificedans I'antiquite.
tiens FondationHardt27 (Geneva 1981) 195-235, esp. 208ff. and J. Bremmer,
"ScapegoatRituals in Ancient Greece," HSCP 87 (1983) 299-320, esp. sec. 7.
Whereas Girard sees "no essential difference between animal sacrifice and
human sacrifice" (10), the whole point of Greek accounts of human sacrifice,
whether they take the form of myth or historicalfiction, is to illustratethe
essential difference between animal sacrifice (the Greek norm) and human
sacrifice (an aberrationin Greek eyes). The only premise which the Greek
view of human sacrificehas in common with Girard'stheory (or with the Cambridge school, for that matter) is that of a development from human sacrifice
in the distant past to less violent forms of sacrificein more recent times. It is
doubtfulsuch a developmentever occurredin the historyof Greek religion.
81Girard133.
234
AlbertHenrichs
quest for origins; the ritual explanation of myth; the evolutionary

model; and the massive use of comparative data drawn from many
different cultures. With Girard's book, certain conspicuous trends in
the modern study of Dionysus which first appear in Rohde and
Harrison have been brought to their logical conclusion--violently.
Dionysus has been so drasticallyuprooted from his original Greek
habitatand transplantedto modern regions where blood is more plentiful than wine that he might not survive. Can Dionysus be saved?
V. RECONCILIATION
OF OPPOSITES
What is needed is a return to a more flexible approachto Dionysus

which avoids the one-sided attention to isolated aspects of the god
that has led many interpreters astray. The keenest students of
Dionysus have always acknowledged that the god is more than the
sum of his components, let alone a subtraction therefrom, and that
the properway to understandhim is to take the bull by the horns and
to focus more consciously on the numerous contradictions and
conflicts which occupy such an importantplace in the Greek conception of him. The way for a more flexible understandingwas opened
in 1933 when Walter F. Otto summed up Dionysus as a god of paradox who combines "immediate presence with absolute remoteness"
and "infinite vitality with savage destruction."82Otto merely articulated some perceptive hints droppedby Nietzsche in his GTand elsewhere.83 By overstating his case, and by ignoring the historical
perspective,Otto nearly rode a good horse to death, and his book was
ignored. In recent years, however, new progress in this direction has
been made by a number of scholars who, while proceeding from
different assumptions, have all emphasized the essential duality and
82Dionysos,Mythos und Kultus (Frankfurt a. M. 1933, repr. 1960) 111
(Englishtrans. Dionysus:Mythand Cult[Bloomington1965] 121).
83Otto'sbook is based on the conceptionof the "dual nature" of Dionysus,
or in Otto's words, his "Doppelheit," "Doppelsein," and "Doppelseitigkeit"
(80, 84, 111, and 153; English trans. 86, 91, 121, and 169). Otto's unacknowledged source of inspirationwas Nietzsche, whose name occurs more than
once in Otto's book. Nietzsche emphasizedthe "Mischungund Doppelheitin
den Affekten der dionysischenSchwarmer"(GT 2) as well as the "Doppelnatur" of Dionysus himself (below, n. 88), whom Nietzsche summed up as
"jener grosse Zweideutige und Versucher-Gott" (Jenseits von Gut und B6se
[1886] 295). On Otto's debt to Nietzsche see McGinty(above, n. 41) 141-180,
esp. 167-168.
235
otherness of Dionysus. Names that come to mind include Louis Gernet, Walter Burkert,and Jean-PierreVernant, not to mention several
other scholars besides Vernant who have studied Dionysus from a
predominantlystructuralistpoint of view.84
Scholars will and must continue to study the Greek and Roman
Dionysus in the specific context of a particularplace and time as well
as under more universal aspects. The historicalmethod tends to compartmentalizeDionysus by concentratingon his concrete manifestations, each taken separately. There is a growing awareness, however,
that the historical approachimposes artificiallimitations on Dionysus
that are contradictedby the god's own openness and lack of definition.
Dionysus consistently exhibits more universal features that cut across
the traditionalcompartmentsinto which nineteenth-centuryhistorians
of religion have separatedhim.
That Dionysus is characterizedby ambiguities in most of his manifestations was recognized long ago by several ancient advocatesof his
cause who felt that Dionysus was more than the god of wine and of
the maenads. The observations I have in mind range from the early
fifth century B.C.to the second centuryA.D.and were made by authors
as different in their interests as Heraclitus, Horace, Plutarch, and
Aelius Aristides. Different though they were, they all tried to define
the dual nature of Dionysus consciously in terms of pairsof opposites
such as male/female, young/old, war/peace, wild/mild, day/night,
and life/death.85Each of these pairsof opposites is at work in the two
most prominent provinces of Dionysus, wine and maenadism. The
84Gernet,Anthropologie
(above, n. 38) 114 ("C'est I'antith6seque Dionysos
signifie partout"); Burkert, GriechischeReligion(above, n. 14) 252 ("Mit solchem Verfliessen der pers6nlichenGeformtheit [see above, n. 46] steht der
Dionysos-Kultin Kontrastzu dem, was mit Recht als typischgriechischgilt");
Vernant, Mytheet pens&e(above, n. 38) 269 = II 81 ("une exp6rience religieuse inverse du culte officiel").
85Thewords life/death/life, peace/warand truth/falsehoodare written next
to the abbreviatedname of Dionysus on two Orphicbone tablets from fifthcenturyB.C.Olbia (A. S. Rusyayeva, VestnikDrevneyIstorii143 [1978] 87-104;
German summary by F. Tinnefeld, ZPE 38 [1980] 67-71; cf. W. Burkert,
"Neue Funde zur Orphik," Informationenzum altsprachlichenUnterricht2 [1980]
27-42, esp. 36-38; M. L. West, "The Orphics of Olbia," ZPE 45 [1982]

