Maenads

The Maenads were the female followers of Dionysus, women who in the myths left their homes to dance in the mountains in a state of divine madness. The name comes from the Greek verb meaning “to rave”, and Homer already uses it of Dionysus himself, “raving Dionysus” (Homer, Iliad 6.132). They are also called Bacchae or Bacchants, and the best-known account of them is Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae.

Who Were the Maenads?

In Greek myth the Maenads are not a single family or a race of creatures. They are women, sometimes mortal women of a city, sometimes a band of devotees who travel with the god. Euripides shows both kinds. The chorus of his play is a company of Lydian women who followed Dionysus from Mount Tmolus in Asia (Euripides, Bacchae 55–63). The women who rave on Mount Cithaeron are Theban: Dionysus says that he drove all the women of Thebes out of their houses in madness, and that they now live on the mountain, out of their wits, dressed in the costume of his rites (Bacchae 32–36).

Euripides describes the costume: fawn skins, with snakes tied round them that lick the women’s cheeks, crowns of ivy, oak and smilax, and the thyrsus, an ivy-covered wand, with fennel stalks as another staff (Bacchae 694–711). When the Theban women are described in the mountains, they let their hair fall loose over their shoulders and fasten their fawn skins with snakes (Bacchae 695–698).

The Origin of the Maenads

According to Euripides, the Theban women were punished because the sisters of Semele said that Dionysus was not the son of Zeus; they claimed that Semele had taken a mortal lover and blamed Zeus for it (Bacchae 26–31). Dionysus drove them mad, and all the women of Thebes followed. In the prose summary of Apollodorus, Dionysus came to Thebes after travelling through Thrace and India, and forced the women to leave their houses and rave in Bacchic frenzy on Cithaeron (Apollodorus, Library 3.5.2). In the same way, when the Argives did not honour him, he drove the women of Argos mad, and on the mountains they devoured the flesh of the infants they carried at their breasts (Library 3.5.2).

Other stories tell of the punishment of women who refused his rites. The daughters of Proetus went mad, according to Hesiod as Apollodorus reports because they would not accept the rites of Dionysus (Acusilaus said it was because they slighted the wooden image of Hera). They roamed over the Argive land, Arcadia and the Peloponnese, other women joined them, and the seer Melampus finally chased them down to Sicyon and cured them; the eldest, Iphinoe, died in the pursuit (Apollodorus, Library 2.2.2). The daughters of Minyas, according to Ovid, stayed at home spinning during the festival and denied that Dionysus was a son of Zeus; they were later turned into bats (Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.1–42, 4.389–415).

Rituals and Practices

Ecstatic Worship in the Wilderness

The Maenads of myth worship in the mountains, away from cities. Euripides’ chorus calls the god sweet on the mountains, leading his bands in running dances and clothed in a fawn skin (Bacchae 135–140). A herdsman who has watched the Theban women from the hills reports what he saw: three companies of women resting on the slope of Cithaeron, who nursed fawns and wolf cubs at their breasts, struck a rock with a thyrsus so that water leaped out, drove a wand into the ground so that the god sent up wine, scratched the earth with their fingertips to get milk, and found honey dripping from the ivy wands (Bacchae 677–713). The chorus sings that the ground flows with milk, wine and the nectar of bees (Bacchae 142–143).

Sparagmos and Omophagia

The same herdsman reports that when his own band tried to seize the women, they escaped, but the women then attacked the grazing cattle with their bare hands. One woman held a bellowing heifer torn in two, others tore calves apart, and ribs and cloven hooves were flung up and down or hung dripping from the pines; bulls were thrown to the ground by countless girls’ hands (Bacchae 734–747). The Greek words for this are sparagmos, the tearing apart of an animal, and omophagia, the eating of its raw flesh; the chorus sings of the god hunting the blood of the slain goat, the joy of eating raw flesh (Bacchae 138–139). These acts belong to the myths; the sources do not say how far any actual cult followed them.

