The Delphic oracle commanded the Corinthians to worship a particular pine-tree “equally with the god,” so they made two images of Dionysus out of it, with red faces and gilt bodies.[1] In art a wand, tipped with a pine-cone, is commonly carried by the god or his worshippers.[2] Again, the ivy and the fig-tree were especially associated with him. In the Attic township of Acharnae there was a Dionysus Ivy;[3] at Lacedaemon there was a Fig Dionysus; and in Naxos, where figs were called meilicha, there was a Dionysus Meilichios, the face of whose image was made of fig-wood.[4]
Like the other gods of vegetation whom we have been considering, Dionysus was believed to have died a violent death, but to have been brought to life again; and his sufferings, death, and resurrection were enacted in his sacred rites. The Cretan myth, as related by Firmicus, ran thus. He was said to have been the bastard son of Jupiter (Zeus), a Cretan king. Going abroad, Jupiter transferred the throne and sceptre to the child Dionysus, but, knowing that his wife Juno (Hera) cherished a jealous dislike of the child, he entrusted Dionysus to the care of guards upon whose fidelity he believed he could rely. Juno, however, bribed the guards, and amusing the child with toys and a cunningly-wrought looking-glass lured him into an ambush, where her satellites, the Titans, rushed upon him, cut him limb from limb, boiled his body
- ↑ Pausanias, ii. 2, 6 (5) sq. Pausanias does not mention the kind of tree: but from Euripides, Bacchae, 1064 sqq., and Philostratus, Imag. i. 17 (18), we may infer that it was a pine; though Theocritus (xxvi. 11) speaks of it as a mastich-tree.
- ↑ Müller-Wieseler, Denkmäler der alten Kunst, ii. pl. xxxii. sqq.; Baumeister, Denkmäler des klassischen Altertums, i. figures 489, 491, 492, 495. Cp. Lenormant in Daremberg et Saglio, i. 623; Lobeck, Aglaophamus, p. 700.
- ↑ Pausanias, i. 31, 6 (3).
- ↑ Athenaeus, iii. p. 78 c.
