Dionysus Sentence Examples

He was often identified with Zeus, Apollo and Dionysus.

He is the constant companion of Dionysus, whom he was said to have instructed in the cultivation of the vine and the keeping of bees.

He is also represented as the companion of Dionysus, especially in Asia Minor.

This mountain, too, was the scene of the mystic rites of Dionysus, and the festival of the Daedala in honour of Hera.

Marsyas, as well as Midas and Silenus, are associated in legend with Dionysus and belong to the cycle of legends of Cybele.

After travelling through many of the Aegean islands, through Sicily, Sardinia and Magna Graecia, everywhere conferring benefits and receiving divine honours, Aristaeus reached Thrace, where he was initiated into the mysteries of Dionysus, and finally disappeared near Mount Haemus.

A more dignified type is the Vatican statue of Silenus carrying the infant Dionysus, and the marble group from the villa Borghese in the Louvre.

The story is repeated of Dionysus; he is torn in pieces, and his head is carried down to Lesbos.

Without going so far as to assert that Orpheus is a hypostasis of Dionysus, there is no doubt that a close connexion existed between them from very early times.

Orpheus, in the manner of his death, was considered to personate the god Dionysus, and was thus the representative of the god torn to pieces every year, a ceremony enacted by the Bacchae in the earliest times with a human victim, afterwards with a bull to represent the bull-formed god.

Again, in regard to Antigone's tragic end Sophocles differs from Euripides, according to whom the calamity was averted by the intercession of Dionysus and was followed by the marriage of Antigone and Haemon.

Philopator Philadelphus Neos Dionysus, nicknamed Auletes, the flute-player (80-51), setting his brother as king in Cyprus.

Dionysus, being set up against him (145) by Tryphon, a magnate of the kingdom.

Dionysus Epiphanes (reigned 86?-85?), and lastly Philip II., the son of Philip I., who appears momentarily on the stage in the last days of confusion.

In front of the reservoir is a small open space towards which several roads converge; close by is a triangular enclosure of polygonal masonry, in which were found various relics relating to the worship of Dionysus, a very ancient wine-press (Anvos) and the remains of a small temple.

The remains of two temples of Dionysus have been found adjoining the stoa of the theatre, and an altar of the same god adorned with masks and festoons; the smaller and earlier temple probably dates from the 6th century B.C., the larger from the end of the 5th or the beginning of the 4th century.

Immediately west of the theatre of Dionysus is the sacred precinct of Asclepius, which was excavated by the Archaeological Society in 1876-1878.

The spirited reliefs of the frieze represent the punishment of the Tyrrhenian pirates by Dionysus and their transformation into dolphins.

On Naxos she is discovered by Dionysus on his return from India, who is enchanted with her beauty, and marries her when she awakes.

In keeping with this, her festivals at Naxos present a double character; the one, full of mourning and sadness, represents her death or abandonment by Theseus, the other, full of joy and revelry, celebrates her awakening from sleep and marriage with Dionysus.

Theseus himself was said to have founded a festival at Athens in honour of Ariadne and Dionysus after his return from Crete.

The story of Dionysus and Ariadne was a favourite subject for reliefs and wall-paintings.

Most commonly Ariadne is represented asleep on the shore at Naxos, while Dionysus, attended by satyrs and bacchanals, gazes admiringly upon her; sometimes they are seated side by side under a spreading vine.

Among the objects of interest described by Pausanias as extant in Epidaurus are the image of Athena Cissaea in the Acropolis, the temple of Dionysus and Artemis, a shrine of Aphrodite, statues of Asclepius and his wife Epione, and a temple of Hera.

In Strabo's time a tribe called Dardanii, then reckoned Illyrian, living next the Thracian Bessi (in whose land was the oldest oracle of Dionysus), were probably as much Thracian as Illyrian.

The people dressed themselves gaily, some in the disguise of the mythical personages in the suite of Dionysus, and paid a round of visits to their acquaintances.

On the part of the state this day was the occasion of a peculiarly solemn and secret ceremony in one of the sanctuaries of Dionysus in the Lenaeum, which for the rest of the year was closed.

Burmeister regards the legend as an incident in the struggle between the followers of Dionysus and Apollo in Thebes, in which the former were defeated and driven back to Lydia.