Famous Myths Involving Maenads

The Tragedy of Pentheus

Pentheus, king of Thebes and son of Agave, tried to stop the Bacchic worship. In Euripides, Dionysus drives him out of his wits so that he agrees to dress as a woman and spy on the women on Cithaeron (Bacchae 821–861, 912–917). The women, led by his own mother, Agave, and by her sisters Ino and Autonoe, take him for a wild beast. Pentheus took off his headband and called to his mother, but she, foaming at the mouth and rolling her eyes, was possessed by Dionysus and did not hear him. She tore off his arm, Ino and Autonoe and the whole crowd of Bacchae took the rest (Bacchae 1114–1136). Agave then carried his head on her thyrsus, thinking it a lion’s head (Bacchae 1139–1142, 1169–1174). Apollodorus gives the same outline in a few lines (Library 3.5.2).

Orpheus and the Maenads

Orpheus was torn to pieces by Maenads, according to Apollodorus, and was buried in Pieria (Apollodorus, Library 1.3.2). The sources give different reasons. Virgil says the Ciconian mothers, whom Orpheus had slighted, tore him apart during their rites of Bacchus at night and scattered his limbs across the fields (Virgil, Georgics 4.516–522). In Ovid the women of the Ciconians, dressed in animal skins, saw him from a hilltop singing; one of them called him “the man who scorns us”, and they killed him with thyrsi, stones and the farmers’ tools, after first tearing apart the birds and beasts that had followed his song (Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.1–43). Bacchus punished the Edonian women who had done it by turning them into trees (Metamorphoses 11.67–84). Pausanias reports that the Thracian women plotted his death because he had persuaded their husbands to follow him on his wanderings; they dared to do it only when drunk (Pausanias 9.30.5).

Lycurgus and the Nurses of Dionysus

In the Iliad, Lycurgus son of Dryas drove the nurses of raving Dionysus down the holy mountain of Nysa; they dropped their sacred implements as he struck them with an ox-goad, and Dionysus plunged into the sea, where Thetis received him Zeus then struck Lycurgus blind (Homer, Iliad 6.130–140). Apollodorus adds that the Bacchants were taken prisoner with the Satyrs but were suddenly released, and Dionysus drove Lycurgus mad (Apollodorus, Library 3.5.1).

Maenads and Thyiads

Homer already compares Andromache, rushing from her house in terror, to a maenad (Iliad 22.460). Pausanias writes that the women the Athenians call Thyiads are Attic women who go with the women of Delphi to Mount Parnassus every second year and celebrate orgies in honor of Dionysus (Pausanias 10.4.3). In Euripides, Dionysus, disguised as a stranger, taunts Pentheus that he is no longer eager to watch the Maenads (Bacchae 829), so the word is used for the women on the mountain.

Misconceptions and Lesser-Known Facts

Maenads, Bacchae and Bacchantes

Maenads, Bacchae and Bacchants are not different kinds of women: Euripides calls the same women both Maenads and Bacchae (Bacchae 829, 1131). Bacchus is another name of Dionysus, and the Bacchants are named after it. The Latin poets use the same names: Ovid calls the Ciconian women who killed Orpheus Maenads (Metamorphoses 11.22).

Not Always Violent

The Maenads are violent in the stories of Pentheus and Orpheus, but the same herdsman who reports the slaughter of the cattle also tells how the women nursed young animals and how the earth gave them water, wine, milk and honey (Bacchae 699–711). In Euripides the madness falls on them because of what is done to the god, not on all women in general.

Maenads Sources

Homer, Iliad 6.130–140, 22.460; Euripides, Bacchae 26–36, 55–63, 135–143, 677–747, 821–861, 912–917, 1114–1142, 1169–1174; Apollodorus, Library 1.3.2, 2.2.2, 3.5.1–2; Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.1–42, 4.389–415, 11.1–43, 11.67–84; Virgil, Georgics 4.516–522; Pausanias 9.30.5, 10.4.3.

See Also: Dionysus, Satyrs, Orpheus, Pentheus, Agave, Semele, Euripides