[75] Hdt. v, 4 (speaking of the Τραυσοί. Hsch. has the same, s.v. Τραυσός). The story was then added to the regular list of νόμιμα βαρβαρικά used for illustrating the variability of νόμος. It was soon after told of the Κρόβυζοι: Isig., Mir. 27 (they were also regarded as strong adherents of a belief in immortality; see above, [n. 65]); then of the Καυσιανοί: Nic. Dam., Mir. 18 West. Zenob., Prov. v, 25, p. 128, 5 L.-Schn. (Καύσιοι, Καυσιανοί). It occurs again in a fragment of some collection of νόμιμα βαρβαρικά written before the third century (there is no reason to ascribe it to Aristotle) given by Mahaffy, On the Flinders Petrie Papyri, Transcript., p. 29: Καυσιανοῖς δὲ νόμιμον τοὺς μὲν γιγνομένους θρηνεῖν τοὺς δὲ τελευτῶντας εὐδαιμονίζειν ὡς πολλῶν κακῶν ἀναπεπαυμένους (κακῶν as above or πόνῶν must be supplied to fill the gap; cf. the well-known fragment of Eur. Cresph.: ἐχρῆν γὰρ ἡμᾶς . . . fr. 449, which perhaps alludes to Hdt.’s account). It is told of Thracians in general, or of some tribe not particularly named, by S. E., P. iii, 232; Val. Max. 2, 6, 12 (both clearly drawing on collections of νόμιμα βαρβαρικά); Mela, ii, 18; AP. ix, 111 (Archias). There were thus three sources of the story: Besides Hdt.’s, two in which either the Krobyzoi or the Kausianoi were named as the Thracian tribe instead of Hdt.’s Trausoi.
[76] ὅσων κακῶν ἐξαπαλλαχθεὶς ἔστι ἐν πάσῃ εὐδαιμονίῃ, Hdt. v, 4.
[77] See Jul., Caes. 327 D, Mela, ii, 18. Likewise of the Καυσιανοί in Anon. ap. Mahaffy (see [n. 75]), p. 29, 10–12. Iamb., VP. 173: as a result of the (Pythagorean) doctrine of immortality taught by Zalmoxis ἔτι καὶ νῦν οἱ Γαλάται (because they had been instructed by Zalm.; from a similar fabulous source comes Hippol., RH. i, 2, p. 14, 93 D.-S.) καὶ οἱ Τράλεις καὶ πολλοὶ τῶν βαρβάρων τοὺς αὑτῶν υἱοὺς πείθουσιν ὡς οὐκ ἔστι φθαρῆναι τὴν ψυχήν . . . καὶ ὅτι τὸν θάνατον οὐ φοβητέον, ἀλλὰ πρὸς τοὺς κινδύνους εὐρώστως ἑκτέον.—Τράλλεις Scaliger for the MS. τραλις, rightly as far as sense goes. But we find the name ΤΡΑΛΕIΣ given to the Pergamene mercenaries called after the Thracian tribes: Ins. Perg. i, n. 13, 23, 59. These had already served as infantry in 331 in the army of Alexander the Great: D.S. 17, 65, 1; cf. Hsch. Τραλλεῖς. They were a south Thracian tribe: Plu., Ages. 16; Ap. Lac. 42; Str. 649 (where read Τραλλέων); Tralli Thraeces, Liv. 38, 21, 2, who elsewhere calls them Illyriorum genus, 27, 32, 4; 31, 35, 1. It appears that a branch of the Thracian tribe of the Tralles reached Illyria in their wanderings; there Theopompos, too, knew them: Steph. Byz. Τραλλία; cf. also s. vv. Βῆγις, Βόλουρος (cf. Tomaschek, Sitzb. Wien. Ak., 128, iv, p. 56 f.).
[78] Appetitus maximus mortis, Mart. Cap. 6, 656. The Thracians esp. are meant by Galen when he speaks of βαρβάρων ἐνίοις who entertained the belief ὅτι τὸ ἀποθνήσκειν ἐστὶ καλόν (xix, p. 704 K).
CHAPTER IX
DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE
ITS AMALGAMATION WITH APOLLINE RELIGION. ECSTATIC PROPHECY. RITUAL PURIFICATION AND EXORCISM. ASCETICISM
The Greeks received from the Thracians and assimilated to their own purposes the worship of Dionysos, just as, in all probability, they received the personality and worship of Ares and the Muses. Of this assimilation we cannot give any further particulars; it took place in a period lying before the beginnings of historical tradition. In this period a multiplicity of separate tendencies and conceptions, freely mingled with features borrowed from foreign creeds, were welded together to form the religion of Greece.
