Dionysus Was the Greek God With a Dual Personality

In Greek mythology, Dionysus is the god of fertility and wine. But mostly, he's all about the vino.

"Dionysus introduced viticulture to Greece," Martin says. "Ancient Greeks knew about, wrote about, and did innumerable vase paintings of all of those situations. In fact, we still have pots of the sort used in drinking parties ('symposia') that show wild dancing, energetic celebration, and even young guys vomiting as someone holds their head."

The Greeks were keenly conscious of how you should keep control and what can happen when you don't. They had a number of myths related to wild creatures like satyrs and centaurs who crave wine but can't always handle it. These semi-human creatures go nuts and try to steal brides at weddings or start huge fights and so forth.

The message in these myths is: Be human, not semi-human, when it comes to drinking.

One of Dionysus' Roman names, Liber Pater, is also now the name of the most expensive wine in the world — no doubt in honor of the god's legacy.

Dionysus is known for having something of a dual personality: He brings joy, ecstasy and merriment, but also delivers "brutal and blinding rage."

He's the only god who can get you to join in ecstatic dance and make you raise a ritual cry of horror just as easily. So, in a sense, he represents all the possible side effects of overindulgence.

For instance, a marble sarcophagus found at New York City's The Met depicts Dionysus ushering in the joy of each season. The National Archaeological Museum in Greece shows him peacefully enamored with the nature around him. Many stories about the god depict him as a fun-loving party animal or proto-hippie, but that's just his good side.

"He's more than a symbol, which implies a kind of bloodless or over-intellectual pigeonholing; instead, he was a deeply felt personal and social reality for the ancient Greeks," Martin says. "He's associated with joy and terror, at once, which is why he always appeals to artists, philosophers and poets who are interested in the boundaries of consciousness and how emotions work. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his final months of madness, would occasionally sign letters 'Dionysos.'"

The scariest stories are about what happens to people who resist Dionysus and his ecstatic bands of worshippers — usually female, called Bacchae or Bacchants, after his name in Roman literature, Bacchus — when they come to town spreading the god's special ritual practices.

"The Athenian dramatist Euripides wrote the most compelling depiction," Martin says of a tragic play produced in the late fifth century B.C.E. "In the drama, the young king of Thebes (named Pentheus) in Greece feels threatened by a mysterious visitor — Dionysus in disguise — who has come back to his own birthplace. He thinks the stranger is up to no good, seducing women. But at the same time he's fascinated by the new worship and spies on the ecstatic women as they celebrate the god"

He continues, "All of a sudden, he's caught — the women are driven to a frenzy, and they turn from tearing apart small animals to actually hunting Pentheus. They tear him limb from limb and his mother in a Dionysus-induced madness carries his head off, thinking she has slain a lion. So Pentheus and the Theban are punished for having resisted the idea that the local boy was really a powerful god."

As is the case with many Greek gods, the morale of the story is: Don't doubt the gods; you won't like them when they're angry.

Zeus managed to impregnate the mortal Semele with Dionysus. There was just one problem: Zeus was married to someone else besides Semele, and her name was Hera (you know, the head honcho of all Greek goddesses).

While other gods had plenty of dalliances outside of wedlock, Zeus was perhaps the premier philanderer on top of Mount Olympus.

"Hera, always jealous of his many affairs, visited Semele in disguise and convinced her to put Zeus to the test (implying that her lover was really just an ordinary man in disguise — the same motif as later crops up in this story)," Martin says. "So Semele begged Zeus to come to her showing himself as he really was — and he did, in the form of a lightning bolt. He incinerated her on the spot."

There's no doubt that's harsh. But even if he killed his son's mortal parent, he didn't want to lose his semi-divine son. He snatched the infant Dionysus from her womb and completed the growth process by sewing him into his own thigh.

Another version of the myth gives the god a different mother: Persephone. While his love for frivolity may not make him the most likely offspring for the queen of the Underworld, Dionysus knew his way around Hades' domain, no matter who his mother might have been.

"The most important to my mind is that he was the god of theater," Martin says. "You can still walk through the ancient Theater of Dionysus, built right next to an old shrine of his, on the southern slopes of the Acropolis in Athens."

How are drama (which the Greeks after all invented — both comedy and tragedy — related to the god of wine? It seems to have to do with masking and disguise, and of going out of your own self — whether by drinking or dressing up — into a fictional otherworld. It's not an accident that 'ecstasy' comes from the Greek ekstasis — and that the ultimate and wild 'outsider' god can cause it in those who worship him."