Portions of the pediments of this temple have been found in the excavations; but no sign has been found of the pediments mentioned by Pausanias, representing on the east Apollo and the Muses, and on the west Dionysus and the Thyiades (Bacchantes), and designed by Praxias, the pupil of Calanias.

Amphitryon accordingly took the field against the Taphians, accompanied by Creon, who had agreed to assist him on condition that he slew the Teumessian fox which had been sent by Dionysus to ravage the country.

This Old Roman Creed may be traced back in the writings of Bishops Felix and Dionysus (3rd century), and in the writings of Tertullian in the 2nd century.

In this connexion it is noticeable that, as Ino tended her nephew Dionysus, so at the Matralia the participants prayed for the welfare of their nephews and nieces before that of their own children.

Dionysus was believed to take the form of a goat, probably as a divinity of vegetation.

In Europe the corn spirit sometimes immanent in the crop, sometimes a presiding deity whose life does not depend on that of the growing corn, is conceived in some districts in the form of an ox, hare or cock, in others as an old man or woman; in the East Indies and America the rice or maize mother is a corresponding figure; in classical Europe and the East we have in Ceres and Demeter, Adonis and Dionysus, and other deities, vegetation gods whose origin we can readily trace back to the rustic corn spirit.

This double sex also attributed to Dionysus and Priapus - the union in one being of the two principles of generation and conception - denotes extensive fertilizing and productive powers.

He was confused with Pan, Sabazios, Men and Adonis, and there were resemblances between the orgiastic features of his worship and that of Dionysus.

The agora, the theatre, an odeum, a temple of Dionysus, a temple of the Muses, a temple of Aphrodite and a great number of minor buildings have been identified, and the general plan of the city has been very clearly made out.

His official residence was the Stoa Basileios, and his wife, as officially representing the wife of Dionysus, was called Basilinna.

Athamas and his second wife Ino were said to have incurred the wrath of Hera, because Ino had brought up Dionysus, the son of her sister Semele, as a girl, to save his life.

She visits his sins upon the children born of his intrigues, and is thus the constant enemy of Heracles and Dionysus.

It is at least remarkable that, except at Argos, Hera had little to do with agriculture, and was not closely associated with such deities as Cybele, Demeter, Persephone and Dionysus, whose connexion with the earth, or with its fruits, is beyond doubt.

Dionysus afterwards descended to the nether world, and brought up his mother, henceforth known as Thyone (the raging one), to Olympus.

The annual vicissitudes of the life of Sabazius, the Greek Dionysus, were accompanied by the mimic rites of his worshippers, who mourned with his sufferings and rejoiced with his joy.

Having taken the drunken Silenus back to his youthful charge Dionysus, he was rewarded by the god with the power of transforming everything he touched into gold.

Finding himself in danger of starvation, even his food and drink being changed by his touch, Midas entreated Dionysus to take back the gift.

As a nature-god he was brought into connexion with Cybele and Dionysus, the latter of whom he accompanied on his Indian expedition.

At Athens, with the increase of commerce and political interest, it was found advisable to call public meetings at the Pnyx or the temple of Dionysus; but the important assemblies, such as meetings for ostracism, were held in the agora.

The Maenads (" mad ones ") or Bacchae, the women attendants of Dionysus, with their snake-accompaniments, are only one of the various snake-features associated with the cult of a deity who was also a god of healing.

The symbol of the Bacchic orgies was a consecrated serpent, and the snakes kept in the sacred cistae of the cult of Dionysus find a parallel among the sect of the Ophites where, at the sacramental rites, bread was offered to the living serpent and afterwards distributed among the worshippers.

The serpent-god revered by Taxilus (king of Taxila), which was seen by Alexander the Great on his way to India, was identified by Greek writers with Dionysus or Bacchus.

Again, the worship of Dionysus, and of Demeter and Persephone, is mainly or wholly post-Homeric. The greatest difference, however, lies in the absence of hero-worship from the Homeric order of things.

In Egypt and in Greece the introduction of wine was ascribed to gods; in Greece to Dionysus; in Egypt to Osiris.

