Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates
RELIGION AND EROTIC
everything else which is usual amongst women in childbed.”
Developing into a vigorous ephebus beautiful as the rays of the sun, Dionysus plants the vine, makes himself, his nurses and all the divinities and spirits of the woods and country fields drunk with the delicious newly-created liquor, and roves about with his following in noisy expeditions, somewhat weak, almost womanish to look at, and yet with the irresistible power of sweet desire and jovial inebriety.
The love of Dionysus for the beautiful Ariadne and her ascension to the stars has been so often treated by the poets that it may be assumed to be well known. As Seneca (Edipus, 491) writes, at the nuptials of Dionysus with Ariadne the most delicious wine flowed from the hard rock. It is not so well known that the mystical side in the cult of Dionysus was developed especially in Argos, and that at Lerna were celebrated in honour of the god mysteries which may be considered an imitation of the Eleusinian but which, nevertheless, had a very obscene character. According to Herodotus (ii, 49), Melampus had introduced the phallusprocession that was common therewith, and Heracleitus (frag. 70) has recorded that very indecent songs were sung at the same time. According to our ideas also, the Dionysiac mysteries held in Thrace in honour of the goddess Cotytto, already mentioned in connection with the Bapie of Eupolis (p. 141), were highly immodest.
A large number of the local stories, which in course of time were attached to Dionysus, have been represented by Nonnus (who lived in the fourth century A.D.) in his gigantic epic Dionyszaca, richly coloured and seasoned with numerous erotic episodes. ‘The phallus, as has been often mentioned, naturally possessed great importance in the worship of Dionysus, and phallic processions were everywhere held in hishonour. At Methymna in Lesbos
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