The Great Dionyeink Myth. By Robert Brown. Vols. I. and
II. (Longinans and Co.)—We may indeed say, with the Stranger, in one of Plate's Dialogues, that the object of inquiry in these two learned volumes "is no trivial thing, but a very various and complicated one." The title hardly suggests to an ordinary person the vast amount of ground which the author covers. The Dionysiak Myth, in his view, is nothing less than a picture of all the most important aspects of human life ; and mankind, in composing it, may be said, in his words, to have been "revealing their own nature and mental basis." Dionysus or Bacchus turns out on investigation to be "one of the vastest and most wonderful concepts that ever entered the imagination of a thinker, or received the homage of a devotee." Mr. Brown is, indeed, an enthu- siastic devotee of the worthy god, and he is too modest in saying, as he does in his preface, that he has simply "amused some leisure- hours" with the study of his subject. He has, in fact, produced two learned volumes, in which the whole matter and many collateral matters are elaborately discussed. He analyses the conceptions of the god, as they would seem to have presented themselves to Homer, Pindar, the tragedians, and Horodetus, and in all those he discovers, as he thinks, a certain unity. The conclusion at which he arrives is not a new one, and it has had many distinguished supporters, among
whom we may name Mr. For. Talbot and Dr. Diillinger. Bacchus, according to this view, was an Assyrian stranger, or Semitic intruder, and henceforth the notion that he was originally an Aryan divinity is to be abjured as a heresy. There can be no question that Mr. Brown makes out a very strong case for this theory. The familiar idea of Bacchus as the wine-god specially, is a mere blunder, and indeed the most careless reader of Greek poetry must have noted that this was, after all, but a subordinate part of his character. As the god of many names, he had a variety of aspects, some of which strike us as very inconsistent with the common notion about him. He was at times even the "wise counsellor" and the "law-giver." Mr. Brown thinks it a mistake to connect his inspiration and oracular utterances with the frenzy produced by wine, and he traces this conception of him to his Oriental origin. He was a solar divinity, and to this the name Dionysus may refer, and this may have been the root of the whole concept ; but it is not possible to treat him from this point of view exclusively, as some would do. The subject, of course, is a very obscure one. It is a pity that Herodotus thought the esoteric history of the god, which he had heard from the Egyptian priests, so awful that he dared not give it.
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