have come about through some other religious or secular tradition in the absence of Dionysian ritual). The most important festival held in celebration of the god, the Greater Dionysia, was held in Athens for five days each spring and it was for this celebration that the Greek dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides wrote their great tragedies (Kerenyi, 1980, p. 40).
After the 5th century before the Christian era, Dionysus was known to the Greeks as Bacchus, who was a simpler deity. In both Greek and Roman religion, Bacchus was the god of wine and as such was identified with Dionysus as the Greek god of wine, and Liber, the Roman god of wine. The son of Zeus (or Jupiter), Bacchus is usually characterized in two ways. One is that of the god of vegetation, specifically of the fruit of the trees, who is often represented on Attic vases with a drinking horn and vine branches. As he came to be the popular national Greek god of wine and cheer, wine miracles were reputedly performed at certain of his festivals. The second characterization of the god, that of a deity whose mysteries inspired ecstatic, orgiastic worship, is exemplified by the Maenads, or Bacchantes. This group of female devotees left their homes to roam the wilderness in ecstatic devotion to the god. They wore fawn skins and were believed to possess occult powers. Such acting-out of fundamental cultural beliefs was very different from the high tragedies inspired by DionysusÆs festivals, and yet the two forms of performance were clearly related (Paris and Mott, 1990, p. 119).
The name Bacchus refers to the loud cries with which he was worsh
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