Besides reforming the city's constitution to the advantage of the Ionians and replacing Dorian cults by the worship of Dionysus, Cleisthenes gained renown as the chief instigator and general of the First Sacred War (5go) in the interests of the Delphians.

In 3 9 he visited Athens, where he behaved in a most extravagant manner, assuming the attributes of the god Dionysus.

When Dionysus leaped into the sea to escape from the pursuit of Lycurgus, king of the Thracian Edones, and Hephaestus was flung out of heaven by Zeus, both were kindly received by Thetis.

Others attach chief importance to the slaying of Neoptolemus (Pyrrhus) by Orestes at Delphi; according to Radermacher (Das Jenseits im Mythos der Hellenen, 1903), Orestes is an hypostasis of Apollo, Pyrrhus the principle of evil, which is overcome by the god; on the other hand, Usener (Archiv fur Religionswesen, vii., 1899, 334) takes Orestes for a god of winter and the underworld, a double of the Phocian Dionysus the "mountain" god (among the Ionians a summer-god, but in this case corresponding to Dionysus j Xavaiyis), who subdues Pyrrhus "the light," the double of Apollo, the whole being a form of the well-known myths of the expulsion of summer by winter.

They dwelt on lofty mountains covered with forests and snow, and on the highest of these was an oracle of Dionysus, whose utterances were delivered by a priestess.

Harrison and others identify them with the Satyri (Satyrs), the attendants and companions of Dionysus in his revels, and also with the Centaurs.

When Dionysus, with his band of frenzied women (Maenads) arrived at Thebes (his native place and the first city visited by him in Greece), Pentheus denied his divinity and violently opposed the introduction of his rites.

Some identify Pentheus with Dionysus himself in his character as the god of the vine, torn to pieces by the violence of winter.

Ino, pursued by her husband, who had been driven mad by Hera because Ino had brought up the infant Dionysus, threw herself and Melicertes into the sea from a high rock between Megara and Corinth.

These stimulants were offered rather by Demeter and Dionysus, later by Cybele, Isis and Mithras.

Auletes, born 69 (or 68) B.C. At the age of seventeen she became queen of Egypt jointly with her younger brother Ptolemy Dionysus, whose wife, in accordance with Egyptian custom, she was to become.

In Homer, notwithstanding the frequent mention of the use of wine, Dionysus is never mentioned as its inventor or introducer, nor does he appear in Olympus; Hesiod is the first who calls wine the gift of Dionysus.

As soon as Dionysus was grown up, he started on a journey through the world, to teach the cultivation of the vine and spread his worship among men.

A similar instance is that of Lycurgus, a Thracian king, from whose attack Dionysus saved himself by leaping into the sea, where he was kindly received by Thetis.

These and similar stories point to the vigorous resistance offered to the introduction of the mystic rites of Dionysus, in places where an established religion already existed.

The worship of Dionysus was actively conducted in Asia Minor, particularly in Phrygia and Lydia.

The other incidents in which he appears in a purely triumphal character are his transforming into dolphins the Tyrrhene pirates who attacked him, as told in the Homeric hymn to Dionysus and represented on the monument of Lysicrates at Athens, and his part in the war of the gods against the giants.

At Naxos Ariadne (probably a Cretan goddess akin to Aphrodite) was associated with Dionysus as his wife, by whom he was the father of Oenopion (wine-drinker), Staphylus (grape), and Euanthes (blooming), and their marriage was annually celebrated by a festival.

Another phase in the myth of Dionysus originated in observing the decay of vegetation in winter, to suit which he was supposed to be slain and to join the deities of the lower world.

Dionysus further possessed the prophetic gift, and his oracle at Delphi was as important as that of Apollo.

It is suggested that the cult of Dionysus absorbed that of an old tree-spirit.

For the connexion of Dionysus with Greek tragedy see Drama.

Other instances of a god being sacrificed to himself as his own enemy are the sacrifice of the goat and bull to Dionysus, and of the bear to Artemis.

Oenopion, a mythical hero, son of Dionysus or of Rhadamanthus, was an early king of Chios.

His name indicated the free, unrestrained character of his worship. When, at an early period, the Hellenic religion of Demeter spread to Rome, Liber and Libera were identified with Dionysus and Persephone, and associated with another Italian goddess Ceres, who was identified with Demeter.

