CHAP,
by the fact that the city which claimed supremacy over all the Boiotian towns has a non-Hellenic name, which Mr. Brown identifies with -^ — -
the Semitic Tebah, the Kibotos, ark, chest, or coffin, of the Septua-
gint, as the mystic egg-chest of Uasar [Osiris] and Adonis, the
Kalathos of Demeter ; the envelopement and covering of the growth
and life -power of the world, a fit mother city for Dionysos and his
train.^
That Dionysos became for the Greeks (whatever he may have Dionysos been at the first) vastly more than the mere god of the vintage and the soil, there can be no question. The epithets in the hymns ad- Bassareus. dressed to him and to Bassareus give more than sufficient evidence of this ; and when we turn to the tragic poets, we find that their Dionysos is a phallic thyrsos-bearing, serpent-crowned god, in his savage aspect Omestes, the eater of raw flesh, the bloodthirsty brother of the Orthian Artemis who took delight in the torments of Spartan youths scourged (not unfrequently to death) in his honour. It is something that the undesigned testimony of some old myths shows that to this horrible Semitic ritual were owing just those features in Hellenic thought and worship which are least attractive, and those also which can only be described as coarse, cruel, and revolting, and that the monsters of Eastern conception which the Semitic nations worshipped as their gods remained for them monsters always. The conclusion, if it be true, is not unwelcome, that the custom of human sacrifice, which happily never laid hold on the Greek world, was a custom which, so far as it was adopted at all, came from the East.
The struggle was a hard one ; but the victory of Dionysos was Dionysos not so complete as that of Poseidon. By Poseidon the true sea-god Nereus was left practically out of sight and out of mind ; but Dionysos could do no more than win himself a throne by the side of that of Demeter and Apollon, in the joint ritual of Delphoi and Eleusis.
To the Greek the name of Bacchos, to denote this god, was Bacchos. almost as familiar as that of Dionysos. The name Zeus Meilichios was also a familiar sound in his ears, and it conveyed to him the notion of a being who is mild and merciful. But he did not know that Meilichios and Bacchos were only different forms of the same name, as in truth they seem to be. Meilichios is as much and as little Greek as Palaimon. It was simply the Greek word which
' Great Dionysiak Myth, ii. 238. and that Thcbai, or Ox-town, was the Mr. Brown adds that Theba amongst proper capital of Thebais, Boiotia, or the Aramoans was the equivalent of ox, Ox-land.