17-29). For further pairs of opposites, see Heraclitus 22 B 15 Diels-Kranz
(Hades/Dionysus); Horace Odes2.19.28 (war/peace);Plut. Ant. 24, see below,
n. 88 (wild/mild; cf. Coh. ira 13, 462B), Demetr.2 (war/peace);Aristid. Or. 41
(male/female, young/old, war/peace, day/night); Olympiod. In Plat. Phaed.
1.6(4), 6.13(38) and 7.10(43) Norvin/Westerink (life/death). Cf. Henrichs,
"ChangingDionysiacIdentities" (above, n. 12) 158-159.
236
AlbertHenrichs
conclusion to be drawn from these observations is that Dionysus

magnifies distinctions imposed by nature or society either by closing
the gap between opposite aspects of existence or by widening it. In
either case, man is caught in the middle and his identity or selfperceptionis affected, at least temporarily.
The dual nature of Dionysus was rediscovered in the eighteenth
century, with help from ancient authors, but it was only applied to
Dionysus in art.86The Romantic tradition went further and understood Dionysus' duality as an innate quality of the god's overall character but did not recognize more than one or two pairs of opposites.87
Nietzsche inherited this narrow perspective and did not broaden it
very much. He was far too preoccupied with the larger antithesis
between Apollo and Dionysus to pay much attention to differentiation
within Dionysus, but scatteredreferences to a "wild" as opposed to a
"gentle" Dionysus and to related aspects of the god's duality occur
not only in GT but also in some of Nietzsche's earlierand later comments on him.88
86G. E. Lessing (Laokoon [1766] 8) suggested that Dionysus was called
(Diod. 4.5.2, who gives an art-historicalexplanation) "weil er sich
81btop~oo
schon als schrecklichzeigen konnte." Lessing was thinkingof ancient
sowohl
representationsof Dionysus that show the god with and withouthorns.
87Novalis(1772-1801) in particulardescribedthe Dionysiacmood as one of
"Wehmut und Wollust, Tod und Leben"; see Baeumer, "Die romantische
Epiphaniedes Dionysos" (above, n. 29) 228-229.
88The key passage is GT 10 (KGW III.1, 68.20-25): "Aus dem Lacheln
dieses Dionysus [i.e., Zagreus] sind die olympischen Gotter, aus seinen
Thranendie Menschenentstanden. In jener Existenz als zerstuckelterGott hat
Dionysus die Doppelnatureines grausamen verwildertenDamons und eines
milden sanftmuthigenHerrschers. Die Hoffnung der Epopten ging aber auf
eine Wiedergeburtdes Dionysus." Three notes Nietzsche wrote in the winter
of 1870/1871 explain the historyof this passage (KGWIII.3, 160 fr. 7 [61]; 165
fr. 7 [81]; and esp. 185 fr. 7 [123], which preservesa fuller version): "Aus dem
Lachelndes Phanes sind die olympischenGotter, aus seinen Thranendie Menschen geschaffen. In jenem Zustandhat Dionysos die Doppelnatureines grauund
samen, verwilderten Damons und eines milden Herrschers (als
und pEtelXLoq). Diese Natur offenbart sich in so &ypLdVLO4
schrecklichen
per'a-n'r,
Anwandlungen,wie in jener Forderungdes WahrsagersEuphrantidesvor der
Schlacht bei Marathon [read: Salamis], man mOsse dem Dionysos
&ypLOoWLO
die drei Schwesternsohne des Xerxes, drei schone
[read:
und
dies
allein
sei die
glanzendgq'o'rk]n
zum
Junglinge
Opfer
bringen:
geschmockte
Burgschaftdes Sieges. Die Hoffnungder Epoptengieng auf eine Wiedergeburt
des Dionysos." Nietzsche's notes establish Plutarch'sLife of Antony24 and
Life of Themistocles13 as his sources. In Ant. 24 two opposite pairs of
Dionysus' epithets, namely,
and
are
tEuLXxLo/&dypuJu'Lo4
xapL8671r4/dAao-or74'4,
13 ( = Phainiasof Eresos
fr. 25 Wehrli) Pluappliedto MarkAntony; in Them.
237
The true artist of Dionysiac dualism in the nineteenth century was

