The Wanderings of Dionysus

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After he grew up, Dionysus travelled through Asia, Thrace and Greece teaching people to grow the vine and founding his rites. The ancient sources tell of his journey east as far as India, of the pirates he turned into dolphins, of the kings Lycurgus and Pentheus who refused him, and of his return to Thebes, the city of his mother Semele.

The Journey Through Asia

In Euripides’ Bacchae, Dionysus opens the play by saying that he has come to Thebes after leaving the lands of the Lydians and Phrygians, the plains of the Persians, the walls of Bactria, the country of the Medes and Arabia, and all of Asia. In those lands he had set the people dancing and established his mysteries, so that he could appear as a god among mortals; Thebes was the first Greek city he visited (Euripides, Bacchae 13–22).

Apollodorus gives a different route. He says Hera drove Dionysus mad and that he wandered through Egypt and Syria, where Proteus, king of Egypt, received him, and then came to Cybela in Phrygia. There Rhea purified him, taught him the rites of initiation and gave him his dress, and he set out through Thrace against the Indians (Apollodorus, Library 3.5.1).

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The Campaign in India

Apollodorus says that Dionysus crossed Thrace and the whole of India and set up pillars there before coming to Thebes (Library 3.5.2). Diodorus says he made a campaign into India and came back to Boeotia in the third year with great booty. He was the first to celebrate a triumph riding an Indian elephant, and the Greeks kept a festival every other year in memory of the campaign, when women gathered in Bacchic bands as the Maenads had once done (Diodorus 4.3). The fullest account is Nonnus’ late epic Dionysiaca, which devotes many books to Dionysus’ war with the Indian king Deriades (for example Books 17 and 24–25).

The Pirates

The Homeric Hymn to Dionysus (Hymn 7) tells how he appeared on a headland by the sea as a young man with dark hair and a purple cloak. Tyrrhenian pirates seized him, thinking him the son of kings, and took him aboard. They tried to bind him with withies, but the bonds fell off, and he sat smiling. The helmsman saw that he was a god and begged the captain to let him go, but the captain mocked him and sailed on. Wine flowed through the ship, a vine spread along the sail and ivy twined around the mast. Dionysus then became a lion in the bows and made a bear appear amidships. The lion seized the captain, and the crew leaped into the sea and became dolphins. Dionysus kept only the helmsman, told him to take courage, and named himself as the son of Semele and Zeus (Homeric Hymn 7).

In Apollodorus, the god wanted to be ferried from Icaria to Naxos; the Tyrrhenian pirates sailed past Naxos to sell him in Asia, and he turned the mast and oars into snakes and filled the ship with ivy and the sound of flutes (Library 3.5.3). In Ovid, the story is told to Pentheus by a captive follower of the god named Acoetes (Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.582–700).

Lycurgus in Thrace

In the Iliad, Diomedes recalls Lycurgus, son of Dryas, who drove the nurses of Dionysus down Mount Nysa and struck them with an ox-goad. Dionysus fled into the sea, where Thetis took him into her arms. The gods were angered at Lycurgus, and the son of Cronus blinded him. He did not live long, because all the gods hated him (Homer, Iliad 6.130–140).

Apollodorus calls Lycurgus king of the Edonians by the river Strymon. He expelled Dionysus, who took refuge in the sea with Thetis. Dionysus then drove Lycurgus mad, and in his madness he killed his own son Dryas with an axe, thinking he was cutting a vine branch. When the land stayed barren, the god declared that it would bear fruit if Lycurgus were put to death. The Edonians took him to Mount Pangaeum, bound him, and he died there, destroyed by horses (Library 3.5.1). In Sophocles, the king is instead shut up in a rocky prison as punishment for mocking the god and trying to stop his female followers (Sophocles, Antigone 955–965).

Pentheus at Thebes

According to Apollodorus, Dionysus came to Thebes and made the women leave their houses to dance in Bacchic frenzy on Mount Cithaeron. Pentheus, son of Agave and Echion, who had succeeded Cadmus as king, tried to stop this. When he went to Cithaeron to spy on the Bacchants, his own mother tore him apart, believing him to be a wild beast (Library 3.5.2).

Euripides tells the story in more detail. Pentheus arrests the Stranger, who is Dionysus in disguise, and imprisons his followers. The bonds fall from the followers, and the god frees himself, so that Pentheus ends up tying a bull instead; an earthquake shakes the palace (Bacchae 434–642). Before this, the blind prophet Teiresias warns Pentheus that the new god will be great in Hellas, and says that Demeter and Dionysus are the two foremost powers among men (Bacchae 266–285). In the end, Dionysus makes Pentheus mad and dresses him as a Bacchant woman to spy on the women (Bacchae 912–976). On Cithaeron, the women pull down the tree in which he is hiding, and his mother Agave, seizing his arm, begins to tear him apart, together with her sisters Ino and Autonoe. She carries his head on her thyrsus, thinking it is a mountain lion’s (Bacchae 1095–1147).

Argos

After showing the Thebans that he was a god, Dionysus went to Argos. When the Argives would not honor him either, he drove their women mad, and they devoured the flesh of the babies they were carrying on the mountains (Library 3.5.2).