Tidings of comfort and joy
Jonathan Keates
BACCHUS: A BIOGRAPHY by Andrew Dolby The British Museum Press. £14.99, pp. 166, ISBN 0714122424 He was born to a virgin honoured with the attentions of the most high god. He assumed human form and gathered disciples around him who were derided for their adoration. Having performed a variety of miracles and made a journey to the underworld, he ascended to heaven, where he joined his father, president of the immortals, as the latest manifestation of personified divinity. In some versions of the story he took his mother with him.
Was it embarrassment at the uncanny similarities between the myth of Dionysus (a.k.a. Bacchus) and the life of Jesus which caused early Christian writers to anathematise the cult of the pagan deity so vigorously? In Bacchus: A Biography Andrew Dalby eschews such vulgar parallels, but it is hard for us to avoid them in tracing the often nail-biting outlines of the wine-god's career. In its earliest phase there was even a sort of 'Flight into Egypt', as the infuriated Hera sought to find and destroy the child, fruit of a liaison between her serial love-rat husband Zeus and the Theban princess Semele. Fantasies of seeing herself enthroned on Mount Olympus had encouraged Semele to demand that her lover appear to her in his full panoply as a god. Not surprisingly, his lightening when he did so burned her to ashes, but he managed to rip their unborn child from her womb, hid it inside his thigh, then consigned it for safekeeping to Hermes, who chose seven nymphs as its guardians on Mount Nysa. The infant Bacchus had some exotic playmates, including a race of centaurs known as the Pheres, and the goat-footed, vagabond satyrs, led by Silenus, who became a sort of Falstaff to the god's Prince Hal. Though brought up in a female household and often sporting women's attire, the youth was what is nowadays called 'a redblooded heterosexual', doing blokeish things like hunting deer and harnessing panthers to his chariot, while gathering round him a throng of groupies, the Maenads (their name means 'women who have gone mad') whose all-night parties echoed to whoops of lobacchos!'
There was no question of him settling down. His whole raison d'être as a god, it seems, was to embody those elements of the footloose, the irresponsible and the unrestrained which challenged all the more sober assumptions made by settled communities living ordered lives within the secure embrace of families and walled towns. This restlessness underlies the myth of his expedition to India with the Maenads, clearly intended to explain or adorn the more prosaic botanical nomadism of the grape vine and its miraculous fruit, which Bacchus is supposed to have brought home from the East to enliven or befuddle the Greeks.
Central to many of the most compelling mythological narratives is the figure of 'Bacchus the jolly god' as wanderer and chancer. The feminised male whose womanliness encourages men's advances only to repel them with demonstrations of his own ruthless masculinity figures in the story of the Etruscan sailors who kidnapped Bacchus, intending to rape and enslave him, but found their ship turned into a vineyard, its decks running with wine and prowled by their prisoner in the shape of a roaring lion. Leaping overboard in terror, the sailors were transformed into dolphins. In the tale of King Pentheus, whose mixture of the prurient and the puritanical brings about his hideous nemesis in Euripides' Bacchae, the god appears as a mysterious alien whose presence both fascinates and disturbs the king. Even in the encounter with forsaken Ariadne on Naxos, it is never taken for granted, after the pair move to Mount Olympus. that Bacchus, newly installed as divine, will do anything so commonplace as surrendering to a cosy monogamy.
Andrew Dalby's narrative is a skilful combination of various biographical styles. Some of it is purely factual, some told as biographic romancee, other sections are once-upon-a-time stories in the manner of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The writer, without pedantry or obfuscation, continuously evaluates and compares his Greek and Roman sources. Such a 'scholarship-lite' approach will be preferable, for many readers, to this sort of thing from the relevant entry in the latest edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary: More recently, Dionysos has emerged as the archetypal 'Other' — in a culturally norma
tive sense — whose alterity is an inherent
function of his selfhood as a Greek divinity.
Quite. Of course Bacchus: A Biography isn't strictly a life complete, since, as we know, gods do not die. If you should happen upon a posse of puking, urinating, binge-drunk ladettes, take it for a sign that Bacchus lives and the Maenads are out on the razzle.
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