not Nietzsche but Walter Pater (1839-94). His essay "A Study of
Dionysus" appearedin December of 1876, five years after the printing of GT.89Chronologicallyas well as in its conception of Dionysus,
Pater's essay stands between the aesthetic refinement of Nietzsche
and the anthropological orientation of the Cambridge school. He
interpretedDionysus symbolicallyas "the spirit of fire and dew" and
as "a dual god of both summer and winter."90He adopted Tylor's
animism and notion of the primitive as a universal religious
category.91Even more striking than his debt to Tylor is his seeming
closeness to Nietzsche. Pater seems to echo Nietzsche's GT so often
that knowledge of it on his part has often been taken for granted.92
tarch quotes a full but fictitious account of the alleged human sacrifice to
before the battle of Salamis (see Henrichs, "Human
Dionysus
Vr0o-ri7"~
Sacrifice"[above,
n. 80] 208-224). Long before Nietzsche's GT, the same two
texts from Plutarch had been adduced, in connection with the "wild"
Dionysus, by F. Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker, besonders der
GriechenIII (2nd ed., Leipzig 1821) 334, abbreviatedin the 3rd ed., IV (Leipzig
1842) 94, and by F. G. Welcker, Griechische Gotterlehre I (Gottingen 1857)
443-444. Nietzsche was familiarwith both works. In his later comments on

Dionysus, however, he described "the psychologyof the Dionysian state" in
terms of more general opposites such as life/death and joy/pain, and without
direct reference to opposite aspects of Dionysus (G6tzen-Dammerung
[18891X
4). More recentlyE. R. Dodds summarizedthe dual natureof Dionysus along
the lines of Nietzsche and Otto, for instancein his introductionto the Bacchae
(above, n. 49) xliv: "Dionysus [is] the embodiment of those tragic
contradictions--joyand horror, insight and madness, innocent gaiety and dark
cruelty-which ... are implicitin all religionof the Dionysiactype." Above, n.
83.
89"A Study of Dionysus: the SpiritualForm of Fire and Dew," Fortnightly
Review 20 (1876) 752-772, repr. in W. Pater, Greek Studies: A Series of Essays
(London 1895) 1-48 (9-52); cf. the sequel "The Bacchanalsof Euripides"
(between 1876 and 1878), Macmillan's Magazine 60 (1889) 63-72 = Greek Stu-
dies 49-79 (53-80). Page numbers in parenthesesrefer to the standardMacmillan Library Edition (London 1910, followed by numerous reprints) of
Pater'sworks.
90GreekStudies5 (13), 19 (26), 22 (28), and 38 (43).
91GreekStudies3-5 (11-13), with references, typically,to Ovid's Metamorphoses and Shelley's "Sensitive Plant," but without acknowledgmentof Tylor
(above, n. 41), whose tree and plantsouls haunt Pater'spages.
92Current scholarly opinion favors the view that Pater had not read
Nietzsche. I am inclined to agree, in the absence of direct evidence for Pater's
acquaintancewith Nietzsche, but considerabledoubts remain. See G. C. Monsman, Pater's Portraits: Mythic Pattern in the Fiction of Walter Pater (Baltimore
1967) 16-29, esp. 18-19; P. Bridgwater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony: A Study of
238
AlbertHenrichs
Like Nietzsche, Pater differentiated between two art forms, one

