Who is Bacchus?
Bacchus is an ancient Roman god, synonymous with the Greek Dionysus. He is typically shown as the god of harvest, grapes, fertility and theater. Some darker traditions associate the god with madness, possibly due to his association with wine drinking and the resulting drunkenness. In mythology, the god is believed to be the son of Jupiter, king of the gods, and the mortal woman Semele. Juno, the wife of Jupiter, was jealous over her husband’s affair, and convinced Semele to ask Jupiter to display himself in his true, godly form to prove who he was. Unfortunately, as a mortal, she could not bear the sight and died upon seeing him. Jupiter took the as yet-unborn Bacchus and sewed him onto his own thigh, thus leading the harvest god to be called twice born. In his youth, the god is believed to have discovered grape vines and began the cultivation of wine. Some stories suggest that Juno, still jealous of his existence, drove him mad and sent him wandering throughout the world until he was
Dionysus, as the Greeks called him, was a relative late comer to the Hellenic mythological epics. Homer affords him a paltry side reference. Yet allusions to the deity reach as far back as the lost Minoan-Mycaeanan era. Homer’s negligence aside, the cult once established became widespread throughout the Greek speaking world. It afforded Hellenism no less than a revolution. In spiritual terms the boisterous rites of the cult provided an alluring counter pose to normative Greek religion. In artistic terms Dionysian motifs permeated visual arts, especially pottery paintings, and would also give birth to a completely new art form in the guise of drama. Greeks in southern Italy introduced it into the Latin West, where it gained solid currency. Finding the cult practices too illicit for its sensibilities, the Senate severely restricted the cult for the next century and a half. By the early empire the cult was en vogue again, with Dionysian art and drinking symposiums quite well established a