It was here, at the foot of the mountain, that Alexander found the ancient city of Nysa and the Nysaean colony, traditionally said to have been founded by Dionysus.

Demosthenes was choragus of his tribe, and was wearing the robe of that sacred office at the great festival in the theatre of Dionysus, when Midias struck him on the face.

Herodotus constantly alludes to the most famous Egyptian myth,that of Osiris, and he recognizes the analogies between the Osirian myth and mysteries and those of Dionysus.

Plutarch remarked the fact that the Greek myths of Cronus, of Dionysus, of Apollo and the Python, and of Demeter, " all the things that are shrouded in mystic ceremonies and are presented in rites," " do not fall short in absurdity of the legends about Osiris and Typhon."

We also hear of the bull and the bull-footed Dionysus.

Among the other gods Dionysus is but slightly alluded to in Homer as the son of Zeus and Semele, as the object of persecution, and as connected with the myth of Ariadne.

The tales of divine cannibalism to which Pindar refers with awe, the mutilation of Dionysus Zagreus, the unspeakable abominations of Dionysus, the loves of Hera in the shape of a cuckoo, the divine powers of metamorphosing men and women into beasts and stars - these tales come to us as echoes of the period of savage thought.

They sometimes appear with the child Dionysus, between whose cult and that of the Mother there was a close affinity.

In later times they are often represented drawing the car of Dionysus, or bound and ridden by Eros, in allusion to their drunken and amorous habits.

On his dethronement and captivity by the Parthians, Antiochus Dionysus, his brother, succeeded him, but was slain in battle by IHaritha (Aretas) the Arab - the first instance of Arab interference with Damascene politics.

He is the male spirit of nature and he shares a common ancestry with Pan and Dionysus.

Very little is made by most mythologists of his relationship to the greatest of the Satyrs, Silenus, who was Dionysus's mentor.

Frazer both explain Pasiphae's monstrous union as a sacred ceremony (iepos yap,os), at which the queen of Cnossus was wedded to a bull-formed god, just as the wife of the iip X wv lwnXein in Athens was wedded to Dionysus.

How much of the story of Alexander's discovery of the sacred mountain of the Nysa and the traces of Dionysus is due to the invention of Aristobulus and Clitarchus (Arrian did not find it in Ptolemy) we cannot say.

As closely connected with religious life, he was an augur and seer; practised magical arts, especially astrology; founded or rendered accessible many important cults, such as those of Apollo and Dionysus; instituted mystic rites, both public and private; prescribed initiatory and purificatory ritual.

At the same time the cult of Dionysus and Persephone (see LIBER AND LIBERA) was introduced.

Among the educated Greeks rationalistic views of the old mythology had become so current that they could assimilate Alexander to Dionysus without supposing him to be supernatural, and to this temper the divine honours were a mere form, an elaborate sort of flattery.

Of the great amount of Roman sculpture the best single piece is a head of Dionysus under the influence of wine, crowned with a wreath of ivy, his right hand thrown carelessly over his head.

As such they are companions of the Nymphs and Graces, with whom they are often confounded, and of other superior deities connected with the spring growth of vegetation (Demeter, Dionysus).

Through the contest for his daughter's hand (see Melampus) he is connected with the legends of the prophetic race of the Melampodidae, who founded the mysteries and expiatory rites and the orgies of Dionysus in Argolis.

According to others, Zagreus was originally a god of the chase, who became a hunter of men and a god of the underworld, more akin to Hades than to Dionysus (see also Titans).

A maenad is a creature of mythology, women devoted to the orgiastic celebrations of Dionysus (Greek) or Bacchus (Roman), gods of libation and celebration.

The use of a baby as a symbol of a new year originated around 600 BC in Greece when Greeks commemorated Dionysus, the god of wine, by displaying a baby as a reminder of rebirth and fertility.

It is probable that Zalmoxis is Sabazius, the Thracian Dionysus or Zeus; Mnaseas of Patrae identified him with Cronus.

Dionysus, as the god of vines, and (in a special procession) Poseidon 4ura?µcos (" god of vegetation ") were associated with Demeter.

Near by are the substructions of a temple of Dionysus and a large altar, and also a gymnasium with arrangements for bathing.