diffuse and archaicand the other controlledand Dorian, which parallel
Nietzsche's Dionysian and Apollonian.93Like Nietzsche, he assigneda
prominentplace to the myth of Zagreus, "a tortured,persecuted,slain
god," as he called him.94He described the "dark" Dionysus in more
detail than any writer had done before, but he interpreted the
suffering of the god differently as nature's suffering in the gloom of
winter.95Again like Nietzsche, he recognized both sides of Dionysus
and applied to him not only the antithesis between fire and dew but
also such pairs of opposites as mild/wild, hunter/spoil, joy/sorrow,
bright/dark.96For the pair mild/wild, he refers to the same two Greek
used by Nietzsche and derived from
terms, aELXtXLO'and
Bacchae
Plutarch.97
likeob'trq-iT'', Pater
Nietzsche,
Exactly
regardedEuripides'
as a palinode in which the poet recanted his earlier rationalism.98
Unfortunately, Pater's letters give no indicationthat he had read GT
or heard of Nietzsche.99The similarities between the two men are
such that each of them could have arrived at his views on Dionysus
Nietzsche's Import on English and American Literature (Leicester 1972) 21-29; D.
S. Thatcher,Nietzschein England,1890-1914 (Toronto 1970) 126-132. I could

not find any reference to Nietzsche in M. Levey, The Case of' WalterPater
(London 1978). Monsman, Bridgwater,and Thatcherfocus almost exclusively
on the two art forms in Nietzsche (Apollonian/Dionysian) and Pater
(Dorian/Ionian)and ignore Pater'sdual conceptionof Dionysus and its similarity to the Dionysus of GT
93GreekStudies 27-30 (34-36).
94GreekStudies 46 (51).
95GreekStudies 41-44 (46-49).
96GreekStudies34 (40), 37 (42), 39 (44), 40-43 (45-48), and 77 (78, see following note).
97Greek Studies 77 (78): "and Dionysus Omophagus-the eater of raw flesh,
must be added to the golden image of Dionysus Meilichius-the honey-sweet,

. . if we are to catch, in its fulness, that deep under-currentof horrorwhich
?
runs
below, all through this masque of spring, and realise the spectacleof that
wild chase, in which Dionysus is ultimatelyboth the hunterand the spoil." Cf.
Greek Studies43 (48) on "Dionysus the Devourer"and the alleged human
sacrificebefore the battle of Salamis. For Plutarch,see above, n. 88.
98GreekStudies50-52 (54-55); Nietzsche, GT 12. The palinodetheory can
be traced back to the eighteenth century (see Dodds's introductionto the Bacchae [above, n. 49] xl-xlii), and, around the middle of the nineteenthcentury,
esp. to K. O. Muller, whose work was known to both Nietzsche and Pater (Historyof the Literature
of AncientGreeceI [London 1840] 379 = ed. of 1858, I 499;
published posthumously from Muller's original text as Geschichte der
griechischen Literaturbis auf'das Zeitalter Alexanders [Breslau 1841] II 176).
99L.Evans, Lettersof WalterPater(Oxford 1970).
239
independentlyof the other, through recourse to the Romanticconcept