Homer is already acquainted with the fanatical worship of Dionysos; the god is called by the name under which Greek worshippers made themselves familiar with the stranger.[1] But in Homer, Dionysos appears only once or twice for a moment in the background. He is not the bountiful giver of wine; he does not belong to the Round Table of the great gods assembled on Olympos. Nowhere in the story told in either of the Homeric poems does he influence the life and destiny of human beings. There is no need to seek far for the reason of Dionysos’ subordinate position in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer’s silence makes it quite plain that at that time the Thracian god had not yet emerged from a position of insignificance or merely local importance in the life and faith of Greece. Nor is this hard to understand; the cult of Dionysos only gradually won recognition in Greece. Many legends tell of the battles that had to be fought by the new worship and of the opposition that met the invader. We hear how the Dionysiac frenzy and the ekstasis of the Dionysiac dance-festival took possession of the whole female population of many districts of Central Greece and the Peloponnese.[2] Sometimes a few women would venture to join the wandering choruses of wild Bacchants who danced upon the mountain tops; here and there the king of the land would oppose the progress of this tumultuous worship. Such stories are told of the daughters of Minyas in Orchomenos, of Proitos in Tiryns, of King Pentheus at Thebes, and Perseus at Argos;[3] their opposition to the Dionysiac form of worship, occurring in [283] reality at no precise date, assumed a deceptive distinctness in the artificial systems of the mythologists and developed the character of historical events. In reality what we are told of these individuals—how the opponents of Dionysos themselves fell into even wilder frenzy and in Bacchic delirium slew and tore in pieces their own children instead of the victim-animal, or (as in the case of Pentheus) became themselves the victim slain and torn in pieces by the raging women—all this belongs to the class of ætiological myth. They are legends in which special features of worship (for example, the existing or dimly remembered sacrifice of human beings at the feasts of Dionysos) are provided with a mythical prototype in the supposed historical past of mythology, and thus receive their justification.[4] Still, there remains a substratum of historical fact underlying such stories. They all presuppose that the cult of Dionysos arrived from abroad and entered into Greece as something foreign. This presupposition notoriously corresponds to the actual facts of the case, and we are bound to assume that the account which they immediately proceed to give of the violent opposition which this cult, and only this cult, met with in many parts of Greece, is not pure fiction.[5] We are obliged to recognize that such stories preserved a trace of real historical memory expressed in the one form which was invariably assumed by the earliest Greek tradition, namely mythology, in which all the accidents and varieties of earthly experience were condensed into types of universal applicability.
It was then not without opposition, it appears, that the worship of Dionysos, descending from the north into Boeotia, spread from thence to the Peloponnese and at an early period invaded even some of the islands as well. In truth, even if we had no evidence at all on the point, we should have expected the Greeks to feel a profound repugnance to this disorderly and tumultuous Thracian worship; a deep-seated instinct must in their case have resisted such extravagance of emotional excitement and refused to lose itself in the limitless abyss of mere feeling. This unchecked roaming over the mountain sides in nocturnal revelry might be suitable enough for Thracian women-folk, but respectable Greek citizens could not give themselves up to such things without a struggle-—without, indeed, a break with all inherited propriety and decorum.[6] It seems to have been the women who were the first to give in to the invading worship,[7] carried away in a real frenzy of inspired enthusiasm, and the new cult may really have owed its first success chiefly to them. What we are told of the irresistible progress and widespread success[8] of the [284] Bacchic dance-worship and its exaltation reminds us of the phenomena which have attended similar religious epidemics such as have in more recent times occasionally burst out and overflowed whole countries. We may in particular recall to mind the accounts which we have of the violent and widespread dance-madness which, soon after the severe mental and physical shock suffered by Europe in the Black Death of the fourteenth century, broke out on the Rhine and for centuries could not be entirely stamped out. Those who were attacked by the fever were driven by an irresistible impulse to dance. The bystanders, in convulsions of sympathetic and imitative fury joined in the whirling dance themselves. Thus the malady was spread by contagion, and soon whole companies of men, women, and girls, wandered dancing through the country. In spite of the insufficiency of the surviving records, the religious character of this dance-enthusiasm is unmistakably apparent. The Church regarded it as a “heresy”. The dancers called upon the name of St. John or of “certain demons”; hallucinations and visions of a religious nature accompanied their ecstasies.[9] Can it have been another such popular religious malady which attacked Greece—perhaps in the train of the disturbance of spiritual equilibrium caused by the destructive migrations which take their name from the Dorians? The circumstances of the time must have predisposed men’s minds in that direction and made them ready to accept the Thracian Dionysos and his enthusiastic dance-worship. In any case this invasion did not, like its mediæval counterpart, break down by coming into conflict with a well-established religion and an exclusive ecclesiastical organization of a very different temper from its own. In the deceptive twilight of myth we can only dimly discern the arrival and progress of the Dionysiac religion in Greece. But so much at least is evident: the Bacchic cult, though it had to overcome many obstacles, at last established itself in Greece and triumphantly overran both mainland and islands, until in the course of time it obtained a profound and far-reaching importance in Greek life of which Homer could scarcely give a hint.