Dionysus: The Greek God of Wine, Ecstasy, and Theatre

Every wine culture has a god, but none is stranger than the Greeks’. Dionysus was the god of the vine and the grape — and, in the same breath, the god of ecstasy, madness, fertility and the theatre. He embodied the double nature of wine itself: the power to release and to ruin, to bring joy and to bring chaos, held together in one unpredictable, boundary-crossing deity¹.

To understand how the ancient world thought about wine, you have to understand its most contradictory god.

The twice-born outsider

Dionysus was an outsider from the start. In myth he was the son of Zeus and the mortal princess Semele; when Semele was destroyed, Zeus sewed the unborn child into his own thigh and carried him to term — hence the epithet “twice-born”². He was imagined as arriving from the East, a foreign god who came to Greece bearing a dangerous gift: the vine¹.

That gift is the heart of his cult. Dionysus gave humankind wine, and with it a way to escape, however briefly, the weight of being human — a mercy and a menace in the same cup, as the playwright Euripides understood better than anyone⁷.

“He discovered and bestowed on mortals the flowing grape that puts an end to grief… there is no other cure for sorrow.”— after Euripides, The Bacchae⁷

Ekstasis: wine and divine madness

The core of Dionysian worship was ekstasis, a Greek word meaning literally to stand outside oneself — the altered state reached through wine, music, dance and religious frenzy¹. His most devoted followers were the maenads, or Bacchae: women who left home and city to roam the mountains in ecstatic bands, dressed in fawn-skins and carrying the thyrsus, a fennel staff tipped with a pine cone⁵.

It was worship as liberation and as danger both. To surrender to Dionysus was to dissolve the ordinary self and the ordinary rules — thrilling, sacred, and, to the authorities who prized order, deeply alarming⁶.

The god who invented theatre

Dionysus’s strangest legacy is the one we least associate with wine: the theatre. In fifth-century-BC Athens, the festivals in his honour — above all the great City Dionysia — evolved into competitions of drama⁴. For several days the city would stop, and citizens would gather on the slope of the Acropolis, in the Theatre of Dionysus itself, to watch tragedies, comedies and satyr plays performed in the god’s presence³.

Western drama — Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides — was, quite literally, an act of wine-worship. It is no accident that one of the greatest surviving Greek tragedies, Euripides’ Bacchae, is about Dionysus himself, and the terrible price a king pays for denying the god his due⁷.

Bacchus and the Roman crackdown

The Romans adopted the god as Bacchus, and his secret nocturnal rites — the Bacchanalia — spread through Italy³. To the Roman Senate they looked less like worship than a subversive secret society: unsupervised, mixed in class and sex, and beyond the state’s control. In 186 BC the Senate cracked down hard, issuing the Senatusconsultum de Bacchanalibus, which banned Bacchic societies on pain of death; by ancient accounts thousands of followers were executed, in what has been called the first great religious persecution in European history³.

It is a striking measure of wine’s perceived power: a god of the grape frightened the most powerful state in the ancient world enough to launch a purge.

The enduring god

Dionysus never really left. His double nature — wine as joy and wine as danger — is still the fundamental fact of our relationship with drink, and his name survives in the word “bacchanal” for any wild feast². Two and a half thousand years later, we still raise a glass to a god who taught that wine could carry a mortal, however briefly, out of himself — and that the same power always cut both ways¹.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Roman bubbles: ancient sparkling wine?
• The sublime language of wine and poetry
• The origins of wine and viticulture

References

1. Encyclopædia Britannica — Dionysus. www.britannica.com ↩
2. World History Encyclopedia — Dionysos. www.worldhistory.org ↩
3. Encyclopædia Britannica — Bacchanalia. www.britannica.com ↩
4. Encyclopædia Britannica — Dionysia (the festivals and Greek drama). www.britannica.com ↩
5. The Archaeologist — The Worship of Dionysus: The God of Wine and Ecstasy. www.thearchaeologist.org ↩
6. Facts and Details — Dionysus Cult: Maenads, Mysteries and Theatre. europe.factsanddetails.com ↩
7. Encyclopædia Britannica — Euripides (and The Bacchae). www.britannica.com ↩

Recommended reading

Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture
Patrick E. McGovern
The definitive account of ancient wine — the archaeology behind the world Dionysus was invented to explain.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Tom Standage
A lively history in which wine is the drink of Greece and Rome: the symposium, the god, and the culture around them.

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