of Dionysus and to well-known Greek texts. Pater's essay on
is one of the
Dionysus, more so than his later one on the Bacchae,1oo
most impressive and probing interpretativeefforts made on behalf of
the god in the nineteenth century, but because of its pervasivenature
symbolism, which was alreadyout of date in 1876, and because of its
torturedstyle, the essay had next to no influence on the modern study
of Dionysus.101
Nietzsche, Pater, and Otto all tried to deal with the complexity of
Dionysus by emphasizing his inherent duality and by paying equal
attention to his opposite aspects. This seems to me the most promising way of studying this god. Much remains to be done, once we
have overcome the modern obsession with blood and with psychological states, which are only isolated facets of a much more comprehensive picture. For instance, no full-scale structuralist analysis of
Dionysus exists, although it would predictablysharpen our eyes for
the enormous range of oppositions that can be found in the ancient
Dionysiac record. Whereas Detienne imposed an artificialpattern of
opposite trends on Greek religion in the classical period which, ironically, tends to ignore the dual nature of Dionysus, Vernant's occasional remarksdo not add up to a coherent analysis of the god and his
religion.102 Charles Segal's recent structuraliststudy of the Bacchae
100Above,n. 89. One of the four stories collected in Pater's ImaginaryPortraitsof 1887, "Denys I'Auxerrois" (first publishedin 1886), is a fictionallife
history, set in medieval France, of the sufferingDionysus reincarnate. Replete
with delicate allusions to Dionysiac myth, it recreates, in Pater's most characteristic genre, the peculiarconception of the god's dual nature as delineated
more factually in "A Study of Dionysus." See Monsman, Pater's Portraits
(above, n. 92) 107-117, and R. M. Seiler, ed., WalterPater: The CriticalHeritage (London 1980) 26-29, 162-187.
1011 discern a clear but unacknowledged echo of Pater's "A Study of
Dionysus" in A. Fairbanks,A Handbookof GreekReligion(New York 1910)
240-241: "The gods who live and work in nature, who suffer as man suffers
and give him joy in their joy, whose worshipis concerned with the ploughand
the sickle, Demeter and Dionysus, tend to supplant the serene spirits of
Olympusin the real religion of the seventh and sixth centuries .... Dionysus,
however, was the god about whom the great religious revival centred,
Dionysus the twice-born, for in a Thraciangod the Greeks recognized that
same spirit of plant-lifeand of the vine which was worshippedin winter and
springby their own farmingclass."
102Detienne, "Dionysos," in Dictionnairedes Mythologies(Paris 1981) I
300-302, 305-307; Dionysosmis ci mort(above, n. 12) 200-202 (English trans.
90-91), a brief comment on "l'alternance indiff6rente des extremes" in
Dionysiac myth. Following Detienne, Vernant too focuses mainly on the col-
240
AlbertHenrichs
contains many useful comments on "dichotomies," "reversals,"

"polarities," and "the resolution of opposites" but is not primarily
concerned with Dionysus as such.103 Perhaps other scholars will
analyze the ambiguities of Dionysus and their various functions in
Greek society more systematically.104
No other Greek god has created more confusion in the modern
mind, nor produceda wider spectrumof different and often contradictory interpretations. By the same token, Dionysus has also stimulated
more interest than any pagandeity. During the past 150 years, attention to Dionysus on the partof scholars as well as appreciationof him
by the general public have increased in the same measure as the
difference of opinion has become more obvious and more extreme.
The curious fact is that the more elusive Dionysus becomes, the more
prominent he appears. If this trend should continue, as it presumably
will, Dionysus is assured of an even longer and more exciting life in
the future than the various lives he has had in the past.105
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
betweengods,men, and beastsin Dionysiacmyth;cf. his

lapseof distinctions
comments in Le sacrificedans I'antiquit?(above, n. 80) 27, 34-35, 38, and in

Mytheet pensee (above, n. 38) 268-270 = II 80-82. On the whole, Detienne
and Vernant emphasize the alleged opposition of "le dionysisme" to more
"normal" types of Greek religion and therefore overemphasize the dark or
"subversive" aspectsof Dionysus.
103DionysiacPoetics and Euripides' Bacchae (above, n. 13). Segal's approach to
Dionysus is exceedinglyflexible. His Dionysus owes as much to the Dionysian

as to the rites
psychologyof Nietzsche, Rohde, Dodds, and Winnington-Ingram
de passage approachof Harrison,Jeanmaire,Calame, and Vidal-Naquetor to
the ahistorical
schematization
of Detienne(see Segal'sbibliography
and index
for references). In the final count, the Dionysus whom Segal presents with
much ingenuityand insight remainsan academicconstruct (much as Euripides'
Dionysus is a poetic construct) that lies outside the historical perimeter of
Greek cult, although not necessarilyoutside the realm of Greek religion at
large (anothermodern construct,however inevitable).
104Myown summary("ChangingDionysiacIdentities,"above, n. 12) is
merely a first step in this direction.

1051am indebtedto Max L. Baeumer,Jan Bremmer,Jerome H. Buckley,Bernard Knox, Hugh Lloyd-Jones,Thomas Martin, Gregory Nagy, Ruth Scodel,
FriedrichSolmsen, Zeph Stewart,and Theodore Ziolkowskifor various advice
and comments.

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Department of the Classics, Harvard University

LOSSOF SELF, SUFFERING,VIOLENCE:

Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin

Loss of Self Suffering,Violence

1970); St. Brecht, The DramaReview13 (1969) 156-169; B. Knox, Wordand

50n GilbertMurraysee below, n. 35; Jane Harrisonand JamesGeorge

existential suffering and of escape from it in Hugo von

Rohde'sfictitiousaccountof the wild worshipersof the ThracianDionysus

(below, n. 43). On Mann's pencil-markedcopy of Psyche see H. Lehnert,

social significance by Walter Burkertas well as by Girard. Burkert's

Nothing illustrates the extremes which mark the perimeter of the

Dionysus from the Bronze Age to the end of antiquityand interprets

Loss of Self, Suffering,Violence

Dionysiac myth, which portraythe god as the instigatoras well as the

140n Dionysus Zagreussee W. Fauth, "Zagreus,"RE 9A (1967) 2221-2283;

A. Henrichs, Die Phoinikika des Lollianos: Fragmente eines neuen griechischen

Romans.PapyrologischeTexte und Abhandlungen14 (Bonn 1972) 56-73; Deti-

into the purview of Detienne's study or into his picture of Greek

For better emphasis, we shall go back to the history of Dionysus in

Loss of Self Suffering,Violence

distinction between blood and wine, and both promisedtheir followers

treatmentof the receptionof Dionysus/Bacchus

387-399; H. R. Williamson,LorenzotheMagnificent(London 1974) 254-258; C.

Museum, HarvardUniversity, 1979) 62-64 (with select bibliographyon Piero

Loss of Self Suffering,Violence

again became heavy and inflated, as in the paintings of Rubens or

61-75 and "Simplicityand Grandeur:Winckelmann,French Classicism, and

Jefferson," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 7 (1978) 63-78, as well as

Baeumer (1976) 167f. and (1977) 134f. (below, n. 37). On Winckelmann,

pre-Romantic reaction set in, and Herder reinstated Dionysus, no

Wein" (1800-1801) and "Der Einzige" (1801-1803). In "Der Einzige,"

Loss of Self Suffering,Violence

Crucified, according to Holderlin, lies not in their suffering, as

Mass. 1964) 142-165; Baeumer1973-74 (precedingnote) 102f., 107ff.

ed.) on "The Myths of Arrival." On Johann Georg Hamann's (1730-88)

Baeumer in B. Gajek, ed., Johann Georg Hamann. Acta des Internationalen

(1967-68) 92-127; K. Stierle, "Dichtung und Auftrag: Holderlins Patmos-

Hymne," Holderlin-Jahrbuch22 (1980-81) 47-68.

"Die zeitgeschichtlicheFunktion des dionysischenTopos in der romantischen

Loss of Self Suffering,Violence

fledged ambivalence seems to have escaped the notice of Germanists

This is the Dionysus which Nietzsche inherited, a dying god who

the Romantic rearticulationof Dionysus was heard by Nietzsche loud

wir, dass der Ubermensch lebe"). Cf. Nietzsche's earlier interpretation,in a

Vogel, Apollinischund Dionysisch.Geschichteeines genialenIrrtums.Studien zur

and its various interpretations before and after Nietzsche have

followedby severalsubsequenteditions;see Baeumer[below,n. 37][1976]

175-180. The Zagreusmythis the cornerstoneof GT,and one wonderswhy

been made in antiquitybut that was later adopted by Gilbert Murray.35

Dionysius of Halicarnassuswas thinkingof the Zagreusmyth).

Loss of Self, Suffering,Violence

of the group. Greek tragedy is thus an artistic representationof the

on Dionysus. The three most prominentnames in the modern study

Etudes de psychologie historique (Paris 1965) 268-270 (= II 80f. of the reissue,

Paris 1981). Typicaldescriptionsof Dionysiacreligionsuch as "la surexcitation

"fr6n6sie collective" (A. Bruhl, LiberPater [Paris 1953] 6; Vernant, Mytheet

wide currencyto Durkheim and to Harrison'sDurkheimianreinterpretationof

Possessionand Shamanism(Penguin Books 1971), who reproducesa dancing

ed., Freiburg 1898) II 1-136 (English trans. London 1925, 253-361). On